More from the RLS
My next two titles are also from the Riverside Literature Series: #77, The Cotter's Saturday Night and other poems by Robert Burns; and #202, The Night Before Thanksgiving, A White Heron, and Selected Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett.
Robert Burns should need no introduction. I'd read many of his poems before, but there were several in this small collection that were unfamiliar. I don't love his works as much as some folks, but his classics are, rightfully, immortal. So to be accurate I should say I don't love his lesser works as much as others.
One poem I didn't know was "Bonnie Doon." whose last stanza has become one of my favorites:
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose,
Frae off its thorny tree,
And my fause luver staw the rose,
But left the thorn wi' me.
Jewett had two volumes in the Riverside Literature Series, this one and #229. I knew the name, but had not read anything of hers that I can recall. The stories are quite charming, and tend to the sentimental and melodramatic. I will be putting her on my list for the American Lit syllabus, though not the story "A War Debt" which set my teeth on edge. It involves a young New Englander attempting to return an item to a Virginia plantation family decades after the Civil War. It reeks of revisionism; portrays Negros as shiftless children or dangerous beasts; glorifies the Southern aristocracy. I hear the KKK riding in the background, and Jim Crow rising. Pah!!
But I particularly liked "A White Heron", "A Little Traveler", the title story, and "Miss Esther's Guest." They're good-hearted stories that all suggest the value of being kind to others. Out of fashion though it be, it's a theme I can live with.
We'll see what the undergrads make of her.
CBsIP: 2666, Roberto Bolano
Literary Values, John Burroughs
The Best American Essays 2008, Adam Gopnik, ed.