Sunday, 7 September 2025

Three Senses And The Widowmaker

There Will Be Time, I.

"...we stood on the Stockton's screened porch. Lighted windows and buzzing conversation at our backs didn't blot out a full moon above the chapel of Holberg College, or the sound of crickets through a warm and green-odorous dark." (p. 16)

A detailed description appealing to three of the senses.

Robert Anderson thinks that Tom Havig, a thirty-plus year old science teacher, could have served his country better by staying at home during World War II:

"But the crusade had been preached, the wild geese were flying, the widowmaker whistled beyond the safe dull thresholds of Senlac." (ibid.)

Evocative language, recalling Kipling:

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
-copied from here.

Two evocative passages from a single page.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

So many of Kipling's stories and poems are permanently apt.

Ad astra! Sean