Tangled Bank #111

Welcome to Tangled Bank #111! Today’s entries are presented without comment, but with poetry, a truly remarkable natural, albeit human, phenomenon, or to quote Love and Rockets:

You can’t go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
It’s part of nature too.

In the umbra, the tunnel,
when the mind went wombtomb,
then it was real thought and real living, living thought.

Everything is spoilt by use:
Where’s the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gazed at? Where’s the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where’s the eye, however, blue,
Doth not weary? Where’s the face
One would meet in every place?

The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.

He loves us not,
He wants the natural touch. For the poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
Her young ones in the nest, against the owl.

I count those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.

His spear, to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast
Of some great ammiral were but a wand,
He walk’d with to support uneasy steps
Over the burning marle.

Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!

No, the heart that has truly lov’d never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close;
As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turn’d when he rose.

As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead
begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind….

Galway is a blackguard place,
To Cork I give my curse,
Tralee is bad enough,
But Limerick is worse.
Which is worst I cannot tell,
They’re everyone so filthy,
But of the towns which I have seen
Worst luck to Clonakilty.

All space, all time,
(The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,
Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)
Fill’d with eidolons only.
The noiseless myriads
The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,
The separate countless free identities, like eyesight
The true realities, eidolons.
Not this the world,
Nor these the universes, they the universes,
Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,
Eidolons, eidolons.

And God said, Let the waters generate,
Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul:
And let fowl fly above the earth, with wings
Displayed on the open firmament of heaven
And God created the great whales, and each
Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously
The waters generated by their kinds,
And every bird of wing after his kind;
And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying
Be fruitful, multiply, and in the seas
And lakes and running streams the waters fill;
And let the fowl be multiplied on the earth.

Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

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