The last couple of days have been days of healing. Here I was lamenting on my distance..such a vast distance from the Divine..or the so called Objective understanding of the universe..and at some point in time even questioning my need for closure of this search..(where is this need coming from in the brain? is it the rational centre that needs closure..can there be completeness without closure..?). And then i read Keats and Wordsworth..after so many years..actually first time in the mind numbing school where the poetry was taught in a manner so brutual..and then in college..
and these poets seem to have gone through the same pain im going thrru right now..this pain of being touched by something and then losing it..
(Excerpts from Ode to a nightingale)..keats
“ ..Thou was not born for Death, immortal Bird
No hungry generations tread thee down
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad hear of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn…
……Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still streams
Up the hillside; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:- Do I wake or sleep?
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thou unravish’d bride of quietness
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme
What lea-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of Dieties or mortals or of both
In Tempe or the dales or Arcady
What men or gods are these ?What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit?what struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstacy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter;therefore, ye soft pipes, play on:
Not to the sensual ear, but more endear’d
…..
With forest branches and trodden weed
Thou silent form dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: cold Pastoral
When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain in the midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to who thou say’st
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
From Prelude : WordsWorth
“….ye presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth! Ye visions of the hills!
And Souls of lonely places! Can I think
A vulgar hopes of yours when ye employed
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon wood and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire; and does did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear..”
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