Out of Time? Can't Find a Copy?

 

This month our selection is Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. As Hardy books go, this one is fairly cheerful. If you don't have time to hunt down a copy, try reading it online here , at "Online Literature."  Or trying listening to a very nice, gentle reading of it on Librivox, here.

Meanwhile, here is, in part, the poem from which the title was taken:

Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard
Thomas Gray,  1751

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Emily Dickinson Selections

In April we will be discussing selected poems by Emily Dickinson, and that selection has been made! Here's the list, along with the standard editorial number which will enable you to find them easily in whatever collection you may use.

214 : I taste a liquor never brewed
241 : I like a look of agony
249 : Wild nights, wild nights!
258 : There’s a certain slant of light
280 : I felt a funeral in my brain
328 : A bird came down the walk
341 : After great pain
414 : Twas like a maelstrom, with a notch
435 : Much madness is divinest sense
465 : I heard a fly buzz when I died
510 : It was not death
632  : The brain is wider than the sky!
741 : Tell all the truth but tell it slant
970 : Color—caste—denomination
986  : A narrow fellow in the grass
1540 : As imperceptively as grief
1593 : There came a wind like a bugle
1740 : Sweet is the swamp with its secrets