It is difficult to return to a world without conversations about poetry, but strawberry season helps. Yesterday I weeded beets in a downpour, pitted cherries, listened to the Red Sox barely beat the Mariners, cooked steamers, and watched the evening sky fade to a watery shadow. Today, however, I return to copyediting. I can't say that I'm thrilled--though if there is scant excitement in copyediting, at least there is a great deal of blunt, unromantic language practice.

Here's a little comment on poetry from Shakespeare's A Midsummer-Night's Dream. It makes poetry sound nothing like copyediting, which probably means I shouldn't be thinking about it this morning. I may become restless and dissatisfied with my poky lot.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!