I am not averse to reimaginations Given you walked out of my conversation As a noetic effect of its distillation
I am not chained to inharmonious juxtapositions When salubrious angels gather in celebration Of a desire prayed and given manifestation
I am simply thankful for your gravitation Towards me, bindingly, irradiate sub-atomic fusion Where once I envisioned only solitary annihilation
Yet this I wonder, and this in never-ending fascination How in moments your eyes gray meet my brown it’s recreation Of a space-time-matter continuum of conflagration
Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember
I don’t know about you, but I’m hanging on to summer as long as I can! For fellow simpaticos, here’s a late summer bloom and a Christina Rossetti poem to help.
A late summer garden rose
The Rose
The lily has a smooth stalk,
Will never hurt your hand;
But the rose upon her brier
Is lady of the land.
There's sweetness in an apple tree,
And profit in the corn;
But lady of all beauty
Is a rose upon a thorn.
When with moss and honey
She tips her bending brier,
And half unfolds her glowing heart,
She sets the world on fire.
-- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Portrait of Christina Rosetti by Dante Gabriel Rosetti
For more on Rosetti, see my Common-Place Jottings post on “Rossetti Rhymes”
Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember
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:
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?
He was the one the serpents went to
And the fish and the honeybees
When their sheen had lost their gloss
Or glimmer and their skin
Had lost their sheen.
I borrow, you borrow, we borrow
She borrows, he borrows, they borrow
The world borrows and borrows to joint sorrow
Hoping there will always be tomorrow.
What, then, do we borrow to our self-destruction
But justice delayed for the satisfaction
Of a life of pursuing our corrupt passion
And ignoring those who need our compassion?
