Quotes
| When
I get a little money I buy books and if any is left, I buy food
and clothes. Erasmus |
Thursday, December 21st, 2000
Holiday Poem
Sonnet at Christmas
This is the day His hour of life draws near,
Let me get ready from head to foot for it
Most handily with eyes to pick the year
For small feed to reward a feathered wit.
Some men would see it an epiphany
At ease, at food and drink, others at chase
Yet I, stung lassitude, with ecstasy
Unspent argue the season's difficult case
So: Man, dull critter of enormous head,
What would he look at in the coiling sky?
But I must kneel again unto the Dead
While Christmas bells of paper white and red,
Figured with boys and girls split from a sled,
Ring out the silence I am nourished by.
Allen Tate,1934
Bonus Poem...
Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow. . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mâché. . ..
the sun was coming from outside.
the scrawny cry—It was
A chorister whose C preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Wallace Stevens, 1954
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