The mood evident in a previous post has not lifted, and a phrase has started rattling around in my head: “The world is too much with us …” Where is that from? Not Shakespeare. Shelley? Coleridge? Keats?
No need to rack one’s brains—it’s out there, a few thousand electrons cleverly lined up, ready to be plucked:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
1806.
A two-hundred-year-old William Wordsworth sonnet, still making sound and perhaps even sense. What other aural comforts lie tucked away in that old Norton Anthology of Poetry?
I think you need this:
Can I introduce you please
to a lump of cheddar cheese
(from “Vinadoo,” English soccer fight song)
oops, “Vindaloo.” Whatever.
With a song like that they should’ve won the World Cup. Life’s so unfair.
Good thing I saw the video after lunch—otherwise all those lovely pics of vindaloo and other Indian dishes would have had my stomach pouring out gastric juices and doing backflips.
As for vinadoo … Google turns up three hits, two of them food. Have you ever had a vinadoo? Or did your fingers betray you as you typed vindaloo?
Never had either one. Just remembered wrong what the song was called.