Looking at Stumbling and Mumbling’s personal blog profile I noticed this:

    What is your favourite poem?   W.B Yeats’s Song of the Wandering Angus, as sung by Jolie Holland

The lovely original poem is here, with Aengus not Angus in the title:

… Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

I too love that poem because it takes me back to that fabulous Ray Bradbury story The Golden Apples of the Sun in which a spaceship is on a mission to fly to the Sun and scoop up a blob of its molten fire to take back to Earth.

The rocket and spacemen have to be deep frozen inside to survive. They head ‘South’ towards the Sun and somehow manage to get the sample. They turn round and fly ‘North’ back away from the unimaginable heat, savouring the very idea of coolness.

If you have not read this superlative anthology of bittersweet American classic short stories, some with a sci-fi theme but all of them making astute or unexpected social and philosophical points, (a) shame on you, and (b) order it right now: