Common-Place Jotting – Page 2

A Common-Place Jotting: the Ancient Mariner

Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember

From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among the ghostly visitor’s words to the wedding guest, driven by the agony of guilt, a warning to his listener that all of creation deserves our praise:

One of Gustave Doré’s celebrated engravings illustrating the poem.
PHOTO: ART RESOURCE

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

lines 614-617

A Common-Place Jotting: Tintern Abbey

Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember

Turner_Tintern1 — Tintern Abbey in 1794, a watercolour by J. M. W. Turner

From William Wordsworth’s Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798: this benediction of nature’s guardian light on his sister, with whom he went on a walking tour, inspiring this homage to nature:

. . . and this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations!

A Common-Place Jotting: Macbeth Act V, Scene 3

Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember

Orson Welles directed and starred as the titular Macbeth in the 1948 film, with Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth.

Two moving speeches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, both in the same scene:

one a soliloquy on his own fate . . .

I have lived long enough: My way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

. . . the other lamenting a physician’s lack of cure for his wife’s guilt-worn sanity —

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?