Category Archives: Poetry

Painting, Poetry

The Word

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Winter Sun. Daniel F. Gerhatz.

 

The Word

Tony Hoagland, 1992

 

Down near the bottom

of the crossed-out list

of things you have to do today,

 

between “green thread”

and “broccoli” you find

that you have penciled “sunlight.”

 

Resting on the page, the word

is as beautiful, it touches you

as if you had a friend

 

and sunlight were a present

he had sent you from some place distant

as this morning—to cheer you up,

 

and to remind you that,

among your duties, pleasure

is a thing,

 

that also needs accomplishing.

Do you remember?

that time and light are kinds

 

of love, and love

is no less practical

than a coffee grinder

 

or a safe spare tire?

Tomorrow you may be utterly

without a clue

 

but today you get a telegram,

from the heart in exile

proclaiming that the kingdom

 

still exists,

the king and queen alive,

still speaking to their children,

 

—to any one among them

who can find the time

to sit out in the sun and listen.

Painting, Poetry

Sonnet CXXIX

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The Music Lesson. Johannes Vermeer. 1662.

Sonnet CXXIX

William Shakespeare

 

How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st

Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds

With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway’st

The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,

Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap

To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,

Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,

At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!

To be so tickled, they would change their state

And situation with those dancing chips,

O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,

Making dead wood more blest than living lips.

Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,

Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.

Painting, Poetry

Seal’s Lullaby

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Seals. Albert Bierstadt.

 

Seal’s Lullaby

Rudyard Kipling

 

Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,

And black are the waters that sparkled so green.

The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us,

At rest in the hollows that rustle between.

 

Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow,

Oh weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!

The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,

Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas!

 

 A Little Poetry—This beautiful lullaby opens the story of “The White Seal” in Kipling’s popular Jungle Book.

A Little Music—Composer Eric Whitacre wrote a choral transcription of Kipling’s lullaby for a DreamWorks film that has since been cancelled. You can watch Whitacre conduct Junges Vokalensemble Hannover at YouTube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuLDD7O29T4>

Painting, Poetry

Vivien’s Song

Francesca and Her Lute. Charles Edward Halle.

 

Vivien’s Song

Alfred Lord Tennyson

 

In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,

Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:

Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

 

It is the little rift within the lute,

That by and by will make the music mute,

And ever widening slowly silence all.

 

The little rift within the lover’s lute

Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,

That rotting inward slowly moulders all.

 

“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” Songs of Solomon 2:15

Drawing and Sketch, Poetry

The Sword of Surprise

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Anatomical Studies of the Shoulder. Leonard da Vinci. 1510.

 

The Sword of Surprise

G. K. Chesterton

 

Sunder me from my bones, O sword of God

Till they stand stark and strange as do the trees;

That I whose heart goes up with the soaring woods

May marvel as much at these.

 

Sunder me from my blood that in the dark

I hear that red ancestral river run

Like branching buried floods that find the sea

But never see the sun.

 

Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes

Those rolling mirrors made alive in me,

Terrible crystals more incredible

Than all the things they see.

 

Sunder me from my soul, that I may see

The sins like streaming wounds, the life’s brave beat

Till I shall save myself as I would save

A stranger in the street.

 

“Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.” —Saint Augustine of Hippo

“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” Psalm 139:14

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intent of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” Hebrews 4:12-13

A Little Poetry—The English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton did much to reveal the delightful strangeness of things we find too ordinary. “We are perishing for want of wonder,” he wrote, “not for wonders.”

Painting, Poetry

My Heart Leaps Up

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Landscape with Rainbow. Robert S. Duncanson. 1859.

 

My Heart Leaps Up

William Wordsworth, 1802

 

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man,

So be it when I shall grow old

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man:

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

A Fine Picture—Robert S. Duncanson became the first African American artist to gain international reputation. He painted this idealized Ohio landscape shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

A Little Poetry—Wordsworth wrote this poem on the night of March 26, 1802. The day after, he began writing his much longer and better-known Ode: Intimations of Immortality. The last three lines of this poem reappear as an epigraph to the Ode. After writing “My Heart Leaps Up,” Wordsworth often thought of altering the poem, but published it as originally written in 1807.

Painting, Poetry

Who Hath a Book

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The Oriental. Friedrich von Amerling.

 

Who Hath a Book

William D. Nesbit

 

Who hath a book

Has friends at hand,

And gold and gear

At his command;

 

And rich estates,

If he but look,

Are held by him

Who hath a book.

 

Who hath a book

Has but to read

And he may be

A king indeed;

 

His kingdom is

His inglenook;

All this is his

Who hath a book.

 

An ‘inglenook’ is the space on either side of a large fireplace.

Painting, Poetry

God’s Grandeur

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The Oxbow. The Connecticut River near Northampton. Thomas Cole. 1836.

 

God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins,

 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have tod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

A Fine Picture—While other painters of the Hudson River School would merge the two in Romantic scenes, Thomas Cole chose in this painting to make clear the dichotomy between wilderness and cultivation.

Long after the painting was completed, Matthew Baigell identified the logging scars on the distant hill as Hebrew letters. Viewed upright they seem to spell the name “Noah”; viewed upside down, as though from God’s perspective, the word shaddai, “the Almighty,” is formed.

A tiny self-portrait of Thomas Cole with his easel can be spotted on the rocks in the foreground.

The painting is an entry submitted by Fiona of Vista Court.

Painting, Poetry

Before the Rain

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The Rain It Raineth Every Day. Leonard Campbell Taylor. 1906.

 

Before the Rain

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

 

We knew it would rain, for all the morn

A spirit on slender ropes of mist

Was lowering its golden buckets down

Into the vapory amethyst.

Of marshes and swamps and dismal fens—

Scooping the dew that lay in the flowers,

Dipping the jewels out of the sea,

To sprinkle them over the land in showers.

We knew it would rain for the poplars showed

The white of their leaves, the amber grain

Shrunk in the wind—and the lightning now

Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain!