Poetry
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It's Sir Richard Lovelace, born in 1617, perhaps in his late 'teens or early 20s (he survived only to the age of 40), but mature enough to have grown a splendid crop of rich black hair. Over his left shoulder is a motto that reads "prodesse non praeesse" which means something like…
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The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz." But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in…
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"Now for my life," the doctor* boasted, "it is a miracle of [eighty] years, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry." Sir Thomas didn't know the half of it; if his life was a miracle, then mine is a hundred times more so. Yesterday the miracles started first thing in…
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I don't know why, but after 66 years I found myself thinking about my first English teacher at EHHS, Mr. Stephen Mitchell . Here's what I can recall. Mr. Mitchell was a lazy guy. I remember that on many a day he would give us busy work assignments, take up his New York Times, rest…
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It wasn't until I reached college that I discovered poetry. My comic-book, super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa; I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had already memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by…
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Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the…
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Setting aside the suspicion that The First Part of Henry the Sixth is a collaborative work or perhaps even a "prequel" to Parts Two and Three, the play can be read as if its first few lines were the earliest example of Shakespeare's playwriting. If so, then, what can be learned, right there at the very beginning, by looking closely…
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Certainly in the 1940s and perhaps in later decades, first-graders all over America were taught an "activity" based on a song called "The Farmer in the Dell." Older readers of this blague, if they are courageous enough to delve into long-forgotten and repressed pockets of the past, might dare to summon up the memory. Here's…
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In Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, it is reported that the woman who is eventually revealed to be Estella's mother was married "over the broomstick (as we say), to a tramping man." Dickens offers no explanation for "over the broomstick," apparently assuming that it was a concept with which his readers were familiar. There is in…
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Insomnia once again — a nightly affliction, a family trait. Perhaps we lack a gene that lets others sleep from dusk to dawn. Have I noted here that I want my tombstone inscribed with the motto, just beneath my name and dates, "No More Insomnia, Forever." During the wakeful nights, I've taken to listening to…