Through Hell and High Water: A Wanderer’s Musings on Dante’s Inferno

I have long been of the opinion that if one is to take a trip, one ought to choose the destination with care. A sojourn in Tuscany, perhaps; a jaunt through the Alps; or, at the very least, an unhurried ramble through the English countryside, where the only fiery pits one encounters are the embers … Continue reading Through Hell and High Water: A Wanderer’s Musings on Dante’s Inferno

T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding & The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding is the grand finale of Four Quartets, a poem of spiritual reckoning and renewal that reads like a soul’s dark night before the dawn. It is a tapestry woven with threads of history, theology, and poetry, each stitch pulling the reader deeper into Eliot’s meditative vision of time, suffering, and redemption. The poem … Continue reading T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding & The Waste Land

Bureaucracy, Bedlam, and Barking Mad Dogs: A Descent into Diary of a Madman

Reading Gogol’s Diary of a Madman is like stepping onto what you think is a quaint cobbled path, only to find it’s actually a rickety conveyor belt leading straight into the abyss. One minute, you’re chuckling at a disgruntled clerk grumbling about his superiors, and the next, you’re clutching your head, wondering if you, too, have started … Continue reading Bureaucracy, Bedlam, and Barking Mad Dogs: A Descent into Diary of a Madman

Waking into Winter: Regret and Ruin in Rossetti’s A Daughter of Eve

Christina Rossetti’s A Daughter of Eve is a lamentation in miniature, a bitter draught distilled into three stanzas, each drop heavy with regret. It is the wail of one who has slept too long beneath a summer sun and awoken to find the warmth fled, the landscape altered beyond retrieval. The speaker’s grief is not loud but … Continue reading Waking into Winter: Regret and Ruin in Rossetti’s A Daughter of Eve