What good is it that girls need never go to war Or wear a shield or march in columns orBow down to Mars, if they take out a bloody knife And blind the womb that bears a fated life?The first who ever tried to cut away her child Deserved to die . . . . Continue Reading »
The heavens hold more stars than earth has grains Of sand, and given time, each tiny sun Combined should make a world where starlight stains The sky bright white and dark would be undone. And yet the night remains. The dim stars gleam Their separate ways, and constellations drawn Connect their . . . . Continue Reading »
The Arts that sensuously address The raising of the consciousness Bloom in a spread of themes and tones –Geology of various zones Some scale the great volcano–sky, Flame, precipice, immensity. While some tread, in the charming vale, The villages-and-vineyards trail. The grandeur group (though . . . . Continue Reading »
When my fantasies, and these extreme regrets, shut my eyes in sleep, I discover, before me, the risin spirit of my lover, who was, even in life, always a dream. Then across some desert, where I can barely see the endlessly distant horizons, I pursue my love without success. She fades from view, by . . . . Continue Reading »
Like the weary sailor, the refugee from wreck and storm, who escapes half-dead, and then, in terror, shudders with dread at the very mention of the name of the “sea”; who swears he’ll never sail again, who raves he’ll stay home, even on the calmest days, but then, in time, forgets his . . . . Continue Reading »
By the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes . . . . Continue Reading »
However much traditional standards are leveled in our late democratic society, American theater will persist in challenging putatively oppressive values and the figures who enforce them. So I concluded after seeing Wit, the play by Margaret Edson that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and is . . . . Continue Reading »
The First and the Lastby isaiah berlinnew york review books, 141 pages, $19.95 In 1996, two years before he died at the age of eighty-nine, Isaiah Berlin received a request from a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University in China, asking him to offer a précis of his core ideas for a Chinese . . . . Continue Reading »
The Sum of the Insignificant Another molecule, this one deliberate and in the act of forming water. Why does it bother? I consult the wind but learn little. Usually I can count on its salient asides—1989 would be just one example. I was apprenticed to nature then, or so I thought. I wrote of . . . . Continue Reading »
I am no lazy lover with sweeping grandeurs of small talk. Words, you discover are passing; love endures. Proffered is no measured length of the potential soul. Rather, influence of strength, corner-stone, cemented whole. The senses know the form and smile and eyes of love, but the lover’s norm is . . . . Continue Reading »
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