‘The Night was wide, and furnished scant’: not one of Emily Dickinson’s most memorable opening lines, but it opens a curious poem which is worth closer analysis. The Night was wide, and furnished scant With but a single Star — That often as a Cloud it met — Blew out […]
Say ‘fox and hedgehog’ and one is likely to think of several things. There is the old proverb, attributed to many people throughout history, that ‘the fox knows many things; the hedgehog, one big thing’. And, building on this idea, there is the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, ‘The Hedgehog […]
‘Mirror’: not the most famous of Sylvia Plath’s poem titles, perhaps, but a fine example of her ability to inhabit some other person, character, or – as here – object, and imbue it with a clear, commanding voice which reveals things about us, and what it is to be human. […]