Good Riddance, 2020

With sheep, a cat, and Beethoven . . .

Visiting Mr. Darcy’s Mansion

Chatsworth House

Well, not exactly, though it’s said that Jane Austen may have “based her idea of Pemberley on Chatsworth House”:

The eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of the valley into which the road into some abruptness wound.

Just Skating Around Eliot’s Four Quartets

It is this madness to explain. . . .
—John Ashbery, The Skaters (I)

The thermometer reads 5 degrees; goldfinches hang from the feeder, juncos peck at seeds on the ground. I wonder at their ability to stay warm in this weather. I know there’s a scientific explanation, but I don’t need one: it’s enough to witness it.

Fall and All

Late September, Buttercup Farm

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

—Wallace Stevens (from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)

Stevens was a master of autumn. (Spring, he didn’t like so much, it seems.) Last year, in my Autumn Thoughts post, I quoted from Stevens’s An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. This year, ModPo is again in session, and the “leaves in whirlings” passage from An Ordinary Evening came to mind as I thought about Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the Stevens poem discussed in the course.