Shakespeare Day - A Bank Holiday?

I really would like to see today as Shakespeare Day, a bank holiday (as you can never have enough of those), a day to celebrate our cultural heritage. Not because Shakespeare needs the PR, think he’s being doing quite nicely on that front for a few hundred years, but because it deflects the jingoism and ridiculous nonsense of St George. The arts enrich our lives, they are good for our wellbeing, and they help us on the road to happiness and fulfilment. The arts celebrate diversity.

Angry, bored, depressed, perplexed, stressed, having trouble making sense of the world or just generally unhappy?

Then get some art in your life. Open your heart to the arts. You’ll feel so much better for it.

Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing), William Blake, ca. 1825 — Source.

A New Jerusalem

Don't you just love translator software ?

As an experiment I thought I'd translate William Blake's Jerusalem from English to French and back again. This is what I got:

And did these feet in ancient time
go on the green of the mountains of England?
And was the holy lamb of God
on the pleasant pastures of England seen?

And it undermines it guessed the glare ahead
on our opacified hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
among these dark mills of Satanic?

Bring to me my extreme gold arc:
Bring to me my arrows of the desire:
Bring to me my lance: The clouds of O reveal!
Bring to me my carriage of fire.

I will not cease a mental combat,
nor my sleep of sword in my hand
until we built Jerusalem
in the green and pleasant ground of England.

Me thinks Blake would have thought it was the work of the devil.

Perhaps the ghost of a flea got into the machine!