Lost, Saturday, sometime before sunrise …
01 Wednesday Jul 2015
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in01 Wednesday Jul 2015
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in14 Thursday May 2015
Posted Writings
inTags
blue, death, donkey.sapphire, dreams, gold, heaven, life's purpose, persistence, prospecting
Year after year he searched for the gold
That he felt in his heart was there,
And year after year he sifted and picked
Refusing to yield to despair.
He thought on little except the prize;
Of the nuggets that dully shone,
Till fact and fiction slowly merged
And the man and his dream became one.
Day by day in heat or cold,
Whatever the dawn might bring,
He scoured the hills and panned the streams
With only his donkey for friend.
“You wait, my Jane, the day will come
When heaven’s stars will sing,
And all the hills will dance with joy
And I shall be a king!
And you, you funny bag of bones
– so stout of heart and true –
You’ll have a carrot ten feet long
And a saddle of sapphire blue”.
Years later, O so many had fled,
They found them ‘mid the rocks – stone dead;
Some shook their heads and looking, sighed,
While others passed – on the farther side.
Yet oft-times on the silent hills,
When the moon is a floating jewel,
There slowly wends a tired old man
With a tired old faithful mule.
“You wait, my Jane, the day will come
When heaven’s stars will sing,
And all the hills will dance with joy
And I shall be a king!
And you, you funny bag of bones
– so stout of heart and true –
You’ll have a carrot ten feet long
And a saddle of sapphire blue”.
You’ll probably think old Ben was mad,
Not so, or so I hold:
Maybe the ground was barren and bare
But his life was of purest gold.
(From Vignettes of Childhood and other Poems by Michael Thurstan Bassett. Available from Amazon.com)
05 Sunday Apr 2015
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inTags
all men are islands, cargoes, death, dreams, fear, foreign languages, greatness, isolation, loneliness, mankind, old age, poetry, ships, universe
“In any of the burial-places of this city, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are in their innermost personality to me than I am to them?” Charles Dickens
Your world is not my world,
And my world is not yours,
Nor ever shall we span the void
Or open wide the doors.
What know I of the inner you,
The real – not that which seems?
I cannot think your midnight thoughts,
Or dream your troubled dreams.
We speak a different language,
A foreign tongue unknown,
And in the castles of our souls
We live for e’er alone.
Like ships upon uncharted seas,
We sail in silence by,
While in our holds, fast-batten’d down
Our secret cargoes lie.
Our compasses point randomly
Across the cavernous deeps,
Defying the powers of darkness
And the terrors that slowly creep.
It is not true, it never was,
That two can e’er be one;
For in our deepest hopes and needs
All men are islands strong.
(Except, perchance, the poet,
Who lays his feelings bare,
And sings his songs of Sixpences
For all the world to hear.
But signals can be hoisted,
‘Ere our ships sink to the grave,
And one, perhaps, who’s sailing by,
Will understand – and wave.
For oft I am Arabian,
Or Chinese, Greek or Scot,
And then within my inward soul
I feel mans’ common lot:
For in our fears and mortal needs
All men are brothers true:
Our dread of death and age and want
Kins infidel with Jew.
But talk not of our self-same roots,
Or universal cries;
‘Tis in the seeds of difference
Man’s greatness ever lies.
From Vignettes of childhood and other poems by Michael Thurstan Bassett (Amazon.com)
24 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted Language & Literature
inTags
Bleak House, death, Dickens, eyes, furniture, literature. art, photography, realism
I always thought that Dickens was guilty of extreme exaggeration when in one of his great novels he describes how the wooden shutters of a dingy bedroom seemed to stare down with gaunt eyes upon the dead body on the bed. How ridiculous, I thought. How can furniture or fixtures be described as having eyes!
However, yesterday while visiting a friend I happened to glance down and with a shock saw this amazing and almost living eye staring up at me from the beautifully polished wooden floor. Its steady, unblinking gaze was highly unpleasant and somewhat unsettling. When I took a photograph of it I almost felt that I should ask it for its permission!
I will certainly never accuse Dickens of hyperbole again!
06 Thursday Dec 2012
Posted Comment, Language & Literature, Poetry, Writings
inTags
aesthetics, beauty, death, decay, flowers, poetry, Wordsworth
href=”https://thurstanbassett.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/01417.jpg”>Yesterday
And today
Symbolic of everything in life.
Why does the first image fill us with happiness and wonder while the second merely disgusts? And what is there in the human psyche
that says: “This one is beautiful – the other is abhorrent”?
Logically, the two stages are part of the same great natural process which should enable us to look on them with equal pleasure and understanding – or is such god-like detachment impossible for most us?
Truly “the heart has its reasons that the head knows not of”!
As Wordsworth finely expressed it:
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”.