Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.Honey-red, closing the face-oval
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as
Beneath half-watt rays
The eyes turn topaz.
—Ezra Pound, Medallion
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought [simile and metaphor] in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind. So he produces what Baudelaire called a ‘suggestive magic including at the same time object and subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself. The motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
—Northrop Frye, “The Educated Imagination”
At fifty generations’ end
(And such abysses time affords us all)
I return to the further shore of a great river
That the vikings’ dragons did not reach,
To the harsh and arduous words
That, with a mouth now turned to dust,
I used in my Northumbrian, Mercian days
Before I became a Haslam or Borges.
On Saturday we read that Julius Caesar
Was the first man out of Romeburg to strip the veil from England;
Before the clusters swell again on the vine
I shall have heard the voice of the nightingale
With its enigma, and the elegy of the warrior twelve
That surround the tomb of their king.
Symbols of other symbols, variations
On the English or German future seem these words to me
That once on a time were images
A man made use of praising the sea or sword;
Tomorrow they will live again,
Tomorrow fyr will not be fire but that form
Of a tamed and changing god
It has been given to none to see without an ancient dread.
Praised be the infinite
Mesh of effects and causes
Which, before it shews me the mirror
In which I shall see no-one or I shall see another,
Grants me now this contemplation pure
Of a language of the dawn.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “On Beginning the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar,” from Dreamtigers
translated by Harold Morland
You say that I have no originality. Now mark this, prince—there is nothing so offensive to a man of our time and race than to be told that he is wanting in originality, that he is weak in character, has no particular talent, and is, in short, an ordinary person. You have not even done me the honour of looking upon me as a rogue. Do you know, I could have knocked you down for that just now! You wounded me more cruelly than Epanchin, who thinks me capable of selling him my wife! Observe, it was a perfectly gratuitous idea on his part, seeing there has never been any discussion of it between us! This has exasperated me, and I am determined to make a fortune! I will do it! Once I am rich, I shall be a genius, an extremely original man. One of the vilest and most hateful things connected with money is that it can buy even talent; and will do so as long as the world lasts.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
Taught to me over breakfast by my German flatmates.
Knusper, knusper, knäuschen—
wer knabbert an meinem häuschen?Nibble, nibble, gnaw—
who is nibbling at my little house?
—the witch, Hansel and Gretel
Wer, wie, was;
der, die, das;
wieso, weshalb, warum;
wer nicht fragt bleibt dumm.Who, how, what;
the, the, the;
why, why, why;
who doesn’t question, stays dumb.
—Sesame Street
Tausend schöne sachen
gibt es überall zu sehen;
manchmal muss man fragen
um sie zu verstehen.A thousand beautiful things
are everywhere to see;
sometimes you must ask
in order to understand them.
He could not make up his mind what he thought about it, and wished he had some friend who would tell him what to think. Actually it seemed to him wholly unsatisfactory, and yet very lovely, the only really beautiful picture in the world. What he would have liked at that moment would have been to see himself walk in, and slap him on the back, and say (with obvious sincerity): “Absolutely magnificent! I see exactly what you are getting at. Do get on with it, and don’t bother about anything else! We will arrange for a public pension, so that you need not.”
However, there was no public pension. And one thing he could see: it would need some concentration, some work, hard uninterrupted work, to finish the picÂture, even at its present size. He rolled up his sleeves, and began to concentrate. He tried for several days not to bother about other things. But there came a tremendous crop of interruptions.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Leaf by Niggle
La Tarde
By Leopold Lugones.
El cielo funde ya su piedra fina
En el horno del sol, que tras del monte,
Va esmaltando el metal del horizonte
Con los más bellos cromos de su mina.
Mordido de color en cada poro.
Friega de oro el metal su pulimento,
Y exorbita hasta el cénit un violento
Pavo real verde delirado en oro.
Sunset
The sky is already melting its fine stone
in the furnace of the sun, behind the mountain,
and will glaze the horizon’s metal
with gorgeous chrome from its mine.
Mouthfuls of color in every pore.
It scrubs the metal golden, polishes
exceedingly more, until the zenith: a violent
green peacock, deliriated in gold.
(Of course when I hear peacocks I think of Flannery O’Connor first and most.)
To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.
—Flannery O’Connor, in her essay “The King of the Birds”
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons