season of mists and mellow fruitfulness think warm days will never cease
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.
To Autumn by Joh Keats as Published in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11th ed., Volumes 1‑2. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).
On a cold fall afternoon in the low country I got my flu shot and my covid shot in the same arm.
The next day summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells and I wish for a Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
in the middle way only fight to recover what has been lost and found
East Coker, V (last section):
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
From Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), (Harcourt, Brace & Company: New York, 1943) by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).
I was out walking today in the low country South Carolina town of Bluffton.
Bluffton is part of the reason that this part of South Carolina is showing the fastest growth of almost anywhere in the United States.
Its a small town that back in 1990 had less than 900 people and now has over 40,000.
Things are coming to town like stoplights and roundabouts and sidewalks.
All things going modern and very fast.
Yet, as I walked down the sidewalk I noticed the east west straight line path of the sidewalk took a big loop that was out of line.
See, someone on the town planning commission noticed that make a nice, straight sidewalk, the city would have to take down a long leaf pine tree.
There are two types of pine trees that grow in the low country.
The lob lolly pine, the lumbermans delight, is fast-growing, especially in its first 50 years. Because of this, it’s heavily used in timber and pulpwood plantations where trees are typically harvested at 25–35 years old.
The long leaf pine can is much slower to mature. In its “grass stage,” it may stay low to the ground for up to 5–7 years, putting energy into its root system before shooting upward.
These trees can stick around for 250 to 300 years and some have been documented to have lived 400 years.
In an age when you can’t fight city hall, someone decided this tree which was here before we were and will most likely be here when we are gone, was worth making the effort to make a loop in a stretch of sidewalk.
For some reason, I found comfort in this.
For some reason, I found confidence that there is something here worth the fight.
as false dawn outside open window morning air awash with angels
Sunrise over Skull Creek and Pinckney Island, SC
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day, And cries, “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying now In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.”
From Collected Poems 1943-2004 by Richard Wilbur (New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004).
light mixed with it look with divided vision see the reflection
Adapted from:
All our Concord waters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand.
The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate color.
The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere.
I have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass.
Some consider blue “to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid.”
But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors.
Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view.
Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.
Viewed from a hill-top it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond.
Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison.
From Walden or, Life in the Woods, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston and ; New York , 1897 Edition).
