The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

        When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

        The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

        Like strings of broken lyers.

And all mankind that haunted nigh

        Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

        The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

        The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

        Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

        Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

        The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

        Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

        In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

        Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

        Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

        Afar or nigh around.

That I could think there trembled through

        His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

        And I was unaware.

- Thomas Hardy

The poem that took the place of a mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,

Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed

A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,

Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,

Where he would be complete in an unexplained

    completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they

    had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,

Recognize his unique and solitary home.

- Wallace Stevens

The Planet on the Table

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.

They were of a remembered time

Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun

Were waste and welter

And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one

And his poems, although makings of his self,

Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.

What mattered that they should bear

Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,

In the poverty of their words,

Of the planet of which they were part.

- Wallace Stevens

That appear and then pop

Like a large blot of smudged fire
The setting sun lingers in the clouds that remain.

I hear a faint whistle in the distance of the still evening.

It must be a distant train.

In this moment I feel a vague nostalgia

Along with a vague and placid desire

That comes and goes.

So too, sometimes, on the surface of streams,

There are bubbles of water

That appear and then pop.

And they have no meaning

But to be bubbles of water

That appear and then pop.

- Fernando Pessoa

What mystery pervades a well

What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far -
A neighbour from another world

Residing in a jar.

Whose limit none has ever seen,

But just his lid of glass -

Like looking every time you please

In an abyss' face!

The grass does not appear afraid,

I often wonder he

Can stand so close and look so bold

At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,

The sedge stands near the sea -

Where he is floorless

And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet:

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get.

- Emily Dickinson

The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding

titles: oak, aspen, willow.

Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north

have dozens of words to describe its

different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their

thick fur, theor shy and wordless gaze. Their

infallible sense of what their lives 

are meant to be. Thus the world

grows rich, grows wild, and you too,

grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

were born to be.

- Mary Oliver

Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

- Robert Frost

Devotion

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean -

Holding the curve of one position,

Counting an endless repetition.

- Robert Frost

Never again would birds' song be the same

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round

From having heard the daylong voice of Eve

Had added to their own an oversound,

Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Admittedly an eloquence so soft

Could only have had an influence on birds

When call or laughter carried it aloft.

Be that as may be, she was in their song.

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed

Had now persisted in the woods so long

That probably it never would be lost.

Never again would birds' song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

- Robert Frost

Two Tramps in Mud Time

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard

And one of them put me off my aim

By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"

I knew pretty well why he dropped behind

And let the other go on a way.

I knew pretty well what he had in mind:

He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,

As large around as the chopping block;

And every piece I squarely hit

Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.

The blows that a life of self-control

Spares to strife for the common good,

That day, giving a loose to my soul,

I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still

You're one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight

And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,

His song so pitched as not to excite

A single flower as yet to bloom.

It is snowing a flake: and he half knew

Winter was only playing possum.

Except in color he isn't blue,

But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look

In summertime with a witching wand,

In every wheelrut's now a brook,

In every print of hoof a pond.

Be glad of water, but don't forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

That will steal forth after the sun is set

And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task

These two must make it love it more

By coming with what they come to ask.

You'd think I never had felt before

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,

The grip on earth of outspread feet,

The life of muscles rocking soft

And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the woods two hulking tramps

(From sleeping God knows where last night,

But not long since in the lumber camps).

They thought all chopping was theirs of right.

Men of the woods and lumberjacks,

They judged me by their appropriate tool,

Except as a fellow handles an ax

They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.

They knew they had but to stay their stay

And all their logic would fill my head:

As that I had no right to play

With what was another man's work for gain.

My right might be love but theirs was need.

And where the two exist in twain

Theirs was the better right - agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future's sakes.

- Robert Frost

Evening in a Sugar Orchard

From where I lingered in a lull in March

Outside the sugarhouse one night for choice,

I called the fireman with a careful voice

And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:

"O fireman, give the fire another stoke,

And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke."

I thought a few might tangle, as they did,

Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare

Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,

And so be added to the moon up there.

The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show

On every tree a bucket with a lid,

And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.

The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.

They were content to figure in the trees

As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.

And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

- Robert Frost

Gathering Leaves

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer 

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight;

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop

And who's to say where

The harvest shall stop?

- Robert Frost

The Diviner

Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick
That he held tight by the arms of the V:

Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck

Of water, nervous, but professionally

Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a string.

The rod jerked with precise convulsions,

Spring water suddenly broadcasting

Through a green hazel its secret stations.

