Written by
Louise Bogan |
A child draws the outline of a body.
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows
that life is missing; she has cut
one background from another.
Like a child,
she turns to her mother.
And you draw the heart
against the emptiness she has created.
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Written by
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
I serve you not, if you I follow,
Shadow-like, o'er hill and hollow,
And bend my fancy to your leading,
All too nimble for my treading.
When the pilgrimage is done,
And we've the landscape overrun,
I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,
And your heart is unsupported.
Vainly valiant, you have missed
The manhood that should yours resist,
Its complement; but if I could
In severe or cordial mood
Lead you rightly to my altar,
Where the wisest muses falter,
And worship that world-warning spark
Which dazzles me in midnight dark,
Equalizing small and large,
While the soul it doth surcharge,
That the poor is wealthy grown,
And the hermit never alone,
The traveller and the road seem one
With the errand to be done;—
That were a man's and lover's part,
That were Freedom's whitest chart.
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Written by
Robert Louis Stevenson |
AS one who having wandered all night long
In a perplexed forest, comes at length
In the first hours, about the matin song,
And when the sun uprises in his strength,
To the fringed margin of the wood, and sees,
Gazing afar before him, many a mile
Of falling country, many fields and trees,
And cities and bright streams and far-off Ocean's smile:
I, O Melampus, halting, stand at gaze:
I, liberated, look abroad on life,
Love, and distress, and dusty travelling ways,
The steersman's helm, the surgeon's helpful knife,
On the lone ploughman's earth-upturning share,
The revelry of cities and the sound
Of seas, and mountain-tops aloof in air,
And of the circling earth the unsupported round:
I, looking, wonder: I, intent, adore;
And, O Melampus, reaching forth my hands
In adoration, cry aloud and soar
In spirit, high above the supine lands
And the low caves of mortal things, and flee
To the last fields of the universe untrod,
Where is no man, nor any earth, nor sea,
And the contented soul is all alone with God.
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Written by
Emile Verhaeren |
The flowers of bright welcome along the wall await us no longer when we go indoors, and our silken ponds whose smooth waters chafe lie outstretched no more beneath pure, soft skies.
All the birds have fled our monotonous plains, and pallid fogs float over the marshes. O those two cries: autumn, winter! winter, autumn! Do you hear the dead wood falling in the forest?
No more is our garden the husband of light, whence the phlox were seen springing towards their glory; our fiery gladioli are mingled with the earth, and have lain down in their length to die.
Everything is nerveless and void of beauty; everything is flameless and passes and flees and bends and sinks down unsupported. Oh! give me your eyes lit up by your soul that I may seek in them in spite of all a corner of the old sky.
In them alone our light lives still, the light that covered all the garden long ago, when it exulted with the white pride of our lilies and the climbing ardour of our hollyhocks.
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