Lupercal

by Ted Hughes

The authors second collection which prints some of his most revered work including Pike, Hawk Roosting and November.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Animals

63 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008, The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
He married fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England, in a tumultuous relationship. They had two children before separating in 1962 and Plath ended her own life in 1963.

Reviews

[Magdalen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly feel bad for giving it such a low rating. The thing is that I just couldn't understand what he wanted to say. I felt utterly lost. Also, I struggled with the vocabulary. But this wasn't the reason why I didn't like it and I trully wanted to like it. You see, when I am reading poetry I want the poet to shake me to speak to me. I don't fancy just well written poems, I want to feel. and unfortunately, and it pains me to say it, Ted Hughes didn't manage to do so.
Mind that this is just my personal opinion and I by no means underestimate Hughes's talent. He just wasn't for me.
Nevertheless, I still am looking forward to reading the Birthday Letters.

[hawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection alot more than 'The Hawk in the Rain', even tho read by the same reader 🙃

I enjoyed the rhythm and alliteration of these poems... the internal rhyme, repetition...

poems that especially caught my ear included:

'February'
"The wolf with its belly stitched full of big pebbles" ♥🐺

the stoat of 'Strawberry Hill' 🙂

'The Bull Moses' ♥

and

'November' 🖤


4.5 🌟🌟🌟🌟

accessed as an audiobook from the RNIB library, read by Michael Tudor Barnes.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Those stars are the fleshed forebears
Of these dark hills, bowed like labourers,

And of my blood.

The death of a gnat is a star's mouth: its skin,
Like Mary's or Semele's, thin

As the skin of fire:
A star fell on her, a sun devoured her.

My appetite is good
Now to manage both Orion and dog

With a mouthful of earth, my staple.
Worm-sort, root-sort, going where it is profitable.

A star pierces the slug,

The tree is caught up in the constellations.
My skull burrows among antennae and fronds.

[leni swagger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Undoubtedly beautiful poetry with striking language, yet as someone who dislikes reading something for the aesthetic, I found it to be quite shallow. I admired his way with words, but sadly, none of the poems made an impact on me or on this reading experience. I’d love to read some of his poetry again, later in life.

[Em · Rating 1 out of 5]

Soulless man who wrote obfuscated nature poetry because the female psyche was too daunting a Muse.

What seemed to be less daunting was chronic adultery and (circa his 40th birthday) a 22-year old wife.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Pike" makes this entire book worthwhile. The rest of the book, though, doesn't disappoint.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tomcat still
Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,
Will take the head clean off your simple pullet,

Is unkillable. From the dog's fury,
From gunshot fired point-blank he brings
His skin whole, and whole
From owlish moons of bekittenings

Among ashcans. He leaps and lightly
Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon.
Nightly over the round world of men,
Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry.
[15]

[Robin Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

View of a Pig, The Bull Moses, To Paint a Water Lily, Esther’s Tomcat, Pike, Mayday on Holderness

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hughes second collection of poems is as good as his first and has the same weakness of inconsistency. Highlights ~ "A Woman Unconscious" "Dick Straightup" "Esther's Tomcat" "Pennines In April" "Hawk Roosting" "To Paint a Water Lily" "The Bull Moses" "View of the Pigs" "Relic" "An Otter" "Drag Jack's Apostasy" "Pike" "Cleopatra to the Asp" and "Lupercalia".

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hughes’s second volume of poems was entitled “Lupercal”, and was published in 1960. In this volume the final poem has the heading of ‘Lupercalia’; and this title, in a somewhat tailored form, was then used by Hughes as the title for the whole volume.

The most marvelous poems in this volume are extraordinary for their interpretation of certain animals which are known for their vicious and savage temperament.

No poet of the past has fairly managed to internalize the homicidal disposition of Nature through such luminously objective means, and with such economy, as Hughes has done in poems like ‘Esther‘s Tomcat’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘To Paint a Waterlily’, ‘View of a Pig’, ‘An Otter’, ‘Thrushes’, and ‘Pike’.

In these poems Hughes shows his aptitude to present a demonstration or a thought in the milieu of brutal action. In all these poems we find a strapping narrative and dramatic eminence which is in no way undermined by any needless portrayal or any authorial comment unsupplied with energy.

In ‘Esther’s Tomcat’, we are given a most explicit portrait of a tomcat attacking a knight on horseback, and throwing him down from his horse. The Knight dies of his hemorrhage wounds.

