insect

The landscape near an aerodrome

In the United Kingdom during the 1930s there thrived four young poets collectively known as MacSpaunday: a compound name that breaks down in aliquot proportions to Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day Lewis. As of 2024, Auden is probably the only one still read off campus, though Cecil did become the father of movie star Daniel.
.
But Spender crafted a thudding political allegory in verse which nevertheless opens with the title above and an entomological description of an airliner coming in, “More beautiful and soft than any moth.” Credit where memory is due: think of a library as a building with a guardian insect at the zoom outside and, inside, still, shelves filled like honeycombs with moving, living words.

.

Nature I loved, and, next to nature, art

This gunmetal-blue ladybug was introduced into Hawaii in a successful attempt to control an insect pest called the spiraling whitefly. But it also does an efficient number on aphids like the one whose not yet fully eaten body lies, for the moment, above.
“Liberty Loans. Official Liberty Bond car, and tank,” Washington, 1918. Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016869097/. Contrast and detail restored. Article: “British Tank Invades Capital. Crew of Tank Collect Big Tribute for Liberty Loan.” Washington Times, April 19, 1918, pages 1 and 2.