Sanity Amid The Madness Of March

"March Madness" has many meanings. Between the lamb and lion weather-- upward springing buds followed by a thin permafrost—and a workload that was oddly up and down (sadly up on weekends), the insanity for me has been less about the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. But since that’s what the term was meant to describe, last week I was thinking about what these kids must be thinking going into games.

See, sports is what I grew up on, basketball being paramount. I remember winning a green ribbon inscribed in gold with a title that said “Most Tenacious Guard” when I was 9 years old. If you weren’t a naturally gifted beast in height or girth, the thing you had to be was good at hustle, defense and shooting. Playing with heart was where it was at and when I played, Oregon girls’ b-ball was quite good. I never made it to a Final Four in college, not even close, but there are some things athletes always carry with them, especially competitive athletes, and lately I’ve been thinking about how it behooves people in life to carry around the good things you learn from athletic experience.

With all of the bad news lately surround athletes in all sports, I think it’s a good reminder that it may behoove everyone, even the cream of the crop to read this poem and think of the advice Kipling offers.  I wish we still lived in an era in which a girl growing up could tack up her walls with posters of stand-up NBA players like Larry Bird and her parents wouldn't have to worry that next week he will have to hold a press conference.  Nobody’s perfect, but there are some good life lessons here and in this season of spring where the proverbial leaf is turned, one or two may resonate with you too.

An Aside:  For basketball lovers, particularly those who enjoyed the very special 1980's NBA era, I highly recommend the new HBO movie Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals.  It's an excellent film, interviewing both of them today but filled with clips and highlights and other influentials in their lives.  A pleasure to watch in these maddening times!

If
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowances for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fool,
Or watch the things you gave you life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

When Seeing Isn't Healing: Yeats At His Peak

Yeats week concludes with the poem I not only memorized in 1998 before I went to Ireland for the first time but it is the poem I can never get out of my head. It’s beautifully written yet is so visual it has taken on many meanings for me throughout the years. Yeats wrote The Second Coming after WWI and in a period of his own life where he was re-examining his own spirituality. Much has been written about this particular poem but what I love about re-reading it from the text I had as an undergrad is that the notes I wrote in the margin are lucid and terse but I remember why I wrote each and every one of them.

This poem, historically, begins a period of Yeats’ writing in which he goes on to speak more about the “gyre” and his spirituality (which may be strange to some people) which will continue to be a favorite theme of his critics and biographers.  I tend to see this poem differently. I like to think Yeats saw WWI and what was happening in Ireland and perhaps around the world and felt that civilization itself was reverting to a more barbaric time, an unhappy phase of history that he couldn’t stomach as a writer, an artist and human. And I think this realization made the man a little numb from disappointment.

Maybe we all go through something like this during our lives where we think we can help change the world or at least we believe we can be part of improving things for the better. Yeats wrote The Second Coming when he was 54 years old (in 1919) old and I truly believe this signifies a turning point in his writing. By invoking images of the Sphinx, a lowering of light and a circling of what can only be considered to be vultures, or at least the nasty black birds that are everywhere in Dublin, this poem doesn’t signify much hope for the world.

I can’t say I blame him; Yeats lived in and through truly terrible times. But this is the poem, for me, where Yeats has reached his peak in terms of creating his own great stuff. Sure, he will go on to write political poems, spiritual poems, eulogize Parnell and others, but they aren’t his own poetry and I think he recognized his sad function as a writer before the world did. 

To me, this is his masterpiece. Thank you, William Butler Yeats, for being a poet, dramatist and writer of many colours, styles and themes and for being the timeless, ever-relevant author of things I'll always read. 

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Seeing Green: A Favorite From The Irish Master

Yeats week continues with one of my all time favorites, a poem that to this day dances in my head. I find it melodic and lovely in every way, just as Yeats would want it to be and instructed his fellow poets to do:

“Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made.”

In his letters, Yeats was quite clear about his aversion to giving meaning or one true interpretation to his poetry as he wanted the reader to come up with their own thoughts, lend their own meanings. “If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.” True enough. Yeats remains largely enigmatic in some poems yet I find a great connection with nearly everything he wrote because I can find a way to make it my own.

The Stolen Child
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

Stripping Down, Bearing All

One of my favorite Yeats poems is one of his shortest, a terse but tenacious declaration that he is taking his own poetry back. After years of writing nationalist anthems for the country he loved, anthologizing and eulogizing heroes, he grew tired of being "that poet." In 1916, Yeats started changing his views and ideologies, writing less romantically and taking on a more in-your-face and screw-the-world tone. Take my ideas, he says take all of my works and all of the times I tried to keep my country together and all of the things you thought my words meant. F-it. I'm a poet and I'm going to find something else. You can keep repeating my nationalist sentiments, singing them like songs, but I'm off to seek a higher power.

