unpermanence

Updated: May 5, 2025

The very steeds are uneasy, as if ashamed. But in Dunbar the allegorical machinery is saved from contempt by colour, poetry, and music. And even in poems where the mood is melancholy, where the burden is the shortness of life and the unpermanence of felicity, his satiric rage breaks out in single lines of fire.

Alexander Smith - Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country