sorrow and its opposite

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[learningfromthehands-blog]

"The Wild Iris," by Louise Gluck

At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice:

from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater. 

[parabola-magazine]

THOSE AWAKE, by Wendell Berry

When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out of the window at the hillside in its season, sunlit, under the snow, and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go.

—Wendell Berry from Given: Poems, (Counterpoint, 2006)

Pictured: Hayami Gyoshū (1894-1935), Snow Night, 1930

[lostincivilisation-blog-blog]

In Memoriam A.H.H. Section: VII

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp’d no more— Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day. By Alfred Lord Tennyson

[missedstations]

“L’Envoi” - Willa Cather

Where are the loves that we have loved before When once we are alone, and shut the door? No matter whose the arms that held me fast, The arms of Darkness hold me at the last. No matter down what primrose path I tend, I kiss the lips of Silence in the end. No matter on what heart I found delight, I come again unto the breast of Night. No matter when or how love did befall, ’Tis Loneliness that loves me best of all, And in the end she claims me, and I know That she will stay, though all the rest may go. No matter whose the eyes that I would keep Near in the dark, ’tis in the eyes of Sleep That I must look and look forever more, When once I am alone, and shut the door.

[iwontbedisappointed]

[iwontbedisappointed]

What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matters names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage,“ he added more hoarsely. "I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!” “Ay, we have the same blood,” moralised Gotthold. “You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic.” “Sceptic?—coward!” cried Otto. “Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward!

Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto

[trembling-colors-deactivated201]

Andrei Rublev (1966)

[18thcenturylove]

The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David, 1787

[piracywhiskeypoetry]

'XXVI' by A.E. Housman

Good creatures, do you love your lives and have you ears for sense? Here is a knife like other knives, that cost me eighteen pence. I need but stick it in my heart and down will come the sky, and earth’s foundations will depart and all you folk will die. (‘More Poems’, 1936)

[iwontbedisappointed]

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

[iwasbornbut]

Winter Light. Ingmar Bergman. 1963. Sweden. (2). 

[iwontbedisappointed]

[millennium-mambo]

Konstantin Flavitsky, Princess Tarakanova

[iwontbedisappointed]

Unknown Girl in a Maternity Ward

The doctors are enamel. They want to know the facts. They guess about the man who left me, some pendulum soul, going the way men go and leave you full of child. But our case history stays blank. All I did was let you grow. Now we are here for all the ward to see. They thought I was strange, although I never spoke a word. I burst empty of you, letting you see how the air is so. The doctors chart the riddle they ask of me and I turn my head away. I do not know.

[spacecadetwench]

Ulver- Eos.

The sun is far away, It goes in circles. Someone dies, Someone lives. In pain It is burning, Into the thin air Of the nature, Of a culture, On the dark side, Under the moon The wolves gather…

[dailylitemilydickinson-blog]

Poems by Emily Dickinson (276 of 447)

XXXVI. TILL THE END. I should not dare to leave my friend, Because – because if he should die While I was gone, and I – too late – Should reach the heart that wanted me; If I should disappoint the eyes That hunted, hunted so, to see, And could not bear to shut until They “noticed” me – they noticed me; If I should stab the patient faith So sure I ’d come – so sure I ’d come, It listening, listening, went to sleep Telling my tardy name, – My heart would wish it broke before, Since breaking then, since breaking then, Were useless as next morning’s sun, Where midnight frosts had lain!

[iwontbedisappointed]