When folks living from the late 17th to the late 19th century had one of those days when nothing goes right, they could cry "Lackaday!" to express their sorrow and disappointment as a shortened form of the expression "alack the day." (Alack is an interjection used to express sorrow or regret.) By the mid-1700s, the adjective lackadaisical had been formed to describe such weary and exasperated folks, as well as their half-hearted doings and sayings.
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is usually
remembered only as the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, but Doyle himself
believed that his historical romances were his most important work. He felt
that detective stories were part of ‘a lower stratum of literary achievement,’
and he aspired to be a ‘serious’ writer; in writing historical romances, he
believed he was following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott.” Kenneth Wilson,
A Tragedy
Who’s that walking on the moorland?
Who’s that moving on the hill?
They are passing ’mid the bracken,
But the shadows grow and blacken
And I cannot see them clearly on the hill.
Who’s that calling on the moorland?
Who’s that crying on the hill?
Was it bird or was it human,
Was it child, or man, or woman,
Who was calling so sadly on the hill?
Who’s that running on the moorland?
Who’s that flying on the hill?
He is there—and there again,
But you cannot see him plain,
For the shadow lies so darkly on the hill.
What’s that lying in the heather?
What’s that lurking on the hill?
My horse will go no nearer,
And I cannot see it clearer,
But there’s something that is lying on the hill.
William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Ireland. He received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry. This poem, “No Second Troy” was written in about 1912 and studies the complexities of love and societal conflict through a series of questions. Composed in twelve lines of iambic pentameter, the poem reflects Yeats’s personal feelings towards Maud Gonne, a woman he loved deeply but who ultimately rejected him. He grapples with the impact of her actions on his life, suggesting that her inability to find a suitable role in society leads to both personal and social turmoil. By comparing Gonne to Helen of Troy, Yeats draws on classical mythology to explore themes of beauty, violence, and the constraints of their contemporary Irish culture.”
No Second Troy
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
O too dull brain, O unperceiving
nerves
That cannot sense what so torments
my soul,
But like torn trees, when deep
Novembers roll
Tragic with mighty winds and
vaulting curves
Of sorrowful vast sound, and light
that swerves
In blown and tossing eddies, branch
and bole
Shudder and gesture with a
grotesque dole,
A grief that misconceives the grief
it serves,
O too dull brain,—with some more
subtle sense
I know you here within the
lightless room
Reaching your hand to me, and my
faint eyes
See only darkness and the night’s
expanse,
And horribly, within the listening
gloom,
My voice comes back, still eager
with surprise.
Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Sonnet”
was collected in The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (Houghton Mifflin Company,
1924). About MacLeish’s poetic work, Grover Smith, a noted scholar of T. S.
Eliot and professor emeritus at Duke University, wrote in his biography
Archibald MacLeish, “Between 1917 and 1924 MacLeish’s style acquired the
features of its maturity—conscious symbolism; witty, almost metaphysical
strategies of argument; composed and intense implications—all of these owing
much, though quite certainly not everything, to Eliot’s example. [...]
MacLeish’s poetry, for the most part, is not introspective, and this is why
indeed no persona is wanted. According to its own purposes, its diminution of
the persona is a strength: by this means it turns the reader away from the
endless labyrinths of subjective illusion and irony, the ‘echoing vault’ of the
poetic self, and invites him to contemplate the phenomenal world. It does not
vocalize that self: it can and often does fabricate a kind of disembodied speech,
or speech whose origin need not be known.”
Archibald MacLeish, born in
Glencoe, Illinois, on May 7, 1892, was a writer, Modernist poet, and lawyer. He
authored several books, including his epic poem Conquistador (Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1932) which won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He served as a Chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets from 1946 to 1949. MacLeish died on April 20,
1982, in Boston.
“I was sifting through an email
account that’s over twenty years old to make space in its storage. I found this
email that my dad wrote for the first time in his life, after I got my heart
broken. I was moved, and heartbroken again, imagining him typing this up in
[South] Korea, away from his family; seeing that I never replied; realizing
that I had forgotten all about this email. I wrote this poem to belatedly
acknowledge and fill my gaps in memory with these moments of tenderness, in
which he was often clumsy but was nevertheless at his sincerest.”
—Emily Jungmin Yoon
After My First Breakup, My Father
Writes His First Email
Emily Jungmin Yoon
With his two index fingers—“the
eagle method,”
as one says in Korea—he broaches
everything else:
the recent death of a Korean
actress, lessons
from the life of a sportswear brand
chairman.
Then, a turn: I don’t like to use
the word “love.”
It never feels complete.
Away from him, me in my new
country, everyone
and everything is in love: I love
your shoes, I love your hair, this,
that, him, her.
When had my father and I said the
word
to each other?
How many times had I, picking up
his call,
ended it in a rush, bored, running
to declare love to my boyfriend?
My teenage passions, precious;
my father’s loneliness, not my
responsibility.
My “wild goose father,” flying back
and forth
to see a closed room, only
petulance left
at the door, as I preened privately
for nonexistent boys.
How easy it was to forget this
man’s sensitivity,
his love for music, that he took
saxophone lessons,
coming home to an unlit apartment.
A taciturn man, who sings alone.
Who, when years later asked
what instrument he likes listening
to the most,
said, the human voice.
Copyright © 2026 by Emily Jungmin
Yoon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2026, by the Academy of
American Poets.
** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***