First Known When Lost

Here are the final two lines of a sonnet: When have we not preferred some going round To going straight to where we are? Reading the li...

Today, I've had two poems circling around each other.  I've been doing my best not to pin them down.  I have no desire to concoct an...

A Thomas Hardy ghost story: "He saw a ghost in Stinsford Churchyard on Christmas Eve, and his sister Kate says it must have been thei...

As I have noted here before, I do my best to keep the news of the world out of my life.  However, by some sort of media osmosis, reports of,...

Once, long ago, I drove through the rolling fields of the Virginia countryside at dusk in autumn, searching for the site of a somewhat obscu...

At the beginning of winter, I tend to be drawn to Chinese and Japanese poetry.  Perhaps the spareness and the directness of the poetry match...

Before I return to dust I intend to read all 947 of Thomas Hardy's poems. (James Gibson has numbered them for us in his 1976 edition of ...

I am ignorant of the seasonal progress of the moon and the other heavenly bodies across the night sky.  I really ought to make a study of th...

The older one gets, the more life begins to take on a dreamlike aspect. Why is this?  First, one's awareness of the transience of all th...

Poetry can help us to appreciate the homely and the commonplace.  This is as it should be:  the homely and the commonplace World -- where we...