0901

Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin

And still allows some stirring down within.

I've known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell

And held in ice as dancers in a spell

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown

Composedly have made their long sojourns,

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze

The random hands, the loose unready eyes

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

-- Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur (link)

1522

Christmas Trees

Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares' candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,
 
restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.
 
Against the wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.

-- Geoffrey Hill

About Dietrich Bonhoeffer and "Christmas Trees" (link)

Geoffrey Hill (link)

0911

To a Leaf Falling in Winter

At sundown when a day's words
have gathered at the feet of the trees
lining up in silence
to enter the long corridors
of the roots into which they
pass one by one thinking
that they remember the place
as they feel themselves climbing
away from their only sound
while they are being forgotten
by their bright circumstances
they rise through all of the rings
listening again
afterward as they
listened once and they come
to where the leaves used to live
during their lives but have gone now
and they too take the next step
beyond the reach of meaning

-- W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin (link)

do not be ashamed if at times your eyes fill with tears (it's good for you)

… tonight we are privileged to undertake Rachmaninov's "All-Night Vigil." Those of you who have baby sitters who expect you home before dawn may wish to step outside for a few moments to make a phone call. (Lest you be frightened by the title, be apprised that the 15 musical numbers take but 65 minutes in the singing.)

Though written during the early years of World War I (1915), with the restrictions which Rachmaninov imposed upon himself to insure their suitability for liturgical performance, their musical idiom clearly "looks backward" –to the 500-year-old orthodox Znamenny chant as clothed in the loving 19th century language of "the last great representative of Russian Romanticism."

… Ranging from unison voices to eight and twelve parts, and moving from simple chant through variation to improvisation, the Vespers sometimes can be a complex work to put together, but it speaks so directly and simply to the heart, that one of the recurrent difficulties in rehearsal is that we become so emotionally touched–that it is next to impossible to continue singing.

Do not be ashamed if at times your eyes fill with tears (it's good for you)

And it almost certainly is best if we withhold applause until the Vespers are complete. We will not be insulted if even then you do not applaud.

-- Robert Shaw, from "Opening Remarks at Spivey Hall," May 14-15, 1993 The Robert Shaw Reader

All-Night Vigil (link)

That which finds expression in art cannot thereafter be unsaid. This may be why art matters at all.

-- Charles Harrison Since 1950

8612

Consciously I had done nothing to promote any such development; on the contrary, my sympathies were on the other side. Something must therefore have been behind the scenes, some intelligence, at any rate something more intelligent than myself. For the extraordinary idea that in the light of consciousness the inner realm of light appears as a gigantic shadow was not something I would have hit on of my own accord.

-- C.G. Jung Memories

She held men closely with discovery,

Almost as speed discovers, in the way
Invisible change discovers what is changed,
In the way what was has ceased to be what is.

It was not her look but a knowledge that she had.
She was a self that knew, an inner thing,
Subtler than look's declaiming, although she moved

With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,
Impassioned by the knowledge that she had,
There on the edges of oblivion.

O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve
And motion outward, reddened and resolved
From sight, in the silence that follows her last word–

-- Wallace Stevens, lines from "The Owl in the Sarcophagus"

Read more (link)