In ‘Hawk Roosting’, the hawk says:

“My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –”

Although the pig in the poem called ‘View of a Pig’ is dead, yet the poem has a brutal quality about it because of the way in which a living pig is represented in one of the stanzas:

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse’s—
They chop a half-moon clean out.

They eat cinders, dead cats.

Lines like these could not have appeared before World War II for the reason that such lines seem to put up with the stamp of the Blitz, the Hydrogen Bomb, and the massacre of the Jews in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Hughes’s view of Nature is not Wordsworthian; it bears a resemblance to the Nazi frame of mind. Hughes finds even the thrushes on a lawn to be a horrifying manifestation. He describes the disparaging nature of these birds and their insatiable craving which knows no compassion.

A thrush would swoop upon an insect in the grass to indulge its hunger, and it would so without any vacillation or contemplation. And yet the poem ‘Thrushes’ also has a meditative eminence.

‘An Otter’ and ‘Pike’ also deal with animals that make an impression on Hughes by their intensity and savagery. Both the otter and the pike-fish can be caught and slaughtered by human beings; and yet Hughes in these two poems has attributed almost paranormal rage to them. An otter is neither fish nor beast, but he carries “the legend of himself’ wherever he goes, and he seeks “some world lost when he first dived.”

The pike-fish have been described by Hughes as “killers from the egg,” and as having a spiteful smirk. Pike is Hughes’s ultimate assemblage, a sequence of accounts, yarns, ideas, building up the lone theme.

The poem entitled ‘November’ draws our notice not to the animal kingdom, but to the world of human beings: and the depiction of the human world here is a shameful one. The poem presents to our eyes a vagrant, observed slumbering in the rain in a ditch. To any spectator, this tramp would seem to be lifeless, though in fact he is only snoozing. The poet esteems the tramp that is quiescent as if nothing can harm him. The tramp lies with his face covered by his beard, in the “drilling rain” and the “welding cold”.

But the poet’s approbation for the tramp’s patience does not lessen the indignity or dishonour to which the tramp is being subjected by his conditions.

The last poem in this volume is Lupercalia which is very complicated to construe or to appreciate. It contains a succession of authoritative pictures of man and beast, then a concise depiction of something ahead of horrid grossness in the images of dancing fauns, and next a prayer for some kind of alteration.

A tad perverse, warped and twisted, but breathtaking!!

[Michael Percy · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I sat down to write about my first reading of this collection of poetry, I drew a blank. I knew nothing of Ted Hughes until he was mentioned in a comment about my reading of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, along with Sylvia Plath. I'd heard of Plath!

I didn't hate the poetry, nor did I like it. But it seemed strange. I knew it was about animals, but that was the extent of the experience of my first reading. So I took to some research and made some enlightening discoveries.

Hughes was the UK's Poet Laureate, just like Alfred, Lord Tennyson. There had to be something I was missing.

In an interview with The Paris Review from 1995, Hughes mentions a number of issues concerning "The Art of Poetry", such as the differences in drafting verse in handwriting versus typing. In response to the question "Is a poem ever finished?", Hughes mentions a struggle he has had with the singular or plural in the middle of the poem, "Hawk Roosting". Neither worked satisfactorily.

So I start there:

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

And he's right. Swap feet for foot and back again, and neither works grammatically. But it works as it is in the poem.

I tried another poem, "Urn Burial". On the first reading, my mind was clouded by seeing some of the oldest remnants of human urn burials in Bahrain on a visit during my sabbatical in 2009. All I could picture were the skeletal remains curled up in the large stone urns. No animals in sight.

Then, like a 3D picture, the symbolism became clear: Oh, it's a weasel! (It even reads "weasel", but I was off in another dimension.) It started to make sense.

This was not entirely my own doing. I had to digress with Hughes' ars poetica, "The Thought Fox". Hughes basically tells me how to read his poetry. It's very clever, but maybe a little more academic than I was expecting.

Hughes' fascination with animals came from his childhood experience. His older brother, ten years his senior, loved to hunt. Hughes acted as his older brother's retriever and this continued for something like twenty years. Hughes is also famous for his children's books.

Like many readers these days, I had fallen victim to the general decline in reading poetry for fun. (Except epic and didactic poetry such as Homer, Virgil, and Hesiod.)

This year I have read Frank O'Hara, Sir Walter Ralegh, T.S. Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and I am now a convert. I also read Nietzsche's The Gay Science and I am currently reading Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, both works about poetry. It makes more sense to read poetry more than once, and with some study in between. (Hughes said this in his Paris Review interview, too.)

Had I not read up about Hughes, I would have been none the wiser. And I would certainly be missing out.

