Posted in Poetry, Quotes, tagged Poetry, Quotes on November 19, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
O glad, glad on the Mountains
To swoon in the race outworn,
When the holy fawn-skin clings
And all else sweeps away,
To the joy of the quick red fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,
The glory of wild-beast ravenings
Where the hill-top catches the day,
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains
‘Tis Bromios leads the way.
– Euripides, Bacchae
via Bertrand Russell,
A History of Western Philosophy
Posted in Poetry, Quotes, tagged Poetry, Quotes on November 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
Where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
– Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
13th century
In paths untrodden,
In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
From all the standards hitherto publish’d, from the
pleasures, profits, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed my soul,
Clear to me now standards not yet publish’d, clear to me
that my soul,
That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades,
Here by myself away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talk’d to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abash’d, (for in this secluded spot I can respond
as I would not dare elsewhere,)
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet
contains all the rest,
Resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly
attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life,
Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,
Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first
year,
I proceed for all who are or have been young men,
To tell the secret of my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades.
– Walt Whitman
Posted in Quotes, tagged Poetry, Quotes on May 9, 2012 | 1 Comment »
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Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Peaceful, Master,
Are all the hours
We lose if we place,
As in a vase,
Flowers on our
Losing them.
There are in our life
No sorrows or joys.
So let us learn,
Wisely unworried,
Not how to live life
But to let it go by,
Keeping forever
Peaceful and calm,
Taking children
For our teachers
And letting Nature
Fill our eyes . . .
Along the river
Or along the road,
Wherever we are,
Always remaining
in the same, easy
Repose of living . . .
Time passes
And tells us nothing.
We grow old.
Let us know how,
With a certain mischief,
To feel ourselves go.
Taking action
Serves no purpose.
No one can resist
The atrocious god
Who always devours
His own children.
Let us pick flowers.
Let us lightly
Wet our hands
In the calm rivers,
So as to learn
Some of their calmness.
Sunflowers forever
Beholding the sun,
We will serenely
Depart from life,
Without even the regret
Of having lived.
– Ricardo Reis, 12 June 1914
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 14, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I love the roses of Adonis’s gardens.
Yes, Lydia, I love those wingèd roses,
………Which one day are born
………And on that day die.
Light for them is eternal, since
They are born after sunrise and end
………Before Apollo quits
………His visible journey.
Let us also make our lives one day,
Consciously forgetting there’s night, Lydia,
………Before and after
………The little we endure.
– Ricardo Reis, 11 July 1914
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
– Francis William Bourdillon
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
– Emily Dickinson
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.
– Ricardo Reis, 14 February 1933
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Calm because I’m unknown,
And myself because I’m calm,
I want to fill my days
With wanting nothing from them.
For those whom wealth touches,
Gold irritates the skin.
For those on whom fame blows,
Life fogs over.
On those for whom happiness
Is their sun, night will fall.
But those who hope for nothing
Are glad for whatever comes.
– Ricardo Reis, 2 March 1933
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
To think about God is to disobey God,
Since God wanted us not to know him,
Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us . . .
Let’s be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end . . .
And he’ll give us nothing more, since to give us more would
…make us less us.
– Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep VI
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
– Carl Sandburg
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow’d.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
G. K. Chesterton described Henley as “a sad, sensitive and tender-hearted pessimist, who endured pain that came from nowhere, and enjoyed pleasure that came from nowhere, with the exquisite appreciation of some timid child.”
Posted in Poetry, Quotes, tagged Poetry, Quotes on February 7, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb –
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings against the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on January 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.
– Anaïs Nin
