Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by the sun of York,

and all the clouds that loured upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths. Our bruised arms hung up for monuments.

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings. Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front.

And now, instead of mounting barbid steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

he capers, nimbly, in a lady's chamber to the lascivious

pleasing of alute.

Now that speech, you may have noticed, is not from Virgil's Aeneid, which is what we are here to talk about all this year, really.

We've been reading the Aeneid.

We've reached a momentous transition point from the first six books, which are based on Homer's Odyssey, or at least loosely modeled on Homer's Odyssey,

into the second six books about the conquering of Italy, the founding of Lavinium and the beginnings of what will become Rome,

and this part is all modeled on Homer's Iliad.

And so I started with that opening monologue from Richard III, Shakespeare's Richard

the Third, because it is also about a transition between love and war.

And these are really the two great themes of poetry.

Obviously the whole world is fit subject for poetry, so you can

write a poem about anything, and human life is various, and there's all sorts of things,

both high and low and obscure and famous, that you can write about, but at the core of human

life, especially before the modern world.

It's really love and war that make up the great themes,

and they correspond to the great genres of comedy and tragedy.

...