Welcome to the merry month of March. Ordinarily, March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, but I rather expect that whatever the weather does, the emotional climate is just opposite in this book. But I get ahead of myself.


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I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out what poem should follow yesterday's choice, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth. And I kept coming up blank, except for a possible return to some verses from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage of which I am particularly fond. And so it came to pass that Byron is my pick for today, even ( Read more... )

I promise you I will not be sharing overly much of this epic poem (or, if you prefer, exceedingly long narrative poem) by Sir Walter Scott, which is referenced in Persuasion by Jane Austen, the focus of my month-long event, A Winter's Persuasion, in which we are proceeding chapter-by-chapter through the book (with Wednesdays off). Come tomorrow, we ( Read more... )

All this month, I've been posting entries for an event I'm calling A Winter's Persuasion, a month-long study of the chapters of Jane Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion. Many consider it the most Romantic of her works, and certainly her references to Romantic poets such as Byron (both explicit and implicit) are part and parcel of why that is ( Read more... )