Lines Written In Early Spring -William Wordsworth

I HEARD a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And 'tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:—-

But the least motion which they made,

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature's holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

Gabriel's words...

...If I would know that these will be the last minutes that I will see you, I will say to you "I love you" and wouldn't assume that you would know it....

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Again and again

Again and again , however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines...

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, "The night is shattered and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

Time (Waqt), Javed Akhtar

The following is the translation fo the orignal in Hindi.

What is time?
What is this thing that goes on without pause?
If it did not pass,
Then where could it have been?
It must have been somewhere.
It has passed.
So where is it now?
It must be somewhere.
Where did it come from? Where did it go?
Where did the process start? Where will it end?
What is time?
These events
Incidents
Conflicts
Every grief
Every joy
Every torment
Every pleasure
Every smile
Every tear
Every song
Every scent,
It may be the pain of a wound
Or the magic of a tender touch,
Or lonely voice or cries around;
Success and failures assailing the mind;
The upheavals of care, the tumult of the heart.
All feelings
All emotions
Are like leaves
Floating on the surface of the water.
As they swim along
Now here,
Now there,
And now they disappear,
Gone from site, but
There must be something
Flowing along.
What is this river?
What hills has it come from?
To what sea is it going?
What is time?
Sometimes I think
When I see trees from a moving train,
It seems
They go in the opposite way.
But in reality
The trees are standing still.
So can it be
That all our centuries,
Row upon row, are standing still?
Can it be that time is fixed,
And we alone are in motion?
Can it be that in this one moment
All moments,
All centuries are hidden?
No future
No past.
What has gone by
Is happening now.
I think -
Can it be possible
That this is true,
That we are in motion?
We pass by,
And what we imagine
Is moving
Is really motionless.
Moving, not moving?
Whole or divided?
Is it frozen,
Or is it melting?
Who knows?
Who can guess?
What is time?
This glorious universe
It seems
Even today is not content
With all its glory.
At every moment
It becomes wider and more vast.
It stretches out its arms
And with its fingers like galaxies
Touches other parts of space.
If this is true,
Outside the bounds of all we can imagine
Somewhere there will certainly be a part of space,
Which
So far it has not touched
With its fingers like galaxies,
Where nothing has happened.
A part of space,
Which has not heard the Creator's command,
'Be!'
Where God does not yet exist.
And in that place
There will be no time
One day
This glorious universe will reach
This untouched part of space.
And then with its whole existence
It will cry:
'Be!'
Time will be born there also.
If there is birth, then there is death.
I think
It is not true
That time has no end and no beginning.
The thread is very long
But
Somewhere the thread will have an end.
Now mankind is confused
Because it was born in this cage of time.
It was brought up and raised here.
But now man has discovered
That outside the cage of time
There lies another part of space.
So he thinks,
He asks,
What is time?
................................................................................
Read about Javed Akhtar.
................................................................................

"Only in Sleep" by Sara Teasdale

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.
Only in sleep Time is forgotten —
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.
The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild —
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?

Childhood -Rilke

It would be good to give much thought, before

you try to find words for something so lost,

for those long childhood afternoons you knew

that vanished so completely -and why?

We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;

life was never again so filled with meeting,

with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to use

except what happens to things and creatures:

we lived their world as something human,

and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd

and as overburdened by vast distances,

and summoned and stirred as from far away,

and slowly, like a long new thread,

introduced into that picture-sequence

Girl in Love - Rilke

That's my window. This minute
So gently did I alight
From sleep--was still floating in it.
Where has my life its limit
And where begins the night?

I could fancy all things around me
Were nothing but I as yet;
Like a crystal's depth, profoundly
Mute, translucent, unlit.

I have space to spare inside me
For the stars, too: so full of room
Feels my heart; so lightly
Would it let go of him, whom

For all I know I have started
To love, it may be to hold.
Strange, as if never charted,
Stares my fortune untold.

Why is it I am bedded
Beneath this infinitude,
Fragrant like a meadow,
Hither and thither moved,

Calling out, yet fearing
Someone might hear the cry,
Destined to disappearing
Within another I.

Neruda once more...

Sonnet LXXXI

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
And you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
We will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
Only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
And let their soft drifting signs drop away;
Your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move
After, following the folding water you carry, that carries
Me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

Words of Shakespeare

Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Thoughts from Pablo Neruda

Sonnet LXIX

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence,
Without you moving, slicing the noon
Like a blue flower, without you walking
Later through the fog and the cobbles,
Without the light you carry in your hand,
Golden, which maybe others will not see,
Which maybe no one knew was growing
Like the red beginnings of a rose.


In short, without your presence: without your coming
Suddenly, incitingly, to know my life,
Gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind:


Since then I am because you are,
Since then you are, I am, we are,
And through love I will be, you will be, we'll be.

In words of Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Sc. I
I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.

Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Sc. II
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.

As You Like It, Act I, Sc. II
The little foolery that wise men have makes a great show.

As You Like It, Act V, Sc. I
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. V
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. V
You must wear your rue with a difference.
There 's a daisy; I would give you some violets, but they withered.

