Pastoral Poetry Quotes

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 Christian gospel is rooted in langauge: God spoke a creation into being; our Savrior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty, form truth… Isn’t it odd that pastors, who are responsible for interpreting the Scriptures, so much of which come in the form of poetry, have so little interest in poetry? … Words create. God’s word creates; our words can participate in creation.”

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant south, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.

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!

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.

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.

People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience--think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouces: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter--poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure--all that matters about poetry to me is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit'ry: no thanks, pal. A person could perish of entertainment, especially comedy, so much of it casually nihilistic, hateful, glittering, cold, and in the end clueless. People in nusing homes die watching late-night television and if I were one of them, I'd be grateful when the darkness descends. Thank God if the pastor comes and offers a psalm and a prayer, and they can attain a glimmer of clarity at the end.

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.

One of the reasons that people need pastors is precisely because God is always present but usually not apparent. It takes a poet to find that presence beneath the layers of strategy for coping with the feeling of its absence. Thus, the parish minister's soul becomes a crucible in which sacred visions are ground together with the common and at times profane experiences of human life. Out of this sacred mix, pastors find their deep poetry, not only for the pulpit, but also for making eternal sense out of the ordinary routines of the congregation.

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.

Then I had the good of my reading,” he explained presently. “I had no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his books were foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember. The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man. I was well acquainted with the works of Milton, but up there it did seem to me as if Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea terms very accurate, and some beautiful passages were calming to the mind. I could say them over until I shed tears; there was nothing beautiful to me in that place but the stars above and those passages of verse.

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting.

Pastor Jón: It is pleasant to listen to the birds chirping. But it would be anything but pleasant if the birds were always chirping the truth. Do you think the golden lining of this cloud we see up there in the atmosphere is true? But whoever isn't ready to live and die for that cloud is a man bereft of happiness. Embi: Should there be lyrical fantasies, then, instead of justice? Pastor Jón: Agreement is what matters. Otherwise everyone will be killed. Embi: Agreement about what? Pastor Jón: It doesn't matter. For instance quick-freezing plants, no matter how bad they are. When I repair a broken lock, do you then think it's an object of value or a lock for some treasure chest? Behind the last lock I mended there was kept one dried skate and three pounds of rye meal. I don't need to describe the enterprise that owns a lock of that kind. But if you hold that earthly life is valid on the whole, you repair such a lock with no less satisfaction than the lock for the National Bank where people think the gold is kept. If you don't like this old, rusty, simple lock that some clumsy blacksmith made for an insignificant food-chest long ago, then there is no reason for you to mend the lock in the big bank. If you only repair machinery in quick-freezing plants that pay, you are not to be envied for your role. Embi: What you say, pastor Jón, may be good poetry, but unfortunately has little relevance to the matter I raised with you - on behalf of the ministry. Pastor Jón: Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.

Isn't it odd that pastors, who are responsible for interpreting the Scriptures, so much of which come in the form of poetry have so little interest in poetry? It is a crippling defect and must be remedied. The Christian communities as a whole must rediscover poetry, and the pastors must lead them. Poetry is essential to the pastoral vocation because poetry is original speech. The word is creative: it brings into being what was not there before - perception, relationship, belief. Out of the silent abyss a sound is formed: people hear what was not heard before and are changed by the sound from loneliness into love. Out of the blank abyss a picture is formed by means of metaphor: people see what they did not see before and are changed by the image from anonymity into love. Words create. God's word creates; our words can participate in the creation.

Why do people go to church on Sundays? A question that is very complicated because I know what the answer is supposed to be but I do not really know the answer. . I think people go because it is a kind of tradition . I think some goes because someone told them if tgey do not they might go to hell . Maybe some go to look for a wife or husband ☺ . Maybe some go to church to display their latest designer shoes or handbags . Some goes just to please their Pastor . Some people go to church because they love the music or the preaching . Some goes because of some social reasons and friendship . Some have it in their mind that they will experience the presence of God in the church . Some goes to church because of miracle . Some goes to church when they are expecting something maybe child, comfort, marriage, work etc. . Some felt it is an obligation to give God a day out of the seven days he created Let me tell you that church is not there to entertain you, Ephesians 3:20... there are things going on in the church that some people barely know about. Ask yourself today why do I go to church. I am sure a sincere answer will help you.

Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles) n Iswrchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its these and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously.

Lord is my Fierce Protector and my Pastor.b I always have more than enough. 2He offers a resting place for me In his luxurious love. His tracks take me to an oasis of peace, The quiet brook of bliss. 3That’s where he restores and revives my life. He opens before me pathways to God’s pleasure, And leads me along in his footsteps of righteousness,c So that I can bring honor to his name. 4Lord, even when your path takes me through The valley of deepest darkness Fear will never conquer me, for you already have! You remain close to me and lead me through it all the way. Your authority is my strength and my peace.d The comfort of your love takes away my fear. I’ll never be lonely, for you are near.e 5You become my delicious feast Even when my enemies dare to fight. You anoint me with the fragrance of your Holy Spirit;f You give me all I can drink of you until my heart overflows. 6So why would I fear the future? For I’m being pursued only by Your goodness and unfailing love. Then afterwards—when my life is through, I’ll return to your glorious presence To be forever with you!