The icing on the cake was the name of the collection, Lupercal, is derived from an ancient Roman pastoral or fertility festival, Lupercalia, held annually on my birthday. This made more sense of the numerous classical references that had confused me in my first reading.

Perhaps I am now a Ted Hughes fan.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lupercal was Hughes's second collection, originally published in 1960.it features some of his best known and most anthologised poems: Esther's Tomcat, Hawk Roosting, View of a Pig and Pike among them. These poems have deservedly passed in to the canon of great late twentieth century writing. Their directness, and Hughes's unflinching eye for life and death are remarkable. Lupercal also provided some new discoveries for me. Poems such as Pennines in April and Cleopatra to the Asp (among others) were real revelations and I couldn't quite believe that I hadn't encountered them before. But that's what reading original, individual works of poetry does: it reveals hidden gems that may not have made it to a Selected or Collected Poems, or which might have been overlooked while leafing through those larger volumes while looking for favourites.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found some of these poems rather self-consciously poetic, and some I just could not see what he meant - but his writing is so strong, The Bull Moses, and View of a Pig, so real and vivid, this is an early collection but clearly the work of a Real Poet.

[David Jonson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first collection of poetry I have read, but I really enjoyed this. Ted Hughes writes accessible poetry that commands your attention. The poems on animals and English countryside were particularly good. Recommended by someone new to poetry

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hughes' ability to convey the beauty and violence of nature unsentimentally is impressive. The poems feel somehow both raw and carefully worked. One of my favourites.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it for the best bits, which are stunning.

[Harris Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I came to live in a quiet rural backwater of Spain I was invited to be part of my Spanish girlfriend’s ‘matanza’ (a killing). I lived in a small village up in the foothills of the Sierra Morena, and one cold December morning with the wind whipping off the plains, when the inky sky was beginning to lighten, her family and myself killed the pig.

The rest of the day was spent processing it to provide food for the rest of the year, until the following year when we did it all again. It’s hard work. But if you tally the time, effort and resources required to drive to the local supermarket, pay (with money that's been earned), and include the time at the checkout, over the year, it probably saves the time, effort and resources by quite some margin. The problem is it’s concentrated into one day’s work.



Why do I mention this?

Ted Hughes is known for writing about animals, the bestiary of the world is found in the pages of his poetry. It might be trite of me to say so, but there’s no sentimentality or superficiality about his writing. Far from it, the brutality and cruelty are predominant and Hughes employs religion, mythological sources, and a comparison with ourselves to expound on the human condition as well as show the reality of animal behaviour.

A reader doesn’t need to have a synergy with a poem, to enjoy it. But View of a Pig did just that. I’m currently writing about my ‘matanza’, where the moment that made the greatest impression on me was the point of the pig’s death, and here Hughes seems equally impressed by it.

’Such weight and thick pink bulk / Set in death seemed not just dead. / It was less than lifeless, further off. / It was like a sack of wheat.’

There’s a typical directness and brevity to the language, but that said at times Hughes’ syntax, obscure references, free form and enjambment will throw you. Some poems from this collection are more complex than others and might require reading aloud a few times (after leaving dust to settle each time) with an encyclopedia to hand. That said there were many poems here that for me hit the button straight away:

Mayday on Holderness, a marvellously melancholic view of the Humber, where the bottom of the North Sea can be scratched beneath the immeasurable quantity of water in its unfathomable depths.

'A loaded single vein, it drains / The effort of the inert North - Sheffield's ores / Bog pools, dregs of toadstools, tributary / Graves, dunghills, kitchens, hospitals.'

Crow Hill, is a unique view of the tussle between the skies and substrata where the elements are rebuffed by those that need to inhabit the liminal space between.

Dick Straightup, is five long stanzas of rollicking roistering with an inevitable obituary to finish. It has a touch of Under Milkwood to it and stands apart from the others.

Esther’s Tomcat will acquaint you with the word ‘grallochs’. I thought, at first reading, it was a range of hills outside Glasgow. In my defence, I put it to you that it's the opening word in the secondary line of an enjambment and therefore starts capitalised.

Hawk Roosting is Hughes at his animalistic best. While like the hawk you can’t help but feel yourself flying through the air with Acrobats.

'The allotment of death. / For the one part of my path is direct / Through the bones of the living. / No arguments assert my right:'

The Bull Moses is a paradoxical observation of a bull’s virility and emasculation in captivity at the same moment—like Moses, it can see but never reach the promised countryside that stretches before it (though it can of course populate it).

