"...under the sun..."

Woman at a Window
Duncan Grant

The thing that hath been,
it is that which shall be;
and that which is done
is that which shall be done:
and there is no new thing
under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9
King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)

*****

I stopped writing The Magpie Files in June 2008 because I had said all I wanted to say in that blog. The title had been essential for creating the references for my posts about family-life but my writing had moved on to include a wider range of topics. When I decided to start a new blog I took a little while to give it a title. Many blog names reference the writer but I didn't want that, I wanted the title to be less specific because I was not sure what it would become. In the end I chose "...the sight of morning..." as a gentle play on words because I intended to post regularly at 12:01am so that it would the first thing that people saw in the morning. I chose the ellipsis because I have a weakness for using this punctuation as an indication for 'trailing off into silence' and put one on either side because it looked attractive. So far, so good. After a previous experiment naming a blog I knew that I had to Google the proposed title to make sure that there were no other blogs of the same name. After I was satisfied that it was original and would be easy to find on Google I started writing and for the next three years thought no more of the title that I had created.

Last weekend I had to use Google again and I noticed the phrase "...I owe you the sight of morning." When I checked out the link I discovered that the Pulitzer prize winning author W.S. Merwin has written a poem which concludes with this line. The ellipsis in this case indicates that it is a quotation from the original poem "To the Surgeon Kevin Lin". The poem was first published in 2007 before I started writing this blog but I was not aware of it until this weekend. I was also not aware, to my shame, of the Pulitzer prize winning poet W.S. Merwin. It was a strange feeling to discover that my small piece of creative writing might have been original to me but was not unique even though "...I owe you the sight of morning." had not surfaced in Google in August 2009.

Some of you commented that my shopping list project has been done elsewhere. I am not surprised although I had not been aware of the other versions and was delighted to discover that there is even a lady who knits mittens and copies other peoples shopping lists onto them. I am not planning to knit mittens so the artistic integrity of that project is unchallenged. My post was a fun and oblique way to record my children's adult handwriting because they don't write letters to me and this is the only handwriting that I have apart from some book dedications and birthday cards. I am not sure that anyone has used shopping lists to do that but maybe somewhere, someone has.

It is ironic that the phrase that drew my attention is "...I owe you the sight of morning." because my contention is that I do not. I claim that in August 2009 my blog title was my own invention, a combination of words that I created without knowledge of the poem which had been written two years before. However, it is very difficult to prove this. I asked my friend the Professor what I should do and he advised me to write about it. So I have.