Inspirational

WHEN Sister Jane, who had produced a child,
In prayer and penance all her hours beguiled
Her sister-nuns around the lattice pressed;
On which the abbess thus her flock addressed:
Live like our sister Jane, and bid adieu
To worldly cares: - have better things in view.

YES, they replied, we sage like her shall be,
When we with love have equally been free.

Dance on, dance on, we see, we see
Youth goes, alack, and with it glee,
A boy the old man ne’er can be;
Maternal thirty scarce can find
The sweet sixteen long left behind;
Old folks must toil, and scrape, and strain,
That boys and girls may once again
Be that for them they cannot be,
But which it gives them joy to see,
Youth goes and glee; but not in vain
Young folks if only you remain.

Dance on, dance on, ’tis joy to see;
The dry red leaves on winter’s tree,
Can feel the new sap rising free.
On, on, young folks; so you survive,
The dead themselves are still alive;
The blood in dull parental veins
Long numbed, a tingling life regains.
Deep down in earth, the tough old root
Is conscious still of flower and fruit.
Spring goes and glee b...

Let thy joys alone be remembered now,
    Let thy sorrows go sleep awhile;
Or if thought's dark cloud come o'er thy brow,
    Let Love light it up with his smile,
For thus to meet, and thus to find,
    That Time, whose touch can chill
Each flower of form, each grace of mind,
    Hath left thee blooming still,
Oh, joy alone should be thought of now,
    Let our sorrows go sleep awhile;
Or, should thought's dark cloud come o'er thy brow,
    Let Love light it up with his smile.

When the flowers of life's sweet garden fade,
    If but one bright leaf remain,
Of the many that once its glory made,
    It is not for us to complain.
But thus to meet and thus to wake
    In all Love's early bliss;
Oh, Time all other gifts may take,
    So ...

        Making his advances
        He does not look at her, nor sniff at her,
        No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.

        Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin
        That work beneath her while she sprawls along
        In her ungainly pace,
        Her folds of skin that work and row
        Beneath    the    earth-soiled    hovel    in    which    she moves.

        And so he strains beneath her housey walls
        And catches her trouser-legs in his beak
        Suddenly, or her skinny limb,
        And strange and grimly drags at her
        Like a dog,
        Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency.

        Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.
        Dragged out of an eternity of sil...

Out of the pregnant darkness, where from fire
To glimmering fire the watchword leaps,
The dirge floats up from those who build the pyre
High and still higher
That yet shall blaze across the verminous deeps.

Farewell, O brother-heart,
Yet we shall not forget;
Though hand from hand must part,
Your hope is with us yet.
The clank of the swaggerer’s sword
And clink of the grasper’s gold
Are not so loud as the lover’s word
In a thousand echoes rolled.

The lords of the tottering order sit and plot,
With cunning courtesy haggling still:
The insistent chorus cannot be forgot
Its words are shot
Like summoning rockets from the eastern hill.

You, it was you who showed
How Murder made his pact
In busy Greed’s abode,
Preparing for ...

Far as the eye can see the land is grey,
And desolation sits among the stones
Looking on ruin who, from rocks like bones,
Stares with a dead face at the dying day.
Mounds, where the barberry and bay hold sway,
Show where homes rose once; where the village crones
Gossiped, and man, with many sighs and groans,
Laboured and loved and went its daily way.
Only the crow now, like a hag returned,
Croaks on the common that its hoarse voice mocks.
Meseems that here the sorrow of the earth
Has lost herself, and, with the past concerned,
Sits with the ghosts of dreams that haunt these rocks,
And old despairs to which man's soul gave birth.

Two shapes of august bearing, seraph tall,
Of indolent imperturbable regard,
Stood in the Tavern door to drink. As the first
Lifted his glass to let the warm light melt
In the slow bubbles of the wine, a sunbeam,
Red and broad as smouldering autumn, smote
Down through its mystery; and a single fleck,
The tiniest sun-mote settling through the air,
Fell on the grape-dark surface and there swam.

