Saturday Rave: A Glimpse by Walt Whitman.

 We will soon be reaching that hellish breeding-ground of bad verse that is Valentine's Day.

So here, for some relief, is something lean and clean and not at all mushy or mawkish. It's by the remarkable American poet Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892).

A Glimpse

A glimpse through an interstice caught,

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner,

Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,

A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

Word To Use Today: interstice. The obvious question is, what is a stice? Sadly, the answer is quite boring. The word interstice comes from the Latin interstitium, which means interval, from sistere, which means to stand. 

In physics, an interstice is the gap between two next-door atoms in the lattice of a crystal.