No, the shepherd’s life in poetry has always been an ideal in which the negative features, the tearing of oneself away from the great world and the disregarding of its customs, have been the decisive elements. It was a kind of sport to imagine oneself in a situation which held the promise of liberation from the fetters of civilization whilst retaining its advantages.

It is not without good reason that the literary tradition of pastoral poetry can look back on an almost uninterrupted history of over two thousand years since its beginnings in Hellenism. With the exception of the early Middle Ages, when urban and court culture was extinguished, there have been variants of this poetry in every century. Apart from the thematic material of the novel of chivalry, there is probably no other subject-matter 15 that has occupied the literature of Western Europe for so long and maintained itself against the assaults of rationalism with such tenacity. This long and uninterrupted reign shows that ‘sentimental’ poetry, in Schiller’s sense of the word, plays an incomparably greater part in the history of literature than ‘naïve’ poetry. Even the idylls of Theocritus himself owe their existence not, as might be imagined, to genuine roots in nature and a direct relationship to the life of the common people, but to a reflective feeling for nature and a romantic conception of the common folk, that is, to sentiments which have their origin in a yearning for the remote, the strange and the exotic. The peasant and the shepherd are not enthusiastic about their surroundings or about their daily work. And interest in the life of the simple folk is, as we know, to be sought neither in spatial nor social proximity to the peasantry; it does not arise in the folk itself but in the higher classes, and not in the country but in the big towns and at the courts, in the midst of bustling life and an over-civilized, surfeited society. Even when Theocritus was writing his idylls, the pastoral theme and situation were certainly no longer a novelty; it will already have occurred in the poetry of the primitive pastoral peoples, but doubtless without the note of sentimentality and complacency, and probably also without attempting to describe the outward conditions of the shepherd’s life realistically. Pastoral scenes, although without the lyrical touch of the Idylls, were to be found before Theocritus, at any rate, in the mime. They are a matter of course in the satyr plays, and rural scenes are not unknown even to tragedy. But pastoral scenes and pictures of country life are not enough to produce bucolic poetry; the preconditions for this are, above all, the latent conflict of town and country and the feeling of discomfort with civilization.

Seen as man of God, a pastor who rapes is more vile than a layman who too rapes. As man of trust, an officer who steals is worse than civvies with hands in the tills.

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: A man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne. Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, trapped in the diversity delusion, knows none of this. And as politics in Washington and elsewhere grows increasingly unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with one final consolation: There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.

By this time I had become well acquainted with her, and could judge of the power and character of her mind, and the natural turn of her disposition. She was no ordinary girl. She had an uncommon degree of intellectual power, and especially of keen discrimination. She was a severe reasoner. She grasped the points of an argument with the hand of a giant, after she had discerned them with the eye of an eagle. Often afterwards I had occasion to be humbled before the penetration and strength of her uncommon mind. She was modest and timid to a fault. Mind —reason, was her forte. She had not much poetry about her. Her taste, however, was correct; ,not only, as might be expected, from the severe correctness of her intellect, but it was gentle and refined also, as might be expected from the amiableness of her affectionate disposition. A truer heart never beat or bled. She was all woman, all affection. A stranger might not think so, because she was timid and reserved in her manners, which cast over her an aspect of coldness. She had a fine education, moved in polite society, and was universally esteemed. The more I knew of her mind and heart, the more I esteemed and loved her.

The pastoral task with words is not communication but communion - the healing and restoration and creation of love relationships between God and his fighting children and our fought-over creation. Poetry uses words in and for communion. This is hard work and requires alertness. The language of our time is in terrible condition. It is used carelessly and cynically. Mostly it is a tool for propaganda, whether secular or religious. Every time badly used and abused language is carried by pastors into prayers and preaching and direction, the word of God is cheapened. We cannot use a bad means to a good end.

Her description of the trees echoed through the air between us, plain poetry that could have graced the pages of any number of pastoral novels, and I realized how beautiful she was, and how insignificant I'd become to her.

Purpose of Purpose (The Sonnet) The purpose of science is its correction, The purpose of religion is its extinction. The purpose of art is purposeful reflection, The purpose of a human is self-annihilation. The purpose of hands is to unfold in help, The purpose of heart is to be a shelter. The purpose of feet is to walk forward, The purpose of eyes is to enhance insight. Purpose is the antithesis of imprisonment, Life is the antithesis of indoctrination. Hands aren't meant to be used for hogging, Heart is the antithesis of division. All purpose must be an aid to the uplift of humanity. If it is impediment, it ain't no purpose, but inhumanity.

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.

Miracle Supreme (The Sonnet) Sapiens is shelter, Shelter is sapiens. Only miracle in the world, Is the miracle of kindness. Hateless heart is a living church, External churches are mere counterfeits. Unless you can face hate without hate, Stories of "water to wine" are plain myths. True miracle does not rely on myths, True miracle is the greatest unmiracle. Miracle is an expression of mutation, hence, Mutation of selflessness is the highest miracle. Nobody can walk on water, it is just fairytale. Be human across fairytale 'n lo, you're walking miracle.

