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    Those Winter Sundays

    By Elusive Trope on Sun, 12/25/2011 - 7:43am |
    Sundays too my father got up early
    and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
    then with cracked hands that ached
    from labor in the weekday weather made
    banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

    I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
    When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
    and slowly I would rise and dress,
    fearing the chronic angers of that house,

    Speaking indifferently to him,
    who had driven out the cold
    and polished my good shoes as well.
    What did I know, what did I know
    of love’s austere and lonely offices?
     
    ~ Robert Hayden

     

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    Musee des Beaux Arts

     

    About suffering they were never wrong,                                                                        

    The old Masters: how well they understood

    Its human position: how it takes place 

    While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along'

    How, when the aged are reverently,passionately waiting

    For the miraculous birth , there always must be

    Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

    On a pond at the edge of the wood:

    They never forgot

    That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

    Anyhow in a  corner, some untidy spot

    Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

    Scratches its innocent behind on a tree

     

    In Breughel's Icarus, for instance : how everything turns away

    Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

    Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

    But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

    As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

    Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

    Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

    Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

     

    W.H. Auden


    by Flavius on Sun, 12/25/2011 - 9:07am

     

     


    by Flavius on Mon, 12/26/2011 - 11:31am

    Nice.  It strikes me as appropriate (can't think of a better word right now) painting for the self approaching the coming new year.  Both the staying in a place and the journey to other places.  Two sides of our impulses.  Work this land and seek new horizons.


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 12/26/2011 - 11:32am

    Never(well almost never) try thinking of a better word. 

    Doesn't mean not to edit i.e. compress, everyone writes too much. But don't try thinking of a better word. "Smells of the lamp,."


    by Flavius on Mon, 12/26/2011 - 11:47am

    compress, everyone writes too much.

    speaking of which - just finishing up my next blog.   :0

     


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 12/26/2011 - 12:14pm

    For those who approve of compression, I offer up this little anthology.


    by Verified Atheist on Mon, 12/26/2011 - 1:58pm

    Had to look up the phrase "smells of the lamp"

    Said of a literary production manifestly laboured. Plutarch attributes the phrase to Pytheas the orator, who said, “The orations of Demosthenes smell of the lamp,” alluding to the current tale that the great orator lived in an underground cave lighted by a lamp, that he might have no distraction to his severe study.

    Learn something new everyday.

    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 12/26/2011 - 12:18pm

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