Category: Nature

Sonnet—Mutation

William Cullen Bryant, 1794 – 1878

They talk of short-lived pleasure—be it so—
Pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain
Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;
And after dreams of horror, comes again
The welcome morning with its rays of peace.
Oblivion, softly wiping out the stain,
Makes the strong secret pangs of shame to cease:
Remorse is virtue’s root; its fair increase
Are fruits of innocence and blessedness:
Thus joy, o’erborne and bound, doth still release
His young limbs from the chains that round him press.
Weep not that the world changes—did it keep
A stable changeless state, ’twere cause indeed to weep.

At the Window

D. H. Lawrence, 1885 – 1930

The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.

Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede,
Winding about their dimness the mist’s grey cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to bleed.

The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass
To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with two dark-filled eyes
That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window glass.

Sonnet—Silence

Edgar Allan Poe

There are some qualities—some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence—sea and shore—
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o’ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name’s “No More.”
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!

January

William Carlos Williams

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.

And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

 

Holidays

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows;—
The happy days unclouded to their close;
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are;— a Fairy Tale
Of some enchanted land we know not where,
But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

North Bovey.

Another travel post.

North Bovey is a small village in the Dartmoor national park. We hired a cottage there as a base of operations last summer. There’s a fancy high-class pub, the Ring of Bells, rated by Egon Ronay, but fortunately regular places are easy to reach either by walking or driving. (Since the roads are mostly one lane, even the A-roads, walking is a good idea). It is a fairly easy drive to the nearby town of  Mortenhampstead (M’hampstead on the street signs) where there are groceries (a co-op) and various diversions. The roads are tiny, even by English standards, so if you hire a car (and to be honest there’s no other way to get there), you do not want a big one.

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The view from our bedroom.

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M’hampstead from the footpath. It’s about a 2Km walk, and well worth it.DSC_0843
This goat skull, bolted to a tree and hidden from view, greets visitors.DSC_0847

More Birds.

Playing with my long (500mm) cheap mirror lens again. I set the shutter speed to 1/4000 (as fast as the Nikon will go) and let the auto-ISO handle the rest. It has a relatively fast f5.6 that cannot be changed.  The other caution to watch for is the T-mount. It can unscrew a little and loosen while the lens is on the camera if it isn’t in tight.  That will cause difficulty with focusing.

We have resident pelicans. They are supposed to be rare. Ours aren’t.

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The herons perch on stumps out in our little branch of Lake Weiss.

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The image quality isn’t perfect, but it could be a lot worse. Not sure how much is the lens and how much is the ISO/low light.

 

Altitude

Lola Ridge, 1873

I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one cleanly,
as with a new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.

Heavy Threads

Hazel Hall

When the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon
Thrown through my window,
I know that hours of light
Are about to thrust themselves into me
Like omnivorous needles into listless cloth,
Threaded with the heavy colours of the sun.
They seem altogether too eager,
To embroider this thing of mine,
My Day,
Into the strict patterns of an altar cloth;
Or at least to stitch it into a useful garment.
But I know they will do nothing of the kind.
They will prick away,
And when they are through with it
It will look like the patch quilt my grandmother made
When she was learning to sew.

Ms. Hall (1886-1924) is a surprisingly modern poet.

Sunrise at Cumberland Island
(c) 2011 Robert W Harrison

The Gift to Sing

James Weldon Johnson

Sometimes the mist overhangs my path,
And blackening clouds about me cling;
But, oh, I have a magic way
To turn the gloom to cheerful day—
I softly sing.

And if the way grows darker still,
Shadowed by Sorrow’s somber wing,
With glad defiance in my throat,
I pierce the darkness with a note,
And sing, and sing.

I brood not over the broken past,
Nor dread whatever time may bring;
No nights are dark, no days are long,
While in my heart there swells a song,
And I can sing.

Cranes in flight
(c) 2015 Robert W Harrison