"Half in Love with
Easeful Death." The Tablet, 18 October 1947, reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews.
Her outsized skill, her
easeful manner, and her certain success at improving the care that physicians provide--those are humbling, silencing remembrances; things of such great value that words just do not work as tribute."
Easeful death?"--a surprising invocation of Keats that acknowledges her inscrutable (sometimes fatal) pleasures.
The dream-breath of the landwash, the sigh of the sea upon the shore, proclaims the
easeful sound of warm snug love --the plain silent sound of home" (140).
He becomes what Keats described as "half in love with
easeful death", the final release from life's troubling uncertainties.
The biographical film, Ein Leben fur die Musik (A Life for Music), made in the last summer of his life, shows a sturdy-looking 85-year-old at the piano playing the transformation music from Daphne (1937)--perhaps a final message or a desired wish for an
easeful end.
Having been rebuffed by Marie (and, one infers, several others), the poet, fully in love with
easeful Death, settles upon the unsuspecting hausfrau Henriette, pressing his case for a dual demise--he will shoot her first, then himself, he later helpfully explains--a proposal she finds initially absurd, then, after she learns she is about to die anyway, increasingly seductive.
Easeful. Celadon." The last two sections on age and beauty offer praise, though not without caution, perhaps as a response to the turmoil of the first two sections.
This exercise helps us feel the natural points of release and teaches our tongues to be more comfortable and
easeful on articulation.
Anderson's flight from custody was neither the first nor last time the legal rights of Bhopal's citizens were to be sacrificed for the purported benefit of India's "investment climate," or the rule of law twisted or circumvented to make the passage of investment into India's economy more
easeful for North American business interests.
We noticed a significant change in his speech--much more
easeful and less high-pitched--which was permanent.
While Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century nuances, rather than rewrites, earlier essay collections--such as Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin's Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century (Ashgate, 2008)--its unique "Reference Guide", sponsorship of different methodological approaches, and the
easeful conversations that take place among its various contributors at once expand and brighten our critical horizons.
Aside from the early, swift stabbing of a vagrant in the street, the only physical violence we see in the first act is the climatic killing of his smooth-talking, loathed colleague Paul Owen (nicely
easeful Ben Aldridge).
