Pro Patria Mori
Thomas Moore

WHEN he who adores thee has left but the name
Of his fault and his sorrows behind,
O! say wilt thou weep, when they darken the fame
Of a life that for thee was resign’d!
Yes, weep, and however my foes may condemn,
Thy tears shall efface their decree;
For, Heaven can witness, though guilty to them,
I have been but too faithful to thee.

With thee were the dreams of my earliest love;
Every thought of my reason was thine:
In my last humble prayer to the Spirit above
Thy name shall be mingled with mine!
O! blest are the lovers and friends who shall live
The days of thy glory to see;
But the next dearest blessing that Heaven can give
Is the pride of thus dying for thee.

Three Minus One

Men's love I now no longer trust,
And find I give no thought to lust,
I'm older, wiser, undeluded,
And live a single life secluded.

When I was young and I could feel,
Then men would vie and men would kneel
And beg me then to be their lover,
And tell me they could love no other.

And three times did I give my heart,
And three times did it fall apart.
Each man thought that he was the one,
I waited till the love was gone.

Love bloomed and then was overblown,
And now I'd rather be alone.
For given most love fades away,
The rose has thorns that always stay.

Now I am strong, my heart secure
from those who'd leave me sad, for sure.
I've lived and loved and now I'm free,
Three minus one, that just leaves me.

Mine

What do you do,
re horse poo?
Do you run through,
or swerve,
unerve
the car or two
behind you?
-----------------------

What can you do
re pollution?
No solution,
or evolve,
solve,
find resolution.
Seek,
Earth's absolution?

It doesn't matter.
We procreate,
desecrate
The Earth,
We overrate
ourselves
Her bane,
we'll cease,
She will remain.
-----------------------
"And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."
J G Magee, Jr

And what of the man
Who's the Earth seen,
Has been,
High,
Higher than sky,
Eternity serene,
What did it mean?
Feeling emotion,
A tear of ocean,
Beautiful sphere,
Lucky man,
Hold it dear.

Elaine x
-----------------------

When We Two Parted
Lord Byron

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted,
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met
In silence I grieve
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.

Beauty of the World (incomplete)
Frank Wilmot

Not what men see,
Not what they draw from the spread
Of hills looming in cloud-
Not this makes them proud;
But what they can hold in fee
With difficulty and dread
To tell their hearts in pain
Over and over again.
The terror of Beauty is this:
That something may find the abyss,
Some fact of miracle that you have seen
And no one ever know it ever had been
Nor what its miracle would mean.
The spacious suns
Flow through the heart as water runs,
Known and not held,
Leaving no trace.
O'er Earth's wind-ruffled face
Goes the sun-shuddering air...
Of all the Beauty that rides
Violent or velvet-footed everywhere,
So little abides-
The hunger of life's unquelled!

Full well we know
Must pass, must pass away
This joy, that woe;
And learn full well in quiet dismay
That Beauty cannot stay.
But this content for which we vainly grope,
This desperate reach for miracle may give place,
Through an intenser waiting, a more passionate hope,
To nobleness in small things, acts of grace.

I last met James in Selfridges.

Ahh! Bumper stickers - My favourite little motor would suit...
THIS IS NOT AN ABANDONED VEHICLE.
(She's still further down the page somewhere.)

HIGH FLIGHT

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Hammond - not just an organ!
------------------------------------
Man has always been quite clever and inventive,
His religions looked attractive with a big incentive.
Serfs and slaves, who's lives, were always full of strife,
could look forward to a very cushy afterlife.
For every need, with great spontaneity,
Man invented then an apt and trendy deity.
And some of them were really, REALLY weird
So, no reason then why Hammond cannot be revered.
The added bacchanalia sounds quite a selling point,
And if it's based in Amsterdam, does that include a joint?
If being very silly, having fun, is the result,
Then count me in and sign me up to join the Hammond cult!

Elaine x

Sorry that you didn't get the Bafta James - I really thought
that you'd cracked it this time with Toy Stories.

Music
Walter de la Mare

When music sounds, gone is the earth I know,
And all her lovely things even lovelier grow;
Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees
Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.

When music sounds, out of the water rise
Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes,
Rapt in strange dreams burns each enchanted face,
With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.

When music sounds, all that I was I am
Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came;
And from Time's woods break into distant song
The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.

