Efesos, Turkey - 2006
“During the fleeting weeks of that single summer, I lived through my first experience of intense love. All the poetry in my nature centered itself with sudden passion upon a single girl. For me she was the sun and moon, the sea, the hills, and the rivers, the cornfields, the hayfields, the plough-lands, and the first stars of nightfall. Everything that is lovely in nature became illuminated by the thought of her: the garden at dawn, as I saw it looking down from the nursery window on the Round-beds and the Crescent-bed, populated with cold, diffident flowers: the meadows by the stream, so hushed in the night air, heavy with the scents of honeysuckle hedges and disturbed only by an occasional deep sighing from one of the ruminating cattle, with weighty body of warm flesh recumbent upon wet summer grass. From the moment I had seen her in the church I could think of nothing else. My whole approach to life was altered. I no longer cared whether I was to be a poet or not a poet, I no longer was concerned with the deeper problems of existence. Unless I could associate what I saw, heard, tasted, smelt, and touched with her I no longer give it attention. What reason was there for me to heed the waves that broke day and night against the irregular coasts of the world, to exult in the grass that grew day and night upon the broad back of the stationary land, to watch from ancient elbow-bone bridges the flowing away of rivers, to look up at the crafty midnight stars, unless such appearances could be made to serve in some way as poetical settings for this girl of my utter idolatry? It seemed to me then, as indeed it seems to me still, that every inch of her body shone with some mysterious light.”
Powys, Llewelyn.
Powys, Llewelyn.