Gently the Drinker with fastidious care
Stretched hand to clear the speck away. "No, no!"--
His comrade stayed his arm. "Why," said the first,
"What would you have me do?" "Ah, let it float
A moment longer!" And the second smiled.
"Do you not know what that is?" "No, indeed."
"A mere dust-mote, a speck of soot, you think,
A plague-germ still unsatisfied. It is not.<...

On Rabbi Kook's Street
I walk without this good man,
A streiml he wore for prayer
A silk top hat he wore to govern,
fly in the wind of the dead
above me, float on the water
of my dreams.

I come to the Street of Prophets, there are none.
And the Street of Ethiopians, there are a few. I'm
looking for a place for you to live after me
padding your solitary nest for you,
setting up the place of my pain with the sweat of my brow
examining the road on which you'll return
and the window of your room, the gaping wound,
between closed and opened, between light and dark.

There are smells of baking from inside the shanty,
there's a shop where they distribute Bibles free,
free, free. More than one prophet
has left this tangle of lanes
while every...

Here'sa song to mi brave old friend,
A friend who has allus been true;
His day's drawin near to its end,
When he'll leeav me, as all friends mun do.
His teeth have quite wasted away,
He's grown feeble an blind o' one ee,
His hair is all sprinkled wi' gray,
But he's just as mich thowt on bi me.

When takkin a stroll into th' taan,
He's potterin cloise at mi heels;
Noa matter whearivver aw'm baan,
His constancy nivver once keels.
His feyts an his frolics are o'er,
But his love nivver offers to fail;
An altho' some may fancy us poor,
They could'nt buy th' wag ov his tail.

If th' grub is sometimes rayther rough,
An if prospects for better be dark;
He nivver turns surly an gruff,
Or shows discontent in his bark.
Ther's nubdy can tice ...

The dewdrops on every blade of grass are so much like silver drops
that I am obliged to stoop down as I walk to see if they are pearls,
and those sprinkled on the ivy-woven beds of primroses underneath the
hazels, whitethorns and maples are so like gold beads that I stooped
down to feel if they were hard, but they melted from my finger. And
where the dew lies on the primrose, the violet and whitethorn leaves
they are emerald and beryl, yet nothing more than the dews of the
morning on the budding leaves; nay, the road grasses are covered with
gold and silver beads, and the further we go the brighter they seem to
shine, like solid gold and silver. It is nothing more than the sun's
light and shade upon them in the dewy morning; every thorn-point and
every bramble-spear has its trembling ...

There it stands, though alas, what a little of her
Shows in its cold white look!
Not her glance, glide, or smile; not a tittle of her
Voice like the purl of a brook;
Not her thoughts, that you read like a book.

It may stand for her once in November
When first she breathed, witless of all;
Or in heavy years she would remember
When circumstance held her in thrall;
Or at last, when she answered her call!

Nothing more. The still marble, date-graven,
Gives all that it can, tersely lined;
That one has at length found the haven
Which every one other will find;
With silence on what shone behind.

St. Juliot: September 8, 1916.

Clumped in the shadow of the beech,
In whose brown top the crows are loud,
Where, every side, great briers reach
And cling like hands, the beechdrops crowd
The mossy cirque with neutral tints
Of gray; and deep, with berries bowed,
The buckbush reddens 'mid the mints.

O'erhead the forest scarcely stirs:
The wind is laid: the sky is blue:
Bush-clover, with its links of burs,
And some last blooms, few, pink of hue,
Makes wild the way- and everywhere
Slim, white-ribbed cones of fungi strew
The grass that's like a wildman's hair.

The jewel-weeds, whose pods bombard
The hush with fairy batteries
Of seeds, grow dense here; pattering hard
Their sacs explode, persuade the eyes
To search the heaven for show 'rs. One seems
To walk where old Enc...

