‘At night, because of the noise of people laughing, they turned up the
treble on the jukebox. But in the early mornings, in the peaceful shift when
customers on their way to work were reading the papers, you could clearly
hear the trip and run of the bass lines. Some people came alone, with a
li...
From "Who list his wealth and ease retain", by Thomas Wyatt:
Who list his wealth and ease retain,
Himself let him unknown contain.
Press not too fast in at that gate
Where the return stands by disdain:
For sure, circa regna tonat.
What is the meaning of the phrase in bold? The word return proba...
While writing up the wiki excerpt for william-mcgonagall a couple of weeks back, I came upon a rather surprising remark about him in Wikipedia:
He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.
The next line down, it says...
In "In the Midst of Alarms" (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates, who was a reporter for Argus newspaper in US and was camping in Canada, was negotiating with a telegraph boy who demanded one hundred dollars to deliver his article to Argus office in Buffalo.
Yates said: “Quite so. I think you will be ab...
The first half of Maya Angelou's "Woman Work" details the extremely busy life of the narrator, ranging from taking care of a baby to mending clothes to picking cotton.
The second half longingly describes how she needs a rest.
The last verse, however, goes like this:
Sun, rain, curving sky
Mounta...
These old folks, you must know, were quite poor, and had to work pretty hard for a living. Old Philemon toiled diligently in his garden, while Baucis was always busy with her distaff, or making a little butter and cheese with their cow’s milk, or doing one thing and another about the cottage. Th...
