June 2012
308 posts
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Sunday poem: Rainer Maria Rilke
Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly, to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate. And if they are sad about how they must wither and die, perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret. All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire, caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness. Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are for them, while eternal childhood...
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Sunday poem: Margaret Atwood
YOU BEGIN You begin this way: this is your hand, this is your eye, that is a fish, blue and flat on the paper, almost the shape of an eye. This is your mouth, this is an O or a moon, whichever you like. This is yellow. Outside the window is the rain, green because it is summer, and beyond that the trees and then the world, which is round and has only the colors of these nine crayons. This is the...
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Sunday poem: Mary Oliver
FROM THE LEAF AND THE CLOUD Even now I remember something the way a flower in a jar of water remembers its life in the perfect garden the way a flower in a jar of water remembers its life as a closed seed the way a flower in a jar of water steadies itself remembering itself long ago the plunging roots the gravel the rain the glossy stem the wings of the leaves the swords of the leaves rising and...
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Sunday poem: Conrad Aiken
TETÉLESTAI I How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead, The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust? Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days, Guarding his heart from blows, to die obscurely? I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste, Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets; Say...
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We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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Patience is everything!
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so...
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[T]he true profit of virtuous deeds lies in the doing, and there is no fitting reward for the virtues apart from the virtues themselves.
Seneca, De Clementia, Book I
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[N]othing given by fortune is stable, and all her gifts flow away more fleetingly than air. For fortune does not know how to be inactive; she enjoys substituting sorrow for happiness, or at least mixing the two. So, no one should be confident in times of success, nor give up in times of adversity. The changes of fortune alternate.
Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones, Book III
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Each man acquires his character for himself, but accident assigns his duties.
Seneca, Epistulae, XLVII
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No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence: they cast over them the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations; into it the gods went back, and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world.
Novalis, Hymns to the Night
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Unlucky Dido, burning, in her madness Roamed through all the city, like a doe Hit by an arrow shot from far away By a shepherd hunting in the Cretan woods— Hit by surprise, nor could the hunter see His flying steel had fixed itself in her; But though she runs for life through copse and glade The fatal shaft clings to her side.
Vergilius, The Aeneid, Book IV (translated by Robert...
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Now our high masters had seen fit to visit Upon the Asian power of Priam’s house Umerited ruin, and the seagod’s town, Proud Ilium, lay smoking on the earth, Our minds were turned by auguries of heaven To exile in far quarters of the world.
Vergilius, The Aeneid, Book III (translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
