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Longfellow’s tomb
Life (and death) brought me back to Mount Auburn Cemetery the other day, so I can now include a personal photo of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s tomb, in place of the one I included in this post: (A...
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Where did Homer get his MFA?
Homer and I go way back — all the way to the summer before my senior year in high school, when one evening a week I would drive to Dorchester and translate the Odyssey while dripping sweat onto the...
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Happy birthday, William Blake!
Born this day in 1757. Here is his poem “Infant Joy”: “I have no name: I am but two days old.” What shall I call thee? “I happy am, Joy is my name.” Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy! Sweet joy, but...
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Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight
The shortest day of the year of the year used to be December 13, Saint Lucy’s Day. Now it’s December 21; Here in the Boston area we get a little over nine hours of sunlight. Here is John Donne’s great...
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Easter 1916
The Easter Rising took place a hundred years ago. It was an idiotic, doomed adventure that caused hundreds of deaths and maybe led, years later, to Irish independence: Almost 500 people were killed in...
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Renowned be thy grave
As today’s Google Doodle will let you know, this is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The Times today has a clever faux-obituary. Here is a funeral song he wrote a few years before his...
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“For I am every dead thing…”
Somehow every year I get around to reprinting this poem by John Donne about Saint Lucy’s Day, the Winter Solstice. Will our sun renew? Sure doesn’t feel like it. But let’s not give up hope. ‘Tis the...
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Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
A day late, but any day is a good day for a poem by John Donne. Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is, And as the other Spheares, by being growne...
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Shakespeare Sunday
It’s Shakespeare’s birthday, probably, and also his death-day. Every day is a good day to quote Shakespeare, though. Here is Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves,...
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This Living Hand
When we think of Rome, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is the English poet John Keats, who died there in 1821 of tuberculosis at the age of 25. Here is his grave in the Protestant...
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