terribly

Shakespeare – As You Like It Act II.7

 Orts  Tagged with:
Nov 192010
 

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

John Donne – The Sun Rising

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”

She’s all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Gabriel Levin – Jerome

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

<em>for Shimon Sandbank</em>

Walled in by the desert, he had no patience
for the solitary rigours of monks in rags
and, notwithstanding the brushwork of pinched
flesh-tints (the wasting away and slag
of self-immolation) displayed on canvas and panel,
the barometer of his affections drew him
elsewhere and turned him into a pupil
of Hebrew, “this language of hissing and grim
aspirates”. But I see him as Antonello
da Messina – who brought to Venice the secrets
of oil glazing – saw him: in the airiness
of his study, where the play of light mellows
chapter and verse, propped on his desk,
on which he trains his mind in muted bliss.
– He who’d pleaded, “Step out, I beg you, a little
from your body,” scrapes back his chair
and treads three steps down, while the peaceable
lion pads in the cloister with nowhere
to go, lost in a perspective that fools the eye
and bids the heart to linger in the domed
mansion, at noon-tide, amid the cries
of swifts, glimpsed through the high windows,
seeding the air. To live and move
under the veritable Bethlehem skies, and thrust
the hand into the flame translating the Good
Book for everyman, and day by day to prove
how words might heave and break the crust,
the hard Judean soil, and serve as food.

Henry David Thoreau – a man in reserve

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

Journal: 18-Dec-1841

Some men make their due impression upon their generation, because a petty occasion is enough to call forth all their energies; but are there not others who would rise to much higher levels, whom the world has never provoked to make the effort? I believe there are men now living who have never opened their mouths in a public assembly, in whom nevertheless there is such a well of eloquence that the appetite of any age could never exhaust it; who pine for an occasion worthy of them, and will pine till they are dead; who can admire, as well as the rest, at the flowing speech of the orator, but do not yet miss the thunder and lightning and visible sympathy of the elements which would garnish their own utterance.

If in any strait I see a man fluttered and his ballast gone, then I lose all hope of him, he is undone; but if he reposes still, though he do nothing else worthy of him, if he is still a man in reserve, then is there everything to hope of him. The age may well go pine itself that it cannot put to use this gift of the gods. He lives on, still unconcerned, not needing to be used. The greatest occasion will be the slowest to come.

Seamus Heaney – from The Tollund Man in Springtime

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Ear to the ground.
My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid.
My cushioned cheek and brow. My phantom hand
And arm and leg and shoulder that felt pillowed
As fleshily as when the bog pith weighed
To mould me to itself and it to me
Between when I was buried and unburied.
Between what happened and was meant to be.
On show for years while all that lay in wait
Still waited. Disembodied. Far renowned.
Faith placed in me, me faithless as a stone
The harrow turned up when the crop was sown.
Out in the Danish night I’d hear soft wind
And remember moony water in a rut.

*

Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable
Solid standing and readiness to wait,
These I learned from. I stood by in the wet.
My head as washy as a head of kale.
Shedding water like the flanks and tail
Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot
fit trampled mud, bringing their heavyweight
Silence to hear on nosed-at sludge and puddle.
Of another world, unlearnable. and so
To he liked by, whatever it was I knew
Came back to me. Newfound contrariness.
In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues
Of wired, far-faced smilers. I stood off,
Bulrush, head in the air, far from its long lough.