Areopagus Volume LVIII

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the fifty eighth volume of the Areopagus — and, this week, an express edition. For I have set myself the challenge of using no more than two hundred words (not including quotes) in each section! What was it Robert Browning said about a man's reach exceeding his grasp?

Well, if we are to begin as we mean to carry on, then it is to the ultimate form of brief poetry — the Japanese haiku — and its unmatched master — the 17th century travelling poet Matsuo Bashō — that we must turn for inspiration and guidance:

a dragonfly / vainly trying to settle / onto a blade of grass

Summer in eleven words! So often it is with less, by the evocative power of implication, that we say most. All that remains to say, then, is onwards...