Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Patriotism
C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), The Buried Day (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), p. 97:
Newer› ‹Older
As I worked on into the early summer of 1940, I felt more and more the kind of patriotism which I imagine was Virgil's—the natural piety, the heightened sense of the genius of place, the passion to praise and protect one's roots, or to put down roots somewhere while there is still time, which it takes a seismic event such as war to reveal to most of us rootless moderns. More and more I was buoyed up by a feeling that England was speaking to me through Virgil, and that the Virgil of the Georgics was speaking to me through the English farmers and labourers with whom I consorted.