The bystanders would ask to have a try.

He handed them the rod without a word.

It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,

He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred.

- Seamus Heaney

Modesties

Words as plain as hen-birds' wings
Do not lie,
Do not over-broider things -

Are too shy.

Thoughts that shuffle round like pence

Through each reign,

Wear down to their simplest sense,

Yet remain.

Weeds are not supposed to grow,

But by degrees

Some achieve a flower, although

No one sees.

- Philip Larkin

The Dancer

    Butterfly
    Or falling leaf,
    Which ought I to imitate
    In my dancing?

And if she were to admit

The world weaved by her feet

Is leafless, is incomplete?

And if she abandoned it,

Broke the pivoted dance,

Set loose the audience?

Then would the moon go raving,

The moon, the anchorless

Moon go swerving

Down at the earth for a catastrophic kiss.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

    If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken.

    And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

    Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

    And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

- Rudyard Kipling

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

    Of deities or mortals, or of both,

        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

    What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

        What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

    Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

        Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss;

Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;

    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

        For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

    Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

    For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

        For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to sacrifice?

    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore,

    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 

    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

    When old age shall this generation waste,

        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

    Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-John Keats

life is more true than reason will deceive

life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)

deeper is life than lose:higher than have

- but beauty is more each than living's all

multiplied with infinity sans if

the mightiest meditations of mankind

cancelled are by one merely opening leaf

(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)

or does some littler bird than eyes can learn

look up to silence and completely sing?

futures are obsolete;pasts are unborn

(here less than nothing's more than everything)

death,as men call him,ends what they call men

- but beauty is more now than dying's when

- e.e.cummings

in time of daffodils

in time of daffodils(who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim

the aim of waking is to dream,

remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze

our now and here with paradise)

forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond

whatever mind may comprehend,

remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be

(when time from time shall set us free)

forgetting me, remember me

yes is a pleasant country

yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let' open the year

both is the very weather

(not either)

my treasure,

when violets appear

love is a deeper season

than reason;

my sweet one

(and april's where we're)

- e.e.cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging

a window,into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps 

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things,while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps 

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

- e.e.cummings

The Roses of the Gardens of Adonis

The roses of the gardens of Adonis
Are what I love, Lydia, those flitting roses

    That in the day when they are born,

           Within that day, die.

The light's for them eternal, because they

Are born with the sun born already, and sink

    Before Apollo may yet leave

        The visible course he has.

Like them, let us make of our lives one day, -

Voluntarily, Lydia, unknowing

    That there is night before and after

        The little that we last.

- Fernando Pessoa

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

And interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because 

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stand plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

- Philip Larkin

Proud Songsters

The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in one and pairs,

And as it gets dark loud nightingales

                In bushes,

Pipe, as they can when April wears,

                As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of twelve-months' growing,

Which a year ago, or less than twain,

No finches were, nor nightingales,

                Nor thrushes,

But only particles of grain,

                And earth, and air, and rain.

- Thomas Hardy

rendering death and forever with each breathing

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

- e.e. cummings

love makes the little thickness of the coin

hate blows a bubble of despair 

hate blows a bubble of despair into

hugeness world system universe and bang

-fear buries a tomorrow under woe

and up comes yesterday most green and young

pleasure and pain are merely surfaces

(one itself showing, itself hiding one)

life's only and true value neither is

love makes the little thickness of the coin.

comes here a man would have from madame death

nevertheless now and without winter spring?

she'll spin that spirit her own fingers with

and give him nothing (if he should not sing)

how much more than enough for both of us

darling. And if i sing you are my voice,

- e.e.cummings

A prose poem

Hysteria

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: 'If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ...' I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

- T. S. Eliot

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

- W.B. Yeats

That we must labour to be beautiful

Adam's Curse


We sat together at one summer's end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ' A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon yout marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.'

                                        And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake

There's many a one shall find out all heartache

On finding that her voice is sweet and low

Replied, ' To be born woman is to know -

Although they do not talk of it as school -

That we must labour to be beautiful.'

I said, 'It's certain there is no fine thing

Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove 

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it has all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

The House was Quiet and the World was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be 

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summet night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The turth in a calm wolrd,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

There is another sky

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a forst has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

Study of Two Pears

                        I

Opusclulm paedagogum.

The pears are not viols,

Nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

                        II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Blulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

                        III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

Tapering toward the top.

