Mr Waterhouse will be turning in his grave!

To a Friend
Walahfrid Strabo

When the moon's splendour shines in a clear sky,
Stand outside and gaze at heaven's brightness,
Marvelling how the pure lamp of the moon
Embraces in its beauty two dear friends
In body separate, but bound in mind by love.
Though face to loving face we may not look,
Yet let this light assure us of our love.
Your faithful friend sends you these small verses,
And if on your part friendship's bond stays firm
May strength and joy be with you all your days!

Without Warning
Sappho

Without warning
As a whirlwind
swoops on a oak
Love shakes my heart

Choirboys

Still Evening
John Milton

Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompany'd; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleas'd. Now glow'd the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil'd her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

How wonderful is this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmz6Rbpnu0&feature=fvwrel

Everyone Sang
Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on--on--and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

The Horses
Ted Hughes

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird-
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey –ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey still world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in a fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came the horses.
                                  There, still they stood,
But now steaming, and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays –

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee

             A wonderful weekend of celebrations
                         for a very special lady.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=QXuL1MGecko&feature=endscreen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0kQLWfvrWI&feature=related

Sonnets from the Portuguese No.28
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee tonight.
This said—he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand. . . a simple thing,
Yes I wept for it—this . . . the paper's light. . .
Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God's future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this . . . 0 Love, thy words have ill availed
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

Memorial Tablet
Siegfried Sassoon

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duckboards: so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
I came home on leave: and then went west...
What greater glory could a man desire?

Wild Geese
 Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Something Told the Wild Geese
Rachel Field

Something told the wild geese
It was time to go.
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered, "Snow."

Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned, "Frost."

All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spice,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.

Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.

I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

He Thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven
W.B.Yeats

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in time out of mind:
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies.
O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,
Must I endure your amorous cries?

"I'm nobody! Who are you?"
Emily Dickinson

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Eva Marton "In Questa Reggia" Turandot

At Last She Comes
Robert Louis Stevenson

At last she comes, O never more
In this dear patience of my pain
To leave me lonely as before,
Or leave my soul alone again.

Another great film from the Space Station,
thank you Lynn.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120305.html

I Said to Love
Thomas Hardy

I said to Love,
"It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
All else above;
Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One
Who spread a heaven beneath the sun,"
I said to Love.

I said to him,
"We now know more of thee than then;
We were but weak in judgment when,
With hearts abrim,
We clamoured thee that thou would'st please
Inflict on us thine agonies,"
I said to him.

I said to Love,
"Thou art not young, thou art not fair,
No faery darts, no cherub air,
Nor swan, nor dove
Are thine; but features pitiless,
And iron daggers of distress,"
I said to Love.

"Depart then, Love! . . .
- Man's race shall end, dost threaten thou?
The age to come the man of now
Know nothing of? -
We fear not such a threat from thee;
We are too old in apathy!
Mankind shall cease.--So let it be,"
I said to Love.

To Calista (part only)
Charles Cotton

I reckon the first day I saw those eyes,
Which in a moment made my heart their prize
To all my whole futurity,
The first day of my first new year,
Since then I first began to be,
And knew why Heav'n plac'd me here;
For till we love, and love discreetly too,
We nothing are, nor know we what we do.

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.

Faults
Sarah Teasdale

They came to tell your faults to me,
They named them over one by one;
I laughed aloud when they were done,
I knew them all so well before, --
Oh, they were blind, too blind to see
Your faults had made me love you more.

Enough
Sarah Teasdale

It is enough for me by day
To walk the same bright earth with him;
Enough that over us by night
The same great roof of stars is dim.

I do not hope to bind the wind
Or set a fetter on the sea --
It is enough to feel his love
Blow by like music over me.