At least that's what I think he would say if we could have asked him about this, simply called "A Coat,” today’s featured poem. However, it would seem I’m not the only one who has thought a lot about this particular poem. Following the words of Yeats are a series of art sketches by Richard Diebenkom called “Etchings for Poems of W.B. Yeats." The first sketch in the 6-part series appears at the top of the post and the latter prints show the coat transformed into a divided Ireland.  Only in the magic of Yeats week would I find this lovely artist who was born in my native Oregon, but grew up in San Francisco and is probably one of a small group of people I would have wanted to meet if we lived at the same time. 

A Coat
W.B. Yeats

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But he fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,

For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

Irish Surprises For Shamrock Week

Last September, when got up the gumption to start this blog, I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a place where I highlighted well know poems, rather contributed to writing again, highlighting a wide variety of poets that would get me excited about writing again. While I take inventory on that, I am happy about the variety of things I’ve been interested in and how in six months, my poet’s ears are back on the ground. For me, that feels pretty good.

That said, this week some people may celebrate St. Patrick’s day and I’m going to get back to my Yeats. Each post this week will highlight a Yeats work (long or short), from obscure to well-known and I’ll offer up my thoughts, something I’ve wanted to do since I last had time to contemplate these things.  And there may be more than one post a day.  Yeats will not be the only one celebrated.

Let us start with a poem in which Yeats talks about frustration in his work as a theatre director. That would be the Abbey Theatre, he founded in 1903 just off the Liffey. The Abbey was little more than a revived shithole when I lived in Dublin and went there several times and I’m quite positive it was even more of a shithole when Yeats founded it. Today, I’m told it’s been revived again as Ireland’s National Theatre. Good on them-- when I go back I hope the bus stop out front isn’t vandalized.  (Judging from it's omission of any sort of current photograph on the website, I think that probably hasn't happened yet.)

This poem transcends professions, and I’m quite certain everyone who has ever had a job or run a household can relate to this sentiment. Sometimes things that appear difficult are complicated by knuckleheads bungling the process or is missing a variable here and there. Here Yeats is able to write about his day’s/week’s frustration in running the Abbey Theatre while making it so personal, it’s no wonder he had problems with his collaborator. First the poem:

The fascination of what's difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

Yeats wrote this during the production of the play “The Unicorn from the Stars,” and it’s presumed that the colt ailing his heart was titular unicorn and contributor Lady Gregory. To what extent we’ll never know, but for everyone out there starting their Monday work week, let us note that the fast pace of information flow and “give it to me now” culture we work in isn’t new to us. Yeats was clearly annoyed and ready to pull the plug. Let’s see if we, in our various professions can make it this one excellent Monday, and move on and reassess where Yeats may be on Tuesday.

Two Short Poetry Finds On A Lovely Rainy Friday

Ahh Friday. And what a beautiful Friday it’s been. It was gray, it misted and rained all day and I can’t wait to sleep tonight so I can hear that little pitter patter against my window. While bright sunny days are nice, my birthplace has instilled in me an appreciation for the rain that makes things grow and how wonderful it is to nap or sleep to that sound I love so well.
Poets have long used the changing of seasons as inspiration for poems but I had no idea that the man who created Winnie The Pooh could summarize how I feel about spring so succinctly and in his own creative and playful way:

Daffodowndilly
by A.A. Milne

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,

She wore her greenest gown;

She turned to the south wind

And curtsied up and down.

She turned to the sunlight

And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
"Winter is dead."

And lest we become too whimsical on this lovely rainy day, I’d like to celebrate a lesser known writer and poet who is noted for coming up with the English variation of the French 'Rondeau', Algemon Charles Swinburne. His lyric poem Atalanta in Calydon is the reason I started this blog. I didn’t read this in high school, it was not required reading in AP English or in any college courses I had, but I love finding new things for the first time. Here is the wonderful Chorus of the poem, also celebrating the coming of spring.
 
Atalanta in Calydon
by Algemon Charles Swinburne

CHORUS.

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,

The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places

With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous

Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
Maiden most perfect, lady of light,

With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamour of waters, and with might;

Bind on thy sandals, Oh thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;

For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?

Oh that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!

For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;

For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Enjoying The Signs Of Spring

In the midst of a busy week, sometimes the smallest of things give you a clue to get back to poetry. On a Wednesday morning that felt more like it should be Friday, I picked up a copy of the Metro Express, a smaller, free version of the Washington Post and flipped to the crossword puzzle while awaiting my morning bus. One of the clues referenced a work by poet James…AGEE, four letters down. A writer all his life, early in his life Agee wrote for Fortune, Time and film criticism in The Nation.

Perhaps best known as a writer of screenplays (The African Queen; The Night of the Hunter), Agee also wrote books, was a freelance journalist, movie and art criticism and smaller eclectic pieces and could probably write just about anything. Unfortunately he died at the age of 46, from a heart attack in a cab in New York on the way to his doctor’s office after a life of hard drinking and chain smoking. Turns out, he was a poet too.

