Of late, while walking about the neighborhood with my sweetheart, I've been spying daffodils in bloom here and there. The rest of my post is a reprise from April of 2010, with a bit of tweaking ( Read more... )

Well, hello there!

I've decided that for National Poetry Month, which started today, I'm going to post a sonnet a day. Not always (or even usually) an original one, but still . . . a sonnet each day in April.

For today, I'll begin by linking to a post I wrote in 2005, in which I explain the sonnet form (14 lines, in one of two basic rhyme schemes ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

In Volume II, chapter 4 (or, if you prefer, Chapter 27) of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen writes "What are men to rocks and mountains?" As noted in a previous post about the chapter, Elizabeth Bennet (and perhaps Austen herself) is expressing an affinity with the Romantic movement of the time, which asserted the importance of Nature ( Read more... )

On my way home from this morning's writing session with Angela De Groot (angeladegroot, who, by the way, just won an award from Writer's Digest for a poem she wrote), I spied daffodils in bloom on a hill. No further explanation is needed for today's poem choice - the rest of my post is a reprise from last April ( Read more... )

I spent about half an hour yesterday looking through my computer files for an article I'd written relating to the quote from Chapter 27 of Pride & Prejudice, "what are men to rocks and mountains?", only to come up empty. But I couldn't get Wordsworth out of my head, so today, I found a post I wrote in 2009 while on retreat in New Hampshire. Most of ( Read more... )

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.


( Read more... )

Georgetown alums will recognize the title of the post as being the source of the team name "hoyas". The phrase is Greek and Latin, traditionally rendered hoia saxa, and literally means "What rocks!" (Of all the Latin phrases I picked up at Georgetown Law, this nonlegal one really stuck ( Read more... )

Before I even hit "post" on yesterday's poem, "Home-Thoughts from Abroad" by Robert Browning, I knew that this was today's choice. Amazing that it took me until after dinner to get around to posting it, huh? But I spent the morning reading Volume II of Sense and Sensibility, and the afternoon on writing and errands, and the day got away from me. ( Read more... )

Yesterday's poem, Among School Children by William Butler Yeats, immediately brought to mind two famous poems about swans - "Leda and the Swan" and "The Wild Swans at Coole", both of which are by William Butler Yeats (I am nothing if not a Yeats fan). Rather than selecting two poems in a row by Yeats, I opted to go another way, and one of the ( Read more... )