Through morning mist, preceded by its moo,
The lowing cow looms slowly into view.
Issa
fr. A Net of Fireflies
translated by Harold Stewart
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Albrecht Durer |
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Martin Lewis |
Nerves
You have noticed the curious increased exasperation
Of human nerves these late years? Not only in Europe,
Where reasons exist, but universal; a rope or a net
Is being hauled in, a tension screwed higher;
Few minds now are quite sane; nearly every person
Seems to be listening for a crash, listening...
And wishing for it, with a kind of enraged
Sensibility.
Or is it that we really feel
A gathering in the air of something that hates
Humanity, and in that storm-light see
Ourselves with too much pity and the others too clearly?
Well, this is February, nineteen-three-nine.
We count the months now, we shall count the days.
It seems time that we find something outside our
Own nerves to lean on.
Robinson Jeffers
I read this with amazement. The date this poem was written!!
It could be describing today.
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Carl Larsson |
The Waggon-Maker
I have made tales in verse, but this man made
Waggons of elm to last a hundred years;
The blacksmith forged the rims and iron gears,
His was the magic that the wood obeyed.
Each deft device that country wisdom bade,
Or farmers' practice needed, he preserved.
He wrought the subtle contours, straight and curved
Only by eye, and instinct of the trade.
No weakness, no offense in any part,
It stood the strain in mired fields and roads
In all a century's struggle for its bread;
Bearing, perhaps, eight thousand heavy loads,
Beautiful always as a work of art,
Homing the bride, and harvest, and men dead.
John Masefield
A perfect poem. How every word fits snug in its place! - I feel an intertwining of the writer and his subject. In his appreciation of the carpenter's craft, there is an equal echo in his own.
The way he writes, "I have made tales in verse, but this man made..." and then describes the wisdom of the woodworker and blacksmith, how they use a knowledge passed down to them through time, and with this create something useful and beautiful to last a hundred years.
That sense of Time! And wisdom passed down! And that "only by eye" and instinct! This is an artist recognizing another's artistry.
It gives me chills.
There is something gorgeous in the meeting of arts.
A recognition of the highest purposes? Beauty and Truth, or Beauty and Usefulness?
Together, they are a powerhouse, an explosion, a celebration.
I walk away from the poem wishing I had a part in that Beauty-work.
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Bruno Liljefors |
John Clare, bird enthusiast, bird poet.
"I drank the sound with joy."
And that's the impression I get - that Clare was a man who needed nature to bring him
out of himself, to lift him up. The birds fed his soul.
I can relate.
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Adriaen van Ostade |
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Agnelo Bronzino |
Words
Always the arriving winds of words
Pour like Atlantic gales over these ears,
These reefs, these foils and fenders, these shrinking
And sea-scalded edges of the brainland.
Rebutted and rebounding, on they post
Past my remembrance, falling all unplanned.
But some day out of the darkness they'll come forth,
Arrowed and narrowed into my tongue's tip,
And speak for me -- their most astonished host.
W.R. Rodgers
The image of words as a wind, a storm, as waves hitting the "sea-scalded edges of the brainland" is so perfectly fitting.
Ceaseless, loud, battering - this is a familiar, daily experience.
The thought that some day this gale might turn, might come from me instead of at me,
I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
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Hubert Shuptrine |
As an example of taking a simile to its limits, this is wonderful.
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness,
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding
darkness on the lost bride and her groom.
D. H. Lawrence
I see Lawrence in this poem, on the edge of Winter, sitting by his gentian, thinking of the world turning into the dark season, meditating on its blueness.
That deep blue - that dark!
"Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower..."
It's a fantasy of blue - it's like a prayer.
Down into frost and darkness -
down into death's country with a flower of hope for a guide?
Is this what they used to call Alchemy?
To carry a dark flower into the blackness where it becomes a light?
"Lead me then, lead me the way."
Even in the darkest place life is not extinguished.
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Gwen Raverat |
from Contradictions: Tracking Poems
1.
Look: this is January the worst onslaught
is ahead of us Don't be lured
by these soft grey afternoons these sunsets cut
from pink and violet tissue-paper by the thought
the days are lengthening
Don't let the solstice fool you;
our lives will always be
a stew of contradictions
the worst moments of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly still and our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life.
18.
The problem, unstated till now, is how
to live in a damaged body
in a world where pain is meant to be gagged
uncured un-grieved over The problem is
to connect, without hysteria, the pain
of any one's body with the pain of the body's world
For it is the body's world
filled with creatures filled with dread
mishapen so yet the best we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I long to live on this earth
walking her boundaries never counting the cost
Adrienne Rich
"This battering, blunt-edged life."
That phrase certainly feels true today.
And how do I live it? How reconcile my struggle and the struggle of others, how "connect" even to broken things and selves?
And that last line --
"Never counting the cost"
That's what I really want.
To live full-out, in spite of all the beat-downs.
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Spider
Teacher of Swedenborg and St. John of the Cross,
First anchorite, mysterious builder --
From the dark corner of my room
His destination
The distant northern star. . .
As he weaves, as he spreads his webs,
He is singing.
I'm certain of it,
He is singing.
Charles Simic
I can't say more about this than it already says -
Singing!