Wednesday, November 05
“ If these brief lays, of Sorrow born, / Were taken to be such as closed / Grave doubts and answers here proposed, / Then these were such as men might scorn: / Her care is not to part and prove; / She takes, when harsher moods remit, / What slender shade of doubt may flit, / And makes it vassal unto love: / And hence, indeed, she sports with words, / But better serves a wholesome law, / And holds it sin and shame to draw / The deepest measure from the chords: / Nor dare she trust a larger lay, / But rather loosens from the lip / Short swallow-flights of song, that dip / Their wings in tears, and skim away.
• Tennyson, In Memoriam, xlviii. In memory of my father-in-law, Dr. Robert Bracken White, May 15, 1922 – November 5, 1982.
