more than me and more than yesterday
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(Tonight's subject line is from "You are the New Day" [the link will take you to a Kings Singers' audiofile on YouTube])
My day: 3 hours of editing, 4 hours of accounting/technical stuff, 2 poems sold (yay me!), 1 rejected, 2 rounds of dishes (one washerload and one stint at the sink), and 551 more words on the current fic.
I have a post percolating in a corner of my mind on poems I love in spite of not agreeing and/or identifying with them -- Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" chief among them, but also C.H. Sisson's "Letter to John Donne" and Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" and Matthew Arnold's "Lines Written in Kensington Gardens" -- the last, in particular, I'm hugely ambivalent about (although I'll be making a point of visiting the Gardens on a future trip because of that very poem): its last two verses are paired with "Tallis's Canon" in the current UU hymnal + a slight tweak of pronoun for what, to me, is an exquisitely balanced, heart-moving setting -- soaring and then descending just so, reflecting how one can simultaneously feel both grace and despair at each day's demands:
And yet, it is not a hymn I am in complete harmony with, because I love cities so much -- they are where I feel most alive -- and the line "the urge to neither strive nor cry" gives me all sorts of trouble I'm not quite ready to articulate here. And yet, the very opening of the poem brings to my mind not only the anticipation of an upcoming trip but also of a past visit to Boston, where I lay down in the corner of a museum garden for a nap, and indeed there found a stretch of sunny, summery stillness between the obligations that had brought me to town and those I had brought with me.
And you know, that's a nice memory to take with me to bed, so off I go. In the meantime, let me point you toward Mary's posting of Alice Oswald's "The Wedding", a poem lively with words that sparkle and ring, brilliant with a broad loveliness that cannot help but sing...
[/playfulness]
[/punchiness]
[/sheer freaking compulsion]
*weary Cheshire smile*
My day: 3 hours of editing, 4 hours of accounting/technical stuff, 2 poems sold (yay me!), 1 rejected, 2 rounds of dishes (one washerload and one stint at the sink), and 551 more words on the current fic.
I have a post percolating in a corner of my mind on poems I love in spite of not agreeing and/or identifying with them -- Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" chief among them, but also C.H. Sisson's "Letter to John Donne" and Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" and Matthew Arnold's "Lines Written in Kensington Gardens" -- the last, in particular, I'm hugely ambivalent about (although I'll be making a point of visiting the Gardens on a future trip because of that very poem): its last two verses are paired with "Tallis's Canon" in the current UU hymnal + a slight tweak of pronoun for what, to me, is an exquisitely balanced, heart-moving setting -- soaring and then descending just so, reflecting how one can simultaneously feel both grace and despair at each day's demands:
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine
I did not make and cannot mar.
And yet, it is not a hymn I am in complete harmony with, because I love cities so much -- they are where I feel most alive -- and the line "the urge to neither strive nor cry" gives me all sorts of trouble I'm not quite ready to articulate here. And yet, the very opening of the poem brings to my mind not only the anticipation of an upcoming trip but also of a past visit to Boston, where I lay down in the corner of a museum garden for a nap, and indeed there found a stretch of sunny, summery stillness between the obligations that had brought me to town and those I had brought with me.
And you know, that's a nice memory to take with me to bed, so off I go. In the meantime, let me point you toward Mary's posting of Alice Oswald's "The Wedding", a poem lively with words that sparkle and ring, brilliant with a broad loveliness that cannot help but sing...
[/playfulness]
[/punchiness]
[/sheer freaking compulsion]
*weary Cheshire smile*
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