From My Easy Chair

View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VanGogh-View_of_Arles_with_Irises.jpg But the landscapes! ...

What did he feel while he painted? He wrote that "in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting." We hav...

Shall I make for you an omelet Of lark's eggs and truffles Here in our garden of eden? Shall we use as our table the moss-covered roc...

Cointreau glazing the sides of a crystal glass-- Bitter orange was the fruit of desire That deceived the mother of mankind. The pungent...

  When we were twenty and would never die,  The world held grand prizes, ours for the taking. Our feet trampled about. We knew no fear. ...

  Are those lines of age upon your face? Is that what time is? You have tried to grasp the moment And the moment is as nothing, Like gr...

  Silhouettes bounce on ceiling, walls, floor. Grace in movement: Forms darkened by night Made black in light Come alive in mime-- The...

How does Daphne feel Trapped in bark? The result of one god's desire and another's revenge. Her father wanted grandchildren from ...

  “How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light...

Here is a sketch based on a story that my Grandmother used to tell about her brother: The summer that Brother put the stick of dynam...

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Mrs. Ramsay is the ideal Victorian wife and mother: devoted to her children, submissive to her husband.  The term for this, based on a poem ...

  In my elective class we will be looking at this novel and at some World War I internet sites. Here are discussion questions I have posted...

An interesting argument developed in class about interpretations of "The Lady of Shalott." Some believe that Tennyson's purp...

Tennyson’s poem clearly portrays, I think, the conditions of the Victorian female. The image of the ideal woman during much of the Nineteent...

Reading another blog brought me back to Montaigne's Essays. I think that one of my favorite lines is in his essay "Of Solitude...

Here are the reading lists for my two fall courses: World Masterpieces 2 (19th-Century to Contemporary--Sophomore level)   Frankenstein ...

Near the end of Book II of Frankenstein, the creature compares himself to Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost.  It is during his narration o...

  In one of the courses I’ll be teaching in the fall (my last semester before I can retire full time!), we are reading Frankenstein , first...