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.

Miracle is Everywhere (The Sonnet) Poetry that lifts a heart is miracle, Science that lifts a society is miracle. Philosophy that aids curiosity is miracle, Art that aids love and laughter is miracle. Technology that solves a problem is miracle, Math that aids humanity's growth is miracle. Theology that makes a mind humble is miracle, Cinema that invigorates a soul is miracle. Janitor who cleans the garbage is a miracle, Teacher who lights up a student is a miracle. Doctor who smiles at a patient is a miracle, Parents who sacrifice their joy are a miracle. Our natural world is teeming with acts of miracle, Yet we keep obsessing over the supernatural!

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。

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

Step out of the picture frames, into the sunlit pastors of life. How long will you worship the painting, isn't it time to take the scenic hike!

Traditionally, Apollo and the nine goddesses known as the Muses make their home on the mountain in Greece called Parnassus. Believed to inspire creativity, they are Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Euterpe (lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and pastoral poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), and Urania (astronomy). Exclusively deities of performance, their blessing was solicited before any play or public recitation. (There were no Muses for sculptors, painters, and architects, regarded in Attic Greece as mere workmen, too lowly for divine patronage.) During the eighteenth century, students from the religious schools of the Latin Quarter, panting up this hill at the southern limit of Paris, may have looked back at the city spreading along the banks of the Seine and thought themselves masters of the known world. Through the haze of wine purchased from the locals, this unpromising landfill, formed from the rubble of urban expansion and fertilized by the corpses of the nameless dead, could have felt like their own Parnassus, an illusion they celebrated by reciting or improvising verse. Still then nameless, the hill first appeared on a map, the Lutetia Parisiorum vulgo of Johannes Janssonius, in 1657, which identified the track leading to its summit as the Chemin d’Enfer: the Road to Hell. The district looked doomed to remain a wasteland until, in 1667, Louis XIV chose to build an observatory there. (Charles II of England, envious, immediately commissioned his own for Greenwich.) Sometime during the next fifty years, it became officially Montparnasse, since in 1725 the city annexed it under that name. A road was laid along the ridge. Tunneling below the unstable topsoil, quarrymen mined the fine-grained limestone from which a greater Paris would be built, and where soon the Muses, though far from home, would again be heard.

During the Middle Ages, when bliss was sought in the beyond and not in any region of the earth, however perfect, pastoral poetry assumed a realistic, moralizing and distinctly non-Utopian character.

Emotions are like a river flowing out of one’s heart. Form is like the riverbanks. Without them the river runs shallow and dissipates on the plain. But banks make the river run deep. Why else have humans for centuries reached for poetry when we have deep affections to express? The creation of a form happens because someone feels a passion. How ironic, then, that we often fault form when the real evil is a dry spring.

I saw those fascinating treatises on the Hafn reverence for the agrarian lifestyle, not to mention all the pastoral poetry. Fucking peculiar for spacefarers, not to mention their descriptions of milking machines are bizarre—who writes poetry about milking machines?

Opera was born in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. It derived almost seamlessly from its immediate precursor, the intermedio, or lavish between-the-acts spectacle presented in conjunction with a play on festive occasions. Plays were spoken, and their stage settings were simple: a street backed by palace facades for tragedies, by lower-class houses for comedies; for satyr plays or pastorals, the setting was a woodland or country scene. Meanwhile the ever-growing magnificence of state celebrations in Medici Florence on occasions such as dynastic weddings gave rise to a variety of spectacles involving exuberant scenic displays: naval battles in the flooded courtyard of the Pitti Palace, tournaments in the squares, triumphal entries into the city. These all called upon the services of architects, machinists, costume designers, instrumental and vocal artists. Such visual and aural delights also found their way into the theater—not in plays, with their traditional, sober settings, but between the acts of plays. Intermedi had everything the plays had not: miraculous transformations of scenery, flying creatures (both natural and supernatural), dancing, singing. The plays satisfied Renaissance intellects imbued with classical culture; the intermedi fed the new Baroque craving for the marvelous, the incredible, the impossible. By all accounts, no Medici festivities were as grand and lavish as those held through much of the month of May 1589 in conjunction with the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinand I and Christine of Lorraine. The intermedi produced between the acts of a comedy on the evening of May 2 were considered to be the highlight of the entire occasion and were repeated, with different plays, on May 6 and 13. Nearly all the main figures we will read about in connection with the birth of opera took part in the extravagant production, which was many months in the making: Emilio de' Cavalieri acted as intermediary between the court and the theater besides being responsible for the actors and musicians and composing some of the music; Giovanni Bardi conceived the scenarios for the six intermedi and saw to it that his highly allegorical allusions were made clear in the realization. Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini were among the featured singers, as was the madrigal composer Luca Marenzio, who wrote the music for Intermedio 3, described below. The poet responsible for the musical texts, finally, was Ottavio Rinuccini, who wrote the poetry for the earliest operas...

I sing the cycle of my country's year, I sing the tillage, and the reaping sing,