Poems of the Week, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl’s trisyllable.
Author: Thomas Fleming
[Between a Rock and a Hard Place] 04-10-18
The only rational argument that this Iranian regime will ever recognize is force majeure
Website Renovation
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Poems of the Week, May 6: Canning on Candid Friends
“Much may be said on both sides.”–Hark! I hear
A well known voice that murmurs in my ear,–
The voice of Candour.–Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which softens party’s headlong rage.
“Which Clash, What Civilization?” Part One of Two
One of the minor annoyances of growing old is the uncomfortable feeling that that less time we have left, the faster it seems to be going by. In a dying civilization the annoyance is aggravated by the constant awareness of how rapidly downhill everything is headed.
Poems of the Week: April 30– Andrew Marvell
Full well I know – my friends – ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead –
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy –
Eating With Sinners, Conclusion
I think I first began to appreciate the problem presented by American individualism, when I had Thanksgiving dinner with a family of eccentrics. They had little or no connection to the small community where their house was located–they had picked the town, decades earlier, by throwing a dart at the map, and most of them had long since scattered across the country. They had picked their religions with almost the same insouciance: one was a Buddhist, another an atheist humanist, another (the only apparently sane member of the tribe) an Episcopalian, and another–a girl I had known in graduate school–a...
Eating with Sinners, Part One of Two
To Americans, who treat eating as either a shameful necessity–the worse food tastes, presumably, the more moral is the consumer–or as an opportunity for displaying a lifestyle choice, the sacred meal is a notion even more alien than the good meal. Americans eat worse than any wealthy nation in the history of the world.
Poems of the Week: Dr. Johnson on the Death of a Friend
Condemned to hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.
Tennis Anyone: Trump v. Putin: 15-Love
If any of Trump’s supporters thought they were voting to restore they old American Republic, this is a time for bitter repentance. If they merely hoped they would get someone to play the man, they still have reason to hope that on balance they did the right thing.
