Yessssss…correctly identified Lady Wishfort and petals on a wet black bough. I keep remembering questions I agonized over–not because I didn’t know the answer, but because there were two answers for which my gut made a case–and looking them up. So far so good. Though may yesterday be the last time I ever fill in bubbles with a no.2 pencil.

I also now have a thermos (thanks hope!) that keeps tea hot up to 15 hours. 15 hours! If that’s not making me grad-school-ready, I don’t know what is.

The night before the test, when I realized I already knew all the Old English I’m ever going to know, I went back to my own personal canon instead.

Five years have passed; five summers with the length of five long winters!
(I got my five-year watch last week. Five years. My fifth long Boston winter.)
I cannot paint / What then I was. The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, /The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood / Their colours and their forms, were then to me / An appetite; a feeling and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm, / By thought supplied, nor any interest / Unborrowed from the eye.
(Five years ago, well, what then I was? I hardly remember. But surely I should have spent the last five years doing something…else?)
That time is past / And all its aching joys are now no more / And all its dizzy raptures.
(Rather, since I have spent the last five years letting words work on me and)
so inform /The mind that is within us, so impress / With quietness and beauty, and so feed / With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues
(can I just cut in line? what’s taking so long? this isn’t a cappuccino. what do you have that’s bold?)
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
(just a minute, i’m ordering *hand over phone tall coffee* sorry, so he said that I didn’t get him, right?)
Nor greetings where no kindness is
(Hi, how’s your day going? small tea. Right, well, we have a couple…whatever.)
nor all / The dreary intercourse of daily life,
(bar coffee)
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb / Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold / Is full of blessings.

I confess to having reached the point where finding the blessings is a challenge. Luckily WW perhaps once felt the same:

While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills;… more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

I am seeking the thing I love, at last; in this moment there is life and hope for future years.

(William Wordsworth’s Lines: written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798)