Painting, Poetry

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

La Belle Dam San Merci. Sir Frank Dicksee.

 

La Belle Dam Sans Merci

John Keats, 1820

 

O what can ail thee, wretched wight,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge is wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

 

O what can ail thee, wretched wight,

So haggard and so wo-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow

With anguish moist and fever dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

 

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

 

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong she would bend, and sing

A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

“I love thee true.”

She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept and sigh’d full sore,

And there I shut her wild eyes

With kisses four.

 

And there she lulled me asleep

And there I dreamed—ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

On the cold hillside.

 

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—”La Belle Dam Sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!”

 

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

 

A Little Poetry—”La Belle Dam Sans Merci” is translated “The Beautiful Lady without Mercy.” Much medieval literature involves a young knight being tempted by a beautiful woman who is actually an evil enchantress. Keat’s cautionary ballad reveals the plight of one who yielded.

A ‘wight’ is a ghost. A ‘grot’ is a grotto, a small cave. To have ‘in thrall’ is to have great power over another. The ‘gloam’ is twilight.

Painting, Poetry

C Minor

Breakfast Piece with Rib of Pork and Cheese Basket. Pieter Claesz.

 

C Minor

Richard Wilbur

 

Beethoven during breakfast? The human soul

Though stalked by hollow pluckings, winning out

(While bran-flakes crackle in the cereal-bowl)

Over despair and doubt?

 

You are right to switch it off and let the day

Begin at hazard, perhaps with pecker-knocks

In the sugar-bush, the rancor of a jay,

Or in the letter box

 

Something that makes you pause and with fixed shadow

Stand on the driveway gravel, your bent head

Scanning the snatched pages until the sad

Or fortunate news is read.

 

The day’s work will be disappointing or not,

Giving at least some pleasure in taking pains.

One of us, hoeing in the garden plot

(Unless, of course, it rains)

 

May rejoice at the knitting of light in the fennel-plumes

And dew like mercury on cabbage-hide,

Or rise and pace through too-familiar rooms,

Balked and unsatisfied.

 

Shall a plate be broken? A new thing understood?

Shall we be lonely, and by love consoled?

What shall I whistle, splitting the kindling wood?

Shall the night wind be cold?

 

How should I know? And even if we are fated

Hugely to suffer, grandly to endure,

It would not help to hear it all fore-stated

As in an overture.

 

There is nothing to do with the day except to live it.

Let us have music again when the light dies

(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it

Something to organize.

 

A Fine Picture—The Dutch Golden age glows in the still-lifes of Pieter Claesz. Here, a generous breakfast meal is spread artistically before us.

A Little Poetry—”Beethoven during breakfast?” the poet asks his wife in the opening lines. “You are right to switch it off. The day, yet un-lived, does not need an overture, he argues. Music is for organizing experience.

Sometimes I will turn on the classical radio to help me wake up in the morning. But often I find that Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and even Delius are too forcible for the first weak rays of light—instruction on how to feel about something that hasn’t happened yet. When I discovered “C Minor” in Richard Wilbur’s volume of New and Collected Poems, I experienced the pleasant shock of recognition. (And I loved the humor in the first stanza, where grand human suffering is juxtaposed with crackling cereal.)

Richard Wilbur, whose Pulitzer prize-winning poetry follows in the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, is perhaps the finest American poet still living. The sophistication and formality of his poetry helps readers find sense and beauty in our present time even while they alienate Wilbur’s critics.

Painting, Poetry

Sea Shell

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The Shell. William Adolphe Bouguereau. 1871.

 

Sea Shell

Amy Lowell, 1912

 

Sea Shell, Sea Shell,

Sing me a song, O Please!

A song of ships and sailor men,

And parrots and tropical trees,

Of islands lost in the Spanish Main

Which no man ever may find again,

Of fishes and corals under the waves,

And seahorses stabled in great green caves.

Sea Shell, Sea Shell,

Sings of the things you know so well.

Painting, Poetry

Gratefulness

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The Angelus. Jean-François Millet. 1859.

 

Gratefulness

George Herbert

 

Thou hast given so much to me;

Give one thing more—a grateful heart.

See how thy beggar works on thee

By art.

 

He makes thy gifts occasion more,

And says, If he be in this crossed,

All thou hast giv’n him heretofore

Is lost.

 

But thou didst reckon, when at first

Thy word our hearts and hands did crave,

What it would come to at the worst

To save:

 

Perpetual knockings at thy door,

Tears sullying thy transparent rooms,

Gift upon gift. Much would have more

And comes.

 

This notwithstanding, thou wenst on

And didst allow us all our noise;

Nay, thou hast made a sigh and groan

Thy joys.

 

Not that thou hadst not still above

Much better tunes than groans can make,

But that these country-airs thy love

Did take.

 

Wherefore I cry and cry again,

And in no quiet thou canst be,

Till I a thankful heart obtain

Of thee—

 

Not thankful when it pleaseth me

(As if thy blessings had spare days),

But such a heart whose pulse may be

Thy praise.

Painting, Poetry

‘I Like to See It Lap the Miles’

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The Lackawanna Valley. George Inness. 1855.

