British poet Ian McMillan is staying in today, he writes in the Guardian, “cowering behind the settee in a hard hat and persuading my wife to bring my meals on a tray, making sure that she tastes them first, or at least offers them to our grandson.” There’s something about Shakespeare’s death day that brings the shadow of extinction to all of his ilk: “William Wordsworth wandered his last lonely walk on this day, as did the great Spanish author Cervantes. Henry Vaughan, the Welsh metaphysical poet, breathed his last lungful of gorgeous Welsh air on this day. Rupert Brooke died today in 1915, and Harold Arlen – whose songs such as Stormy Weather and Let’s Fall in Love (mind you, he didn’t write the lyrics) approach the status of poetry— passed to the far side of the rainbow on 23 April 1986.”