"Oh You Are Coming"

Oh you are coming, coming, coming,
How will hungry Time put by the hours till then?--
But why does it anger my heart to long so
For one man out of the world of men?

Oh I would live in myself only
And build my life lightly and still as a dream--
Are not my thoughts clearer than your thoughts
And colored like stones in a running stream?

Now the slow moon brightens in heaven,
The stars are ready, the night is here--
Oh why must I lose myself to love you,
My dear?

Sara Teasdale

The Prayer

My answered prayer came up to me,
And in the silence thus spake he:
"O you who prayed for me to come,
Your greeting is but cold and dumb."

My heart made answer: "You are fair,
But I have prayed too long to care.
Why came you not when all was new,
And I had died for joy of you."

Sara Teasdale

Paris in Spring

The city's all a-shining
Beneath a fickle sun,
A gay young wind's a-blowing,
The little shower is done.
But the rain-drops still are clinging
And falling one by one--
Oh it's Paris, it's Paris,
And spring-time has begun.

I know the Bois is twinkling
In a sort of hazy sheen,
And down the Champs the gray old arch
Stands cold and still between.
But the walk is flecked with sunlight
Where the great acacias lean,
Oh it's Paris, it's Paris,
And the leaves are growing green.

The sun's gone in, the sparkle's dead,
There falls a dash of rain,
But who would care when such an air
Comes blowing up the Seine?
And still Ninette sits sewing
Beside her window-pane,
When it's Paris, it's Paris,
And spring-time's come again.

Sara Teasdale

To Enone

What conscience, say, is it in thee,
...When I a heart had one,
To take away that heart from me,
...And to retain thy own?

For shame or pity now incline
...To play a loving part;
Either to send me kindly thine,
...Or give me back my heart.

Covet not both; but if thou dost
...Resolve to part with neither,
Why, yet to show that thou art just,
...Take me and mine together!

Robert Herrick

To enjoy a book

To enjoy a book . . . I find I have to treat it as a
sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin
by making a map on one of the end leafs; then I put
in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running
headline at the top of each page. Finally I index
at the end all the passages I have for any reason
underlined.

I often wonder--considering how many people enjoy
themselves developing photos or making scrapbooks--
why so few people make a hobby of their reading in
this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had
to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-
nibbed pen in my hand.

One is making something all the time and a book so
read acquires the charm of a toy without losing
that of a book

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Books

"Books are the plane and the train and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."

Anna Quindlen (1998)

I prefer reading

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading".

Logan Pearsall Smith

Love in a Cottage

They may talk of love in a cottage,
And bowers of trellised vine —
Of nature bewitchingly simple,
And milkmaids half-divine;
They may talk of the pleasure of sleeping
In the shade of a spreading tree,
And a walk in the fields at morning,
By the side of a footstep free!


But give me a sly flirtation
By the light of a chandelier —
With music to play in the pauses,
And nobody very near;
Or a seat on a silken sofa,
With a glass of pure old wine,
And mama too blind to discover
The small white hand in mine.

N.P.Willis 1790-1870

Deserving

People need loving the most when they deserve it the least.

John Harrigan

Slowly

Act quickly, think slowly.

Proverb, Greek

Consequences

When anger rises, think of the consequences.

Confucius

Earl Mertoun's Song

There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest;
And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest:
And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of lustre
Hid i' the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wild-grape cluster,
Gush in golden-tinted plenty down her neck's rose-misted marble:
Then her voice's music . . . call it the well's bubbling, the bird's warble!

And this woman says, 'My days were sunless and my nights were moonless,
Parch'd the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's out-break tuneless,
If you loved me not!' And I who (ah, for words of flame!) adore her,
Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably before her--
I may enter at her portal soon, as now her lattice takes me,
And by noontide as by midnight make her mine, as hers she makes me!

Robert Browning

As I Ponder'd in Silence

As I ponder'd in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands,
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
Know'st thou not there is hut one theme for ever-enduring bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
The making of perfect soldiers.

Be it so, then I answer'd,
I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance
and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the
field the world,
For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I above all promote brave soldiers.


Walt Whitman

Instinct

There is no instinct like that of the heart.

Lord Byron

Creative

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Dimly

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors;
Amid these earthly damps
What seem to us but sad, funeral tapers
May be heaven's distant lamps.

Henry W. Longfellow

No battle

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party: there is no battle unless there be two.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I soldi

"I soldi sono una cosa orribile da seguire, ma affascinante da incontrare."

Henry James

"Only in Sleep"

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.

Only in sleep Time is forgotten--
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild--
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?


Sara Teasdale

Places

Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired;
I see the oak woods at Saxton's flaming
In a flare of crimson by the frost newly fired;
And I am thirsty for the spring in the valley
As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.

I know a bright world of snowy hills at Boonton,
A blue and white dazzling light on everything one sees,
The ice-covered branches of the hemlocks sparkle
Bending low and tinkling in the sharp thin breeze,
And iridescent crystals fall and crackle on the snow-crust
With the winter sun drawing cold blue shadows from the trees.

Violet now, in veil on veil of evening
The hills across from Cromwell grow dreamy and far;
A wood-thrush is singing soft as a viol
In the heart of the hollow where the dark pools are;
The primrose has opened her pale yellow flowers
And heaven is lighting star after star.

