Down The Vast Edges Drear

and so not to draw out the poem into pieces of time too far to remain entrained within its' thrall we enter the middle ground where faith somehow, always how, even when we deny it how, enters stage left to let us know that even in dying it is in our thoughts, even in denial it rhymes in counter-point, even when retreating we know it's there

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The eternal note

Here it is 10 p.m. and our house in the wood is quiet with only the sound of Brownian motion in my ear as I for reasons unknown find comfort in talking to this blog sending a ripple of minimum intensity out into the aether of the 'cloud' and looking to see what country, what individual might be seeking in the mystery of it all - and quite often when music is quiet and sensory input is at an ebb I think that poetry, poetry that rhymes in certain compelling ways, somehow conveys a momentary insight from the unknown into our repository of reflections, into our questing soul, a glimmer onto the gossamer gestaltness of our mind, a mental 'shadow nymph' that just eludes our searching eye ....... and like perhaps a late night disk jockey sending out the melody of sound that serves his sharing of life's unanswerables  I think that I should share the rest of Dover Beach so here-with the first stanza:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Ah, Love, Let Us Be True To One Another

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 Mathew Arnold - excerpt from poem Dover Beach

Mom Never Told Us About This Stuff

The following countries visited this blog

- in order of most visiting to least visiting -

other countries have also visited but the statistics available to me show only the top ten countries - the past week is probably quite accurate and complete but more than likely in the past month there have been a few visiting countries that don't make the 'top ten' cut and over the lifetime of this blog - a little over 3 years - there are at least another dozen countries that have stopped by

ALL TIME	PAST MONTH	PAST WEEK
United States	United States	United States
Canada	Germany	Germany
Russia	Russia	Canada
Germany	Canada	France
Ukraine	Belarus	China
France	France	Greece
Malaysia	China	Italy
Poland	United Kingdom	Poland
United Kingdom	Greece	Turkey
Turkey	Poland