 

Video Overnight Thread- Northern Lights from space station

Video Overnight Thread- Northern Lights from space station

Sonnet XL: Severed Selves
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Two separate divided silences,
Which, brought together, would find loving voice;
Two glances which together would rejoice
In love, now lost like stars beyond dark trees;
Two hands apart whose touch alone gives ease;
Two bosoms which, heart-shrined with mutual flame,
Would, meeting in one clasp, be made the same;
Two souls, the shores wave-mocked of sundering seas:—
Such are we now. Ah! may our hope forecast
Indeed one hour again, when on this stream
Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam?—
An hour how slow to come, how quickly past,—
Which blooms and fades, and only leaves at last,
Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream.

My Kitchen Window

What a difference a week makes.

Look at the state of my chair, Purdey Puddy Cat.

Have A Nice Day
Spike Milligan

'Help, help, ' said a man. 'I'm drowning.'
'Hang on, ' said a man from the shore.
'Help, help, ' said the man. 'I'm not clowning.'
'Yes, I know, I heard you before.
Be patient dear man who is drowning,
You, see I've got a disease.
I'm waiting for a Doctor J. Browning.
So do be patient please.'
'How long, ' said the man who was drowning.
'Will it take for the Doc to arrive? '
'Not very long, ' said the man with the disease.
'Till then try staying alive.'
'Very well, ' said the man who was drowning.
'I'll try and stay afloat.
By reciting the poems of Browning
And other things he wrote.'
'Help, help, ' said the man with the disease,
'I suddenly feel quite ill.'
'Keep calm.' said the man who was drowning,
' Breathe deeply and lie quite still.'
'Oh dear, ' said the man with the awful disease.
'I think I'm going to die.'
'Farewell, ' said the man who was drowning.
Said the man with the disease, 'goodbye.'
So the man who was drowning, drownded
And the man with the disease past away.
But apart from that,
And a fire in my flat,
It's been a very nice day.

The Cockney Amorist
John Betjeman

Oh when my love, my darling,
You’ve left me here alone,
I’ll walk the streets of London
Which once seemed all our own.

The vast suburban churches
Together we have found:
The ones which smelt of gaslight
The ones in incense drown’d;
I’ll use them now for praying in
And not for looking round.

No more the Hackney Empire
Shall find us in its stalls
When on the limelit crooner
The thankful curtain falls,
And soft electric lamplight
Reveals the gilded walls.

I will not go to Finsbury Park
The putting course to see
Nor cross the crowded High Road
To Williamsons’ to tea,
For these and all the other things
Were part of you and me.

I love you, oh my darling,
And what I can’t make out
Is why since you have left me
I’m somehow still about.

Little Whale Song
Ted Hughes
(for Charles Causley)

What do they think of themselves
With their global brains -
The tide-power voltage illumination
Of those brains? Their x-ray all-dimension
Grasp of this world’s structures, their brains budded
Clone replicas of the electron world
Lit and re-imagining the world
Perfectly tuned receivers and perceivers,
Each one a whole tremulous world
Feeling through the world? What
Do they make of each other?
"We are beautiful. We stir
Our self-colour in the pot of colours
Which is the world. At each
Tail-stroke we deepen
Our being into the world’s lit substance,
And our joy into the world’s
Spinning bliss, and our peace
Into the world’s floating, plumed peace."
Their body-tons, echo-chambered,
Amplify the whisper
Of currents and airs, of sea-peoples
And planetary manoeuvres,
Of seasons, of shores, and of their own
Moon-lifted incantation, as they dance
Through the original Earth-drama
In which they perform, as from the beginning.
The Royal House.
The loftiest, spermiest
Passions, the most exquisite pleasures,
The noblest characters, the most god-like
Oceanic presence and poise --
The most terrible fall.

We Three Kings

When We Were Young

April Rise
Laurie Lee

If ever I saw blessing in the air
I see it now in this still early day
Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips
Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round
Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod
Splutters with soapy green, and all the world
Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.

If ever I heard blessing it is there
Where birds in trees that shoals and shadows are
Splash with their hidden wings and drops of sound
Break on my ears their crests of throbbing air.

Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates,
The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,
While white as water by the lake a girl
Swims her green hand among the gathered swans.

Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,
Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;
Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,
If ever world were blessed, now it is.

To Electra
Robert Herrick

I dare not ask a kiss,
I dare not beg a smile;
Lest having that, or this,
I might grow proud the while.

No, no, the utmost share
Of my desire shall be,
Only to kiss that air
That lately kissed thee,

Wishes of an Elderly Man
Walter Raleigh

I wish I loved the Human Race,
I wish I loved its silly face,
I wish I liked the way it walks,
I wish I liked the way it talks,
And when I'm introduced to one,
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun

Dedicated to someone with no sense of direction...

No Sense of Direction
Vernon Scannell

I have always admired
Those who are sure
Which turning to take,
Who need no guide
Even in war
When thunders shake
The torn terrain,
When battalions of shrill
Stars all desert
And the derelict moon
Goes over the hill:
Eyes chained by the night
They find their way back
As if it were daylight.
Then, on peaceful walks
Over strange wooded ground,
They will find the right track,
Know which of the forks
Will lead to the inn
I would never have found;
For I lack their gift,
Possess almost no
Sense of direction.
And yet I owe
A debt to this lack,
A debt so vast
No reparation
Can ever be made,
For it led me away
From the road I sought
Which would carry me to -
I mistakenly thought -
My true destination:
It made me stray
To this lucky path
That ran like a fuse
And brought me to you
And love's bright, soundless
Detonation.

TS Eliot said: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Devotion
Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet!
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet!
There, wrapt in cloud of sorrow, pity move,
And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love:
But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain,
Then burst with sighing in her sight, and ne'er return again!

All that I sung still to her praise did tend;
Still she was first, still she my songs did end;
Yet she my love and music both doth fly,
The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy:
Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight!
It shall suffice that they were breathed and died for her delight.

On Beacon Hill
Laurie Lee

Now as we lie beneath the sky,
Prone and knotted, you and I,
Visible at last we are
To each nebula and star.

Here as we kiss, the bloodless moon
Stirs to our rustling breath; Saturn
Leans us a heavy-lidded glance
And knows us for his revenants.

Arching, our bodies gather light
From suns long lost to human sight,
Our lips contain a dust of heat
drawn from the burnt-out infinite.

The speechless conflict of our hands
Ruffles the red Mars' desert sands
While coupled in our doubled eyes
Jupiter dishevelled lies.

Now as we loose the knots of love,
Earth at our back and sky above,
Visible at last we gather
All that is, except each other.

The Relapse
John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire

Like children in a starry night,
When I beheld those eyes before,
I gaz'd with wonder and delight,
Insensible of all their power.

I play'd about the flame so long,
At last I felt the scorching fire;
My hopes were weak, my passion strong,
And I lay dying with desire.

By all the helps of humane art,
I just recovered so much sense,
As to avoid, with heavy heart,
The fair, but fatal influence.

But, since you shine away despair,
And now my sighs no longer shun,
No Persian in his zealous prayer
So much adores the rising sun.

If once again my vows displease,
There never was so lost a lover;
In love, that languishing disease,
A sad relapse we ne'er recover.

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
William Shakespeare

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee--and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The Edge of Day
Laurie Lee

The dawn's precise pronouncement waits
With breath of light indrawn,
Then forms with smoky, smut-red lips
The great O of the sun.

The mouldering atoms of the dark
Blaze into morning air;
The birdlike stars droop down and die,
The starlike birds catch fire.

The thrush's tinder throat strikes up,
The sparrow chips hot sparks
From flinty tongue, and all the sky
Showers with electric larks.

And my huge eye a chaos is
Where molten worlds are born;
Where floats the eagle's flaming moon,
And crows like clinkers, burn;

Where blackbirds scream with comet tails,
And flaring finches fall,
And starlings, aimed like meteors,
Bounce from the garden wall;

Where, from the edge of day I spring
Alive for mortal flight,
Lit by the heart's exploding sun
Bursting from night to night.