    Discord and plots, which have undone our age,
    With the same ruin have o'erwhelm'd the stage.
    Our house has suffer'd in the common woe,
    We have been troubled with Scotch rebels too.
    Our brethren are from Thames to Tweed departed,
    And of our sisters, all the kinder-hearted,
    To Edinburgh gone, or coach'd, or carted.
    With bonny bluecap there they act all night
    For Scotch half-crown, in English three-pence hight.
    One nymph, to whom fat Sir John Falstaff's lean,
    There with her single person fills the scene.
    Another, with long use and age decay'd,
    Dived here old woman, and rose there a maid.
    Our trusty doorkeepers of former time
    There strut and swagger in heroic rhyme.
    Tack but a copper-lace to drugget suit,<...

I never shall furgit that night when father hitched up Dobbin,
An' all us youngsters clambered in an' down the road went bobbin'
To school where we was kep' at work in every kind o' weather,
But where that night a spellin'-bee was callin' us together.
'Twas one o' Heaven's banner nights, the stars was all a glitter,
The moon was shinin' like the hand o' God had jest then lit her.
The ground was white with spotless snow, the blast was sort o' stingin';
But underneath our round-abouts, you bet our hearts was singin'.
That spellin'-bee had be'n the talk o' many a precious moment,
The youngsters all was wild to see jes' what the precious show meant,
An' we whose years was in their teens was little less desirous
O' gittin' to the meetin' so 's our sweethearts could admire us.
So on we...

Not far away does that bright city stand,
'Tis but the mist o'er its dividing stream,
That wraps the glory of its glitt'ring strand,
Its radiant skies, and mountains silvery gleam;
Oh, often in the blindness of our fate
We wander very near the city's gate.

We love that unseen city, and we yearn
Ever within our earthly homes to see
Its golden towers, that in the sunset burn,
Its white walls rising from the quiet sea;
Its mansions gleaming with immortal glow,
Filled with the treasure lost to us below.

Yes, dear ones that we loved and lost are there;
Bright in that fair clime beam those sweet eyes now;
Fanned by its soft breeze floats the shining hair,
Hair we have smoothed back from the gentlest brow;
Softest white hands we kissed and clasped in ours...

Once upon a time there lived a Tinkle-Tinkle. I cannot tell you what he was like, because no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself. Sometimes he lived on the ground, sometimes in a tree, sometimes in the water, sometimes in a cave; and I can't tell you what he lived on, for no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself.

One day the Tinkle-Tinkle was going through a wood, when he heard a piteous weeping. He stopped, for he was a kindly Tinkle-Tinkle, and found two small dormice sobbing under a tree because they had been cruelly deserted by their parents. He wiped their eyes tenderly and took them to his cave home; but I cannot tell you how he went, for no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle. However, when he got there he put the dormice to bed in his grandmother's boots, for which he had never found any use before, ...

    Companion! by whose buoyant Spirit cheered,
    In whose experience trusting, day by day
    Treasures I gained with zeal that neither feared
    The toils nor felt the crosses of the way,
    These records take, and happy should I be
    Were but the Gift a meet Return to thee
    For kindnesses that never ceased to flow,
    And prompt self-sacrifice to which I owe
    Far more than any heart but mine can know.
    
W. Wordsworth.

Rydal Mount, Feb. 14th, 1842.

There were many burning hours on the heart-sweet tide,
And we passed away from ourselves, forgetting all
The immortal moods that faded, the god who died,
Hastening away to the King on a distant call.

There were ruby dews were shed when the heart was riven,
And passionate pleading and prayers to the dead we had wronged;
And we passed away unremembering and unforgiven,
Hastening away to the King for the peace we longed.

Love unremembered and heart-ache we left behind,
We forsook them, unheeding, hastening away in our flight;
We knew the hearts we had wronged of old we would find
When we came to the fold of the King for rest in the night.