This week’s poem of the week is the much quoted St. Crispen’s Day Speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V.
You can follow the link above to read it for yourself or you can watch it performed below. My main complaint with the performance is that everyone looks right except Henry himself.
And if you are the type that wants to see the battle afterwards click here. The only noteworthy part is that the actors portraying the English do a good job of looking scared when the French charge them.
This week’s essay of the week is the Mowing of the Field by Hilaire Belloc.
This week’s poem of the week is We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar
This week’s poem of the week is Israfel by Edgar Allan Poe.
This week’s rant of the week is this pod cast from Joel Dueck.
This week’s poem of the week is Epicoene from Ben Jonson
This week’s poem of the week is The Last Pain by William Empson because it has been a while since we have allowed a godless skeptic to have his say in the poetry section.
“Bloom County” had five times the edge of the work I do now. In 1986 I had a cockroach scream, “Reagan sucks!” in print size that took up the entire cartoon box. Nobody blinked — 1,000 newspapers, quiet as a mouse. Now I draw a woman wearing a Muslim scarf, and the frantic publisher of the Washington Post Co. is on the phone at 9 p.m. telling me — I am not making this up — to adjust my character’s hair so she doesn’t look too unkempt.
Fear doesn’t so much rule the wood pulp news industry. More like pee-on-themselves existential terror.
This week’s poem of the week is Rich Mullen’s song Creed. In an ironical way, it goes along nicely with this week’s essay.