Tag Archives: Claude Monet

Painting, Poetry

Virtue

Giverny in Springtime. Claude Monet, 1900.
Giverny in Springtime. Claude Monet, 1900.

 

Virtue

George Herbert

 

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky,

The dew shall weep thy fall tonight;

For thou must die.

 

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:

Thy root is ever in the grave,

And thou must die.

 

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;

My music shows ye have your closes,

And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like season’d timber, never gives;

But though the whole world turn to coal,

Then chiefly lives.

 

Painting, Poetry

Binsey Poplars

Polars on the Banks of the River Epte, Seen from the Marsh. Claude Monet. 1892.

 

Binsey Poplars

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

felled 1879

 

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank

Not spared, not one

That dandled a sandalled

Shadow that swam or sank

On a meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

 

O if we but knew what we do

When we delve or hew—

Hack and rack the growing green!

Since country is so tender

To touch, her being só slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

To mend her we end her

When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Ten or twelve, ten or twelve

Strokes of havoc unselve

The sweet especial scene,

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.