Category: Comment

Dear H,   After a long day’s travel from Johannesburg, my family and I finally found ourselves in a safari jeep in Zimbabwe on our way through Hwange National Park to our lodge. As dusk gathered over the landscape of...

Dear H,   The Labour Party came bounding into power in July last year, determined to shake things up. “Broken Britain!” is a cry that echoes all around, not without cause. The National Health Service, our sacred cow, is on...

  The Emperor of Ice-Cream   Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring...

Dear H,   The Teatro Bibiena in Mantua, Italy, also called the Teatro Scientifico, was opened in late 1769, and six weeks later, on January 16, 1770, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, not yet 14 years old, gave a performance of his...

. . . belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing,—characterizes all valuable minds. —R. W. Emerson, Chapter II: “Power,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)   One sunny fall day, I passed the...

These five poems are all late poems by the great American modernist Wallace Stevens. And yet since Stevens’ first book, Harmonium, was published in 1923 when he was 44, all of Stevens’ poems might be called late poems. That...