"Without the hell, the heav'n of joy"

A Thousand Martyrs
by Aphra Behn (1640-1689)

A thousand martyrs I have made,
All sacrificed to my desire;
A thousand beauties have betrayed,
That languish in resistless fire.
The untamed heart to hand I brought,
And fixed the wild and wandering thought.

I never vowed nor sighed in vain
But both, though false, were well received.
The fair are pleased to give us pain,
And what they wish is soon believed.
And though I talked of wounds and smart,
Love’s pleasures only touched my heart.

Alone the glory and the spoil
I always laughing bore away;
The triumphs, without pain or toil,
Without the hell, the heav’n of joy.
And while I thus at random rove
Despise the fools that whine for love.

Text from Poetry Foundation.

Illustration by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). Image from A World History of Art.

Nothing happened today

At least, not on my walk through the woods. Nobody had an orgy, or got eaten by an owl, or anything like that. If they did I missed it. I did see a gray catbird--one of my favorites--and he posed very prettily in a bush for me. I stood there for ages, waiting for him to sing, but he never made a sound. Contrary little bastard.

I was going to post a catbird photo, but I couldn't find any I liked. I did, however, find a fun website on "Biomes of the World," created by the biology department at Marietta College in Ohio. Just click here, and then click on any of the color regions on the world map. Each section has a lot of photos, so be patient if your internet connection is slow. I think the page on Temperate Deciduous Forest (which includes my corner of the planet) is especially nice. Click here to see it.

Hunters like us

I decided to scrap the essay I promised. It went all stupid on me. That happens. So instead I'm going to tell you about the drama in the woods this morning. I was in an area where I often see owls, and I was just thinking about how scarce they've been this spring when I heard a commotion up ahead. It was a red-bellied woodpecker in full freak-out, squawking madly. I couldn't see what the trouble was at first, but then I realized there was a great horned owl, a big female, behind the woodpecker. She spread her wings and took off through the trees. I think she was taking the woodpecker's mate with her. I couldn't see for sure but it's likely that she was, since woodpecker couples like to feed together in the early morning, and it would explain the red-bellied's distress. He carried on for quite a while after the owl was gone.

Between keeping feeders and doing a fair amount of birdwatching, I see a lot of bird-on-bird predation. Usually it doesn't bother me. It's a little gruesome, I guess, but the process of killing, plucking and eating is fascinating to watch. Seeing the attack on the woodpeckers made me sad, though. Stupidly, irrationally sad. It's not as if woodpeckers are endangered, or there's anything abnormal about an owl making breakfast out of one. This is how the world works, after all--and who should understand that better than me, a member of a predator species and citizen of a predator nation? But there's something about the woodpeckers that arouses my sympathy. Maybe it's their feisty attitude, or their weirdly engineered bodies, or their sweet attentiveness to their fledglings. Whatever it is, it destroys my natural admiration for the power and beauty of my sister, the killer.





La Nuit, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1883.

I know y'all are just dying for an essay from me

Okay, maybe you're not, but I am working on one, which I hope to post tomorrow. Meanwhile, here are some encouraging words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Bravely take hold of the real, not dallying now with what might be.
Not in the flight of ideas but only in action is freedom.
Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living.

From "Stations on the Way to Freedom" in Ethics


You can read a good, short article on Bonhoeffer's Ethics here.

One Sentence Perfume Review: Douce Amére, Serge Lutens

Anisette toast and heavy cream are delightful, but they're best consumed in small quantities at long intervals.


Notes per Now Smell This: Cinnamon, artemisia absinthium, anise, lily, jasmine, tiare flower, tagette, cedar, and musk.

Photo from Veniero's Pastry.com. (Mmmmm...)

Bunting Report

In one of the parks where I walk there's a meadow where the Indigo Buntings always appear in April and May. I generally don't have much luck seeing them there later in the summer, so I'm guessing it's more a place to cruise for dates than a nesting ground. In any case, they're all over that meadow just now, and since I'm usually visiting early in the day, I get to see the the males' plumage in its full glory, as it flashes deep turquoise in the morning sun. The boys also have a pretty, high-pitched song that's very distinctive, which is helpful to sighting them, since they're small. I always hear them before I see them. The Cornell site says Indigo Buntings are declining in the Southeast, which seems true to me. I think I saw them more often ten years ago than I do now. They're a popular cage bird in Mexico, which sort of horrifies me. Since I've only seen them wild, I can't imagine imprisoning such a bright, beautiful thing.

Read about the Indigo Bunting at Animal Diversity Web and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Indigo Bunting photo courtesy of the Kingsville, Texas Chamber of Commerce website.

"meteors are not needed less than mountains"

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy;
life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

From "Shine, Perishing Republic" by Robinson Jeffers. Read the complete poem (with the correct line breaks)* here.


Still Life with a Skull, Paul Cézanne, 1895-1900.


*A pox on Blogger and its persnickety template.

"...the rain is full of ghosts tonight ..."

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.



Text from Poetry Foundation.

Mary Magdalene in the Cave, Jules Joseph Lefebvre, 1876. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

"Long live the weeds ..."

Inversnaid

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.



Text from Bartleby.com.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The reason my blog posts have been a little skimpy lately

I've got a couple of reviews out this week. One's a book piece on Don Beisswenger's prison memoir, Locked Up. I've blogged about Beisswenger before. He's a remarkable man. You can read my review of his book here. Also, you can click here to read my bloviation on what's wrong with treating books as art objects.