Hold fast to conscience and push deliberately towards self-mastery. — Seamus Heaney Upstairs in the high perch the strands of coallight discoursing over the house and cottage in County Wicklow the burial ruins temper the light of the skull shone on our heathen forebears, sunlight and periscoped floss of Catherine’s cries in the glen where…
I. The Romantics were right. Gothic buildings are best seen in ruin: sky-sprung clerestories in wild brambles — bare ruin’d quires — Romanesque arches reconstructed by the mind, tumbled-over stones to stumble on in a field of grey violets, in a place you can no longer drive to. When I walk by the Neo-Gothic duPont…
She turned into the drawing-room for privacy, but Henry and Eleanor had likewise retreated thither, and were at that moment deep in consultation about her. She drew back, trying to beg their pardon, but was, with gentle violence, forced to return . . . —Northanger Abbey When Henry and his sister Eleanor brought Miss Morland…
For those who are neither hero of myth nor witness to history: remember all life is holy. In the year of the blizzard in the month of February I have traipsed up the middle of Lexington Avenue, a spectacular middle passage in the snow to my own poetry reading: James Wright, Philip Levine, each having…
Because of the shabby character of the boy's mother, and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years…
Mr. Larkin’s picture is on the back. Lowell poses on the front of the jacket. Mr. Larkin’s glasses distort his eyes. Lowell doesn’t seem to be wearing his. Mr. Larkin is rather nicely dressed. Lowell’s collar is open, showing chest hair. Mr. Larkin, trying quite hard to smile, asks us, “Did you like my poems…
The air still freighted with her labor holds them both, cow, and calf creased in her flank, together, the simple alphabet of bond and bondage. Drawing close, I stared at her long profile, her huge eye brimming like a dark tear. In the shadows, heavy with scent of dung I saw Hera, Queen of Olympus,…
—Jonathan Edwards Edwards said we may go out of the world suddenly at any moment, when God pours his words before us & they freeze On roads, on bridges, new cold skin is laid on, flayed off by the wind’s whipping sentence. Driving, I hold my foot back: in due time it will…
A cold joy leaps from the orchard in early evening, when the pear and apple flower. Their petals enclose the nubs of the unformed fruits with a private dampness. Cattle drift through the fields like headstones, and soon the sky will spill its milky light down almost into the trees. Children are swimming in a…
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