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The Snow-Storm
Still snowing in my neck of the woods. Emerson wrote this poem in 1841, about 30 miles from where I’m sitting by my radiant fireplace, in a tumultuous privacy of storm. Announced by all the trumpets of...
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The more it snows (Tiddely pom)
Eight p.m. and it’s still snowing. We shoveled a while ago, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort. The plows are undoubtedly coming back, and we’ll have to do it again. This is probably our favorite...
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Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm; but we’ll always have memories of...
This latest snowstorm has changed my poetical mood from A.A. Milne to Ezra Pound: Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm....
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This is my last snow poem
The South Shore of Massachusetts, where I live, seems to have caught the brunt of the latest in our endless stream of snowstorms. Here’s my backyard, with the snow almost up to the top of that fence....
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Fire and Ice
It’s starting to feel like the end times around here. The heart of our downtown area is closed off because the weight of the snow caused a building to collapse. I went to a grocery store yesterday,...
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Spring, the sweet spring
Here’s what Thomas Nashe has to say about spring: Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king, Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do...
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Hardly a man is now alive…
This is the 240th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride. Longfellow’s poem starts like this: Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in...
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It’s Shakespeare’s birthday, so let’s randomly replace words with “duck”
Put aside your well-thumbed copy of Timon of Athens and go to this site, obviously created by folks with too much time on their hands. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your duck. Note that you can...
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In which I attempt to make amends to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I wasn’t complimentary to Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” in this post. Well, opinions differ. The other day I was driving through Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery at twilight, looking for a...
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It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country
Wilfred Owen wrote this poem in 1917 at a hospital where he was recovering from shell shock. He died the next year, at the age of 25. Is there any more vivid description of what it is like to die for...
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In which I run into Edgar Allen Poe
I was walking from the Boston Common over to Jacob Wirth’s after my road race when I ran into this guy with his pet raven at twilight: Poe was born in Boston in Boston in 1809, although he went to...
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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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