horripilation

 Orts, Words
Nov 202010
 

noun. The bristling of the body hair, as from fear or cold; goose bumps.

Also a musical genre which draws wide dark emotional elements from horror films, gothic music, industrial music, heavy metal music, and/or ambient music/dark ambient. Horripilation music is always centered around the attempt to make the listener generally experience dread, fear, terror, and/or horror. Its sound often involves feelings of intrusion from an evil force, fear of the mysterious, event or personage, sometimes of supernatural origin, on the mundane world and the consequences thereof. [Wikipedia]

Richard Wilbur – Anteroom

 Poems
Nov 202010
 

Out of the snowdrift
Which covered it, this pillared
Sundial starts to lift,

Able now at last
To let its frozen hours
Melt into the past

In bright, ticking drops.
Time so often hastens by,
Time so often stops—

Still, it strains belief
How an instant can dilate,
Or long years be brief.

Dreams, which interweave
All our times and tenses, are
What we can believe:

Dark they are, yet plain,
Coming to us now as if
Through a cobwebbed pane

Where, before our eyes,
All the living and the dead
Meet without surprise.

Anne Carson – Helen

 Poems
Nov 202010
 

Nights of a marriage are like an Egypt in a woods.
Dark around its edges mirror at the heart.
War has gone quiet.
It moves, a reflection: no.
Cheap theatre smell, rooms
settle and hiss. What is he doing. Sleep,
its hours pleat together and close
like a fan, what does she know.
Waters move slightly or do they.
Paths glide to them, to who? Glide off.
Vanishes
out of the marriage, into the marriage.
Troy
vanishes too, murmuring, stain
is a puzzle you do not want
the answer to.
Every war
needs
one.

Bessie Stanley on “What Constitutes Success” (1905)

 Orts
Nov 202010
 

“He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Snow-Flakes

 Poems
Nov 202010
 

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.