Good to see Cowper's Homer - long overshadowed by Pope's - praised by Peter McDonald in his review essay in this week's TLS. An extract herewith.
David Wheatley
@nemoloris.bsky.social
Cairngorm-regarder. Bairn-herder.
Enliven your first-year lectures by stopping as you go along to ask how many of your hearers agree with you. This is Ruskin’s ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’.
Ah, rock of Cashel, how like unto ‘vast Persepolis on her mountain stand, /Or Thebes half buried in the desert sand’, as Aubrey de Vere so helpfully suggested.
Anyone who has ever wondered what became of the twelve male apostles version of the Irish literary canon – once so ubiquitous – may be interested to learn it has sought asylum in a gift shop near the Rock of Cashel.
Enliven a meal at the Castlerosse Hotel in Killarney by informing your fellow diners of the overlooking by the hotel guide of the poisonous satire by Aodhagán Ó Rathaille inspired by Lord Kenmare, as was (‘fá deara dhom triall riamh ort, a Vailintín Brún’ etc).
Eagle’s nest rock, Killarney, inspiration of Tennyson’s ‘The Splendour Falls.’
Happy birthday to my mother Helen, who is eighty today, with bonus ghost hand on my face.
Adolphus Cooke of Westmeath instructed his servants to genuflect to a turkey, which he believed to be his reincarnated father, once entered into hand-to-hand combat with a bull, and ended his life believing he had been transformed into a screech owl.
Among old masters, in this case Frank O’Meara (not O’Hara).
A political come-all-ye from Sydney Bernard Smith’s Scurrilities, whose cover art I shall forbear from reproducing here. Autre temps, autres moeurs.
Amused to find that while I was busy being born on 16 August 1970 Irish-Scottish bard Sydney Bernard Smith was being inspired to write this.
16 November 1976 was full of surprises, I learn from an old diary.
My old friend Aidan Mathews turns seventy in September. What celebrations will be marking the occasion though? None that I can see.
Inspired perhaps by Peter Cook calling one of his shows Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time - Bernard Levin, John McGahern’s publishers appear to stepped in to tweak the title of his 1966 novel.
Some poignancy in the juxtaposition of ‘first ed’ and ‘£3’ on this pristine Aidan Higgins.
Sure amn't I tellin yiz this long time that Tennyson writ 'The Splendour Falls' afther a thrip to the county Kerry, but did I know he'd writ this sthurrin payse o' paddywhackery too? Divil a bit I did!
Drinking from the fount of resipiscence in the very last thing that Ruskin wrote.
A church group asked to me give them a talk on Scottish religious poetry, and here are my closing remarks on Edwin Muir’s ‘One Foot in Eden’, a poem I have long loved.
Skull, stinkhorn and deadly nightshade before the mist of a Cairngorms wildfire suddenly descended.
Having known Justin Quinn’s father, Jack, I am terribly moved by this essay of Justin’s in the new Dublin Review.
A poem by my fellow Paterian (as I like to think of him) Alex Wong, from the first issue of Arderyth House, a new poetry journal based in… doesn’t actually say.
As I approach the age at which MacNeice died, I find I have much catching up to do with that poet’s startling epiphanies of death lying in wait for us amid the everyday. One thing at least I can tick off the to-do list, though, is middle-aged pseudo-Scottisizing (this is from ‘Ten Burnt Offerings’).
Air leith toilichte seo fhaicinn/delighted to see this. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
I am haunted by this review of Edward Thomas’s in which he declares that the poems of Ernest Dowson are the ‘comic, terrible cry of the superfluous man.’
A long-ago photograph of the British Extracting Company on the river Hull.
Right out of our skins we jumped watching this curled shot of Kevin Keegan’s. www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9yR... #KevinKeegan #footballhaiku
KEEGAN,Kevin vs Saint Etienne 16/03/1977
YouTube video by gr8footy
youtube.com
I often store texts of poems with rejected lines stuck on at the end, in case I might ever want to revisit them. Today I was sent a proof of a poem with a wagging tail of rejected lines at the bottom of the page, whose presence there I had forgotten. Should I now just leave them in?!
Ashes, ashes, wet swill, dry swill, bones. (Near Darlington.)
