I don't mind not-cheerful at all--in fact, it is often just right.

Oh, good. Often it doesn't matter to me, but then it does to other people, and I don't want them to feel unprepared.

--do you think it's meant this way, that the coal for the great armies is not coal, and the pit is not a mine pit, but rather, the pit is the trench, and the coal is the soldiers? Because that's how I read it.

I thought the minepits and the coal were real, and the larches cut down for pit-props real, but so are all the other associations that you read—and the narrator's lover, planted out onto the hill again under the larches up in Sheer, is dead and that too is real.

And "everlasting glare" was something that was commented on in "Wide Sargasso Sea," how the blessing "and let perpetual light shine upon them" is fine in temperate climates, but in the tropics you crave shade, shade is what is gentle.

Oh, nice. I have not read that book and I really should.

Anyway, I liked those last lines, and thought of you, plagued by sleeplessness...

It may be why those two poems spoke to me so strongly now.