To Hafiz of Shiraz

The rose has come into the garden,

from Nothingness into Being

Once I did not know the birds were described,

classified, observed, fixed in their proper localities.

Each bird that sprang from its tree, passed overhead, hawked from the bough,

was sole, new, dressed as no other was dressed.

Any leaf might hide the paradise-bird.

Once I believed any poem might follow my pen,

any road might beckon my feet to mapless horizons,

any eyes that I met, any hand that I took, and word that I heard

might pierce to my heart, stay forever in mine, open worlds on its hinge.

All then seemed possible; time and world were my own.

Now that I know that each star has its path, each bird

is finally feathered and grown in the unbroken shell,

each tree in the seed, each song in the life laid down --

is the night sky any less strange; should my glance less follow the flight;

should the pen shake less in my hand?

No, more and more like a birth looks the scheduled rising of Venus;

the turn of the wing in the wind more startles my blood.

Every path and life leads one way only,

out of continual miracle, through creation's fable.

over and over repeated but never yet understood,

as every word leads back to the blinding original Word.

-- Judith Wright

She's glad her simple worsted grey is silver now with clinging mist

My November Guest

My sorrow, when she's here with me,

    Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

    She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

    She talks and I am fain to list:

She's glad the birds are gone away,

She's glad her simple worsted grey

    Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

    The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eyes for these,

    And vexes me for reasons why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

    The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

    And they are better for her praise.

-- Robert Frost

The world but seems to be

The world but seems to be

    yet is nothing more

than a line drawn

    between light and shadow.

Decipher the message

    of this dream-script

and learn to distinguish time

    from Eternity.

-- Fakhruddin Iraqi

Beauty is its own excuse for being

The Rhodora

On Being Asked Whence is the Flower

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the redbird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being;

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask; I never knew;

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there, brought you.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The imperfect is our paradise

The Poems of Our Climate


I

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,

Pink and white carnations. The light

In the room more like a snowy air,

Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow

At the end of winter when afternoons return.

Pink and white carnations -- one desires

So much more than that. The day itself

Is simplified: a bowl of white,

Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,

With nothing moe than the carnations there.

II

Say even that this complete simplicity

Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed

The evilly compounded, vital I

And made it fresh in a world of white,

A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,

Still one would want more, one would need more,

More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

-- Wallace Stevens

What to make of a diminished thing

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes the other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

-- Robert Frost

Two songs from a play

I

I saw a staring virgin stand

Where holy Dionysus died,

And tear the heart out of his side.

And lay the heart upon her hand

And bear that beating heart away;

Of Magnus Annus at the spring,

As though God's death were but a play.

Another Troy must rise and ser,

Another lineage feed the crow,

Another Argo's painted prow

Drive to a flashier bauble yet.

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called.

II

In pity for man's darkening thought

He walked that room and issued thence

In Galilean turbulence;

The Babylonian starlight brought

A fabulous, formless darkness in;

Odour of blood when Christ was slain

Made all platonic tolerance vain

And vain all Doric discipline.

Everything that man esteems

Endures a moment or a day.

Love's pleasure drives his love away,

The painter's brush consumes his dreams;

The herald's cry, the soldier's tread

Exhaust his glory and his might:

Whatever flames upon the night

Man's own resinous heart has fed.

-- William Butler Yeats