A Lovers' Quarrel (Incomplete)
Robert Browning

Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey,

Runnels, which rillets swell,
Must be dancing down the dell,
With a foaming head
On the beryl bed
Paven smooth as a hermit's cell;
Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well.

Dearest, three months ago!
When we lived blocked-up with snow,---
When the wind would edge
In and in his wedge,
In, as far as the point could go---
Not to our ingle, though,
Where we loved each the other so!

Dearest, three months ago
When we loved each other so,
Lived and loved the same
Till an evening came
When a shaft from the devil's bow
Pierced to our ingle-glow,
And the friends were friend and foe!

Not from the heart beneath---
'Twas a bubble born of breath,
Neither sneer nor vaunt,
Nor reproach nor taunt.
See a word, how it severeth!
Oh, power of life and death
In the tongue, as the Preacher saith!

Woman, and will you cast
For a word, quite off at last
Me, your own, your You,---
Since, as truth is true,
I was You all the happy past---
Me do you leave aghast
With the memories We amassed?

Love, if you knew the light
That your soul casts in my sight,
How I look to you
For the pure and true
And the beauteous and the right,---
Bear with a moment's spite
When a mere mote threats the white!

So, she'd efface the score,
And forgive me as before.
It is twelve o'clock:
I shall hear her knock
In the worst of a storm's uproar,
I shall pull her through the door,
I shall have her for evermore!

A couple of verses from
Thomas Gray's Elegy

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste it's sweetness on the desert air.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

The Cragsman
Geoffrey Winthrop Young

In this short span
between my finger tips on the smooth edge
and these tense feet cramped to the crystal ledge
I hold the like of man.
Consciously I embrace
arched from the mountain rock on which I stand
to the firm limit of my lifted hand
the front of time and space:-
For what is there in all the world for me
but what I know and see?
And what remains of all I see and know,
if I let go?

With this full breath
bracing my sinews as I upward move
boldly reliant to the rift above
I measure life from death.
With each strong thrust
I feel all motion and all vital force
borne on my strength and hazarding their course
in my self-trust:-
There is no movement of what kind it be
but has it's source in me;
and should these muscles falter to release
motion itself must cease.

In these two eyes
that search the splendour of the earth, and seek
the sombre mysteries of plain and peak,
all vision wakes and dies.
With these my ears
that listen for the sound of lakes asleep
and love the larger rumour from the deep,
the eternal hears:-
For all of beauty that this life can give
lives only while I live;
and with the light my hurried vision lends
all beauty ends.

Above The Storm
Wilfred Gibson

Sheer through the storm into the sun the plane
Shot, streaming silver from it's wings;
And he who'd won through volleys of blind rain
And baffling smother of dense cloud
To heights of rare
And eager air,
Keen-edged as icy wine,
Where only man's heart sings
In the celestial hyaline,
Where only man's heart sings, adoring,
Beyond the range even of the eagle's soaring -
He, who had braved the tempest's rage and roaring,
Sang out above the loud
Propeller's whirring
As in the crystal light
Above the curded white
Of billowy snows.

He rose
Even to his own heart's height;
And happily in flashing flight
He soared and swooped
And zoomed and looped
With ease unerring
Through the unsearchable inane
In dizzy circles of insane
And death-defying insolence
Of youth's delight
Above the sunny dense
And seething cloud whereunder
Still rolled the thunder
Over an earth already drowned in night.

He soared and swooped again,
Exulting in the flawless enginery
Of hand and brain
That, even in the heady urgency
And wildest flight
Of his insatiable soul,
Obeying his intrepid will,
Still kept serene control
Of his frail plane
That hung
Ever on peril's edge and swung
In thin and scarce-sustaining air
As by a single hair,
When one missed heart-beat or untaken breath
Might lunge him in a fiery plunge to death

And still in aerial ecstacy,
A flittering midge in the infinity
Of heaven, he revelled till the light
Drained even from that celestial height,
And through the icy beryl of the night
Star after star dawned silverly.