Just as from time to time we feel the need to retreat to comfort food, so it is with reading.
I’ve found it impossible in the past week to open anything in the nature of a book. Book reviews seem OK, but invariably one has to put up with all the baggage of the reviewer.
So today I moved on to “comfort poetry”. Clearly that’s not complex, hard-to-grasp poetry, so rewarding if one puts in the intellectual effort. In my semi-veg state, I have reached for works that had already revealed themselves and their pleasure over many years.
For me, first and foremost that's Robert Louis Stevenson.
Here is one that fits the bill, “Envoy”. Stevenson included it as the introductory verse to his 1887 collection, Underwoods.
Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!
In his Dedication to the collection, Stevenson lists the groups and individuals he most admires, top of the pile being the physicians who have kept him alive through thick and thin.
And so say I.
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