Tho' much is taken, much abides

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D y i n g   F l a m e

Old Gray Cemetery

Knoxville, Tennessee

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I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

from Ulysses

= Alfred, Lord Tennyson =

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Happy Tuesday

Our ceremonies conceal no secrets

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T w o   E i g h t

Gay Street Clock

Knoxville, Tennessee

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Is a real event still possible?

Yesterday I took the old track by the water,

Along the hillside where the hedges start,

Following the amaryllis blooming in the woods

Across the shoulder of ground that falls to the stream.

This is what you meant to say: that as one gets older,

The days grow more formal, distinct arrangements

Of trees and fields and circles of birds

Calculated from an algebra

Too exact to take account of tenses.

Now no one is waiting for you,

Not even in this clean, familiar yard

Glistening in sunlight after the rain,

Another sequence with its own composition,

Its own movements and sounds, its own way

Of implying a successor that must be resisted.

Our ceremonies conceal no secrets.

There has always been exactly this view,

This image seen through tall, clear windows

Of things as they are known to be:

The still reflections, the vast, bright gliding.

= Robert Beverley Ray =

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Happy Monday

Through ways I cannot see

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F e r v e n t   S e r v a n t

Old Gray Cemetery

Knoxville, Tennessee

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There is an unseen hand to me

That leads through ways I cannot see

While going through this world of woe

This hand still leads me as I go

This hand has led through shadows drear

And while it leads, I have no fear

I know 'twill lead me to that home

Where sin nor sorrow e'er can come

I long to see my Savior's face

And sing the story, saved by grace

And there upon that golden strand

I'll thank Him for the unseen hand

I'm trusting to the unseen hand

That leads me through this weary land

And some sweet day I'll reach that strand

Still guided by the unseen hand.

= Albert Jackson Simms =

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I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go;

I will guide thee with mine eye.

Psalms 32:8

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Happy Sunday

With implements to fly away

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R u r a l   R u n w a y

SkyRanch Airport

Alcoa, Tennessee

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Bring me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning's flagons up
And say how many Dew,
Tell me how far the morning leaps —
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadth of blue!

Write me how many notes there be
In the new Robin's ecstasy
Among astonished boughs —
How many trips the Tortoise makes —
How many cups the Bee partakes,
The Debauchee of Dews!

Also, who laid the Rainbow's piers,
Also, who leads the docile spheres
By withes of supple blue?
Whose fingers string the stalactite —
Who counts the wampum of the night
To see that none is due?

Who built this little Alban House
And shut the windows down so close
My spirit cannot see?
Who'll let me out some gala day
With implements to fly away,
Passing Pomposity?

= Emily Dickinson =

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Happy Saturday

There were never a rose to reply

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F u l l   T i l t

Maryville, Tennessee

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In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briars if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
Did he whisper? "look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die -- but we?"
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.

All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.

Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

= Algernon Charles Swinburne =

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Happy Friday