It saddens me and serves as a reminder that so many talented, prolific and beautiful writers cut their own lives short by poisoning themselves to death. What a great reminder on this lovely spring day that life is indeed for living and not for dying.

Permit Me A Voyage
By James Agee

Take these who will as may be: I
Am careless now of what they fail:
My heart and mind discharted lie
And surely as the nerved nail

Appoints all quarters on the north
So now it designates him forth
My sovereign God my princely soul
Whereon my flesh is priestly stole:

Whence forth shall my heart and mind
To God through soul entirely bow,
Therein such strong increase to find
In truth as is my fate to know:

Small though that be great God I know
I know in this gigantic day
What God is ruined and I know
How labors with Godhead this day:

How from the porches of our sky
The crested glory is declined:
And hear with what translated cry
The stridden soul is overshined:

And how this world of wildness through
True poets shall walk who herald you:
Of whom God grant me of your grace
To be, that shall preserve this race.

Permit me voyage, Love, into your hands.

Oscar, Meet Oscar

Tonight is Oscar night, the annual event where celebrities come together for two hours of red carpet reveling and then spend the rest of the night honoring themselves, doing arm curls with those coveted golden statues. From talking about who’s wearing what to seeing who wins for each award, I do love the Academy Awards. I’m less invested this year because I found the quality of movies in 2009 to be far inferior than previous years. For me it was definitely a downer. The only thing I care about is not having to endure any speech by James Cameron, the “King of the World” in 1997 and a person who annoys me more than any other.

But it’s not really him, it’s his movie Avatar. The writing in that movie is atrocious. Everything out of Sigourney Weaver’s mouth was embarrassingly bad. But that’s the last of my Oscar night commentary. Now on to an Oscar who definitely knew how to write, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. Yes, that one.

I’d love to know what the flamboyant even in his time Oscar Wilde would think of all of this. Wilde was quite a character and I wish he were alive to blog and tweet about the styles, hair and make-up of everyone involved on this opulent awards night. I spent a good half hour today thinking about him, and how I often traced his paths along the streets of Dublin when I lived there over a decade ago. Wilde would love the costumes, the elegance of Sandra (for some reason being called "Sandy") Bullock’s hair, the breast enhancing dress of Charlize Theron, the undeniable beauty of Dame Helen Mirren and he definitely would have done something with George Clooney’s overgrown mop of hair. 
(Addendum: If you want entertainment via the blogosphere, try the Cooler).

Oscar Wilde once wrote “Anybody can make history. Only great men can write it.” I sincerely hope some good writers win tonight and some good actors have their fun. Who better to give us our poem for the day, appropriately with a golden title.

In The Gold Room-- A Harmony
by Oscar Wilde

Her ivory hands on the ivory keys
Strayed in a fitful fantasy,
Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees
Rustle their pale-leaves listlessly,
Or the drifting foam of a restless sea
When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze.

Her gold hair fell on the wall of gold
Like the delicate gossamer tangles spun
On the burnished disk of the marigold,
Or the sunflower turning to meet the sun
When the gloom of the dark blue night is done,
And the spear of the lily is aureoled.

And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine
Burned like the ruby fire set
In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,
Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,
Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet
With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.

The Sweet Sounds Of March

The start of this week was wonderful; the sun finally came out and shone for a full day on Monday, a short-lived but welcome omen of the spring to come. Also a gift I took as the weather gods granting me warmth after a very cold spell on my birthday. The loveliness of the morning was wonderful and while it was a normal work day, and busy work week, the irony and poetry of life did not fail to gift itself to me or punch me in the face in a good way these last few days.

I’ve been listening to Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac every morning at 6:35am on WAMU for so many years now (and let’s not count at this point) but it was a happy reminder that I shared March 1 with poets Robert Lowell (1917), writer/poet Richard Wilbur (1921), and Howard Nemerov (1920). Not a bad bunch with which to share the day. That feeling was even better than eating cake and ice cream, which, let’s face it, isn’t the best for an aging frame starting to feel the effects of gravity.

But Keillor selected for the first of March, apropos of nothing, the first two stanza’s of William Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, no link to birthdays or anything else. I loved it, Wordsworth on a day I didn’t know I wanted it. As we age these little things are important, like feeling loved by your family, friends even co-workers. When tiny fateful things happen like getting to enjoy an excerpt from Wordsworth and having the sun shine all day long, you know it’s a good day to be thankful for the gift of life.

While I appreciated Keillor’s selection, what I appreciated more was that it made me read the full poem and there are other parts I find even better. While a little long in the tooth in places – hey it’s a pastoral after all, what do you expect?—but I love final stanza and in order to get there the middle part is crucial to the overall understanding. While the rainbow may come and go, the poetry remains forever.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality
By William Wordsworth
I
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

III
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;--
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!

IV
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

V
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

VIII
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest--
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

X
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.