On this day Miss Ruth Pitter would have celebrated her 117th birthday.
»…Poor comfort all comfort: once what the mouse had spared
Was enough, was delight, there where the heart was at home:
The hard cankered apple holed by the wasp and the bird,
The damp bed, with the beetle’s tap in the headboard heard,
The dim bit of mirror, three inches of comb:
Dear enough, when with youth and with fancy shared.…«
Time’s Fool
from The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse,
edited by Philip Larkin, 1973.