’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Read more about November 8th>“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
Alexander Theroux
Darconville's Cat Read more about A Line for September
I can almost picture Thomas Hardy, working late one summer night, the window open to cool the heat from an August day when, perhaps, it had been a bit too hot to work. And I was delighted to find that a dumbledore is not only a wizard, but also a bumblebee.
While quoting last week from a novel by Toni Morrison, I was reminded of this poem. An old favorite of mine. You must forgive - even, I think, accept - the occasional use of language we don't like to use today. Benet died in the year that I was born, not quite a month later actually. No wonder I feel a connection. Read more about American Names
I didn't know my friend Hall's father, Jim Lovell, as well as I might have liked to. I know that he liked birding - we went together, he and I and Hall and his wife, Hall's mother, she in a wheelchair. She counted off more birds than any one of us. The too few times I visited Pete and Hall on my own, Jim would take us all out to dinner. He was a nice man. He was a learned man. He was an English professor, in his working days, and we might have had some delightful conversations had time and chance allowed. But not too long ago, time ran out. Read more about For Jim Lovell
Robin Coste Lewis drew on a multitude of sources for her . These lines remind me vividly of captions in National Geographic of years past.
Read more about Captions>A Negro Slave Woman
Carrying a Cornucopia
Representing Africa
Titus Lucretius Carus was not religious in the usual sense of the word, and yet he opens De Rerum Natura
with an invocation to Venus, whom Lucretius addresses as an allegorical representation of the reproductive power. (from the Wiki)
Spring is nearly here and it seems that Lucretius, much like myself, is sometimes in it for the metaphor: Read more about The Nature of Things
This month's full moon is still two weeks away, but I care not a rap.
Full Moon
Victoria Sackville-West
Read more about Memories of Moonlight>She was wearing the coral taffeta trousers
Someone had brought her from Ispahan,
And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
And the coral-hafted feather fan;
But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,
And skipped in the pool of the moon as she ran.She cared not a rap for all the big planets,
I'm one of those besotted souls with a weakness for English period drama, and one of my favorites for a few seasons was Lark Rise to Candleford. I think it was in Series 3, Episode 4, when the villagers go out to gather in the wheat, that Alf (John Dagleish) leads the men into the field with The Keeper. I was so taken with it that I memorized it. I bet you will be too. Read more about Sing Ye Well