Beautifully Donne

THE GOOD-MORROW.
by John Donne


I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not wean'd till then?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

True Fact.

After Tuesday, even the calendar says WTF.

Comfort me with Pumpkin

Let's imagine, hypothetically of course, that you are really, really anxious. Your anxiety, in fact, is so off the scale that you really think it might be a good idea to just get into bed and stay there until it passes. (It's not a good idea, by the way.) Let's imagine that you went to your doctor and she gave you an anti-depressant that works by making you feel so physically wretched that you forget how emotionally wretched you are. (They're definitely on to something there.) Maybe you've spent weeks and weeks trying to find a counsellor, only to encounter answering machines that say no one can talk to you until you're so desperate that you're ready to drive yourself to the hospital, where they would probably have you committed. Also, the answering machines all give the number of the distress line. In case, you know, you're distressed.

And now let's imagine that you got out of bed this morning and your first thought was "I am going to re-arrange the pantry." And so you did, taking every single thing out of it and putting most of the stuff back in a far, far more pleasing and orderly manner. Then your friend called and asked if you wanted to come see her sister's new baby, so you went on over and cuddled a newborn for a while. Maybe when you got home you finished the pantry and decided to make a pumpkin pie. Then you did three loads of laundry and cleaned the house from top to bottom and only had one or two tiny moments of short breath and incipient panic. You roasted a chicken, you ran the dishwasher, you knitted a little on your Anti-February sweater, you read a book, you stayed out of bed.

Maybe you are thinking right now that counsellors and drugs are just fine, but sometimes what you need to do is take complete and utter control of everything around you that can be controlled - not your brain chemistry, not your fear, not your crying in inappropriate places - but your pantry, and a graham-cracker crust, and pumpkin filling, and chicken with lemon and rosemary.

Maybe some days, having a grip on those things (and a wickedly tidy pantry) is just enough to get you through.

Saturday Poem: this one has a great title.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare.

The things I do to earn a wage.

Today my grade 7 classes and I were talking about the Poet Laureate - who he is and what his job is. This led, as one would imagine, down all kinds of interesting paths.

"What do you think he might write about today?" I asked them.

"Haiti!"

"H1N1!"

"Math class!"

and finally....

"The Olympic torch!" [It passed through yesterday on the way to Vancouver, making a fabulous mess of traffic.]

"He might," I agreed. "But what rhymes with "torch"?"

"Porch!" everyone shouted.

I can't help myself - once we start down a path like this I am absolutely unable to stop, no matter how many warning signs I see.

"I bet he wrote one like this," said I:

I saw the torch
From my porch
It was hot
But I was not.

It's one for posterity, so it is.

Brevity being the soul of something or other...

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

- Ezra Pound

A Poem for Saturday, Oldies Edition

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th'earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
- Whose soul is sense - cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th'other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th'other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.