                        

                        IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

                        V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

                        VI 

The shadows of the pears 

are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

not-thinking, not-remembering, not-wanting

Six Recognitions of the Lord

1.

I know a lot of fancy words.

I tear them from my heart and my tongue.

Then I pray

2.

Lod God, mercy is in your hands, pour

me a little. And tenderness too. My

need is great. Beauty walks so freely

and with such gentleness. Impatience puts

a halter on my face and I run away over

the green fields wanting your voice, your

tenderness, but having to do with only

the sweet grasses of the fields against

my body. When I first found you I was

filled with light, now the darkness grows

and it is filled with crooked things, bitter

and weak, each one bearing my name.

3.

I lounge on the grass, that's all. So

simple. Then I lie back until I am

inside the cloud that is just above me 

but very high, and shaped like a fish.

Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place

of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-

wanting. When the blue jay cries out his

riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always

near. Over and back, over and back. Then

I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I

have been asleep. But I have not been 

asleep. I have been, as I say, inside

the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating

on the water. Then I go back to town,

to my own house, my own life, which has 

now become brighter and simpler, some-

where I have never been before.

4.

Of course I have always known you

are present in the clouds, and the

black oak I especially adore, and the

wings of birds. But you are present 

too in the body, listening to the body,

teaching it to live, instead of all

that touching, wiht disembodied joy.

We do not do that easily. We have

lived so long in the heaven of touch,

and we maintain our mutability, our

physicality, even as we begin to

apprehend the other world. Slowly we

make our appreciative response.

Slowly appreciation swells to

astonishment. And we enter the dialogue

of our lives that is beyond all under-

standing or conclusion. It is mystery.

It is love of God. It is obedience.

5.

Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with

the fragrance of the fields and the

freshness of the oceans which you have

made, and help me to hear and to hold

in all dearness those exacting and wonderful

words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying:

Follow me.

6.

Every summer the lilies rise

    and open their white hands until they almost

cover the black waters of the pond. And I give

    thanks but it does not seem like adequate thanks,

it doesn't seem

    festive enough or constant enough, nor does the

name of the Lord or the words of thanksgiving come

    into it often enough. Everywhere I go I am 

treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and

    am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given

the white lilies on the black water. My heart 

    sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't convey

hald what it feels and means. In spring there's hope,

    in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in

winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its

    leafy cave, but in summer there is

everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,

    the hospitality of the Lord and my

inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body

    through this water-lily world.

More Evidence

1.

The grosbeak sings with a completely cherishable

roughness.

The yellow and orange and scarlet trees - what do 

they denote about willingness, and the flamboyance 

of change?

With what words can I convince you of the

casualness with which the white swans fly?

It doesn't matter to me if the woodchuck and

the turtle are not always, thoughtfully,

considering their lives and making decisions,

the certainty that they are doing this at all -

that alters everything.

Do you give a thought now and again to the 

essential sparrow, the necessary toad?

Just as truly as the earth is ours, we belong

to it. The tissue of our minds is made of it,

and the soles of our feet, as fully as the

tiger's claw, the branch of the whitebark pine,

the voices of the birds, the dog-tooth violet

and the tooth of the dog.

Have you ever seen a squirrel swim? I have.

Is it not incredible, that in the acorn something

has hidden an entire tree?

"For there is nothing that grows or lives that

can approach the feathery grace, the symmetry

of form, or the lacy elegance of pattern of the 

Ferns: and to be blind to all this beauty is

nothing less than calamitous."

In Australia there is a cloud called The

Morning Glory.

Okay, I confess to wanting to make a literature 

of praise.

2.

Where are you when you're not thinking?

Frightening, isn't it?

Where are you when you're not feeling anything?

Oh, worse!

Except for faith and imagination, nature is that

hard fortress you can't get out of.

Some persons are captive to love, others would

make the beloved a captive. Which one are you?

I think I have not lived a single hour of my life

by calculation.

There are in this world a lot of devils with wondrous 

smiles. Also, many unruly angels.

The life of the body is, I suppose, along with 

everything else, a lesson. I mean, if lessons are

what you look for.

Faith: this is the engine of my head, my breast

bone, my toes.

3.

It is salvation if one can step forth from the

clutter of one's mind into that open space -

that almost holy space - called work.

Emerson: how the elegance of his language can 

make me weep over my own inadequacy.

Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.

Or, how sweet just to say of a great, burly 

man: he's a honey.

