the last rose of summer, sort of

... or rather: "the last rose of summer" sounds like a good heading for a post, but I doubt that this is indeed the case.  This isn't one of our own (when did we see "the last rose..."? Maybe May ...), of course, but the last of a bunch bought at Trader Joe's, and therefore probably Colombian.  On the other hand, the kind of light that it's catching on the kitchen window ledge is unequivocally autumnal, post clock change, pale.

And the semester is unequivocally both winding down and speeding up.  I have only two more grad classes to go (Thanksgiving week is a "research week," so far as they are concerned) - and I feel exhausted with the current iteration - one of those semesters where I wish I could start again, and a more basic level, since only one of the five (or six - one dropped) is, or is potentially, a Victorianist.  They are all Eng Lit students.  Today, I had to disabuse the idea that Michael Field was a man ("Oh - I wondered why the syllabus said 'Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper,' after the name,"); learned that none of them had read The Turn of the Screw; and gently pointed out that the Emperor Hadrian wasn't Greek.  (On the other hand, Antinous was, in that he was from Bythnia, only not Greek as in ...).  From which you'll gather that we were reading Olive Custance, too and generally wondering, in the context of people kissing marble statues, marble statues coming to life, Pygmalion, and all the rest of it, why so many late Victorians were so weird.  On the other hand, I was gloomily realizing that they haven't read enough to see quite how wacky they were ...