- Hölderlin

"If having gone so far from one another
On distant ways, if across all the ways
And all the time, you know me still who was
Your partner in those days in all the sorrow,
Then something after all is left of it all.

Where's she who loved you waiting for you now? -
Here in the Civic Garden, just as before,
Here where in memory once again we're meeting,
In the dusk, as before, and after all the sorrow,
Beside the flowing black original river.

There were those moments, I remember there were those moments,
When you, so closed up in yourself, were able,
With me, to be, if, just for a moment, less so.
There was something good about that, for you, for me.
The time went by as if there was no trouble.

I remember how you showed me all those places
That though this was my country I had never
Visited or seen as through your eyes,
The open fields, and also the hidden places
Looking from concealment out over the sea.

Was it in springtime then? Was it in summer?
The nightingales and the other birds were singing
And the fragrance of the trees was all around us;
And the hyacinth, the violets, the tulips,
Green ivy on the housewalls, green the shadows

Of the pathways where we walked together then,
Thinking it all, after all, was possible.
It wasn't that you were different than you were,
Nor I than I, but that we were for awhile
All right together in our separate selves..."

David Ferry, "She Speaks Across the Years"

This Christian fuss

                                          This Christian fuss -

Nothing but words of shadow and grief -
What can I say through them that speaks to you?
Less than the water draining away down the runnels.
An old abandoned mill wheel, the trunk of a tree,
Markers of the limits of the world...
A pile of litter shakes and disintegrates...
At night the porcupines come out, seeking
A trickling of water to pity them...They join
My waking vigil to your deep dreaming sleep.

David Ferry, "News from Mount Amiata"

it must be believed and it must be lived

So also is love known by its own fruit and the love of which Christianity speaks is known by its own fruit - revealing that it has within itself the truth of the eternal. All other love, whether humanly speaking it withers early and is altered or lovingly preserves itself for a round of time - such love is still transient; it merely blossoms. This is precisely its weakness and tragedy, whether it blossoms for an hour or for seventy years - it merely blossoms; but Christian love is eternal. Therefore no one, if he understands himself, would think of saying of Christian love that it blossoms; no poet, if he understands himself, would think of celebrating it in song. For what the poet shall celebrate must have in it the anguish which is the riddle of his own life: it must blossom and, alas, must perish. But Christian love abides and for that very reason is Christian love. For what perishes blossoms and what blossoms perishes, but that which has being cannot be sung about - it must be believed and it must be lived.

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (26)

How can we better compare this love in words and speech than with the leaves of the tree; for words and expressions and the inventions of speech can also be a mark of love, but they are uncertain. The same words in one person's mouth can be very significant and reliable, in another's mouth as the vague whisper of leaves; the same words in one man's mouth can be like "blessed nourishing grain," in another's like the unfruitful beauty of the leaves.

Ibid (29)

yet we drop them away

In a right inventory, every man that ascends to a true value of himself, considers it thus; First, His Soul, then His life; after his fame and good name: And lastly, his goods and estate; for thus their own nature hath ranked them, and thus they are (as in nature) so ordinarily in legal consideration preferred before one another. But for our souls, because we know not, how they came into us, we care not how they go out; because, if I aske a Philosopher, whither my soul came in, by propagation from my parents, or by an immediate infusion from God, perchance he cannot tell, so I think, a divine can no more tell me, whither, when my soul goes out of me, it be likely to turn on the right, or on the left hand, if I continue in this course of sin. And then, for the second thing in this inventory, Life; the Devil himself said true, skin for skin, and all that a man hath, will he give for his life; indeed we do not easily give away our lives expresly, and at once; but we do very easily suffer our selves to be cousened of our lives: we pour in death in drink, and we call that health, we know our life to be but a span, and yet we can wash away one inche in ryot, we can burn away one inch in lust, we can bleed away one inch in quarrels, we have not an inch for every sin; and if do not pour out our lives, yet we drop them away.

John Donne, "A Sermon Preached at Greenwich, Aprill 30. 1615"

words

shiggaion
from the verb shagah, "to reel about through drink," occurs in the title of Ps. 7 ("O LORD my God, in You I have taken refuge; Save me from all those who pursue me, and deliver me,"). The plural form, shigionoth, is found in Hab. 3:1 ("A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet, according to Shigionoth."). The word denotes a lyrical poem composed under strong mental emotion; a song of impassioned imagination accompanied with suitable music; a dithyrambic ode.

beme
From Middle English beme, from Old English bēme, bȳme, bīeme ‎(“trumpet", also "tablet, billet”), from Proto-Germanic *baumijǭ ‎(“wooden instrument”), from *baumaz ‎(“tree”), from Proto-Indo-European *bhū ‎(“to grow”).
From Middle English bemen, from Old English bȳmian ‎(“to blow a trumpet, trumpet forth”), from bȳme ‎(“trumpet”).

Blodeuwedd or Blodeuedd,
(Middle Welsh composite name from blodeu 'flowers, blossoms' + gwedd 'face, aspect, appearance': "flower face"), is the wife of Lleu Llaw Gyffes in Welsh mythology, made from the flowers of broom, meadowsweet and the oak by the magicians Math and Gwydion, and is a central figure in the fourth branch of the Mabinogi.

connate
1. Bot. and Zool. Congenitally united, so as to have the form of one compound organ or body; used, e.g. of leaves united at the base; of elytra (in insects), bones (in vertebrates), etc., typically distinct but in certain species coalescent.
2.Geol. Designating water trapped in a sedimentary rock during its deposition.
3. Born with a person; existing in a person or thing from birth or origin, or as a part of his nature; inborn, innate, congenital. (Usually of ideas, principles, etc.)

incalescent
Becoming hot or warm; increasing in warmth. lit. and fig.

clart
Sticky or claggy dirt, mud, filth; (with pl.), a daub of sticky dirt.

carnifex
(ˈkɑːnɪfɛks)[L. carnifex, carnific-em, f. carn-em flesh + -fex, -ficem, maker, f. fac- (in comb. -fic-) make, making; in ancient L. `executioner', but in med.L. often `butcher' (the trade),παρουσία

παρουσία (parousia)
Presence, arrival, official visit of a king or emperor, and celebrated the glory of the sovereign publicly. A less common and distinct secondary meaning is to refer to a person's material substance, property, or inheritance, including contribution in money.

caparison
1. A cloth or covering spread over the saddle or harness of a horse, often gaily ornamented; housings, trappings; also of other beasts of burden.
2. The dress and ornaments of men and women: equipment, outfit. Also fig.

hibernacle
A winter retreat; a hibernaculum.

moue
1. a pout
2. to ogle, to stare at
3. to utter (words) with a moue

rogation
1. (f. rogāre to ask)  Eccl. (Usually pl.) Solemn supplications consisting of the litany of the saints, chanted during procession on the three days before Ascension Day; hence freq., the days upon which this is done, the Rogation days. (Cf. roveison.)

awn
The delicate spinous process, or `beard,' that terminates the grain-sheath of barley, oats, and other grasses; extended in Bot. to any similar bristly growth.

Let's talk of graves

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 3 Scene 2