Or of the fox: his neat trot. The donkey, his 

sorrowful plodding. The cheetah: his clean leap.

The alligator: his lunge.

Do you hear the rustle and outcry on the page?

Do you hear its longing?

Words are too wonderful for words. The vibrant

translation of things to ideas. Hello there.

My best greetings to you.

Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in

my heart. It's going to take something I can't

even imagine, to put them all out.

4.

Let laughter come to you now and again, that

sturdy friend.

The impulse to leap off the cliff, when the 

body falsely imagines it might fly, may be

restrained by reason, also by modesty. Of the

two possibilities, take your choice, and live.

Refuse all cooperation with the heart's death.

5.

Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be 

musical inside yourself.

The Kingfisher

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave

like a blue flower, in his beak

he carries a silver leaf. I think this is

the prettiest world - so long as you don't mind

a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life

that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

There are more fish than there are leaves

on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher

wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.

When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water

remains water - hunger is the only story

he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.

I don't say he's right. Neither

do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf

with its broken red river, and with a rought and easy cry

I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body

if my life depended on it, he swings back

over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it

(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

To be great, be entire

To be great, be entire: of what's yours nothing
    Exaggerate or exclude.

Be whole in each thing. Put all that you are
    Into the least you do.
Like that on each place the whole moon
    Shines, for she lives aloft.

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not, how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

(May God grant us the grace to appreciate and care without worrying)

I Want

I want - unknown and calm
Because unknown, and my own

Because calm - to fill my days

With wanting no more than them.

Those whom wealth touches - their skin

Itches with the gold rash.

Those whom fame breathes upon -

Their life tarnishes.

To those for whom happiness is 

Their sun, night comes round.

But to one who hopes for nothing

All that comes is grateful.

The Peninsula

When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.

The sky is tall as over a runway,

The land without marks so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

And you're in the dark again. Now recall

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

Islands riding themselves out into the fog

And drive back home, still with nothing to say

Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

Water and ground in their extremity.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves.

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Borges on writers

 From his review of William Faulkner's 'Absalom! Absalom!':

I know of two kind of writers: those whose central preoccupation is verbal technique, and those for whom it is human acts and passions. The former tend to be dismissed as "Byzantine" or praised as "pure artists". The latter, more fortunately receive the laundry epithets "profound", "human", or "profoundly human", and the flattering vituperation "savage". The former is Swinburne or Mallarme, the latter, Celine or Theodore Dresier. Certain exceptional cases display the virtue and joys of both categories. Victor Hugo remarked that Shakespeare contained Gongora; we might also observe that he contained Dostoevsky.... Among the other great novelists, Joseph Conrad was perhaps the last who was interested both in the techniques of the novel and personalities of his characters. The last, that is, until the tremendous appearance of Faulkner. 

The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking
the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
that we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it 

    from the sand.
Let me fumble it into a box, with the 

    lid open.
Okay, I put the box into my car and started 

    up the highway
to the place where sometimes, sometimes not, 

    such things can be mended.

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I 

    won't call it good or bad, just

        one way or another.

Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

    the back of the front seat and 

        punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

But we all know, don't we, how sometimes

    things have to feel anger, so as not

        to be defeated?

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world,

    even in its hard places.

So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

    you have to do something.

It was, generally speaking, a perfectly beautiful

    summer morning.

The gull beat the air with its good wing.

I kept my eyes on the road.

The Plantation

Any point in that wood
Was a center, birch trunks

Ghosting your bearings,

Improvising charmed rings

Wherever you stopped,

Though you walked a straight line,

It might be a circle you travelled

With toadstools and stumps

Always repeating themselves.

Or did you re-pass them?

Here were bleyberries quilting the floor

The black char of a fire.

And having found them once

You were sure to find them again.

Someone had always been there

Though always you were alone.

Lovers, birdwatchers,

Campers, gipsies and tramps

Left some trace of their trades

Or their excrement.

Hedging the road so.

It invited all comers

To the hush and the mush

Of its whispering treadmill,

Its limits defined,

So they thought, from outside.

They must have been thankful 

For the hum of traffic

If they ventured in

Past the picknickers' belt

Or began to recall

Tales of fog on the mountains.

You had to come back

To learn how to lose yourself,

To be pilot and stray-witch,

Hansel and Gretel in one.

These things are not secrets but mysteries

from Glanmore Sonnets (II) (Seamus Heaney)

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.