The Forsaken Merman By Matthew Arnold Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below! Now my brothers call from the bay, Now the great winds shoreward blow, Now the salt tides seaward flow; Now the wild white horses play, Champ and chafe and...
I was searching for something or other the other day and I stumbled across this article on Quora, an answer to a question about what is the most difficult grammar rule applying to commonly used words in the English language. And the top answer was...
It’s been a rather dispiriting week with everyone, all five kids, being sick. Not terrible illness, but coughs and runny noses and whiny, unhappy children. Yesterday was a true sick day. I stayed in bed as much as possible, nursing the sick...
A Broken Appointment By Thomas Hardy You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb,— Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for...
It’s alive! I’m growing my very own starter from scratch started with just rye flour and water. And if I can do this anyone can. I am not good at feeding it on a schedule a couple of days I forgot altogether. And yet it’s growing...
Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me...
MacBeth shared this article on The Wine-Dark Sea’s Facebook page: Were the ancient Greeks and Romans colour blind? I’ve read many articles about “the wine-dark sea.” As you might guess from my blog’s title, the phrase...
The Language Issue I place my hope on the water in this little boat of the language, the way a body might put an infant in a basket of intertwined iris leaves, its underside proofed with bitumen and pitch. then set the whole thing down amidst the...
A friend on Facebook shared a link to this hypercritical take on Dead Poet’s Society by Kevin Dettmar, an English professor at Pomona College: I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society. I expect that them’s fighting...
Lives (for Seamus Heaney) First time out I was a torc of gold And wept tears of the sun. That was fun But they buried me In the earth two thousand years Till a laborer Turned me up with a pick In eighteen fifty-four And sold me for tea and sugar In...
