Pastoral Poem Quotes

There is a comfort in the strength of love; 'Twill make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain, or break the heart. -Michael: A Pastoral Poem

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight. Her hands asleep beside her. Her hair draped on the lawn like a mantle of cloth. I give her my life for our love is whole I sing her beauty in my soul.

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men. Polonius

Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." "Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming: Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not--for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I am that poet who in times past made the light melody of pastoral poetry. In my next poem I left the woods for the adjacent farmlands, teaching them to obey even the most exacting tillers of the soil; and the farmers liked my work. But now I turn to the terrible strife of Mars.

Tell people HOW MUCH I love them.  Feed my sheep. Pour out my love on them.

Saints don't turn water into wine, Saints just turn tears into cheer. Saints don't walk on water, Saints just walk on land, without drowning in hate and fear.

Just as the body is shaped for movement, the mind is shaped for poetry. Rhythm and rhyme aid recall. Poems are always rhythmic but not always rhyming. In the same way that melody became rather suspect in twentieth-century classical music – atonal fractures being the mark of seriousness – so Modernism re-branded rhyme as pastoral, lovesick, feminine, superficial. Fine for kids and tea-towels, not fine for the muscular combative voice of the urban poet. It has taken a long time for rhyme to return to favour. Rap, and the rise of performance poetry, has been part of that return.

Saints don't turn water into wine, Saints just turn tears into cheer. Saints don't walk on water, Saints just walk on land, without drowning in hate and fear. Saints are not magical beings, whose basket never runs empty. Saints are just mortal beings, whose heart never runs out of amity.

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.

More Important Than Truth (The Sonnet) In the beginning even I was, Bedazzled by the concept of truth. It took me some time to, Step across the lure of truth. That is when I realized that, Every brain creates its own truth. So we'd never achieve harmony, With the heartless pursuit of truth. Understanding the definition of truth, May differ from person to person. But the virtues of basic goodness, Need no divisive interpretation. Always place love first, truth second. Humanity first, intelligence second!

Nothing is Everything (The Sonnet) Your accent doesn't matter, Your language doesn't matter. Your scripture doesn't matter, Your nationality doesn't matter. Beyond the prisons of all divisions, There is a valley of total nothingness. In that nothingness you shall find light, In nothingness lies absolute wholeness. So long as you are exclusively something, You can never be everywhere and everything. Once you are everywhere and everything, You have no need for the backward things. For once in our life, let's be whole in nothing. Once we taste nothingness, there is no turning.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? - Ode to a Nightingale

Enjoyment requires discernment. It can be a gift to wrap up in a blanket and lose myself in a TV show but we can also amuse ourselves to death. My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but it can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment we need to learn the craft of discernment: How to enjoy rightly, to have, to read pleasure well. There is a symbiotic relationship, cross-training, if you will, between the pleasures we find in gathered worship and those in my tea cup, or in a warm blanket, or the smell of bread baking. Lewis reminds us that one must walk before one can run. We will not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable but we shall not have found Him so. These tiny moments of beauty in our day train us in the habits of adoration and discernment, and the pleasure and sensuousness of our gathered worship teach us to look for and receive these small moments in our days, together they train us in the art of noticing and reveling in our God’s goodness and artistry. A few weeks ago I was walking to work, standing on the corner of tire and auto parts store, waiting to cross the street when I suddenly heard church bells begin to ring, loud and long. I froze, riveted. They were beautiful. A moment of transcendence right in the middle of the grimy street, glory next to the discount tire and auto parts. Liturgical worship has been referred to sometimes derisively as smells and bells because of the sensuous ways Christians have historically worshipped: Smells, the sweet and pungent smell of incense, and bells, like the one I heard in neighborhood which rang out from a catholic church. At my church we ring bells during the practice of our eucharist. The acolyte, the person often a child, assisting the priest, rings chimes when our pastor prepares the communion meal. There is nothing magic about these chimes, nothing superstitious, they’re just bells. We ring them in the eucharist liturgy as a way of saying, “pay attention.” They’re an alarm to rouse the congregation to jostle us to attention, telling us to take note, sit up, and lean forward, and notice Christ in our midst. We need this kind of embodied beauty, smells and bells, in our gathered worship, and we need it in our ordinary day to remind us to take notice of Christ right where we are. Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will save the world.” This might strike us as mere hyperbole but as our culture increasingly rejects the idea and language of truth, the churches role as the harbinger of beauty is a powerful witness to the God of all beauty. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his poem, “One more day,” “Though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.” And when people cease to believe there is good and evil, only beauty will call to them and save them so that they still know how to say, “this is true and that is false.” Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore and intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful. These moments of loveliness, good tea, bare trees, and soft shadows, or church bells, in my dimness, they jolt me to attention and remind me that Christ is in our midst. His song of truth, sung by His people all over the world, echos down my ordinary street, spilling even into my living room.

