CAMRA's Month of Sundays has been a delightful success — a series of Sunday afternoon concerts by Canberra singers, accompanied by Colin Forbes.
It was a small relief to discover that "A Charm", no. 4 from A Charm of Lullabies Op. 41, by Benjamin Britten, which was sung by Rosemary Lohmann, was indeed intended as comical by the poet Thomas Randolph (1605-1635).

Quiet!
Sleep! or I will make
Erinnys whip thee with a snake,
And cruel Rhadamanthus take
Thy body to the boiling lake,
Where fire and brimstones never slake;
Thy heart shall burn, thy head shall ache,
And ev'ry joint about thee quake;
And therefor dare not yet to wake!
Quiet, sleep!
Quiet, sleep!
Quiet!

Quiet!
Sleep! or thou shalt see
The horrid hags of Tartary,
Whose tresses ugly serpants be,
And Cerberus shall bark at thee,
And all the Furies that are three
The worst is called Tisiphone,
Shall lash thee to eternity;
And therefor sleep thou peacefully
Quiet, sleep!
Quiet, sleep!
Quiet!

Picture: William Blake. Cerberus. Pen, ink and watercolour over pencil and black chalk, National Gallery of Victoria.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

— e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

She knew the words she wanted to say—about seeing Morse or at least her mind knew. Yet she was aware that those words had homodyned little, if at all, with the words she'd actually used.
—Colin Dexter. The daughters of Cain. London: Pan, 1994, p.362.

"Homodyned?" . . . to the dictionary:

Homodyne, adj. of or pertaining to reception by a device that generates a varying voltage of the same or nearly the same frequency as the incoming carrier wave and combines it with the incoming signal for detection.

Hmm . . . a bit pretentious, Mr Dexter. By the way, do you remember the primitive radios we used to try to make when we were boys? This circuit is a homodyne.

On the theory of the Big Bang as the origin of the Universe

I.
What banged?

II.
Before banging
how did it get there?

III.
When it got there
where was it?

— Wendell Berry. Leavings: poems. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010, p.5.

Prayer flags

I left the store with a Kleenex and Snickers bar.
The girl behind the counter said,
"Enjoy your afternoon"; I said, "you too"
and walking home I asked myself
what I could do, if anything,
too reel that pleasure in.
Perhaps in stores across the city
people were telling one another
as we had done just now
to fill the afternoons with happiness
and as those wishes caught the wind
like prayer-flags in the Himalayas
were there enough of them
to change the days for some of us? Who knows?

—David Chandler, Quadrant, March 2008, p. 107.