On listening to easy music

I must say that women are not easily pleased, and they are even harder to understand, as our dear friend Freud once declared. Today I sat at the library trying to read while listening to some easy music (Elizabethan madrigals). One song struck me as especially cool.

Have a beautiful Halloween.

My mistress had a little dog whose name was Pretty Royal,
Who neither hunted sheep nor hog, but was without denial
A tumbler fine, that might be seen to wait upon a fairy queen.
Upon his mistress he would wait in courteous wise and humble,
And with his craft and false deceit, when she would have him tumble,
Of coneys in the pleasant prime, he would kill twenty at a time.

The goddess which Diana hight among her beagles dainty
Had not a hound so fair and white, nor graced with such beauty;
And yet his beauty was not such, but his conditions were as rich.

But out, alas? I'll speak no more. My heart with grief doth shake;
This pretty dog was wounded sore e'en for his mistress sake:
A beastly man or manly beast knock'd out his brains and so I rest.

A trial royal, royal a trial, a trial! O yes!
Ye hounds and beagles all, if ye sat in Appleton Hall:
Would you not judge that out of doubt Tyburn were fit for such a lout?

William Byrd

Songs of Darkness, Words of Light

When autumn arrives darkness is likely to follow close behind. The symbol of night is almost at its peak. When reading William Blake's poems one get a feeling of calmness; night time is the right time:
The moon, like a flower
In heaven's high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.

It is Halloween and it's time to enjoy the darkness and listen to the Songs of the Night.

The Wreckage of My Flesh

Loathsome I've become.
A creature so undone.
Wretched and broken.
Cannot find my faith.
Any God will do.
Nothing said is new.
Nothing said is true.
Fly away my hope.

The embrace of shade holds me dear
Eats me away.
Loose the dogs of disgrace upon me.
I have no faith.
Raise the poor outcast I have become.
I am undone.
Calm is the air. Still is the sea.
The valley of death keeps calling me.

Rest my eyes from the world.
This dying place, it's so absurd.
Oh, Christ above, whom I love.
Lost to me. My snow white dove.
Make this day like the night.
songs of darnkess. Words of light.
Pulling down my heart.
I won't forget my lovers heart.

With utter loathing and scorn,
I was somehow born.
Strewn in black decay.
None shall I obey.
The wreckage of my flesh
The nakedness of my death.

My Dying Bride

Bottom

I met this professor, Clive Wilmer, a very nice chap, he did some lectures at my school and then he read us some of his poems. One poem in particular caught my attention, it was a Shakespearian poem, about a character I fancy very much and a play I like. The poem touches upon many of the Bard's plays, which I find extremely amusing.

Bottom's Dream

It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream', because it hath no bottom...

I was a weaver, and I wove
The moody fabric of my dream.
By day I laboured at the loom
And glimpsed the image of a love
I now know bottomless.

We were young men. We played our parts.
We schooled ourselves in the quiet wood.
By night the moon, who draws the flood,
Tugged at the rhythms of our hearts
And they were bottomless.

I loved a girl who was a boy;
I took my stand and beat my breast.
Yet what was I but fool and beast,
Who did not so much speak as bray
In bombast bottomless?

I trusted I had mastery
Until one night, being left alone,
I snorted at the wandering moon
In terror of the mystery,
Which seemed quite bottomless,

And out of that she spoke, who had
No voice, although she stirred my sense,
Who touched me, though she had no hands,
And led me where you cannot lead
Since it is bottomless.

I tried to speak: again I brayed.
I pinched and scratched my face: coarse hairs
Were crisping over cheeks and ears.
And when she drew me in, she made
The whole world bottomless.

Nothing possessed me. So she said
Do not desire to leave this wood.
Among the mossy clefts I hid
With petals where she pressed my head,
Desire being bottomless.

A most rare vision, such a thing
As who should say what such things be:
My terror turned to ecstasy,
The one much like the other, being
Both of them bottomless.

And then the change. The sun came up
Brash as a brassy hunting-horn.
I woke and, yes, I was a man.
Was I myself though? Self, like sleep,
May well be bottomless.

New moon tonight. Another dream
To act. They laugh at our dismay.
Oh but it's nothing. Only play.
Except we just don't feel the same,
For play is bottomless.


And so the story ends. My eyes
Are sore with weeping, but I laugh
(I who was seen to take my life),
For, having been an ass, I'm wise
And bottomless. Bottomless.

Clive Wilmer

Flight of Crows

People once believed that when someone dies
a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead.
But sometimes something so bad happens that
a terrible sadness is carried with it, and the soul can't rest.
Then sometimes, just sometimes,
the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.

A building gets torched, all that is left is ashes.
I used to think that was true about everything--
families, friends, feelings.
But now I know that sometimes, if love proves real,
two people who are meant to be together--
nothing can keep them apart.

If the people we love are stolen from us,
the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them.
Buildings burn, people die ...
but real love is forever.


C