愛は最高の宗教である、 愛は最高法則であり、 愛は最高の科学です。

あなたの痛み、私の痛み。

Anne Hathaway's Garden by Stewart Stafford In Stratford, lies a garden's tended hair, Two lovebirds, Avon swans, nested there. Anne kept counsel as Shakespeare's bride, United home and clan over distance wide. Pestilence, flood and war roared with fright, This English idyll thrived in the pastoral light, Rose, rosemary pruned with nurturing care, Floral Tudor fireworks, exploding fragrant air. The Bard, swansong past, returned to her, Wooed Anne with words, the heartbeat spur, To walk and reminisce among the green, Sparked a fire that life apart rendered lean. Anne Hathaway's garden outlived them all, Paralleled words, evergreen, as in virgin scrawl. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

NATURE MORTE You are given two things today, one is an angry nail in your side; Changing what you are able to sense is the second thing you are gifted. Nature is always a referred existence, writes Emerson, never a presence. Who knows where the time goes, sings Sandy Denny. Who can bear to hear it? One reaches the moment when one loses words—in the pastoral, in the cosmic? Think about the scars on the planets, & how patient those stars seem to be. I am painting the natural landscape with my eyes closed today. It is like writing A poem with all the cross-outs left in; an expression like never thought I’d see the day. Nature that begins with unknowable & ends with more monotonous hills. Today, I want to be the country-fried philosophe or a Hudson River School painting. When this life is over, describe to me how its concave & convex forms are & are not. We live amid surfaces, writes Emerson, & the true art of life is to skate well on them.

My pastor recently described the progression of sin in each of our lives by reading the famous poem, “There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk.” Here’s how it goes. Chapter One I walk down the street. There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost . . . I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. Chapter Two I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place. But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out. Chapter Three I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in . . . it’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault . . . I get out immediately. Chapter Four I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. Chapter Five I walk down another street.2

All Fergusson's verses, indeed all humanist verse, has within it an eligiac seam; always present beneath the surface is the assumption that the world is imperfect, that it has fallen from grace. As with the disintegrating Tory ideal in the country, there is in Fergusson's poetry an ideal, imagined city of the past, hopelessly toppling as the new Babylon lays down its foundations: city of chaos, dirt, noise, broken communication, luxury, disorder. In essence the poet follows in his representation the timeless humanist imperative, attempting 'to create order out of disorder, and to make sense of life'. Hallow-Fair and Leith Races to a degree make just such a clear demarcation between the two cities of past and present in their thesis - antithesis structures. The two cities embody two different Scottish cultures: Auld Reekie, the pastoral, civilised, humanist culture; and Edina, the Athens of the North, but more often, Babylon, the counter-pastoral, brutal, Whig culture. Hallow-Fair, Leith Races, The Election, The King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh, satirise the new Babylon; the poems of this group celebrate an older Scotland, and Auld Reekie, in the same eligiac vein as The Daft Days. Yet, as we have seen, the poet, at times, undermines too rigorous a humanist position: demarcations are not all that clear; ideals don't always elevate the human codition; the endless wheel of change and creativity, diversity and unrest, may be forging themselves into a new order.

This is why so many people are so confused when it comes to the Bible. They were taught by their pastor or parents or authority figures to submit to the authority of the bible, but that's impossible to do without submitting first to whoever is deciding what the Bible is even saying. And that requires trust. Because authority is a relational reality. Someone told you, This is how it is. The problem, of course, is that the folks who talk the most about the authority of the Bible also seem to talk the most about things like objective and absolute truth, truth that exists independent of relational realities.

Happy Holidays (The Sonnet) Spirit of Christmas doesn't grow on a fir tree, Christmas blooms wherever the heart is hatefree. Ramadan isn't fulfilled by feasting on some tasty beef, The greatest of feast is haram if others go hungry. Hanukkah's miracle isn't about the oil lasting 8 days, Rather it's about the resilience of light amidst darkness. Fireworks may be diwali for those still in kindergarten, Everyday is diwali for an existence rooted in kindness. The will to love and the will to lift are the backbone, Of all human celebration, tradition and communion. Take that fundamental will out of the equation, All you have left are rituals without meaning and mission. Fasting, feasting and decorating are step two of any festival. First and foremost, at our altar within, we gotta light a candle.

