It’s a good idea to know the definition of dapple (cloudy and rounded spots or patches of a color or shade different from their background) before you read Gerard Manley Hopkins because it’s a word he uses a lot and nobody else does. Not ever. I have a dappled relationship with him. Music, painting, and  Read the Rest…

Rudyard Kipling. The few of his poems featured in the Norton reminded me that I had an old copy (1899) of Plain Tales from the Hill that has a swastika embossed on the front. In India in 1899, the swastika was a revered symbol, however between the swastika on the book and what we today  Read the Rest…

“A deep sense of religion (is) compatible with the entire absence of theology.” So is Thomas Henry Huxley quoted in the Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 2, and all over the Internet but no one seems to have any source other than “a letter.” A great statement like that is, in my opinion, free  Read the Rest…

Disclosure statement: I used Grammarly.com to grammar check this post because I wanted to see what it thought of Robert Browning’s 19th century English usage: not much. Actually I took the bait of using Grammarly to enter a contest. So here we go: In Victorian Lit class I was told that Robert Browning was set  Read the Rest…