Better.

Wyeth, November First, 1950

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 eye for these,

     And vexes me for reason 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

Unflinching.

Deiker, Rabbits in a Cabbage Field, 1864

THE SCARECROW

The Scarecrow

All winter through I bow my head

beneath the driving rain;

the North Wind powders me with snow

and blows me black again;

at midnight 'neath a maze of stars

I flame with glittering rime,

and stand above the stubble, stiff

as mail at morning-prime.

But when that child called Spring, and all

his host of children come,

scattering their buds and dew upon

these acres of my home,

some rapture in my rags awakes;

I lift void eyes and scan

the sky for crows, those ravening foes,

of my strange master, Man.

I watch him striding lank behind

his clashing team, and know

soon will the wheat swish body high

where once lay a sterile snow;

soon I shall gaze across a sea

of sun-begotten grain,

which my unflinching watch hath sealed

for harvest once again.

Walter de la Mare

Thanks for the image, Kurt ... don't neglect the sidebar.

Yet.

The LOVE of OCTOBER

A child looking at ruins grows younger

but cold

and wants to wake to a new name

I have been younger in October

than in all the months of spring

walnut and may leaves the color

of shoulders at the end of summer

a month that has been to the mountain

and become light there

the long grass lies pointing uphill

even in death for a reason

that none of us knows

and the wren laughs in the early shade now

come again shining glance in your good time

naked air late morning

my love is for lightness

of touch foot feather

the day is yet one more yellow leaf

and without turning I kiss the light

by an old well on the last of the month

gathering wild rose hips

in the sun

W.S. Merwin

Keeps.

Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1660

VERMEER

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum

in painted quiet and concentration

keeps pouring milk day after day

from the pitcher to the bowl

the World hasn’t earned

the world’s end.

Wisława Szymborska 

Rekindles.

Homer, The Pumpkin Patch, 1878

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Tell me where you hide by day?"

"In the cradle where the vapours

Dream the sunlit hours away."

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Who rekindles you at night?"

"Any firefly in the meadow

Lends a Jack-o'-Lantern light."

John B. Tabb

Happy Birthday, Robert Bridges

LOW BAROMETER

The south-wind strengthens to a gale,

Across the moon the clouds fly fast,

The house is smitten as with a flail,

The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in

A haunted house. Tenants unknown

Assert their squalid lease of sin

With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the pack’d

Pollution and remorse of Time,

Slipp’d from oblivion reënact

The horrors of unhouseld crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer

Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,

Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair

Or burts the lock’d forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interr'd

Escape from hallowing control,

Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard

The shrilling of a troubled soul,

That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d

The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound

Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust

The baleful phantoms underground.

Robert Bridges, born on this day in 1844

Happy Birthday, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1814

FROST at MIDNIGHT

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this day in 1772

Wonder.

ANOTHER POEM of the GIFTS

I want to give thanks to the divine

Labyrinth of causes and effects

For the diversity of beings

That form this singular universe,

For Reason, that will never give up its dream

Of a map of the labyrinth,

For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,

For love, which lets us see others

As God sees them,

For the solid diamond and the flowing water,

For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,

For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,

For Schopenhauer,

Who perhaps deciphered the universe,

For the blazing of fire,

That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,

For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,

For bread and salt,

For the mystery of the rose

That spends all its colour and can not see it,

For certain eves and days of 1955,

For the hard riders who, on the plains,

Drive on the cattle and the dawn,

For mornings in Montevideo,

For the art of friendship,

For Socrates’ last day,

For the words spoken one twilight

From one cross to another,

For that dream of Islam that embraced

A thousand nights and a night,

For that other dream of Hell,

Of the tower of cleansing fire

And of the celestial spheres,

For Swedenborg,

Who talked with the angels in London streets,

For the secret and immemorial rivers

That converge in me,

For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,

For the sword and harp of the Saxons,

For the sea, which is a shining desert

And a secret code for things we do not know

And an epitaph for the Norsemen,

For the word music of England,

For the word music of Germany,

For gold, that shines in verses,

For epic winter,

For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,

For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,

For crystal prisms and bronze weights,

For the tiger’s stripes,

For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,

For mornings in Texas,

For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle

And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,

For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,

Who, before there was Spanish, had written

All Spanish literature,

For gallant, noble, geometric chess,

For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,

For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,

For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,

For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,

For habits,

Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,

For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,

For night, its darkness and its astronomy,

For the bravery and happiness of others,

For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers

Or in an old sword,

For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,

For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible

And becomes one with the sum of all created things

And will never reach its last verse

And varies according to its writers

For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon

For dying so slowly,

For the minutes that precede sleep,

For sleep and death,

Those two hidden treasures,

For the intimate gifts I do not mention,

For music, that mysterious form of time.

Jorge Luis Borges

O'er.

OCTOBER 

My ornaments are fruits; my garments leaves,
  Woven like cloth of gold, and crimson dyed;
I do not boast the harvesting of sheaves,
  O'er orchards and o'er vineyards I preside.
Though on the frigid Scorpion I ride,
  The dreamy air is full, and overflows
With tender memories of the summer-tide,
  And mingled voices of the doves and crows. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sings.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot

The ordinary reader, when warned against the obscurity of a poem, is apt to be thrown into a state of consternation very unfavourable to poetic receptivity. Instead of beginning, as he should, in a state of sensitivity, he obfuscates his senses by the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something, he doesn't know what-or else by the desire not to be taken ill. There is such a thing as stage fright, but what such readers have is pit or gallery fright. The more seasoned reader, he who has reached, in these matters, a state of greater purity, does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first. I know that some of the poetry to which I am most devoted is poetry which I did not understand at first reading; some is poetry which I am not sure I understand yet.