Places I love come back to me like music--
Mid-ocean, midnight, the waves buzz drowsily;
In the ship's deep churning the eerie phosphorescence
Is like the souls of people who were drowned at sea,
And I can hear a man's voice, speaking, hushed, insistent,
At midnight, in mid-ocean, hour on hour to me.


Sara Teasdale

"I Have Loved Hours at Sea"

I have loved hours at sea, gray cities,
The fragile secret of a flower,
Music, the making of a poem
That gave me heaven for an hour;

First stars above a snowy hill,
Voices of people kindly and wise,
And the great look of love, long hidden,
Found at last in meeting eyes.

I have loved much and been loved deeply--
Oh when my spirit's fire burns low,
Leave me the darkness and the stillness,
I shall be tired and glad to go.

Sara Teasdale

"What Do I Care?"

What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring,
That my songs do not show me at all?
For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,
I am an answer, they are only a call.

But what do I care, for love will be over so soon,
Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,
For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,
It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.

Sara Teasdale

Summum Bonum

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
...All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
...Breath and bloom, shade and shine,--wonder, wealth, and--how far above them--

. . .Truth, that's brighter than gem,
. . .Trust, that's purer than pearl,--
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me
. . .In the kiss of one girl.

Robert Browning

On my volcano grows the grass

ON my volcano grows the grass,
A meditative spot,
An area for a bird to choose
Would be the general thought.
How red the fire reeks below,
How insecure the sod�
Did I disclose, would populate
With awe my solitude.


Emily Dickinson

Price of liberty

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Orwell, George

Disinclination

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Adams

Connected

Everything is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

Paul Hawken

Man of thought

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Henri Bergson

Your name

Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of - for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

Socrates

Mediocrity

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.

W. Somerset Maugham

Rest

We find rest in those we love, and we provide a resting place in ourselves for those who love us.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Books

Books . . . are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) In

Be glad

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.

Henry Van Dyke

Doubt

Doubt is the father of invention.

Galileo

Of bronze and blaze

Of bronze and blaze
The north, to-night!
So adequate its forms,
So preconcerted with itself,
So distant to alarms, --
An unconcern so sovereign
To universe, or me,
It paints my simple spirit
With tints of majesty,
Till I take vaster attitudes,
And strut upon my stem,
Disdaining men and oxygen,
For arrogance of them.

My splendors are menagerie;
But their competeless show
Will entertain the centuries
When I am, long ago,
An island in dishonored grass,
Whom none but daisies know.



Emily Dickinson

The Lover's Resolution

Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
'Cause another's rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flow'ry meads in May,
...If she think not well of me,
...What care I how fair she be?

Shall my silly heart be pined
'Cause I see a woman kind?
Or a well disposed nature
Joined with a lovely feature?
Be she meeker, kinder, than
Turtle-dove or pelican
...If she be not so to me,
...What care I how kind she be?

George Wither

Stars

Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;

Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;

Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I watch them marching
Stately and still,

And I know that I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty.

Sara Teasdale

Blue Squills

How many million Aprils came
Before I ever knew
How white a cherry bough could be,
A bed of squills, how blue!

And many a dancing April
When life is done with me,
Will lift the blue flame of the flower
And the white flame of the tree.

Oh burn me with your beauty, then,
Oh hurt me, tree and flower,
Lest in the end death try to take
Even this glistening hour.

O shaken flowers, O shimmering trees,
O sunlit white and blue,
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,
May bear the scar of you.


Sara Teasdale

Twilight

Dreamily over the roofs
The cold spring rain is falling,
Out in the lonely tree
A bird is calling, calling.

Slowly over the earth
The wings of night are falling;
My heart like the bird in the tree
Is calling, calling, calling.

Sara Teasdale

Artistic

I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Vincent Van Gogh

Move!

"Let him that would move the world first move himself."

Socrates

My dreams

"My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free."

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Self-recovery

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

Fulton J. Sheen

Being an author

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum

Graycie Harmon

Once in a while

Home is heaven and orgies are vile
But you need an orgy, once in a while.

Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

To One in Paradise

Thou wast all that to me, love,
...For which my soul did pine--
A green isle in the sea, love,
...A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
...And all the flowers were mine.

Now all my days are trances,
...And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
...And where thy footstep gleams--
In what ethereal dances,
...By what eternal streams!

Edgar Allan Poe

The Princess: A Medley: O Swallow

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.
O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.
O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.

O were I thou that she might take me in,
And lay me on her bosom, and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.

Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,
Delaying as the tender ash delays
To clothe herself, when all the woods are green?

O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown:
Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,
But in the North long since my nest is made.

O tell her, brief is life but love is long,
And brief the sun of summer in the North,
And brief the moon of beauty in the South.

O Swallow, flying from the golden woods,
Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine,
And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

Langston Hughes

A Minuet of Mozart's

Across the dimly lighted room
The violin drew wefts of sound,
Airily they wove and wound
And glimmered gold against the gloom.

I watched the music turn to light,
But at the pausing of the bow,
The web was broken and the glow
Was drowned within the wave of night.

Sara Teasdale

A Fantasy

Her voice is like clear water
That drips upon a stone
In forests far and silent
Where Quiet plays alone.

Her thoughts are like the lotus
Abloom by sacred streams
Beneath the temple arches
Where Quiet sits and dreams.

Her kisses are the roses
That glow while dusk is deep
In Persian garden closes
Where Quiet falls asleep.

Sara Teasdale