‘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.

The admissions building at Connecticut College, founded in 1911 as "Connecticut College for Women" in response to Wesleyan University, in nearby Middletown, closing its doors to women in 1909; it shortened its name to "Connecticut College" in 1969, when it began admitting men.

Uncasvillle Mill in 1906, in its industrial heyday