T.S. Eliot, born on this day in 1888, from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

Blanche being unordinary ...

Record.

Volkov, The Old Divide, n/d

SONG of the STONE WALL

Come walk with me, and I will tell

What I have read in this scroll of stone;

I will spell out this writing on hill and meadow.

This is New England's entablature of rock,

Leagues upon leagues of sealed history awaiting an interpreter.

It is a chronicle wrought by praying workmen,

The forefathers of our nation.

The walls have many things to tell me,

And the days are long. I come and listen;

My hand is upon the stones, and the tale I fain would hear

Is of the men who built the walls,

And of the God who made the stones and the workers.

With searching feet I walk beside the wall;

I plunge and stumble over the fallen stones;

I follow the windings of the wall

Over the heaving hill, down by the meadow-brook,

Beyond the scented fields, by the marsh where rushes grow.

On I trudge through pine woods fragrant and cool,

And emerge amid clustered pools and by rolling acres of rye.

The wall is built of field stones great and small,

Tumbled about by frost and storm,

Shaped and polished by ice and rain and sun;

Some flattened, grooved, and chiseled

By the inscrutable sculpture of the weather;

Some with clefts and rough edges harsh to the touch.

Gracious Time has glorified the wall

And covered the historian stones with a mantle of green;

The sunbeams flit and waver in the rifts,

Vanish and reappear, linger and sleep,

Conquer with radiance the obdurate angles,

Filter between the naked rents and wind-bleached jags.

I understand the triumph and the truth

Wrought into these walls of rugged stone.

They are a miracle of patient hands,

They are a victory of suffering, a paean of pain.

All pangs of death, all cries of birth,

Are in the mute, moss-covered stones;

They are eloquent to my hands.

O beautiful, blind stones, inarticulate and dumb!

In the deep gloom of their hearts there is a gleam

Of the primeval sun which looked upon them

When they were begotten.

So in the heart of man shines forever

A beam from the everlasting sun of God.

Unresponsive, rude are the stones;

Yet in them divine things lie concealed.

I hear their imprisoned chant:

"We are fragments of the universe,

Chips of the rock whereon God laid the foundation of the world;

Out of immemorial chaos He wrought us.

Out of the sun, out of the tempest, out of the travail of the earth, we grew.

We are wonderfully mingled of life and death;

We serve as crypts for innumerable, unnoticed, tiny forms.

We are manifestations of the Might

That rears the granite hills unto the clouds

And sows the tropic seas with coral isles.

We are shot through and through with hidden color;

A thousand hues are blended in our gray substance.

Sapphire, turquoise, ruby, opal,

Emerald, diamond, amethyst, are our sisters from the beginning;

And our brothers are iron, lead, zinc,

Copper, and silver, and gold.

We are the dust of continents past and to come,

We are a deathless frieze carved with man's destiny;

In us is the record sibylline of far events.

Helen Keller, from "Song of the Stone Wall"

Autumn.

Wyeth, James Browning, Night Visitors, 2003

‘Tis Autumn.

THE SCARECROW

All winter through I bow my head

beneath the driving rain;

the North Wind powders me with snow

and blows me black again;

at midnight 'neath a maze of stars

I flame with glittering rime,

and stand above the stubble, stiff

as mail at morning-prime.

But when that child called Spring, and all

his host of children come,

scattering their buds and dew upon

these acres of my home,

some rapture in my rags awakes;

I lift void eyes and scan

the sky for crows, those ravening foes,

of my strange master, Man.

I watch him striding lank behind

his clashing team, and know

soon will the wheat swish body high

where once lay a sterile snow;

soon I shall gaze across a sea

of sun-begotten grain,

which my unflinching watch hath sealed

for harvest once again.

Walter de la Mare

Different.

Thank you, Veerle.

Catch.

Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies — alas! how soon he dies!

Samuel Johnson

Waken.

How we are moved by the bird’s call ...

Some single screech uniquely created.

Yet the children scream, as they play

Outdoors, beyond the need for screaming.

Screaming at random. Into this world-space,

Of cosmic space (into which the whole

Bird-call enters as people enter our dreams)

They drive their screams like wedges.

Oh, where are we? Ever more freely,

Like the loose dragon-kites we chase

At half-height, brimming with laughter,

Torn by the wind. God of song, so order

The screaming throng that, in rushing, they waken

A flowing current bearing the head and the lyre.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Ring.

Quiet friend of the many distances, feel

How your breath still enlarges space.

Let yourself ring out, a dark cradled bell

In the timbering. That, which erodes you

Gains a strength from your sustenance.

Go out and in, through transformation.

What do you know of the greatest loss?

Is drinking bitter? Then, become wine.

Be, in this night made of excess,

The magic art at the crossroads of senses,

The feel of their strange encounter.

And, if the earthbound forget you,

Say to the silent Earth: I flow.

To the rushing water: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Solace.

NUN'S FRET NOT at THEIR CONVENT'S NARROW ROOM

In truth the prison, unto which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

William Wordsworth

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World

What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the 

middle of the night and

sing?

Happy Birthday, Tommaso Campanella

Cozza, Portrait of Campanella, 1650

The world's the book where the eternal sense

Wrote his own thoughts; the living temple where, 

Painting his very self, with figures fair

He filled the whole immense circumference.

Tommaso Campanella, born on this day in 1568