Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with the one pulse (Somebody stopped the moving stairs): Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down; The stream’s music did not stop Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
Where is the promise of my years; Once written on my brow? Ere errors, agonies and fears Brought with them all that speaks in tears, Ere I had sunk beneath my peers; Where sleeps that promise now?
Naught lingers to redeem those hours, Still, still to memory sweet! The flowers that bloomed in sunny bowers Are withered all; and Evil towers Supreme above her sister powers Of Sorrow and Deceit.
In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace— Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion, It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair!
An axe rang sharply ’mid those forest shades Which from creation toward the skies had tower’d In unshorn beauty. There, with vigorous arm Wrought a bold emigrant, and by his side His little son, with question and response, Beguiled the toil. ‘Boy, thou hast never seen Such glorious trees. Hark, when their giant trunks Fall, how the firm earth groans. Rememberest thou The mighty river, on whose breast we sail’d, So many days, on toward the setting sun? Our own Connecticut, compar’d to that, Was but a creeping stream.’ ‘Father, the brook That by our door went singing, where I launch’d
Where, like a pillow on a bed A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest The violet's reclining head, Sat we two, one another's best. Our hands were firmly cemented With a fast balm, which thence did spring; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string; So to'intergraft our hands, as yet Was all the means to make us one, And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation. As 'twixt two equal armies fate Suspends uncertain victory, Our souls (which to advance their state
Oh! yet one smile, tho' dark may lower Around thee clouds of woe and ill, Let me yet feel that I have power, Mid Fate's bleak storms, to soothe thee still.
Tho' sadness be upon thy brow, Yet let it turn, dear love, to me, I cannot bear that thou should'st know Sorrow I do not share with thee.
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills! In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same; The village street its haunted mansion lacks, And from the sign is gone Sibylla's name, And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks— Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep; Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers,
MARIA NEFELE: I walk in thorns in the dark of what’s to happen and what has with my only weapon my only defense my nails purple like cyclamens.
ANTIPHONIST: I saw her everywhere. Holding a glass and staring in space. Lying down listening to records. Walking the streets in wide trousers and an old
'There it is!– You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise, Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang,
You are a friend then, as I make it out, Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us Will put an ass's head in Fairyland As he would add a shilling to more shillings, All most harmonious, — and out of his Miraculous inviolable increase Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like Of olden time with timeless Englishmen; And I must wonder what you think of him — All you down there where your small Avon flows By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman. Some, for a guess, would have him riding back To be a farrier there, or say a dyer; Or maybe one of your adept surveyors; Or like enough the wizard of all tanners.
Unlike the ashes that make their home with hot coals, snails prefer moist earth. Go on: they advance while gluing themselves to it with their entire bodies. They carry it, they eat it, they shit it. They go through it, it goes through them. It’s the best kind of interpenetration, as between tones, one passive and one active. The passive bathes and nourishes the active, which overturns the other while it eats.
(There is more to be said about snails. First of all their immaculate clamminess. Their sangfroid. Their stretchiness.)
One can scarcely conceive of a snail outside its shell and unmoving. The moment it rests it sinks down deep into itself. In fact, its modesty obliges it to move as soon as it has shown its nakedness and revealed its vulnerable shape. The moment it’s exposed, it moves on.
During periods of dryness they withdraw into ditches where it seems their bodies are enough to maintain their dampness. No doubt their neighbors there are toads and frogs and other ectothermic animals. But when they come out again they don’t move as quickly. You have to admire their willingness to go into the ditch, given how hard it is for them to come out again.
Note also that though snails like moist soil, they have no affection for places that are too wet such as marshes or ponds. Most assuredly they prefer firm earth, as long as it’s fertile and damp.
They are fond as well of moisture-rich vegetables and green leafy plants. They know how to feed on them leaving only the veins, cutting free the most tender leaves. They are hell on salads.
What are these beings from the depths of the ditches? Though snails love many of their trenches’ qualities they have every intention of leaving. They are in their element but they are also wanderers. And when they emerge into the daylight onto firm ground their shells will preserve their vagabond’s hauteur.
It must be a pain to have to haul that trailer around with them everywhere, but they never complain and in the end they are happy about it. How valuable, after all, to be able to go home any time, no matter where you may find yourself, eluding all intruders. It must be worth it.
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!
I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together
Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere (Horace, Epistles II.i.267) While you, great patron of mankind, sustain The balanc'd world, and open all the main; Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend, At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
To the Priest, on Observing how most Men mistake their own Talents When beasts could speak (the learned say, They still can do so ev'ry day), It seems, they had religion then, As much as now we find in men.
St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man; Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees, And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan, Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees: The sculptur'd dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
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