Tag Archives: seasons

Moons and hearts rise and fall.

calendar, poetry, , , ,

George MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul is a long poem with seven lines for each day of the year. You can find the whole thing at Project Gutenberg. Here are just the first five days/stanzas of “November,” in which MacDonald so richly describes the situation we often find ourselves in, our hearts weary and plodding, and our thoughts dull. He prays for strength to face the darkness, and to find Christ in it.  

1.
THOU art of this world, Christ. Thou know’st it all;
Thou know’st our evens, our morns, our red and gray;
How moons, and hearts, and seasons rise and fall;
How we grow weary plodding on the way;
Of future joy how present pain bereaves,
Rounding us with a dark of mere decay,
Tossed with a drift Of summer-fallen leaves.

2.
Thou knowest all our weeping, fainting, striving;
Thou know’st how very hard it is to be;
How hard to rouse faint will not yet reviving;
To do the pure thing, trusting all to thee;
To hold thou art there, for all no face we see;
How hard to think, through cold and dark and dearth,
That thou art nearer now than when eye-seen on earth.

3.
Have pity on us for the look of things,
When blank denial stares us in the face.
Although the serpent mask have lied before,
It fascinates the bird that darkling sings,
And numbs the little prayer-bird’s beating wings.
For how believe thee somewhere in blank space,
If through the darkness come no knocking to our door?

4.
If we might sit until the darkness go,
Possess our souls in patience perhaps we might;
But there is always something to be done,
And no heart left to do it. To and fro
The dull thought surges, as the driven waves fight
In gulfy channels. Oh! victorious one,
Give strength to rise, go out, and meet thee in the night.

5.
“Wake, thou that sleepest; rise up from the dead,
And Christ will give thee light.” I do not know
What sleep is, what is death, or what is light;
But I am waked enough to feel a woe,
To rise and leave death. Stumbling through the night,
To my dim lattice, O calling Christ! I go,
And out into the dark look for thy star-crowned head.

–George MacDonald

This is really it…

nature, weather, ,

 

This is the last really warm day. Yesterday and today have been around 90 degrees by midafternoon, and staying warm into the evening. I opened the windows again after having them closed when it was cold and drizzly for a week. All through the day I have gone up and down the stairs doing housework; and every time when I am going up, and encounter the extra heat in the stairwell, it surprises me afresh, and I praise God for it.

Autumn gropes for us.

poetry, smells, , , ,

SONG AT THE BEGINNING OF AUTUMN

Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this —
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names —
Autumn and summer, winter, spring —
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.

-Elizabeth Jennings

Pippin Photo – her dahlia “Nicholas,” 2023

 

The living enchantment of September.

nature, poetry, , , , , ,

In addition to several poems that he shares in his recent post about September, including those of Derek Mahon, Howard Nemerov, and Bashō, Stephen Pentz offers this thought:

“I have a vague notion of what occurs when ‘the ecliptic and equator cross.’ Something to do with the movement of spheres, I suspect. But I’m reminded of my oft-repeated first principle of poetry: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry. Here is a wider principle I have adopted at this moment: Explanation and explication are the death of enchantment. The enchantment of the World, of course. Mind you, I accept the existence of the ecliptic and the equator. This is not an anti-scientific manifesto. I simply prefer, for instance, a single butterfly or a single leaf, with no explanations attached.”

-Stephen Pentz on his blog, First Known When Lost

Here is one of the poems:

THRESHOLD

When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road.

-Howard Nemerov

I hope you will visit his blog and read the whole loving tribute, including evocative works of art, to the month that is soon to be gone for another year.