Wordle!

Why I was right and assorted thoughts

My last post was spot-on: the day after I wrote it, a political piece appeared in the Times-Picayune that began with one of my favorite and most abused quotes:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead.

This particular quote, from Henry V by Shakespeare, is when King Henry is assaulting a French-held city and he is telling his soldiers to attack a breach in the wall of the city - even if they fail and must fill it up with their dead comrades.  The soldiers must go, once more, into that breach which has been such a menace to them all.  Victory or death.

The piece was about how a Republican Senator, absolutely disgusted with the state of affairs in Washington, has come out of a decade or more of retirement and relaxed living to run again.  The quote was used as both a humorous and extremely serious comment about how he must throw himself into the breach he once left, abandoning all of the comforts of retirement to re-enter the bloody business that is politics.

I don't usually read that particular writer's columns, but it was that quote which really drew me in and forced me to read.  It works, even on someone who tries not to get pulled in by fancy tricks.  I close with the last four lines of the same quote:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'