In this special guest blog post, Porter Girl – who, when she isn’t blogging about her adventures at Old College, is sharing her experience reading difficult James Joyce novels – tells us about her journey from blogger to published author

Interesting Literature has long been one of my favourite sites, proving to be the most informative and entertaining of literary resources across the whole of the world wide web. Being asked to contribute a small missive for its illustrious readership is indeed a great honour and, handily, coincides nicely with the release of my latest tome, Old College Diaries, the collected works of my PorterGirl series thus far.

I began dabbling with writing as a young girl when, as a spirited primary schooler, my teachers searched desperately for ways to distract me from being disruptive in the classroom. My first great work was a self-illustrated novel aimed at the…

‘I Remember, I Remember’ is, along with ‘The Song of the Shirt’, Thomas Hood’s best-loved poem. Although much of the rest of his work is not now much read or remembered, ‘I Remember, I Remember’ has a special place in countless readers’ hearts. Although its meaning is fairly straightforward, it’s worth probing the language of Hood’s poem a little deeper, as closer analysis reveals why this poem is held in such high regard.

I Remember, I Remember

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!

I remember, I remember,
The roses, red and white,
The vi’lets, and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,

‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’: John Keats wrote many a memorable and arresting opening line in his short life, but his opening to his great poem ‘To Autumn’, one of his finest odes, is perhaps his most resonant of all. On one level a straightforward evocation of the season of autumn, ‘To Autumn’ (or ‘Ode to Autumn’ as it is sometimes known) is also a poem that subtly reflects the early nineteenth-century context in which it was written. Such contemporary allusions and references require closer analysis, but before we get to them, here is John Keats’s great autumnal poem.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

I have, for as long as I can remember, taken pleasure in nonsense poetry or verse. But what, exactly is nonsense poetry?

The online edition of The Oxford Dictionary defines nonsense poetry as follows:

NOUN

list of 1 items

(Originally) whimsical or nonsensical verse; (later) the genre of poetry that includes nonsense verse such as limericks, as well as looser poetic forms”.(https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nonsense_poetry).

The best known (and loved) writer of nonsense verse is the 19^thcentury english poet and artist Edward Lear,(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear).The best known of Lear’s poems is, undoubtedly the wonderful “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”,(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43188/the-owl-and-the-pussy-cat)),in which the poet describes the journey of these 2 creatures “in a beautiful pea green boat” “to the land where the bong-tree grows”, where they are married “by the turkey who lives on the hill”. Of course they where, for…