Ah, this is our week for Man’s Best Friend, the humble and faithful dog. And because you have to search far and wide to find anyone who doesn’t naturally understand the truth of that old and true appellation, it’s not surprising that some of Dogs’ Best Friends have commemorated their canine pals in song or story. We featured one such story about a …

Hollywood has made quite a few films in which the dog is the focus of everything. My favorite is one we’ve featured here at Word and Song: William Wellman’s Goodbye, My Lady, with Walter Brennan and the boy actor Brandon de Wilde and a Basenji girl-dog the boy finds in the woods and trains to be the best birder anybody’s ever seen. And surely The H…

Once again, a Substack glitch plagues us. Today’s poem, from Tony’s excellent book-length poem, The Hundredfold, only went out to a small number of our subscribers. We cannot discover why this happens, but when it does, we resend the post in a new draft. We very much want all of our subscribers to receive what we write — so we are opening this post…

Our Word of the Week, the phrase “Man’s Best Friend,” puts me in mind of all the creatures we share the world with, from the blazing sun — he’s about to set behind a bank of clouds as I write these words — to our dog Molly, out on a walk with our daughter Jessica, to the wild coreopsis flowers I see through the window, shooting up in the backyard, …

Many are the stories we associate with the brave and humble DOG — to use C. S. Lewis’s happy words, our servant, fellow-worker, playfellow, and jester. Here’s one of the best-known. Odysseus, in disguise as a beggar who’s seen a lot and suffered a lot, has returned to his homestead in Ithaca, after twenty years of war and wandering on the seas. Nob…

I had to struggle a bit to decide on a song for this week, with “justice” as our word. The fact is there aren’t many songs about that specific topic to choose from unless we veer into the realm of social protest music, which by its topical nature often doesn’t outlive the cause it is written to serve. Then I thought, what better time to revisit Cou…

It puzzles me sometimes that people of our time talk a lot about justice, thinking, I guess, that they will be on the good side when that is handed out. But Shakespeare’s Portia in The Merchant of Venice reminds us that “in the course of justice none of us / Should see salvation.” And Jesus warns us that when we judge, “with what measure ye measure…

Today I am happy to share with you a popular song which I have loved since my childhood, “Young at Heart.” This song was such a big hit for Frank Sinatra in early 1953 that the title of the movie he was working on at the time was changed to “Young at Heart,” and the song was played over the opening and closing credits as well. I’m not a film expert…