Julius Caesar, Act IV, Sc. III
The deep of night is crept upon our talk,
And nature must obey necessity.

King Henry IV. Part I, Act II, Sc. III
Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.

King Henry IV. Part II, Act I, Sc. II
Some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time.

King John, Act III, Sc. IV
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

You who never arrived in my arms - Rilke

You who never arrived in my arms,
Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you.
I have given up trying to recognize
you in the surging wave of the next moment.
All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

Story - Stephen Dunn

A woman's taking her late-afternoon walk
on Chestnut where no sidewalk exists
and houses with gravel driveways
sit back among the pines. Only the house
with the vicious dog is close to the road.
An electric fence keeps him in check.
When she comes to that house, the woman
always crosses to the other side.
I'm the woman's husband. It's a problem
loving your protagonist too much.
Soon the dog is going to break through
that fence, teeth bared, and go for my wife.
She will be helpless. I'm out of town,
helpless too. Here comes the dog.
What kind of dog? A mad dog, a dog
like one of those teenagers who just loses it
on the playground, kills a teacher.
Something's going to happen that can't happen
in a good story: out of nowhere a car
comes and kills the dog. The dog flies
in the air, lands in a patch of delphiniums.
My wife is crying now. The woman who hit
the dog has gotten out of her car. She holds
both hands to her face. The woman who owns
the dog has run out of her house. Three women
crying in the street, each for different reasons.
All of this is so unlikely; it's as if
I've found myself in a country of pure fact,
miles from truth's more demanding realm.
When I listened to my wife's story on the phone
I knew I'd take it from her, tell it
every which way until it had an order
and a deceptive period at the end. That's what
I always do in the face of helplessness,
make some arrangements if I can.
Praise the odd, serendipitous world.
Nothing I'd be inclined to think of
would have stopped that dog.
Only the facts saved her.

Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World - Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are
in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;

Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their
omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on
earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks
and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter
love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult
balance."

Different Hours -Stephen Dunn

And now, next day, I wake before
the sound of traffic, amazed
that the paper has been delivered,
that the world is up and working.
A dazed rabbit sits in the dewy grass.
The clematis has no aspirations
as it climbs its trestle. . . .

And somewhere a philosopher is erasing
"time's empty passing" because he's seen
a woman in a ravishing dress.
In a different hour he'll put it back.

-------------

Words of interest:

Clematis - Any of various ornamental climbing plants of the genus Clematis usually having showy flowers .

Trestle - A horizontal beam or bar held up by two pairs of divergent legs and used as a support.

Like Most Revelations by Richard Howard

It is the movement that incites the form,
discovered as a downward rapture--yes,
it is the movement that delights the form,
sustained by its own velocity. And yet

it is the movement that delays the form
while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact
it is the movement that betrays the form,
baffled in such toils of ease, until

it is the movement that deceives the form,
beguiling our attention--we supposed
it is the movement that achieves the form.
Were we mistaken? What does it matter if

it is the movement that negates the form?
Even though we give (give up) ourselves
to this mortal process of continuing,
it is the movement that creates the form.

Ode To the Smell of Wood - by Pablo Neruda

Late, with the stars
open in the cold
I open the door.
The sea galloped
in the night.
Like a hand from the dark house
came the intense aroma of firewood in the pile.
The aroma was visible as if the tree were alive.
As if it still breathed.
Visible like a garment.
Visible like a broken branch.
I walked into the house surrounded
by that balsam-flavored darkness.
Outside the points in the sky sparkled
like magnetic stone
sand the smell of the wood
touched my heart like some fingers,
like jasmine,
like certain memories.
It wasn't the sharp smell
of the pines,no,it wasn't
the break in the skin
of the eucalyptus,neither was it
the green perfumes
of the grapevine stalk,but
something more secret,because that fragrance
only one
only one
time existed,
and there, of all I have seen in the world
in my own house at night, next to the winter sea,
was waiting for methe smell
of the deepest rose,
the heart cut from the earth,
something that invaded me like a wave
breaking loose
from timeand it lost itself in me
when I opened the door
of the night.

No Platonic Love - by William Cartwright

Tell me no more of minds embracing minds,
And hearts exchang'd for hearts;
That spirits spirits meet, as winds do winds,
And mix their subt'lest parts;
That two unbodied essences may kiss,
And then like angels, twist and feel one Bliss.
I was that silly thing that once was wrought
To practise this thin love;
I climb'd from sex to soul, from soul to thought;
But thinking there to move,
Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then
From soul I lighted at the sex again.

As some strict down-looked men pretend to fast,
Who yet in closets eat;
So lovers who profess they spririts taste,
Feed yet on grosser meat;
I know they boast they souls to souls convey,
Howe'r they meet, the body is the way.

Come, I will undeceive thee, they that tread
Those vain aerial ways
Are like young heirs and alchemists misled
To waste their wealth and days,
For searching thus to be for ever rich,
They only find a med'cine for the itch.

--------

Words To Note:

Alchemy: Any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.