art

A POET! He hath put his heart to school

Gill Washington Nature, Poems, William Wordsworth , , , , , 0 Comment

By William Wordsworth

Miscellaneous Sonnets, 1842

I

‘A POET’!–He hath put his heart to school,
Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff
Which Art hath lodged within his hand–must laugh
By precept only, and shed tears by rule.
Thy Art be Nature; the live current quaff,
And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool,
In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool
Have killed him, Scorn should write his epitaph.
How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold;
And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree
Comes not by casting in a formal mould,
But from its ‘own’ divine vitality.

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The Power of Art

Gill Washington Death, George Santayana, Life, Nature, Poems, Spirituality , , 0 Comment

By George Santayana

NOT human art, but living gods alone
Can fashion beauties that by changing live,–
Her buds to spring, his fruits to autumn give,
To earth her fountains in her heart of stone;
But these in their begetting are o’erthrown,
Nor may the sentenced minutes find reprieve;
And summer in the blush of joy must grieve
To shed his flaunting crown of petals blown.
We to our works may not impart our breath,
Nor them with shifting light of life array;
We show but what one happy moment saith;
Yet may our hands immortalize the day
When life was sweet, and save from utter death
The sacred past that should not pass away.

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A thought went up…

Gill Washington Emily Dickinson, Poems , , 0 Comment

Emily Dickinson

A thought went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish,–some way back,
I could not fix the year,

Nor where it went, nor why it came
The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was,
Have I the art to say.

But somewhere in my soul, I know
I’ve met the thing before;
It just reminded me–‘t was all–
And came my way no more.