These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June, --
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a ( Read more... )

Interesting.  This stuff fascinates me.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/22/math.genius.ap/index.html

This poem has entirely captured my imagination.  I cannot get it out of my head; I cannot stop musing on it and wondering and marvelling and feeling.

The Listeners
Walter de la Mare

"Is anybody there?" said the Traveler,
    Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence chomped the grasses
    Of the forest's ferny floor.
And a ( Read more... )

The old melancholy, the old longing, the old, mysterious ache.

I feel like a caged bird, watching the others fly home.

It hurts me and thrills me at the same time.

I wonder if I will ever understand this divine agony, this soul-splitting ecstasy.

At once I cry for relief and beg for it never to end.

It is Alfred, Lord Tennyson's birthday.  Three months ago I stood upon his grave and murmured the song from Maud, and wept and let the tears splash the marble.  It was wonderfully maudlin.  But the tears were sincere; they fell as I quoted the last two stanzas:

There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate;
She is coming, my ( Read more... )

This is great stuff.

"Know ye, now, Bulkington?  Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

"But as in landlessness alone ( Read more... )

I walked the shore in the moonlight and let the waves wash over my ankles, and the silver of the reflected light on the ever-cresting waves looked like a path to the stars.  I wanted to follow it, even if it meant drowning in the black and silver water or the black and diamond sky ( Read more... )

When I looked up at the stars tonight and thought about eternity, I felt that I was suspended in a single moment, as everlasting and unchanging as the things that are, that always have been, that will endure for ages, with time stretching out before and after, with no beginning and no end, like a beam of light. Suddenly the scale of things altered ( Read more... )

I didn't get around to posting yesterday, but I was thinking all day that it was Percy Bysshe Shelley's death day, and had this bit of "To a Skylark" running through my head ( Read more... )

In the gloaming I walked with my trusty dog, and I felt once more that this life is so achingly beautiful that Heaven will have a job to outdo it ( Read more... )