Happy to announce the sudden change of about 100 tadpoles into 100 tiny frogs this morning. The whole process is still as exciting to watch as when my mother and I collected these critters in pickle jars and set them on the window ledge in the apartment near Westminster where I spent my second and third years. These are common rice-field frogs–or “rain frogs”–amagaeru–as the j-folk call them. The true frogs swim about with their slower developing siblings and then make expeditions up the sides of the tank, where they cling and meditate in a manner worthy of the anchorites of Yamadera. Just as exciting as the new residents of our apartment is my old friend Sir Thomas Wyatt, who we’ve been dipping into this morning. here’s the beginning of a prosodic gem:

In eternum I was once determined
For to have loved, and my mind affirmed
That with my heart it should be confirmed
In eternum.

Forthwith I found the thing that I might like,
And sought with love to warm her heart alike,
For as me thought I should not see the like
In eternum.

I like the rugged, half-spoken, half sung feeling of these stanzas, and the intricate echoes of the first and second halves of each line. John Stubbs suggests that Wyatt was an important influence on the young Donne and we can surely see it here.

Another new arrival is Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening. We’re at chapter four, the consideration of Free Verse by Marjorie Perloff–vital stuff as always.

I’ve also just finished a new translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Ruin” and am working on “The Fates of Men”–both from the Exeter book.

So as the new life in the tank continues to change and intrigue, so do the things of the mind-freighted breath.