Thank you, TS Eliot for summing up the weather situation in New England – too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry.
He wrote really great poetry, not just random lines that sound like rants.
Eliot is pretty famous for this book:
a book made more famous by the musical..
It was too windy or too rainy or too cold to plant garden seeds – but the weeds are doing just fine.
But enough about the weather..
I’ve been to book launches –
James W. Baker, formerly of Plimoth Plantation was up to his eyeballs in a new edition of a 17th century sermon…
The book is great because there’s a copy of the 17th century page facing an transcribed one….as well as annotations by Jim
and then a former neighbor published a 20th century Plymouth history…of Plymouth connection to Bartolomeo Vanzetti of the Sacco and Vanzetti trials
Edna St Vincent Millay (when she wasn’t hanging out with the like of TS Eliot) wrote a poem about this trial
Justice Denied in Massachusetts
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.What from the splendid dead
We have inherited —
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued —
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children’s children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
And I went to both a Beer tasting and a Beer dinner……
AND ….I’ve been spending time at the Richard Sparrow House. Among other things they have a very fantastic wafer iron.
Tree of Life on one side the year 1752 and another tree on the other
April is the cruelest because it’s just too much.
It’s not really a complaint, it just is.
Vincent Van Gogh Field of Yellow Flowers April 1889