'And he took no pace but the farmer / Led him to take, as if he knew nothing / Of the ages and continents of his fathers, / Shut while he wombed, to a dark shed'

The Retired Colonel is a droll characterisation full of irony, the soddenness of November and course, the menace of Pike are all highlights in this collection, which was a follow-up to his debut collection Hawk in the Rain and well worth the read.

'Stilled legendary depth: / It was as deep as England. It held / Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old / That past nightfall I dared not cast'

If you find Hughes challenging it's worth persevering with Lupercal; once you are used to the free-form irregularities it becomes very enjoyable, especially if read aloud in a stentorian voice.

[Constance Plumley · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a few amazing poems in this volume; the man, indeed, had a gift! It is not difficult at all, though to see the almost-naked, barely-veiledmisogyny, and Anti-Semitism. Although think like many people he both adored *and* hated manyulture things about women; he also a tendency to exotiize non-white- women to the point of exaltation, and then barely disguise his racism etc. after things when south. Hughes had an Israeli-Jewish mistress for years, and would never publicly claim Shura as his own by Assia. You could say that it was his upbringing, the British culture at the time, Sylvia's mental health, what have you---but there *were* other straight, British poets of the same background, upbringing, and education at the time who were artists, who didn't treat their partners badly.

Seperating the art from the artist for a moment, though: it's difficult to fault this collection. Ted Hughes wasn't the Poet Laureate of England at one point for no reason---his imagery is rich and stunning, and each poem asserts itself with the same boldness as a hunter's flaming arrow in the darkness. Hughes adeptly uses his knowledge and familiarity with the natural world to guide us through scenes of brutality and majesty---our human selves and our animal selves---with the intensity of a mage, and the vocabulary of a brilliant writer and a learned man.

One *can* see why Plath fell for him when she first read a poem of his in The St. Boltoph's Review. We can see how and to what degree Ted Hughes influenced Sylvia Plath as poet, fascinated her as a lover and a person---and also why the intense relationship just could not be sustained.


Highly recommended

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lupercal is the second collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The poems in it continue the voice Hughes established with The Hawk in the Rain. Poems such as “To Paint a Water Lily” and “Pike” show nature without a sentimental gloss. Others, such as “Everyman’s Odyssey,” “Cleopatra to the Asp,” and “Lupercalia,” evoke the ancient world, but not in an antiquarian way. Instead, the figures in them are not so different from us.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure how a poem’s title related to the text. One example is “Wilfred Owen’s Photograph.” Another is “February,” in which the speaker regards a photo of the last wolf killed in England (who makes a surprise reappearance in “The Retired Colonel”). That wolf hovers over the entire collection, given the book’s title and its final poem.
Some poems, such as “Esther’s Tomcat,” are very accessible, whereas others are more obscure. For example, I had to read “Mayday at Holderness” three times before I got a feeling for the juxtaposition of the inexorable work of the North Sea (like a vast digestive tract) and a single death amid the ferocious slaughter at Gallipolli.
“Hawk Roosting” is a masterpiece. Another is “The Bull Moses,” an evocation so powerful I felt as if I were peering through the barn’s half-door and inhaling the odors.
Throughout, Hughes employs short words carefully marshaled for full effect of vowels and consonants, appropriate counterpart to his unflinching view of nature.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

View of a Pig

The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.

I thumped it without feeling remorse.
One feels guilty insulting the dead,
Walking on graves. But this pig
Did not seem able to accuse.

It was too dead. Just so much
A poundage of lard and pork.
Its last dignity had entirely gone.
It was not a figure of fun.

Too dead now to pity.
To remember its life, din, stronghold
Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
Seemed a false effort, and off the point.

Too deadly factual. Its weight
Oppressed me—how could it be moved?
And the trouble of cutting it up!
The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

Once I ran at a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a cat,
Its squeal was the rending of metal.

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse’s—
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.

Distinctions and admirations such
As this one was long finished with.
I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

[Peter Longden · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Sealey Challenge 2025
Day 10: ‘Lupercal’ by Ted Hughes
While I’ve been collecting poetry books to read during this year’s challenge, I realised that I hadn’t read a whole collection of poems by Ted Hughes, a fellow Yorkshire poet, born in Mytholmroyd, in Calderdale. I decided to put this right and have 3 of his collections, potentially, to read this summer. (I say ‘potentially’ as I have more books than are needed for the 31 days, so choices are being made and anything unread this year will remain ‘in-hand’ for next year).

