Category: Poetry

Richard Savage, whose birthday falls in January, was a close friend of Johnson who celebrated his unfortunate life and death in prison from liver failure.  This passage is from a longer satire “The Authors.”  Note how brutally relevant are down to the last detail, e.g., the stupid press’s attack on inoculation and their cruelty toward the unfortunate.

Thomas Hardy wrote “The Darkling Thrush” on the eve of the 20th century.

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould

A great hymn by Charles Wesley, an Anglican minister who never abandoned the church in which he had been ordained.

This is a poem I loved in the days I regarded myself as a cynical roué and was only a very foolish romantic.

Friday is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi.  This crude poem–sometimes described as a piece of rhyming prose– is written in Umbrian, an Italian dialect distinct from but not too different from the Florentine Tuscan that Dante made  the language of Italian literature