Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Ionian, by Constantine P. Cavafy

Fresco painting of Flora, or Primavera,found in the luxurious resort of Stabiae in the Bay of Naples.
 
Just because we've torn their statues down, 
and cast them from their temples, 
doesn't for a moment mean the gods are dead. 
Land of Ionia, they love you yet, 
 their spirits still remember you. 
When an August morning breaks upon you 
a vigour from their lives stabs through your air; 
and sometimes an ethereal 
and youthful form in swiftest passage, 
indistinct, passes up above your hills.

Monday, August 12, 2013

The house was quiet and the world was calm - by Wallace Stevens

young woman reading by a window - Delphin Enjolras (1857-1945)
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom


The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.