Monday, January 28, 2008

Be You Still

Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude.

-William Butler Yeats-

Monday, January 21, 2008

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy-buds
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

-Christopher Marlowe-

Her Reply:

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy Love.

But Time drives flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward Winter reckoning yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, the beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither- soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy-buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,-
All these in me no means can move
To live with thee and be thy Love.

But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy Love.

-Sir Walter Raleigh-

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Renatus

In her is Eden's ashen grove restored
Unto the likeness of its lost increase;
Its fateful fruit changed for the Golden Apple
Enfolded in her hands' Hesperides.

-Thomas Banks-

Monday, January 14, 2008

Maugham Quotes

1. "You don't know America as well as I do. . . they always prefer a live mouse to a dead lion."

2. "She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit."

3. "Money is like a sixth sense without which one cannot fully enjoy the other five."

Friday, January 11, 2008

Browning, Again

My Star

All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird, like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

-Robert Browning-

Thursday, January 3, 2008

The Wisdom of Lionel Trilling

"We must be aware of the dangers that lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of out nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."