In a Dark Time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood-
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure dispair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady stream of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is-
Death of the self in a long tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant-
What then?
Stephen Crane
Out of the dreams that heap
The hollow hand of sleep,-
Out of the dark sublime,
From the averted Face
Beyond the bournes of space,
Into the sudden sun
We journey, one by one.
Out of the hidden shade
Wherein desire is made,-
Out of the pregnant stir
Where life and death confer,
The dark and mystic heat
Where soul and matter meet,-
The enigmatic Will,-
We start, and then are still.
Inexoreably decreed
By the ancestral deed,
The puppets of our sires,
We work out blind desires,
And in our sons ordain,
The blessing or the bain.
In ignorance we stand
With fate on either hand,
And question stars and earth
Of life, and death, and birth.
With wonder in our eyes
We scan the kindred skies,
While through the common grass
Our atoms mix and pass.
We feel the sap go free
When spring comes to the tree;
And in our blood is stirred
What warms the brooding bird.
The vital fire we breathe
That bud and blade bequeath,
And strenth of native clay
In our full veins hath sway.
But in the urge intense
And fellowship of sense,
Suddenly comes a word
In other ages heard.
On a great wind our souls
Are bourne to unknown goals.
And past the bournes of space
To the unaverted Face.
author unknown
(to me anyway)
Little Fly
Thy summers play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away,
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength & breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die
William Blake