While Hughes, in the volume, doesn’t give an explanation for the collections title, it appears to be associated with the Roman god of fertility, Lupercus. The name, ‘Lupercalia’ is also known as the Feast of Lupercal as well as the name given to the cave where Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome were alleged to have been nurtured by a she-wolf. Hence, many of the poems in this collection relate to nature, animals and, specifically, wolves (‘February’ and ‘Lupercalia’).
At times entertaining, at all times fascinating, Ted Hughes is a poet for all times!

[Colin Cloutus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contains some of the best from Ted Hughes' early work, but overall is a quite obscure read.
It is for the most part read more like Hughes' later work where dense imagery and awkward near-Biblical phrasing can puzzle the understanding brain, but pleasure the Soul behind, though there are sadly more hits than misses. Interestingly, it is probably the most conventional of Hughes' collections (apart from those for children), being moreso than the quite conventional Hawk in the Rain by assuming a more primitive ballad-influenced style for its bulk.
Hughes himself believed the work to be unsatisfactory and awkward despite his enjoyment of its style and content - something I have to agree on - and the loose Lupercalia 'conceit' is not fully realised. Regardless it is a worthwhile collection and an important point in Hughes' bibliography, and one which I shall return to, perhaps with more joy.

[Differengenera · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd put this guy in for the most fascist poet of the twentieth century. If he has one subject its the redemptive power of violence and murder. This isn't even insensible or unconscious murder, because you can't write a poem that represents anything extrinsic to language. It's about pride, and a kind of annihilatory hygiene. Nature is conceived exclusively according to this dynamic and all human effort, society, speech, progress pathetic attempts to deny it. He has this line about how lighthouses are for the weak for example. There's some power to his capacity to summon up this grandeur but it is far more often self-parody, a man posing that he lives on the moors eating roots and dirty.

'Dick Straightup' or 'The Retired Colonel' are the two most egregious examples, where old men with military connections are afforded supreme dignity for being at a distance from a gossipy and garish age monopolised by showy young men and drinking a lot. Anything that's good here is stolen from Eliot

[Cassandra Glissadevil · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars!
Resplendent nature poetry hinting at Hughes obsession with obsessed women.

“CLEOPATRA TO THE ASP

The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it
Loved me like my soul, my soul:
Now that I seek myself in a serpent
My smile is fatal.

Nile moves in me; my thighs splay
Into the squalled Mediterranean;
My brain hides in that Abyssinia
Lost armies foundered towards.

Desert and river unwrinkle again.
Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk
Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.
Now let the snake reign.

A half-deity out of Capricorn,
This rigid Augustus mounts
With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn
Summarily the moon-horned river

From my bed. May the moon
Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole
With coiled Egypt's past; then from my delta
Swim like a fish toward Rome.”
― Ted Hughes, Lupercal

Welcome addition to any poetry collection.

[Reece · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really brought me round to the conclusion that my love for poetry comes from poetry with a connection to the natural world. Naturalistic writing makes it timeless, and the relation between man and beast is especially dear to me.

The book is framed as a piece of British Poetry, but I have also read similar naturalistic writings from North America and Europe, such that I don't think this is a uniquely British piece of work.

The similiea between man and cat and man and dog can't help but warm your heart. Even when compared to the lowly stray tramp, you feel a connection and love towards your fellow creature.

It's a very pragmatic view of Britain and its nature. It isn't the rolling green countryside imagined by Kipling. There is talk of stray dogs and drowned cats, but in the tragedy of death, there's the celebration of the life cycles of nature.

[Leyla Hunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed Hawk Roosting, The Good Life, The Bull Moses and Pike. The animals were written in very vividly which I enjoyed. Overall though the poems and style of writing were a bit too bleak and serious for me. Though atmospheric, I didn't think he was pointing to any grand ideas, and nothing really 'spoke' to me.

A very Yeats vibe !

I would like to try another book of his though, perhaps Crow 🐦‍⬛

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ted Hughes’ volume is a remarkable work. His verses are precise, clean, and clear. His voice is unmistakable. For my money’s worth any discussion about great 20th century poets must include Ted Hughes.

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are lines that I cannot understand and lines that I feel close to my heart. I have not yet comprehended the charm of animals. My favorites: 'To Paint a Water Lily', 'Thrushes', and 'Cleopatra to the Asp'. My favorite phrase: 'Cattic Bacchanal'.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t expect to give this book five stars while reading it. After I finished it I had to. It expands my idea of what poetry can do. And that’s the best thing, really.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

This can really hit at times and I love that !! other times the cat sat on the mat