hope

hope kills.
hope reunites that spark of resilient beauty in life
breathes invigoration across my heart's fading embers
once content to glow softly
hope stirs up
what little life my spent spirit has left
consumes all I have left to give,
leaving me with a faint glimmer
receding into ash.

Memory

This is a place I've known all too well.

THE PHILOSOPHER

And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?

I know a man that's a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?

Yet women's ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell, --
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?

ESVM

Hunger

My Heart, Being Hungry
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

My heart, being hungry, feeds on food
The fat of heart despise.
Beauty where beauty never stood,
And sweet where no sweet lies
I gather to my querulous need,
Having a growing heart to feed.

It may be, when my heart is dull,
Having attained its girth,
I shall not find so beautiful
The meager shapes of earth,
Nor linger in the rain to mark
The smell of tansy through the dark.

A Weekend Well Spent

I won't be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious,
and you hide them from me. p.164

I believed in a return to Nature once.
But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her?
To-day, I believe that we must discover Nature.
After many conquests we shall attain simplicity.
It is our heritage. p. 121

She had worked like a great artist; for a time--indeed, for years--she had been meaningless, but at the end there was presented to the girl the complete picture of a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn better--a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who have used them most." p.77

She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer's evening with the window open. Passion was there, but it could not be easily labelled; it slipped between love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style. And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what--that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are writen tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.



--E. M. Forster, A Room With A View