The Trees
Edward L Davison

I did not know your names and yet I saw
The handiwork of Beauty in your boughs,
I worshipped as the Druids did, in awe,
Feeling at spring my pagan soul arouse
To see your leaf-buds open to the day,
And dull green moss upon your ragged girth,
The hoary sanctity of your decay,
Life and Death glimmering upon the Earth.
-----------------------------------------
What is Stonehenge?
Siegfried Sassoon

What is Stonehenge? It is the roofless past;
Man's ruinous myth; his uninterred adoring
Of the unknown in sunrise cold and red;
His quest of stars that arch his doomed exploring.
And what is Time but shadows that were cast
By these storm-sculptured stones while centuries fled?
The stones remain; their stillness can outlast
The skies of history hurrying overhead.


The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I was busy taking photos
of the sunset at Weston last night

Thunderstorms
William Henry Davies

My mind has thunderstorms,
That brood for heavy hours:
Until they rain me words,
My thoughts are drooping flowers
And sulking, silent birds.

Yet come, dark thunderstorms,
And brood your heavy hours;
For when you rain me words,
My thoughts are dancing flowers
And joyful singing birds.

Alone
James Joyce

The noon's greygolden meshes make
 All night a veil,
 The shorelamps in the sleeping lake
 Laburnum tendrils trail.

The sly reeds whisper to the night
 A name-- her name-
 And all my soul is a delight,
 A swoon of shame.

Full Moon
Du Fu

Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across the waves.
On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!

i carry your heart with me
E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Old blue eyes? - no, young brown eyes!

A verse from John Trumbull's
Ladies of a Certain Age

Contented tread the vale of years,
Devoid of malice, guilt and fears;
Let soft good humour, mildly gay,
Gild the calm evening of your day,

And virtue, cheerful and serene,
In every word and act be seen.
Virtue alone with lasting grace,
Embalms the beauties of the face,
Instructs the speaking eye to glow,
Illumes the cheek and smooths the brow,
Bids every look the heart engage,
Nor fears the wane of wasting age.

'I Loved You'
by Alexander Pushkin,
translated by R. Mainwaring-Hewitt:

I loved you; even now I may confess,
Some embers of my love their fire retain;
But do not let it cause you more distress,
I do not want to sadden you again.
Hopeless and tongue-tied, yet I loved you dearly
With pangs the jealous and the timid know,
So tenderly I loved you, so sincerely,
I pray God grant another love you so.

A Silly Poem
Spike Milligan

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

Fears and Scruples (incomplete)
Robert Browning

Here’s my case. Of old I used to love him,
This same unseen friend, before I knew:
Dream there was none like him, none above him,—
Wake to hope and trust my dream was true.

Loved I not his letters full of beauty?
Not his actions famous far and wide?
Absent, he would know I vowed him duty;
Present, he would find me at his side.

Pleasant fancy! for I had but letters,
Only knew of actions by hearsay:
He himself was busied with my betters;
What of that? My turn must come some day.

A Lover's Quarrel (incomplete)
Robert Browning
I.

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,

III.

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!

XII.

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!

XIV.

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?

XV.

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!

XXI.

Each in the crypt would cry
``But one freezes here! and why?
``When a heart, as chill,
``At my own would thrill
``Back to life, and its fires out-fly?
``Heart, shall we live or die?
``The rest.... settle by-and-by!''

XXII.

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!

I went to watch my daughter run the 'Race for Life' on Sunday.
If you could fit all the people who live on hate in that park with those three thousand ladies producing love for humanity, so thick, you could almost cut it with a knife, then the world would be at peace.
So proud of you, Jessica x

Life in a Love
by Robert Browning

Escape me?
Never -
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear -
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed -
But what if I fail of my purpose here?

It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And baffled, get up to begin again, -
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound,
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope drops to ground
Than a new one, straight to the selfsame mark,
I shape me -
Ever
Removed!

William Makepeace Thackeray:
It is best to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

I So Liked Spring
Charlotte Mew

I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here;-
The thrushes too-
Because it was these you so liked to hear-
I so liked you.

This year's a different thing,-
I'll not think of you.
But I'll like the Spring because it is simply spring
As the thrushes do.

Small world!
My daughter's new friend lived opposite your mum and dad and regularly saw you down there, lawnmowing!

