Cold, rainy weather makes it trickier to be strong and courageous, much easier to be unmoored, like flotsam: the sea is so big and my front crawl was never that strong (despite my broad shoulders). But the week ahead, I am determined, will see me valiantly treading and spluttering. (I'll attempt the butterfly after I'm a little more certain that the saltier and more bitter the water, the easier it is to float). And then I'll make a resolution to leave extended metaphors to late sixteenth century British poets.

But speaking of poetry: I have been teaching critical reading to a very bright, newly emigrated Korean high schooler. The student's English improves at an astonishing pace, but words like "snowflake" and "helmet" are still new. Thanks to rigorous study, the student can define "belligerent" ; "valley" is more elusive. Sometimes, classes turn into a game of pictionary. "These are pillars," I say, drawing a triangle and four lines. Most of the time, such scrawlings are greeted with a quizzical look, followed by an epiphany (the student is very bright) and then a vastly improved rendering of my illustration, with Korean in the margin.

There's a small chance that a poem will appear on the all-important test, so we have been reading "250 Poems." It will take us 20 minutes to work through a Shakespearean sonnet, making sure that antecedents are clear, interrogating why seasons often stand in for life's stages ("Ah! All poems are about life," my student observed one day), clearing up the "haths" and "thous", etc. But at the end of those 20 minutes, there is always a full-out smile as the last couplet's twist becomes clear. I start to think that all shall be well, tempests be damned.