What is Afterlife (The Sonnet) Read a few books, you live a little. Help a few beings, you live a lifetime. Heaven is not a place high above the sky, Heaven is the moment you're someone's lifeline. Even I enjoy a good dc and marvel story, But it mustn't turn you blind to reality. To live selfish is the animal's purgatory, To die while living for others is humanity. Memory is the fabric upon which time is carved. Where there is no memory, there is no time. Neurons are the building blocks of mind and memory. Where there is no neuron, there is no paradise. There's not one but two paradise, one real, another fiction. The real one is made of action, the other imagination.

Reason and Fanaticism (The Sonnet) I feel at home with every faith and ideology, Unless it's peddled with bigotry and arrogance. I bear a clinical revulsion to booze and smoke, More than that, I am allergic to arrogance. You cannot reason with a caveman who starts off, By saying, "my thing is the best because". If you could reason with fanaticism, There wouldn't be any fanaticism in the world. Holding on to a belief system is very much human, But a belief that undermines other beliefs is animal. Likewise, to sharpen intellect is a good habit unless, You sharpen it so much that it makes you mechanical. Maintain a healthy balance between facts and fiction. Learn to make your head and heart work in unison.

Be generous—with your money, of course. But more important, give of yourself. Take an interest in people. Get to know people. Get to know what they’ve been through before you pass judgment. That’s essential. Read history. By all means read history. We are all where we are, each of us, because others helped. As my friend Dr. Samuel Proctor, former pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, likes to say, “If you see a turtle sitting on a stump, you know it didn’t get there on its own.” Read books. Try to understand the reason why things happen, why they are as they are. If you see only the surface phenomena, then the world becomes extremely confusing, ever more unsettling. But if the reasons are understood there’s a kind of simplicity that emerges. Sometime, somewhere along the line, memorize a poem. Sometime, somewhere along the line, go out in a field and paint a picture, for your own pleasure. Sometime, somewhere along the line, plant a tree, buy your father a good bottle of New York state wine, write your mother a letter. And sometime, somewhere along the line, do something for your country.

Some pastors have gone so far as to turn the poem into a Christian sex manual.

We who live in wonders must be blind to wonders. If fish could see the water, they could see nothing else.

Paula Bonhoeffer had memorized an impressive repertoire of poems, hymns, and folk songs, which she taught her children, who remembered them into their old age.

To imagine that destructive power might be made harmless by gathering enough power to destroy it is of course perfectly futile. William Butler Yeats said as much in his poem “The Great Day”: Hurrah for revolution and more cannon shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on. Arrogance cannot be cured by greater arrogance, or ignorance by greater ignorance. To counter the ignorant use of knowledge and power we have, I am afraid, only a proper humility, and this is laughable. But it is only partly laughable. In his political pastoral “Build Soil,” as if responding to Yeats, Robert Frost has one of his rustics say, I bid you to a one-man revolution— The only revolution that is coming.

I figured I wasn't supposed to be capable of that kind of thinking, and I felt like an alien. I feel that a lot, actually, in a lot of circumstances. Like I ought to be feeling something I don't.

When reading this unusual novel, then, with its oddly unsettling and sometimes strained combination of Christian and pagan, sacred and profane attributes—its earthiness and surreality, violence and pastoralism, pantheism and anthropomorphism, naturalism and lyricism—it is helpful to remember that Steinbeck invested his essential self in it, which is to say, he wrote it more like an extensive poem, or extended dream sequence, than like a traditionally mimetic or realistic novel. “I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener,” he informed Grove Day in late 1929. Thus, while To a God Unknown has an urgent, breathless fairy-tale quality, and is, as critic Howard Levant asserts, more “a series of detached... scenes” than “a unified... organic whole,” it is not an incoherent concoction—“a rambling and improbable history,” as Warren French calls It—that flies in the face of all sensible literary convention. During its long gestation through different versions and multiple drafts, Steinbeck worked hard to create a palpable factual dimension that gives this otherwise arcane book a recognizable texture in regard to its geographical setting and landmarks (the moss-covered rock actually existed in the northern California town of Laytonville), its unusual characters (some of whom, such as the seer, Steinbeck claimed were based on living persons), and in its feel for telling details of nature and social life in Monterey County in the early part of this century.