‘Hope’ is a short poem by Emily Brontë (1818-48); a poem we thought worth sharing at this time. In this poem, the author of Wuthering Heights personifies Hope, but here she is a false friend, who only seems to be interested in being with the poet if her ‘fate’ is a good one. Unlike Keats’s
Literature
June 5, 2020, 12:29pm Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of New York City’s Strand Bookstore—one of the largest independent bookstores in the country—purchased stock in Amazon three times between April 6 and May 1, totaling somewhere between $115,000 and $250,000, according to Barron’s. If you’ll recall this was a time period which saw the coronavirus pandemic
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the comic genius of Dickens in one of his less well-known novel Dombey and Son is some way from being Charles Dickens’s most popular novel. Indeed, of his fifteen full-length novels, it’s probably down there at the bottom, alongside Barnaby Rudge. The last
June 5, 2020, 12:46pm Yesterday, riding my much-cheaper-than-a-Peloton bike and bobbing to Killer Mike and El-P on Run The Jewels 4, you could say I was in a mood. On the heels of Killer Mike’s speech in response to the George Floyd protests in Atlanta, some people are already calling the newly released album the anthem
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ in 1797. The poem has a curious origin in an incident involving spilt milk; there may be no use crying over spilt milk, but there is something to be said for writing great poetry about it. ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, written in blank verse,
In the days before the virus arrived, I was falling out of love with my hometown. I’d had enough of Los Angeles and its conspicuous displays of wealth, and the public tragedy of its smoky homeless camps. I was sick of the Teslas and the exotic Porsche SUVs and the gas-guzzling Expeditions cutting me off
Although it was first performed in the 1590s, the first documented performance of Romeo and Juliet is from 1662. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the audience, and recorded that he ‘saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my
On the final episode of Sheltering, Maris Kreizman speaks with Genevieve Hudson about her recent novel, Boys of Alabama. Hudson talks about the Deep South, where she grew up, and the culture one finds there: the religion-like following of football, biscuits with honey, and white masculinity, to name a few. She also speaks about the
‘Song of Hope’: not a title we’d necessarily associate with Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), who elsewhere even coined the word ‘unhope’ to convey his own deep despair (in his poem ‘In Tenebris’). But ‘Song of Hope’ is the title of a Thomas Hardy poem, which we reproduce below, followed by a brief analysis of its meaning.
Dear Readers—America, Colonists, Allies, and Ancestors-yet-to-be, We’ve seen that face before, the drape of frost-stiffened hair, the white-rimmed eyes peering out from behind the tanned hide of a humanlike mask, the flitting gaze that settles only when it finds something of true interest—in a mirror. Cruel eyes, a false face and demeanor of ravening hunger
On this episode of Sheltering, Maris Kreizman speaks with Ilana Masad about her new novel, All My Mother’s Lovers. The book centers on a queer woman named Maggie who, after her mother’s sudden death, discovers five sealed envelopes her mother left behind, each to a past lover. Maggie embarks on a road trip to deliver
‘Warning’ is Jenny Joseph’s best-known poem. It’s become one of the best-loved poems among British readers of poetry, but its appeal extends beyond the United Kingdom. What makes ‘Warning’ so continually popular? Before we offer some words of analysis, it’s worth reading the poem: you can find it here. The poem is written in free
‘The Man of the Crowd’ is one of the shorter short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe (who pioneered the short story form when it was still an emerging force in nineteenth-century magazines and periodicals). Written in 1840, the story is deliciously enigmatic and, in some ways, prefigures later fiction, including modernism. You can read
In the beginning was sex. And sex begat skill, and skill (or its absence) begat judgement, and judgement begat insecurity, and insecurity begat doctors’ visits, which begat treatments, which have flourished into a multibillion-dollar industry, so that sex between men and women is today almost inconceivable without the shadow of disorder, dysfunction, the “little blue
‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?’ This couplet is the one truly enduring legacy of the poet and self-described ‘supertramp’, W. H. Davies (1871-1940). There was actually a fair bit more to William Henry Davies than these two lines, but there’s no doubt that they,
Yesterday, around dinnertime, the President of the United States walked from the White House to nearby St. John’s Church for a photo op with a borrowed bible. Several minutes prior to this, police used tear gas and excessive force to clear peaceful protestors from the president’s path—his own constituents, lawfully assembled, removed by state violence.
‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), written in 1915 and published the following year. It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication. Before we analyse ‘On Being Asked for
Donald Trump’s autocratic attempt began with a war on words. As with other things he has done, in his attack on language Trump has resembled, or perhaps emulated, 20th-century totalitarian leaders and 21st-century autocrats like Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Totalitarian regimes use words to mean their opposite. In 1984, George Orwell imagined the Party