Monk

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

-- "The World Is Too Much with Us" by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Yeah, but we have the Internet!

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And Thou shalt not writ over the door:
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

-- "The Garden of Love" by William Blake

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.


I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

-- Theodore Roethke, from “The Far Field”

Ah, another poem on Adam and Eve and the fall, this one titled "The Loneliness of God".

( Read more... )

Of the great hope to find happiness some otherwhere, here is a nice poem that tells you that you can never really leave home.

_ _ _

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”


You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

-- "The City" by C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

“Kafka said, A book
must be an axe

for the frozen sea
inside us, which sounds

great, but what good
is an axe against

a frozen sea?
Perhaps this is why

he said, while dying,
Destroy everything.”

-- Matt Rasmussen, from “Elegy in X Parts”

Arriving early at the limit of understanding,
I managed to find a good seat,
and settled in with the others,
who were fanning away the heat

with their programs full of blank pages.
The orchestra was in place,
and soon the show started.
First, deep space

rose high and flooded the stage,
immersing all the spots
where our thoughts could have fixed
if our minds had thoughts.

Which they didn’t. Then
the sun came out and stood.
That was all that happened,
and ever would.

-- "The Day of the Sun" by Vijay Seshadri

“I don’t know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction.”

-- Melissa Stein

So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

-- Lord Byron

That is the first stanza of his "So, We'll Go No More A Roving". Although I am not entirely sure of its intended meaning, I read it as an ode to the passing of life, the leaving behind of youth, the woeful decline into old age.

The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and You -- beside --

The Brain is deeper than the sea --
For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue --
The one the other will absorb --
As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --

The Brain is just the weight of God --
For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound --
And they will differ -- if they do --
As Syllable from Sound --

-- Emily Dickinson

One of Sully's readers pointed out how well this poem goes with the Roger Penrose quote on the brain being the most powerful thing in the universe.