Life just keeps on getting the better of me and these blog entries don’t get written (or only in my head) and as for Facebook….I can’t seem to get into that at all!

But in amidst the general chaos of my life, good things happen and this journal is my way of marking that. So here at last are a few words of appreciation for Peter Brennan’s wonderful day on ‘The Transcendent Art’… a great group of people spending a whole day with great poetry…what could be better.

After a day in the company of Coleridge, I felt quite sane and together (though untalented) At least I can cross opium addiction off my list of life failings…but then I haven’t written Frost at Midnight … or the ultimate ‘depression poem’ … Dejection… read this and weep!

II
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear-
  O Lady, in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
  All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
  And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze – and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!