text: Poem du Jour: We Lucky Few . . .
  Today I'm going to ask you to do something different. I want you to be absolutely sure to read through the entire poem before you read any commentary afterwards. Maybe you do normally. But if you don't, then this once make an exception:
  Phew! Done! Okay, now, congratulate yourselves. Most educated English-speaking humans know at least the title and can quote it on a day like some we've had recently. "What is so rare as a day in June?" they asked rhetorically, and stop. Because they're on vacation and who needs the mental work? It's time for hot dogs!
  But now, we few, we brave band of brothers, have soldiered through the reversals of words, the hark!s and 'tises, the phrasing that looked so poetic when it was new and looks so poem-y now, and won to the final sulphurous rifts.
  So what did you think of it? Liked it in spite of the poetic diction? Disliked it for the artifice of the thing? Yours is the judgment of posterity, after all, and as any artist can tell you, it's the only judgment that matters.