Software's delivered and that other business has come to nothing, so there are no public excuses left for not blogging. My brain, however, needs to have the poetry channels reinforced, and the evidence is that not only did I find that article via Slashdot but that I've been dreaming code, and not in nightmares.
So where have I turned? Slate, of course—where I found an article explaining that Miss Manners is to blame for Harriet Miers' troubles. That article links the Wikipedia article on the villanelle and a letter written by Virginia Woolf to Thomas Hardy to thank him for his novels and poetry, in particular the 1914 volume of poetry Satires of Circumstance, which included a sonnet about her father, Sir Leslie Stephen:
THE SCHRECKHORN
(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)
(June 1897)
Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;
Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams
Upon my nearing vision, less it seems
A looming Alp-height than a guise of him
Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.
At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,
Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,
And the eternal essence of his mind
Enter this silent adamantine shape,
And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows
When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?
That sonnet certainly colors the portrait of the father in To the Lighthouse, especially after Woolf says the poem (along with some other remembrances of Sir Stephen by Hardy) is "incomparably the truest and most imaginative portrait of him in existence, for which alone his children should be always grateful to you."
She wrote 10 days before her thirty-third birthday and her own first novel was yet to be published, and it would be nine years before she wrote "on or about December 10 1910 human nature changed," but surely it means something that Virginia Woolf, of all people, would end her letter calling Hardy's book of poetry "the most remarkable book to appear in my lifetime."
I'll very strenuously deny it's cat-vacuuming (though I admit I should have been working on the next Turco form or other things I've promised), but looking up the dates for Woolf's essay on the art exhibition led me to this article by Kathleen Goonan, one of my favorite SF writers. It's wonderful to find she shares so many of my interests, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people who write things I like think about things I like to think about.
BTW, you can find the complete text of Hardy's 1914 Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with
Miscellaneous Pieces at Project Gutenberg, hosted by ibiblio, the love-child of North Carolina poet and uber-geek Paul Jones. There's an interview with Paul Jones at Slashdot. His wife Sallie Green is the editor of Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance.
8:17:01 PM 
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