He's not wrong...

5 February 2019: My students were killing it today with smart points and unexpected connections. The one that made me laugh the most? "It reminds me of the debate about 'Baby It's Cold Outside." What was he talking about? Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover." Ha!

"Caliban upon Setebos"

9 January 2019:

"'...Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only, she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He." --Robert Browning, "Caliban upon Setebos"

Spent some time with this poem today, in anticipation of teaching it in a few weeks. The image above, which comes fairly early in the poem, really stuck out to me, illustrating that Caliban, though in so many ways limited and beastly, has a way with words.