“I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!” Keats
“When we look into Keats’s expressions of conflict between
imagination and reality we can see the roots of this conflict in the
problem of identity. Keats wrote about the sunset, the sparrow, the
mythological figure as if he had lost his identity in the object. He
experienced these identifications sometimes with a sense of discovery
and sometimes with fear or irritability. Eventually, Keats began to see
that his identity would not be maddened by his imagination and could
be strengthened by it. He realized, in other words, “that a not inconsiderable increase in psychical efficiency” can result “from a disposition
which in itself is perilous.” In-the four years we know Keats as a letter
writer and a poet, we can see the development of his capacity for
retaining a sense of identity even when seized by powerful or seductive
visions. This is the development–the turning of a weakness into a
strength, both as artist and as man-that accounts for many apparent
contradictions in Keats’s thought. The language of negative capability
has been difficult because it suggests a puzzling oxymoron- a negative
and a positive. The figure presents two aspects of a dual process, the
first part of which, in its partial renunciation of control, can be felt as a
negative, while the second, or alternating, state recreates and is felt as a
capability. The creative process in some of its operations posed
dangers for Keats’!; identity. But by the spring of 1819, the period of the
great odes, there appears a new strength in the second aspect of
negative capabilily imagination”
I’d love to write a sonnet but I daren’t For in this steamy heat it’s much too hard So please don’t send me messages that taunt Nor with disdain compare me to our bard.
.For not all people have poetic skill And what I have will sometimes fall to dust Like virtue writing’s not made by the will Await the grace ,as saints and mystics must
In the mind an empty bowl of space We keep to catch the offerings of the gods. It’s more like contemplation than a race; For freely, quietly we receive the good.
The lady’s not for turning words to gold But with a chosen few she loves to mould
When the fruit has rotted on the stalk Bruised and broken like the lost in need When leaders meet but rarely truly talk When children caught in gun fire lie and bleed
Don’t we see God’s Kingdom is a joke? One hundred million deaths in two world wars Not quick death but tortured bodies broke They lost their lives and love died in their gore
Utopia, evolution, grandiose plans Sacrifice yourself for those to come We saw the little children hand in hand Ground mines blew them up, they could not run
One thing’s clear, God’s here or not at all The future’s fiction, theatre forms the soul
Freed from her trap Bird soared into air,and hovered And floated, resting; And flew higher, singing as she flew, And higher again, Till there was only her song, Left in the silence, Trembling.
Up on the wide,stump topped hill, I felt the lark inside my heart And heard her singing. And flying up with her, I saw gold sun and silver moon, Moors of heather ,and sheep grazing Green hills, And shimmering lakes, Clouds ,sun and sky in watery mirrors. And sang ,and dipped,and dropped, And curled Up the blue Bright heaven, and rested On the wind. All that day I was a lark singing.
I shall always have a vision of A bird That flew upwards, Rejoicing and free Into a deep blue sky, and high And higher Beyond high Into a place, beyond eye even, But music still sending.
I wish I were back on that heathery moor, With the nibbling sheep and the bees sweetly humming, Hearing again The poignant song Of the skylark, A prisoner,freed by a magician, From her trap, So happy to be free, So wonderful to see. Do it again, For me.
The sun enfolds me in its wealth of light Caressing eyes and making love seem right Forgot,the lonely darkness in a trance When spring begins its equinoxal dance Forgotten too is how the frost can bite And how warm lethargy turns day to night As we lie indoors like parasites Into lighted windows, I will glance A minor crime when brightness draws my sight Here’s a drying rack with clothes mutant Here’s a sill entirely filled with plants Imagine you’re a spy and see our plight The mirror crackles, full of long-held spite
On our expedition through the magazine, we wondered whether all poems—whether or not they cross linguistic boundaries—are inherently efforts at translation. In a prose snippet rendered into English by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
My difficulty (in writing poems—and perhaps other people’s difficulty in understanding them) is in the
impossibility of my goal, for example, to use words to express a moan: nnh-nnh-nnh. To express a sound using words, using meanings. So that the only thing left in the ears would be nnh-nnh-nnh.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Sometimes writing makes me breathe differently.
I can feel the silence settle around me,
Like a prayer shawl.
i accept it gratefully.
There’s a thin feeling to the day
As if the sun might have tried harder
to come through
But it had a blue feeling
And the clouds were greedy,
Wanting too much to melt
And shed their moisture.
Some perfume please.I think it was £27.99
Yes,I like that one even more than jasmine oil.
Pour it down over London
Like a blessing.
A black woman laughed and patted my arm,
You’re so funny, she cried.
And I smiled coyly
As if someone hidden was taking my photograph.
Sometimes life’s too sweet
And needs a little pepper.
The chair creaks as I lean forward
Trying to see everything at once
As if it all happened now, not yesterday.
You stabbed my heart when I was left alone Telling me my writing was like porn Now you give me nightmares, be my pest We all need one or two,and you confessed
My writing is so bad, you envy not Did I hit you on a painful spot? If others have a gift, that is their call You have yours , get out a net and trawl
Ambivalent in love which turns to hate We wound ourselves in making this our fate Talking overmuch lets such thoughts out As tea will pour down from a tilted spout
The ancient virtues,patience and restraint Shall be our wise protectors when distraught
Patience is a virtue! Or, at least that is how the saying goes. But is it really? Patience is defined as “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without getting angry or upset,” a definition with several important components. Patience is also a skill. We can work on increasing our ability to be patient and engage in practices to become a more patient person.
Before looking at how to develop more patience, it is best to define what we are actually talking about. Patience (or the lack thereof — impatience) occurs in response to some sort of difficulty or delay in life that is not going according to expectation. A day can hardly be lived without encountering something that interferes with our plans, and so we might say that the “interferences” or “disruptions” are a normal part of life; to expect otherwise will make it difficult to be patient.
This time he followed his feet up Peter’s Hill into St Paul’s Cathedral. It was not his body. He was watching it go up the wide west steps of St Paul’s and paying his entrance fee and refusing the offer of the audio headphone guide and letting someone else do the walking down the nave and looking up at the Whispering Gallery, and all this without giving in to his internal policeman who was getting into his ear with his oh come on, Patrick,
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/25/the-vale-of-soul-making/
How my heart speaks 