‘Panting like spaniels’
“Climbing the stairway gray with urban midnight,
Cheerful, venial, ruminating pleasure,
Darkness takes me, an arm around my throat and
Give me your wallet.
Fearing cowardice more than other terrors,
Angry I wrestle with my unseen partner,
Caught in a ritual not of our own making
panting like spaniels….”
— From “Effort at Speech,’’ by William Meredith (1919-2007), U.S. poet laureate in 1978-1980. He taught at Connecticut College, in New London, and had a farm on the Thames River in nearby Uncasville, an old mill village in the town of Montville. He became a very able arborist.
Trying to save what we inherited
“What I have done in life has not been motivated by an effort to save myself from unpleasant experiences in the next, but rather, at least in part, by a desire to preserve the beauty and biological integrity of the earth we have inherited.’’
— Richard H. Goodwin (1910-2007), botanist and conservationist, co-founder and twice president of The Nature Conservancy and long-time professor and director of the arboretum at Connecticut College, in New London
—