Tennyson and Longfellow have poems about bells ringing out an age of sin and suffering and ringing in new hope. Let them ring.
A survey of literature through the ages that has dealt with plagues.
Posted in Atwood (Margaret), Camus (Albert), Defoe (Daniel), Erdrich (Louise), King (Stephen), Mandel (Emily St. John), Porter (Katherine Anne), Sophocles, Virgil | Tagged Aeneid, Albert Camus, COVID-19, Daniel Defoe, Emily St. John Mandel, Journal of the Plague Year, Katherine Anne Porter, Louise Erdrich, Margaret Atwood, Oedipus, Oryk and Crake, Pale Horse Pale Rider, plague, Sophocles, Stand, Station Eleven, Stephen King, Tracks, Virgil | Jesus’s flight into Egypt resonates with the symbolism of multiple religions.
Republicans are once again defending Scrooge and for good reason: when it comes to wealth inequality, he’s their model.
Trump’s abuse of the pardon system invites comparisons with the behavior of Chaucer’s Pardoner and Summoner.
Dorothy Parker and Scott Bates have poems that see the nativity from the vantage point of commoners.
John Heath-Stubbs’s “On the Nativity” is one of my favorite Christmas poems.
Scott Bates’s Mrs. Santa Claus poems push environmental and peace themes. The next few posts consist of some of these poems.
Gaiman’s account of the Norse apocalypse Ragnarok comes close to describing a world destroyed by climate change.
