Jameswoodward’s Weblog

close enough

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, God’s World

the choir and music

Silence is a great blue bell
Swinging and ringing, tinkling and singing,
In measure’s pleasure, and in the supple symmetry
of the soaring of the immense intense wings
glinting against
All the blue radiance above us and within us, hidden
Save for the stars sparking, distant and unheard in their
singing.
And this is the first meaning of the famous saying,
The stars sang. They are the white birds of silence
And the meaning of the difficult famous saying that the
sons and daughters of morning sang,
Meant and means that they were and they are the children
of God and morning,
Delighting in the lights of becoming and the houses of
being,
Taking pleasure in measure and excess, in listening as in
seeing.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage.
Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of
love.

from Delmore Schwartz, the choir and music of solitude and silence

in a glass darkly

Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass: or as tinkling cymbal.

And though I could prophesy and understood all secrets and all knowledge: yea if I had all faith so that I could move mountains out of their places and yet had no love, I were nothing.

And though I bestowed all my goods to feed the poor, and though I gave my body, even that I burned, and yet had no love, it profiteth me nothing.

Love suffereth long, and is courteous. Love envieth not. Love doth not frowardly, swelleth not, dealeth not dishonestly, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh not evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity; but rejoiceth in the truth, suffereth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things.

Though that prophesying fail, other tongues shall cease, or knowledge vanish away, yet love falleth never away. For our knowledge is unperfect and our prophesying is unperfect; but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is unperfect shall be done away.

When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I imagined as a child. But as soon as I was a man I put away childishness. Now we see in a glass, even in a dark speaking: but then shall we see face to face. Now I know unperfectly: but then shall I know even as I am known.

Now abideth faith, hope, and love, even these three: but the chief of these is love.

St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, ch. 13, in the translation of Thomas Tyndale, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernised.

intricate

Intricate and untraceable
weaving and interweaving,
dark strand with light:

designed, beyond
all spiderly contrivance,
to link, not to entrap:

elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined;

shaking, changing,

forever

forming,

transforming:

all praise,

all praise to the

great web.

Denise Levertov, Web

roses in sunlight

Our sense of these things changes and they change,
Not as in metaphor, but in our sense
Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.

It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.
It is like a flow of meanings with no speech
And of as many meanings as of men.

We are two that use these roses as we are,
In seeing them. This is what makes them seem
So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.

Wallace Stevens, Bouquet of roses in sunlight

I love surprising discoveries. As a very enjoyable lunch last week in a London restaurant in Notting Hill this particular picture captured my imagination. I was sitting opposite it and amazed at its rhythmic and soothing effect. Painted by a Cornishman, influenced by American abstract Expressionists (especially Jackson Pollock) Lanyon is  rooted in the Cornish landscape. Looking at this gave me a extraordinary sense of being in nature.

Have a look closely at it.

Painted in 1958 and entitled Barley Wind it is an extraordinary exhibition of fluid movement and energy. The quick, stabbing brushstrokes, particularly noticeable in the upper half of the painting give a sense of the waving movement of barley field scene from a high vantage point.

The wonderful thing about such discoveries is that it opens up  another avenue of visual exploration. I am looking forward to seeing more of his work.

The food and the conversation  were also very good that day ?

I love surprising discoveries. As a very enjoyable lunch last week in a London restaurant in Notting Hill this particular picture captured my imagination. I was sitting opposite it and amazed at its rhythmic and soothing effect. Painted by a Cornishman, influenced by American abstract Expressionists (especially Jackson Pollock) Lanyon is  rooted in the Cornish landscape. Looking at this gave me a extraordinary sense of being in nature.

Have a look closely at it.

Painted in 1958 and entitled Barley Wind it is an extraordinary exhibition of fluid movement and energy. The quick, stabbing brushstrokes, particularly noticeable in the upper half of the painting give a sense of the waving movement of barley field scene from a high vantage point.

The wonderful thing about such discoveries is that it opens up  another avenue of visual exploration. I am looking forward to seeing more of his work.

The food and the conversation  were also very good that day ?

wildflower

Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don’t see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day – the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.

Linda Pastan, A new poet

wrought flower

I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream

the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.
Be, that I may believe. Amen.

From Denise Levertov, Opening Words