frequentpondcrosser

[frequentpondcrosser]

[frequentpondcrosser]

It’s already come for you…

[frequentpondcrosser]

Christopher Weyant for The New Yorker

[frequentpondcrosser]

It would be very unwise to suppose that political spectacles designed to feed insatiable egos and daunt political foes are harmless things, mere shows without historical consequences.

[frequentpondcrosser]

AT SUNSET

We have gone hand in hand

Through joys and distress,

Now we rest from our wanderings

High above the quiet land.

Around us the valleys slope down,

The skies have begun to darken,

Only two larks, recalling a dream,

Soar up into the haze.

Come, and leave them to fly,

Soon it will be time to sleep,

We must not lose our way

In this solitude.

O vast and silent peace!

So deep in sunset glow,

How weary we are with wandering –

Could this perhaps be death

[frequentpondcrosser]

“How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of a man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the sign-board at the corner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge.”

~ Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

[frequentpondcrosser]

[frequentpondcrosser]

[frequentpondcrosser]

[frequentpondcrosser]

ANCESTRAL HOUSES

William Butler Yeats

Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,

Amid the rustle of his planted hills,

Life overflows without ambitious pains;

And rains down life until the basin spills,

And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains

As though to choose whatever shape it wills

And never stoop to a mechanical

Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung

Had he not found it certain beyond dreams

That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung

The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems

As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung

Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,

And not a fountain, were the symbol which

Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man

Called architect and artist in, that they,

Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone

The sweetness that all longed for night and day,

The gentleness none there had ever known;

But when the master’s buried mice can play,

And maybe the great-grandson of that house,

For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.

O what if gardens where the peacock strays

With delicate feet upon old terraces,

Or else all Juno from an urn displays

Before the indifferent garden deities;

O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways

Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease

And Childhood a delight for every sense,

But take our greatness with our violence?

What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,

And buildings that a haughtier age designed,

The pacing to and fro on polished floors

Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined

With famous portraits of our ancestors;

What if those things the greatest of mankind

Consider most to magnify, or to bless,

But take our greatness with our bitterness?

[frequentpondcrosser]

[frequentpondcrosser]

“This music crept by me upon the waters”

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

~ From T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

[frequentpondcrosser]

[frequentpondcrosser]

“Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.” ~ Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

[frequentpondcrosser]

REPLYING TO SUBPREFECT ZHANG

By Wang Wei

Grown old, I’ve learned to value silence,

The world's affairs no longer stir my heart.

Returning to myself, I’ve no great plan,

Free of thought, I return to the old forest.

Wind from the pines loosens my sash.

Moon shines over hills; I pluck the qin.

You ask me why all things must rise and fall.

Fishermen sing on steep banks on the river.

[frequentpondcrosser]

A lovely wisteria photo from California, taken by @cazbruce, reminded me to offer this photo of Chinese wisteria growing up the wall of the Master’s Lodge at Christ’s College, Cambridge.