A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promonotory it stood

    isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of 

    itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of 

    space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking

    the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the

    ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere,

    O my soul.

-- Walt Whitman

An orientation of the spirit

Vaclav Havel, on Hope. It is:

"a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation ... It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don't think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favourable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are ... It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

-- from Seamus Heaney's 'The Redress of Poetry' 

The Great Face behind

The Last Chrysanthemum

Why should this flower delay so long

To show its tremulous plumes?

Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,

When flowers are in their tombs.

Through the slow summer, when the sun

Called to each frond and whorl

That all he could for flowers was being done,

Why did it not uncurl?

It must have felt that fervid call

Although it took no heed,

Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,

And saps all retrocede.

Too late its beauty, lonely thing,

The season's shine is spent,

Nothing remains for it but shivering

In tempests turbulent.

Had it reason for delay,

Dreaming in witlessness

That for a bloom so delicately gay

Winter would stay its stress?

-- I talk as if the thing were born

With sense to work its mind;

Yet it is but one mask of many worn

By the Great Face behind.

-- Thomas Hardy

Craftsmen (temp post)

All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held

Reality down fluttering to a bench;

Cut wood to their own purposes; compelled

The growth of pattern with the patient shuttle;

Drained acres to a trench.

    Control is theirs. They have ignored the subtle

Release of spirit from the jail of shape.

    They have been concerned with prison, not escape;

Pinioned the fact, and let the rest go free,

And out of need made inadvertent art.

All things designed to play a faithful part

Build up their plain particular poetry.

    Tools have their own integrity;

The sneath of scythe curves rightly to the hand,

The hammer knows its balance, knife its edge.

All tools inevitably planned,

Stout friends, with pledge

Of services, with crotchets too

That masters understand,

And proper character, and separate heart,

But always to their chosen temper true.

-- So language, smithied at the common fire,

Grew to its use; as sneath and shank and haft

Of well-grained wood, nice instruments of craft,

Curve to the simple mould the hands require,

Born of the needs of man.

The poet like the artisan

Works lonely with his tools; picks up each one,

Blunt mallet knowing, and the quick thin blade,

And plane that travels when the hewing's done;

Rejects, and chooses; scores a fresh faint line;

Sharpens, intent upon his chiselling;

Bends lower to examine his design,

If it be truly made,

And brings perfection to so slight a thing

But in the shadows of his working-place,

Dust-moted, dim,

Among the chips and the lumber of his trade,

Lifts never his bowed head, a breathing-space

To look upon the world beyond the sill,

The world framed small, in distance, for to him

    The world and all its weight are in his will.

    Yet in ecstasy of his rapt mood

    There's no retreat his spirit cannot fill,

    No distant leagues, no present, and no past,

No essence that his need may not distil,

All pressed into his service, but he knows

    Only the immediate care, if that be good;

The little focus that his words enclose;

As the poor joiner, working at his wood,

Knew not the tree from which the planks were taken,

Knew not the glade from which the trunk was brought,

Knew not the soul in which the roots were fast,

Nor by what centuries of gales the boughs were shaken,

But holds tham all beneath his hand at last.

-- Vita Sackville-West

Once again, the stone, the chisel and opened ground

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,
Words entering almost the sense of touch

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch --

'These things are not secrets but mysteries,'

Oisin Kelly told me years ago

In Belfast, hankering after stone

That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

-- Seamus Heaney

The Mind is Still

The mind is still. The gallant books of lies
are never quite enough.

Ideas are a whirl of mazy flies

over the pigs' trough.

Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone

for thirty years and still it is not done,

that image of the thing I cannot see.

I cannot finish it and set it free,

transformed to energy.

I chip and stutter but I do not sing

the truth, like any bird.

Daily I come to Judgement stammering

the same half-word.

So what's the matter? I can understand

that stone is heavy in the hand.

Ideas flit like flies above the swill.

I crowd with other pigs to get my fill.

The mind is still.

- Ursuka K. Le Guin

The Sycamore

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it. 

    There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

-- Wendell Berry

The Broken Ground

The opening out and out,

body yielding body:

the breaking 

through which the new

comes, perching

above its shadow

on the piling up

darkened broken old

husks of itself:

and opening to flower

opening to fruit opening

to the sweet marrow

of the seed --

            taken

from what was, from

what could have been.

What is left

is what is.

-- Wendell Berry