Areopagus Volume LIII

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the fifty third volume of the Areopagus, coming to you this week on the final day of June — a day falling slowly but surely, as these very words are written, into night. To Rupert Brooke we turn, then, once called the "handsomest young man in England", and a poet treated altogether unfairly by posterity, to set the tone for us:

Void now and tenebrous,
The grey sands curve before me. . . .
From the inland meadows,
Fragrant of June and clover, floats the dark, and fills
The hollow sea's dead face with little creeping shadows,
And the white silence brims the hollow of the hills.

These lines come from a poem called Day That I Have Loved, written in those strange and fateful years just before the First World War changed everything that was and everything to be thereafter. Is it not the law of all things, Change? Perhaps, perhaps not. Alack, let us yet make hay while the sun shines; another instalment of the Areopagus is yours. Avanti!