All Purls. No Swine.
There are some personal anniversaries I celebrate in my iPhone calendar app. Birthdays, death days, anniversaries, significant--even tragic--events of family, friends, and loved ones. Plenty of all those. Perhaps more than my fair share of a couple of them. But a few events superimpose themselves, irrespective of personal experience. And so, here we go, for… Continue reading “Lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon”: The Eve of St. Agnes
Sixty-three years ago today, my idyllic life as an only child came to an end and I began the rest of my life as a sibling. We were living in Mubi, in the British Cameroons which was, at the time, administered as a United Nations Trust Territory. In a few short months, a plebiscite would… Continue reading “Two Different Faces”–Happy Birthday, Sis!
Lifted from a post two years ago this very day, and updated for the occasion: See, this is why I like doing random research for Quote of the Day posts. I can go out and do a bit of investigating (my family doesn’t call me the “data ferret” for nothing), and, willy-nilly, I nearly always… Continue reading “God bless us, every one, December 19, 2023!” (And a musical interlude)
One hundred six years ago today, on December 4, 1917, the Scottish psychiatrist W.H. Rivers first delivered his report titled The Repression of War Experience. It wasn't published until several months later, by which time the title had been "borrowed" by WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon, in his poem of the same name: Repression of War… Continue reading “These are the men whose minds the dead have ravished”
So there I was, as I often am, chasing down some reference or other that has nothing to do with the point at hand, and I stumbled over the fact that it was only 160 years ago today, on November 19, 1863 (what a very young country this still is), that a President of the… Continue reading “These Honored Dead”
465 years ago today, on November 17, 1558, "Elizabeth the Bastard,” the product of the oft-disputed marriage of Henry VIII and his second wife, Ann Boleyn, accessed to the throne on England on the death of her half-sister Queen Mary. As did many of her subjects, I admire and even love “Good Queen Bess,” who… Continue reading Celebrating the OTHER Queen Elizabeth on the 465th Anniversary of Her Accession to the Throne
While this is a lovely little couplet, with nary a verb in sight, it’s not my favorite Ezra Pound poem. That one is his parody of the Medieval English round, “Sumer is Icumen In,” which starts out: Winter is Icumen In Lhudde sing Goddamm . . . And, indeed, I was singing away and giving… Continue reading These Poems No Verbs
Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Ne la miseria--Dante Alighieri, The Inferno It's been translated six ways from Sunday over the years. A few examples: Oh! how grievous to relate Past joys, and tread again the paths of fate--tr. Henry Boyd, 1802 There is no greater pain than to recall a happy… Continue reading Unlike Francesca, I Always Remember the Happy Hours with Gladness
The following is a lightly edited version of a post I wrote on the Queen's death, a year ago today: The only British monarch of my lifetime died a year ago today. She was crowned in June 1953, slightly more than a year before I was born. I was named after her, “Elizabeth,” and–for my… Continue reading “I have to be seen to be believed”–Queen Elizabeth II
I'm piggybacking on a Ricochet post from today which has made it to the main feed and is--therefore--on the public Internet. It's a great post, and one which has generated considerable discussion. The meat of the post is a quote from the American Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, as follows: I prefer to be true to myself,… Continue reading “I prefer to be true to myself….”