Lazy Day

Mostly laid around yesterday reading and listening to music: Emmylou, Steve Earle, Irma Thomas, Zachary Richard...

The New Yorker has a very nice review of a new book about the poet John Keats (1795-1817). Unappreciated and poorly reviewed in his day (Keats' publishers informed his brother that “By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it [his first book] from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it"), the 25-year old Keats died a lonely death in Rome of tuberculosis, attended by a single friend. An apothecary by training, Keats early on recognized the symptoms of what was then an incurable disease. Unsurprisingly, the subject of death preoccupied him and informed his greatest work.

This morning, I dug out what little Keats we have around here and read 

• "To Autumn" ("Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they?/Think not of them, thou hast thy music too--"),
• "Ode to a Nightingale" ("Perhaps the self-same song that found a path/Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home/She stood in tears amid the alien corn"), and 
• "La Belle Sans Sans Merci" ("She took me to her elfin grot/And there she gazed and sighed full sore:/And there I shut her wild, wild eyes/With kisses four")
  

Magnificent.

Since we didn't explore much yesterday, here are pictures of holy wells we've discovered on trips past. These are much more spiritually nourishing than the kitsch of Knock.