 

Emily Dickinson

 

I like to see it  lap the miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step

 

Around a pile of mountains,

And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;

And then a quarry pare

 

To fit its sides, and crawl between,

Complaining all the while

In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down hill.

 

And neigh like Boanerges;

Then, punctual as a star,

Stop—docile and omnipotent—

At its own stable door.

Memory Box, Painting, Poetry

A Comparison Addressed to a Young Lady

Princess out of School. Edward Robert Hughes.

 

A Comparison Addressed to a Young Lady

William Cowper, 1875

 

Sweet stream that winds through yonder glade,

Apt emblem of a virtuous maid—

Silent and chaste she steals along,

Far from the world’s gay, busy throng;

With gentle yet prevailing force

Intent upon her destined course;

Graceful and useful all she does,

Blessing and bless’d where’er she goes,

Pure-bosomed as that wat’ry glass,

And Heav’n reflected in her face.

 

Painting, Poetry

Crying, My Little One

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Life of Christ: Flight into Egypt. Giotto di Bondone

 

Crying, My Little One

Christina Rossetti, 1893

 

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?

Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:

I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,

While snow falls on me colder and colder.

 

You are my one, and I have not another;

Sleep soft, my darling, my trouble and treasure;

Sleep warm and soft in the arms of your mother,

Dreaming of pretty things, dreaming of pleasure.

 

A Little Poetry—This poem comes from Rossetti’s nursery rhyme collection Sing Song.

A Little Music—Natalie Merchant sings “Crying, My Little One” (a rearrangement of the original lines) in her album Leave Your Sleep; you can listen to the entire track on YouTube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNsmjZzdAf4>

Memory Box, Painting, Poetry

The Philosopher’s Garden

A Pensive Moment. Daniel Ridgeway Knight.

 

The Philosopher’s Garden

John Oxenham, 1913

 

‘See this is my garden,

Large and fair!’

—Thus, to the friend,

The Philosopher.

 

‘ ‘Tis not too long,’

His friend replied

With truth exact,—

‘Nor yet too wide.

But well compact,

If somewhat cramped

On every side.’

 

Quick the reply—

‘But see how high!—

It reaches up to God’s blue sky!’

 

Not by their size

Measure we men

Or things.

Wisdom, with eyes

Washed in the fire,

Seeketh the things

That are higher—

Things that have wings,

Thoughts that aspire.

 

A Little Poetry—William Arthur Dunkerley was a prolific writer who published poems, hymns, and novels under the name John Oxenham. “The Philosopher’s Garden” was a poem early placed in my memory box. I first encountered Oxenham’s poem in the garden anthology Up from the Earth. It was originally published in the volume Bees in Amber (1913), in which Oxenham poetically fossilized the proverbial bees in his bonnet.

This poem reminds me of my mother. As a homemaker and the teacher of our home-school, she has been wrongly contemned by others. Her sphere of influence, though powerful and beautiful, would seem a very small plot of earth—a Little garden. But the wise philosopher of the poem reminds his friend, and readers, to look vertically for the true magnitude of a work. Mark out Mama’s work in linear inches, if you like, but there aren’t enough of them in the world to tell how high her work reaches. “Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.”

Memory Box, Painting, Poetry

The Little Land

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The Titan's Goblet. Thomas Cole. 1833.

 

The Little Land

Robert Lewis Stevenson, 1913

 

When at home alone I sit

And am very tired of it,

I have just to shut my eyes

To go sailing through the skies—

To go sailing far away

To the Pleasant Land of Play;

To the fairy-land afar

Where the Little People are;

Where the clover tops are trees,

And the rain-pools are the seas,

And the leaves like little ships

Sail about on tiny trips;

And above the daisy tree

Through the grasses,

High o’erhead the Bumble Bee

Hums and passes.

 

In that forest to and fro

I can wander, I can go;

See the spider and the fly,

And the ants go marching by

Carrying parcels with their feet

Down the green and grassy street.

I can in the sorrel sit

Where the ladybird alit.

I can climb the jointed grass

And on high

See the greater swallows pass

In the sky,

And the round sun rolling by

Heeding no such things as I.

 

Through that forest I can pass

Till, as in a looking-glass,

Humming fly and daisy tree

And my tiny self I see,

Painted very clear and neat

On the rain-pool at my feet.

Should a leaflet come to land

Drifting near to where I stand,

Straight I’ll board that tiny boat

Round the rain-pool sea to float.

 

Little thoughtful creatures sit

On the grassy coasts of it;

Little things with lovely eyes

See me sailing with surprise.

Some are clad in armor green—

(These have sure to battle been!)—

Some are pied with ev’ry hue,

Black and crimson, gold and blue;

Some have wings and swift are gone;—

But they all look kindly on.

 

When my eyes I once again

Open, and see all things plain:

High bare walls, great bare floor;

Great big knobs on drawer and door;

Great big people perched on chairs,

Stitching tucks and mending tears,

Each a hill that I could climb,

And talking nonsense all the time—

O dear me,

That I could be

A sailor on the rain-pool sea,

A climber in the clover tree,

And just come back, a sleepy-head,

Late at night to go to bed.