Monthly Archives: August 2017

Still Falls the Rain

As Hurricane Harvey pounds the Gulf Coast, Edith Sitwell’s poem “Still Falls the Rain” comes to mind. Sitwell was writing about the World War II London blitzkrieg, but the poem still applies.

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Clean Rooms, Despair of the Mind

Mary Oliver’s “University Hospital, Boston” captures my experience of having a friend in a hospital. Oliver understands the various ironies involved.

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Rachel Kranz, R. I. P.

When my best friend Rachel Kranz died yesterday. I turned to Shelley’s “Adonais” for comfort.

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Memorizing Poetry Is Good for You

Memorizing poetry is a powerful way to understand it. Unfortunately, the practice of doing so has fallen out of favor in schools.

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A Cradle Yet Shall Save the Earth

Mark Twain has fun in “Huckleberry Finn” with today’s New Testament reading, which is about Moses being discovered in “the bushrushers.” Victor Hugo also has a charming poem about the incident.

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Do You Believe in the Great White Race?

There’s a marked contrast between the nobility people claim for the Confederate statues and the young men swarming around them. Langston Hughes understood the contrast in his darkly humorous “Ku Klux.”

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Seeing the Beauty in an Invalid

As I sat by the hospital bed of a dear friend holding her hand, the well-known opening lines from Auden’s “Lullaby” came to mind:

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What Kind of Con Man Do You Want?

Gogol’s “Dead Souls” shows us two conmen, one who is a lot like our president, the other like various politicians (including Ryan, McConnell and Hillary Clinton). The boisterous and ineffective conman comes off better that the carefully calculating one.

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The Eclipse Brought 2 Poems to Mind

While watch the solar eclipse, I conflated two poetic passages, one from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the other from “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.”

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