#westwards

[700verses]

When you see the subsiding sun

lip and slip the west’s salty hip

only those who have not kissed

will not move their tongue

and remember.

Only those who have not lost

will turn away before that

last ecstatic slide

has taken this night’s last light.

Bruce Pascoe - Saturday August 26 Figueria da Foz

[700verses]

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

[700verses]

At night he dream of angels. All day long

Their bright wings brush against him, till it seems

The world is Florence, Florence is the chapel,

And all the people in his world angelic.

Now is the marbled floor almost completed;

The shining walls and towers beyond the window,

The flowers falling through the air from heaven

Want not a brush-stroke.

Rosemary Dobson - Painter of Umbria

https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/dobson-rosemary/poems/painter-of-umbria-0192038

[700verses]

The rain drums down like red ants,

each bouncing off my window.

The ants are in great pain

and they cry out as they hit

as if their little legs were only

stitched on and their heads pasted.

Anne Sexton - The fury of rain storms

[700verses]

The earth was turning around the sun to which it had been assigned, indifferent to its cargo of destinationless passengers. How could one believe, under that infinitely tranquil sky, that those very passengers now had it within their power to transform the earth into a moon barren of life?

Simone de Beauvoir - The Mandarins

[700verses]

But a full-fed fountain will be generous with its waters even in the rain, when they are worse than useless; and a fine fount of admonition is apt to be equally irrepressible.

George Eliot - Middlemarch

[Bulstrode gets his come-uppance.]

[700verses]

On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.

George Eliot - Middlemarch

[700verses]

His candle’s steady flame burned on

At elbow all the darkness through

And still he strove to celebrate

(Devising first the lyric form)

The huntress moon, her beauty, till

Scant light surprised the neighbouring hill.

Rosemary Dobson - The passionate poet and the moon