Heaven and Earth

Easter Week – Charles Kingsley

See the land, her Easter keeping,
Rises as her Maker rose.
Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping,
Burst at last from winter snows.
Earth with heaven above rejoices;
Fields and gardens hail the spring;
Shaughs and woodlands ring with voices,
While the wild birds build and sing.

You, to whom your Maker granted
Powers to those sweet birds unknown,
Use the craft by God implanted;
Use the reason not your own.
Here, while heaven and earth rejoices,
Each his Easter tribute bring-
Work of fingers, chant of voices,
Like the birds who build and sing.

Krishna (Spring in Kulu), by Nicholas Roerich:

At this glorious time of year, I hope all my readers have a very blessed holiday. I offer my warmest, sincerest wishes for peace, fellowship, strong spirits and joyous hearts, and respect for sacred earth.

See you soon

Claudia

Hope is . . .

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson

Giotto’s St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, 1299

Nocturne

Nocturne, by Archibald MacLeish

The earth, still heavy and warm with afternoon,
Dazed by the moon:

The earth, tormented with the moon’s light,
Wandering in the night:

La, La, The moon is a lovely thing to see-
The moon is an agony.

Full moon, moon rise, the old old pain
Of brightness in dilated eyes,

The ache of still
Elbows leaning on the narrow sill,

Of motionless cold hands upon the wet
Marble of the parapet,

Of open eyelids of a child behind
The crooked glimmer of the windown blind,

Of sliding faint remindful squares
Across the lamplight of the rocking chairs:

Why do we stand so late
Stiff fingers on the moonlit gate?

Why do we stand
To watch so long the fall of moonlight on the sand?

What is it we cannot recall?

Tormented by the moon’s light
The earth turns maundering through the night.

Big Thumb. Beach. Moon and Decaying Bird, Salvador Dali, 1928:

Love Sonnet LXXIX

by Pablo Neruda

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness
like a double drum in the forest, pounding
against the thick wall of wet leaves.

Night travel: black flame of sleep
that cuts the threads of earthly orbs,
punctual as a headlong train that pulls
cold stone and shadow, endlessly.

Because of this, Love, tie me to a purer motion,
to the constancy that beats in your chest
with the wings of a submerged swan,

So that our sleep might reply to the sky’s
questioning stars with a single key,
with a single door the shadows had closed.

Embrace, Egon Schiele, 1917

Enter Autumn

A good Saturday evening to you! Hope this blog post finds you well. Let us say an official adios to summer as we celebrate the autumnal equinox with art and poetry.

Four Trees, by Egon Schiele, 1917:

For our poetry, one of my personal favorites from William Butler Yeats. This is “The Wild Swans at Coole”:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

A little reminder to all Museworthy readers, please visit on Monday for another “celebration”

See you soon, friends!

Welcome Summer

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,-
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,-
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

– Summer Song, William Carlos Williams

Yesterday was the Summer Solstice. The dog days – the dreaming days – are here. In the next few weeks we will the crack open new watercolor sets, open new books, join in games with children, kick off our shoes at every opportunity, pen little stories, ride our bikes to the water’s edge, toss frisbees and softballs, spray hoses, and laze under the big yellow ochre ball of the sun

Summer Night, Riverside Drive, George Wesley Bellows, 1909:

“a spirit of youth in every thing”

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

—- Sonnet 98, William Shakespeare

Spring, by William Adolphe Bouguereau:

if i believe

if i believe – e.e. cummings

if i believe
in death be sure
of this
it is

because you have loved me,
moon and sunset
stars and flowers
gold crescendo and silver muting

of seatides
i trusted not,

one night

when in my fingers

drooped your shining body
when my heart
sang between your perfect
breasts

darkness and beauty of stars
was on my mouth petals danced
against my eyes
and down

the singing reaches of
my soul
spoke
the green-

greeting pale-
departing irrevocable
sea
i knew thee death.

and when

i have offered up each fragrant
night,when all my days
shall have before a certain

face become
white
perfume
only,

from the ashes

then
thou wilt rise and thou
wilt come to her and brush

the mischief from her eyes and fold
her
mouth the new
flower with

thy unimaginable
wings,where dwells the breath
of all persisting stars

Marianne Stokes, Death of Tristram, 1902:

What Lies Ahead

2012 has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Look at it written out: twenty-twelve. It sounds really fresh and sharp, but also has a tone of valor and assuredness, optimism and resolve. The alliteration and concise rhythm add to that tone. Twenty-twelve. Of course neither I nor anyone else knows if this year will unfold with such attributes. We’ll see.

