Monthly Archives: May 2019

Bilbo Back from a Long Journey

By Robin Bates | Published: May 20, 2019

Tuesday Julia and I returned home last night after 16 days on the road. Given that we traveled from Sewanee to Washington, D. C. to southern Maryland to Pennsylvania to Cincinnati to Des Moines and back to Sewanee, I lacked the energy to write a new post. I’ve therefore repurposed an old essay on the […]

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Are We Overanalyzing Trump?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2019

Monday My son gave me a tough-love talk about my writing at a wedding reception this past Saturday afternoon. We were in Iowa together for my wife’s nephew and Darien took a few moments to express doubts about book he is helping me self-publish. While he is a big supporter of the blog, he worries […]

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The Wine of Love Is Music

By Robin Bates | Published: May 18, 2019

Spiritual Sunday I attended a joyous Des Moines wedding yesterday, one where the bride, an avid runner, wore running shoes. The groom is a runner as well. Things promise well. Here’s a lovely wedding poem by the 18th century poet James Thomson, author of The Seasons and “Rule, Britannia.” I send it out to all […]

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Alabama Returning Women to Doll’s House

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2019

Friday I’m missing much of the news as I travel across country but managed to hear about Alabama threatening doctors who perform abortions with 99-year prison sentences. Here’s a post I wrote four years ago about how state legislatures are infantilizing women. I managed some optimism then but, with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh now on the […]

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Music Only Poets Can Hear

By Robin Bates | Published: May 15, 2019

Thursday As I’m currently traveling, I’m reposting an essay I wrote seven years ago about a poem by Xavier University’s Norman Finkelstein, whom we dined with last night. Norman was my best friend in graduate school and this may be my favorite of his poems, perhaps because I too am in love with Kenneth Graham’s […]

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Swift on the Separation of Powers

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2019

Wednesday As Donald Trump seeks to neuter Congress while at the same time welcoming autocrats to the White House, we find ourselves praying that Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and others who love our Constitution can successfully push back. It’s a battle we see dramatized in Gulliver’s account of the flying island. The executive power in this instance […]

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R.I.P. Doris Day, America’s Sweetheart

By Robin Bates | Published: May 13, 2019

Tuesday To honor Doris Day’s memory, who died yesterday at 97, here’s a John Updike poem. When he wrote it at 76, Updike was having a hard time admitting that Day was 86. Our memories of movie stars remain forever young, even though time itself moves on. Oscar Levant once joked that he knew Day […]

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Old Friends Recall the Midnight Chimes

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2019

Monday When Julia and I reunited with my senior Carleton roommates recently, I found myself thinking of the reunion that concludes Henry IV, Part II. To be sure, our memories didn’t involve loose women we had encountered in our youth. Nevertheless, there was an elegiac feel to our gathering as there is in the play. […]

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To My First Love, My Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2019

Spiritual Sunday Christina Rossetti honors her mother with this unorthodox sonnet that speaks for itself. The “blessed glow” of Mother Love “transcends the laws/ Of time and change and mortal life and death.” Apparently Rossetti’s mother encouraged her in her sonnet writing, giving the poem additional resonance. Happy Mother’s Day to the many mothers in […]

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