fadeaway, silver youth.

Never regret thy fall,
 O Icarus of the fearless flight
 For the greatest tragedy of them all 
Is never to feel the burning light

It was the immense, lovely, cloud-sashed Arctic sunset at mid-night, the icebergs as big as hills a mile off, with waters crashing slowly and ponderously upon them, the porpoises with their Mona Lisa smiles disporting and diving in formations, and bitter cold, and north pole grayness ahead. It was the fantastic North of men’s souls, the place of unbelievable desolation and final solitude, the place of Thor and the Ice Kings and monarchial coasts, the place of whales and polar birds, of craggy rocks washed by forlorn waters of thousands of miles from man, the last place.

His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of oldtime American heroes and orators. Something earnest and strong and humanly hopeful I liked about him, while the other poets were either too dainty in their aestheticism, or too hysterically cynical to hope for anything, or too abstract and indoorsy, or too political, or too incomprehensible to understand.

You rarely see a “wend" without a “way." You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. “Wend" was just another word for “go" in Old English. The past tense of “wend" was “went" and the past tense of “go" was “gaed." People used both until the 15th century, when “go" became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where “went" hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.