Because I was just in Boston last week, I thought I’d post a New Year’s poem by a Boston native: the one and only Sylvia Plath.  She found the inspiration for “New Year on Dartmoor” as she was taking a walk with her young daughter. While the child sees the end-of-year surroundings with wonder and “newness”, the mother’s voice – the cynical and apprehensive adult – points out the superficiality of it all, knowing that challenges and uncertainty lie ahead. Plath presents it like only Sylvia Plath can.

New Year on Dartmoor, by Sylvia Plath

This is newness: every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only you
Don’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness,
The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
There’s no getting up to it by the words you know.
No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
We have only come to look. You are too new
To want the world in a glass hat.

You can read a superb analysis of this poem here.

Happy 2012 to all of my readers. Let’s hope for peace, prosperity, love, and strength in the New Year. Looking forward into the future, we all have much to think about.

A beauty from Frederic Lord Leighton, this is Solitude:

O Me! O Life!

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the
foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish
than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I
see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me
intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring–What good amid these,
O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here–that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

- Walt Whitman

Me in watercolor, by Carl. September 2011:

Epilogue

Epilogue - Robert Lowell

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme -

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter’s vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 1657, Johannes Vermeer:

Blog Refurbishing

I think Museworthy could use a little sprucing up, don’t you agree? Nothing major. It’s just that I haven’t made any changes in the sidebar/links in a really long time, nor have I updated the About page, Events and News, or introduced any new features. I have been lazy and neglectful  But I’m on top of it now and have some ideas I’m considering. Also, reader suggestions are welcome, so don’t hesitate to share!

Right now I’m in the mood for some John William Waterhouse, so we have the beautiful The Lady Clare, from 1900. This painting was inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s wonderful poem in which a young woman decides she cannot enter into a marriage on false pretenses regarding her birth station. Lord Ronald had proposed to her, and given her a white doe, thinking she was of aristocratic lineage. When Lady Clare is told that she was really just the child of a poor nurse who substituted her as a newborn for the real baby Lady Clare who died in infancy, Clare is compelled to reveal the truth to Lord Ronald. The nurse implores her not to tell him, to just go ahead with the marriage and keep her mouth shut about the whole thing. But Lady Clare could not in good conscience carry such a secret for the rest of her life. She needed to tell Lord Ronald the truth – that she was not an heiress, but “a beggar born”, and let the chips fall where they may. How do you think the story ends? Read this illustrated version of the poem and find out

“language where all language ends”

A splendid poem for “Music Monday”:

To Music, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what? –: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,–
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

Spring Dance, by Franz von Stuck, 1909:

Cloths of Heaven

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The Tree of Forgiveness, Sir Edward Burne-Jones:

“Life’s Maimed Imaginings”

Frankincense and Myrrh – Amy Lowell

My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings

Vibrate most readily to minor chords,

Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words

Which voice the passion and the ache of things:

Illusions beating with their baffled wings

Against the walls of circumstance, and hoards

Of torn desires, broken joys; records

Of all a bruised life’s maimed imaginings.

Now you are come! You tremble like a star

Poised where, behind earth’s rim, the sun has set.

Your voice has sung across my heart, but numb

And mute, I have no tones to answer. Far

Within I kneel before you, speechless yet,

And life ablaze with beauty, I am dumb.

Hera, by Francis Picabia, 1929:

I had to turn this post over to the poetry of Amy Lowell (one of my favorites) and the imagery of Francis Picabia, because I’m in a bit of a pissy mood. Well, maybe not pissy but moody and disconcerted. And anxious. And perturbed. I like the word “perturbed”. Eh, whatever. Maybe I’ll go shave my fucking head and give myself a nose piercing. Wouldn’t that be just splendid?