Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 immediately springs to mind:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.If this be error and upon me proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
But there are lots of others, of course. T.S. Elliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
This:
Dust
by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world's delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;
When your swift hair is quiet in death,
And through the lips corruption thrust
Has stilled the labour of my breath---
When we are dust, when we are dust!---
Not dead, not undesirous yet,
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,
And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.
And every mote, on earth or air,
Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,
Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that's I
Shall meet one atom that was you.
Then in some garden hushed from wind,
Warm in a sunset's afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow
Upon the peace; and, past desiring,
So high a beauty in the air,
And such a light, and such a quiring,
And such a radiant ecstasy there,
They'll know not if it's fire, or dew,
Or out of earth, or in the height,
Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,
Or two that pass, in light, to light,
Out of the garden, higher, higher. . . .
But in that instant they shall learn
The shattering ecstasy of our fire,
And the weak passionless hearts will burn
And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know---poor fools, they'll know!---
One moment, what it is to love.
And This:
EDWARD THOMAS
No one so much as you Loves this my clay, Or would lament as you Its dying day.
You know me through and through Though I have not told, And though with what you know You are not bold.
None ever was so fair As I thought you: Not a word can I bear Spoken against you.
All that I ever did For you seemed coarse Compared with what I hid Nor put in force.
Scarce my eyes dare meet you Lest they should prove I but respond to you And do not love.
We look and understand, We cannot speak Except in trifles and Words the most weak.
I at the most accept Your love, regretting That is all: I have kept Only a fretting
That I could not return All that you gave And could not ever burn With the love you have,
Till sometimes it did seem Better it were Never to see you more Than linger here
With only gratitude Instead of love--- A pine in solitude Cradling a dove.
As far as collections, John Donne. And I love the poetry of Michael Ondaatje, and Robert Frost, and quite a few other people.
*************************************************************
Well, we had our Federal Election. And what a fizzer that turned out to be. It could be two weeks before we get a 'proper' result and none of them are likely to be particularly good. Whoever eventually becomes Prime Minister, they will have to kowtow to a small number of independents holding the balance of power - who are either insanely conservative or not - but I have decided that I am tired of the fate of the nation being held in the hands of a tiny number of people, who have usually got into that position because of extremist views of one sort or another. I used to vote for the Greens, and still like some of their policies, but I;m not sure that I want every decision in the country to be made by one of them. Still less do I want ANY decisions being made by people so insular that they left the National Party because it was too left-wing!!!
Otherwise, quite a good weekend. I took Wombat to Manifest, an anime convention, and he had the time of his life. I enjoyed bits of it - gawking at the bizarre cosplay costumes, buying myself a pair of Pikachu slippers, and getting us into a Q & A session with LittleKaribo who was extremely funny. Wombat has now elevated me to the position of Best Mum in the Universe, which I think I deserve!
No comments:
Post a Comment