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare

An Epilogue
John Masefield

I had seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

I love my little Celica, even though she's a bit of a 'Christine'!

Night Bombers
Anon

Eastward they climb, black shapes against the grey
Of falling dusk, gone with the nodding day
From English fields. Not theirs the sudden glow
Of triumph that their fighter-brothers know;
Only to fly through cloud, through storm, through night,
Unerring, and to keep their purpose bright,
Nor turn until, their dreadful duty done,
Westward they climb to race the awakened sun.


Reported Missing
John Bayliss

With broken wing they limped across the sky
caught in late sunlight, with their gunner dead,
one engine gone,- the type was out-of-date, -
blood on the fuselage turning brown from red:

Knew it was finished, looking at the sea
which shone back patterns in kaleidoscope
knew that their shadow would meet them by the way,
close and catch at them, drown their single hope:

Sat in this tattered scarecrow of the sky
hearing it cough, the great plane catching
now the first dark clouds upon her wing-base, -
patching the great tear in evening mockery.

So two men waited, saw the third dead face,
and wondered when the wind would let them die.

Wants
Philip Larkin

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death—
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Fire and Ice
Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

There Are Too Many People
D H Lawrence

There are too many people on earth
insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hopping.
They nibble the face of the earth to a desert.

Looking through the kitchen window tonight - I love this time of year

Perfect Day,
(or world domination?)
------------------------------

So glad to read of your perfect day,
Your aircraft and a sports car with which to play,
With roads that were empty and vapour trail free skies,
It's hard to believe James, that the rumours were just lies.

Tell me,
to achieve such a perfect day as that,
Did you turn up that Icelandic firework's thermostat?
Did you light the blue touch paper, in the land of fire and ice,
Shades of James Bond, a villain, a world dominance device?
When I saw you burn that sausage and admire fields of reflectors,
A mad scientist I thought! - and Heaven please protect us!

The quintessential Englishman,
You will forever be,
An eruption, a drive and an afternoon flight,
But back in time for tea.

Elaine x

Sad Story of a Motor Fan
H. A. Field

Young Ethelred was only three
Or somewhere thereabouts, when he
Began to show in divers ways
The early stages of the craze
For learning the particulars
Of motor-bikes and motor-cars.
He started with a little book
To enter numbers which he took,
And, though his mother often said,
‘Now, do be careful, Ethelred;
Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What shall I do
If anything runs over you?’
(Which Ethelred could hardly know,
And sometimes crossly told her so),
It didn’t check his zeal a bit,
But rather seemed to foster it;
Indeed it would astonish you
To hear of all the things he knew.
He guessed the make (and got it right)
Of every car that came in sight,
And knew as well its m.p.g.,
Its m.p.h. and £.s.d.,
What gears it had, what brakes, and what –
In short he knew an awful lot.

Now, when a boy thinks day and night
Of motor-cars with all his might
He gets affected in the head,
And so it was with Ethelred.
He called himself a ‘Packford Eight’
And wore a little number-plate
Attached behind with bits of string,
And cranked himself like anything,
And buzzed and rumbled ever so
Before he got himself to go.
He went about on all his fours,
And usually, to get indoors,
He pressed a button, then reversed,
And went in slowly, backmost first.
He took long drinks from mug and cup
To fill his radiator up
Before he started out for school
(‘It kept,’ he said, ‘his engine cool’);
And when he got to school he tried
To park himself all day outside,
At which the Head became irate
And caned him on his number-plate.

So week by week he grew more like
A motor-car or motor-bike,
Until one day an oily smell
Hung round him, and he wasn’t well.
‘That’s odd,’ he said; ‘I wonder what
Has caused the sudden pains I’ve got.
No motor gets an aching tum
Through taking in petroleum.’
With that he cranked himself, but no,
He couldn’t get himself to go,
But merely buzzed a bit inside,
Then gave a faint chug-chug and died.

Now, since his petrol-tank was full,
They labelled him ‘Inflammable,’
And wisely saw to it that he
Was buried safely out at sea.
So, if any time your fish
Should taste a trifle oilyish,
You’ll know that fish has lately fed
On what remains of Ethelred.

Scarface! Surely not?

In My Craft or Sullen Art
Dylan Thomas

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

No, sorry Rocky, apart from the odd classic
and some amazing guitar work,
I am still not a rock fan!