jack

Dad always used to quote impressive sayings They were almost always original to Robert Frost, John Donne, or himself, but we'd never know which, and he'd always coyly not want to tell us :) And this was before smartphones, so if you wanted to know for sure, you'd have to wait until you got home and found a poetry book, and even then you couldn't be sure it wasn't somewhere more obscure.

We spent ages looking for "No man is an island, entire unto himself" until we realised it wasn't a poem :)

I still treat Dad, Robert Frost and John Donne as basically the same person :)

I never realised that the following passage was actually one verse of a longer poem by Robert Frost, not a generic english weather aphorism like "march, in like a lamb, out like a lion":

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.