Monthly Archives: July 2016

The Road Goes Ever On and On

Tolkien’s “The Road Goes Ever On and On” is a good poem for travelers returning home.

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Not Your Father’s Apple Cider

A visit to my cousins’ hard apple cider processing plant showed me that making the beverage has changed markedly since the days of John Keats and Robert Frost.

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The Tern from Turner, Maine

A fun poem about a liberated tern from Turner, Maine.

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Mustering Courage To Become Jane Eyre

I’m convinced that “Jane Eyre” helped give my great-grandmother the courage to leave her home and launch herself into the world as a governess.

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Stillness, One of the Doors of the Temple

The Biblical story where Jesus visits the home of Mary and Martha can be read as an injunction to eschew busyness and focus on God. This Mary Oliver poem captures the spirit of such a lesson.

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My Great Grandmother Read for Courage

Reading over the memoirs of my great grandmother, I have been impressed by how reading literature helped her get through the hard times. The authors included Tennyson, George Eliot, Susan Warner, and Charlotte Yonge.

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Helms’s Attack on Marvell’s “Coy Mistress”

Tales of unexpected attacks against great literature: in 1966 Jesse Helms, later a rightwing North Carolina senator, attacked Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” for providing male students a chance to talk about erotic matter in front of female students.

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Tales of the Wayside Inn

A visit to the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts made me aware of Longfellow’s collection “Tales from the Wayside Inn.” Like Longfellow’s storytellers, I had a good time there.

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Toni Morrison’s Caution about Black Anger

The killer of the Dallas policemen is not unlike Guitar in Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Through Guitar, Morrison shows how black anger is corrupted by violence. She also shows, through the novel’s protagonist (Milkman), how black resolve is stronger than anger and can soar above the earth.

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