"I think for Christmas I'll ask Santa for some tree work; I'll point and he can cut. It's not just more flowers I want, it's more light, more air for flowers, more sun for cheerfulness. A person gets her fill of shade-loving plants. She wants swaying hollyhocks, clove-scented pinks, and lavender plants as big as bushes. She doesn't care so much about conquering Moscow as she does about having a comely pear tree and a hundred white daffodils that glow after dusk against the unpainted boards of an old barn."
The old woman had wept, notAnd joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a
minute to take breath. "The past," he thought, "is linked with
the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of
another." And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends
of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see all evil and all our pain sink away in the great compassion that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and tender and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith. [She wipes away her tears]
Tristia: 1891-1938
A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam
Difficult friend, I would have preferred
You to them. The dead keep their sealed lives
And again I am too late. Too late
The salutes, dust-clouds and brazen cries.
Images rear from desolation
Look...ruins upon a plain...
A few men glare at their hands; others
Grovel for food in the roadside field.
Tragedy has us all under regard.
It will not touch us but it is there -
Flawless, insatiate - hard summer sky
Feasting on this, reaching its own end.
Clasping of hands.
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BRoken in pieces all asunder, |
I'm still in awe of George Herbert, as a poet, theologian, priest, as one charting a via media course against the increasing pressures of radicalism. After the death of King Charles, Andrew Marvell lamented that we have become the barbarians we feared and heard not the cultured voice of George Herbert (who was then deceased).
Clasping of hands
LOrd, thou art mine, and I am thine,
If mine I am: and thine much more,
Then I or ought, or can be mine.
Yet to be thine, doth me restore;
So that again I now am mine,
And with advantage mine the more,
Since this being mine, brings with it thine,
And thou with me dost thee restore.
If I without thee would be mine,
I neither should be mine nor thine.
Lord, I am thine, and thou art mine:
So mine thou art, that something more
I may presume thee mine, then thine.
For thou didst suffer to restore
Not thee, but me, and to be mine,
And with advantage mine the more,
Since thou in death wast none of thine,
Yet then as mine didst me restore.
O be mine still! still make me thine!
Or rather make no Thine and Mine!
From John Milton's Paradise Lost, in his account of Adam and Eve, we have some of the most stunning and tender expressions of love and caring, possessing remarkable beauty, that can be found in all of English Literature. We all know, or should know, the greatness of John Milton's poetry and that Paradise Lost is the finest epic in the language if not also the finest poetry ever written in English. But, I must confess that as I was re-reading this masterpiece I was moved by the power of sentiment and truth in his expressions of Love, Sacrifice for Love and Loss. Milton is a great poet of Love!
His rapture meets its height in his declaration of their harmonious state of union - dedication to one another strengthened by a shared sense of the world and by shared 'decencies' to one another. It is a beautiful expression of love and the contentment / fullness of being in love.
The next expression or declaration of love by Adam that bares quotation is his response to her after she has told him that she has eaten of the forbidden tree and bids him to do the same.
Take particular note of the lines beginning, "How can I live without thee?" Adam declares how can I not be with you, have conversations with you, be alone? Even if God were to create another 'Eve' from yet another rib of mine, the loss of you will never leave me - would break my heart. And so, Adam chooses the death threat of eating of the forbidden tree rather than the loss of Eve. Having heard the story of the fallen angels and the battle in heaven that lead to their eternal damnation and separation from God, Adam is aware that he is at great risk in joining Eve. Love of Eve conquers his fear of death (a great unknown for Adam particularly) and loss of God (incomprehensible for Adam who daily conversed with Angels and had heard the voice of God). He will be damned to death, labor and separation from God - i.e. loneliness at its deepest level. Adam and Eve must now depend on their love to compensate for their loneliness - the absence of the divine. One is left to wonder whether outside the Paradise of Eden the 'thousand decencies' continue from either party?
Because we don't know when we will die we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood? Some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the moon rise, perhaps twenty and yet it will all seem limitless.
If one listens to Beethoven and then states that it is 'bad' music and boring, it says more about the person than it does about Beethoven. Beethoven is clearly anything but boring to those who appreciate pure genius and beautiful music. In truth, both Beethoven and Hawthorne are geniuses of the highest level. One who says that either Beethoven or Hawthorne are boring or old-fashioned needs to develop their sophistication and understanding of great works of art.
Aside from his short stories & novels, I strongly recommend reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's American Notebooks. They are a very different experience than reading those of Henry James, Steinbeck, Thomas Mann (Diaries), Robert Musil or even those published by Reynolds Price. The self-mannered awareness that the future will prize their "private" thoughts and ideas is absent. These were truly private workbooks. Hawthorne writes in full voice as someone for whom communication is vital and difficult. Open this work anywhere and read what sounds like the inner voice of someone practiced at concealing his thoughts publicly. Expansive, suggestive, and illuminating for all those who would like to know more of the deep thought and artfullness that went into his major works.
Finally, maybe it is like Anna Karenina by great Tolstoy.... in the amazing final section... beautiful in its details and not attempting a mass theory or definition of what all humans experience. One person, Anna, this makes sense. Life has robbed Anna of love, family, her children, her husband, her new lover, her name & position, her self-respect, and worse of all her fondest hopes had been cruelly played with and destroyed with guile. She stands on the dock of the train station, she steps closer to the edge of the platform as she hears the train approach.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
Robert Frost
SLEEP, sleep, old sun, thou canst not have repass'd,
