Secure Within

     The first poet laureate of the United Kingdon was John Dryden. He lived in the 1600s, was the grandson of a baronet, and looked like this:

Dignity. Always dignity.

                                                  His most famous lines are perhaps these:

     Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.

     The current UK poet laureate is the son of a one-time fireman from Yorkshire. He's the first DJ to ever hold the position, and presumably the first whose love for Smiths-style guitar pop led him to form a band in middle age:  

     Britain has been hit hard by the coronavirus. Armitage, working from home, has issued a poem about the crisis called "Lockdown." It references a previous plague that struck the village of Eyam in the days of Dryden. To quote The Guardian: 

     The inhabitants of Eyam quarantined themselves, in a famous act of self-sacrifice, to prevent the spread of the plague. Villagers would come to place money in six holes drilled into the top of the boundary stone to pay for food and medicine left by their anxious neighbours.
     By the end of the outbreak, more than a quarter of the village’s population of almost 1,000 were dead. The plague, however, was contained.

     Armitage told The Guardian that we'll all come through this pandemic "slightly slower, and wiser, at the other end – given that one thing that’s accelerated the problem is our hectic lives and our proximities and the frantic ways we go about things." Here's hoping, for tomorrow will do its worst.