Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on Noah, Wine and Water)

“Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,

He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,

And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and fish he took was Whale,

But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,

And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,

‘I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.’"—English man of letters G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), “Wine and Water,” in his The Flying Inn (1914)

(The image accompanying this post shows John Huston as Noah in the director’s 1966 epic, The Bible—In the Beginning…)

Quote of the Day (W. S. Merwin, on the Shock of the First Flood)

“At last the sigh of recession: the land

Wells from the water; the beasts depart; the man

Whose shocked speech must conjure a landscape

As of some country where the dead years keep

A circle of silence, a drying vista of ruin,

Musters himself, rises . . .”— American poet W. S. Merwin, “Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge,” in A Mask for Janus (1952)

I am not familiar with the work of W.S. Merwin, and Dan Chiasson, in his 90th-birthday retrospective on him in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, is not particularly impressed with the poet’s early collection, A Mask for Janus. No matter: As soon as I read the poem excerpted here, on Noah’s reaction to the world he found after the Great Flood, it seemed all too appropriate to the Southern U.S. in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, particularly the “circle of silence, a drying vista of ruin.”

(The photo accompanying this post, showing storm surge flooding caused by Hurricane Isabel in Bowleys Quarters, Maryland, in September 2003, was taken by Jason Cohen.)