Tears

Tears are so strange. I seldom cry but know several people who often do, in all kinds of circumstances. When things move people immensely, many weep. When things move me immensely, I withdraw and often smile...but every now and again, for no apparent reason, something quite ordinary appears extraordinary - the love of a mother for a child; the beauty of an animal or the sky or the ocean...the passing of seasons....Tennyson's poem is so self-indulgently pleasing at this time of year:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

(Photo by Andre Hilliard: andrehilliard.com

Autumn

Autumn comes again with the hazy mornings, the sun being a little lazy in rising, then coming out in all its amber splendour by mid-afternoon, and the chilly evenings with those scents which are so evocative! This poem is so often quoted that it seems almost trite to repeat it, but it is 'the' poem of autumn and its timelessness is so touching. Keats' "To Autumn".

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

"Love Every Leaf, Love Every Ray of Light...."

"Love every leaf, love every ray of light, love the animals and plants, each separate thing," wrote Dostoevsky. "If thou lovest each thing thou wilt begin to see the mystery of God in all, and grow everyday to a fuller understanding of it."

I have just been kicking through the autumn leaves that are like a golden carpet through the woods of Temple Newsam. The sunlight, shining through the copper leaves that are still clinging to the branches, was glimmering on the lake, so dazzlingly bright, and sparkling on the water and the velvety-green of the ducks' heads. I knew what Dosteovsky meant!

Isn't it interesting to look 'into' things rather than simply 'at' them? To feel so much a part of it all - to see there truly is only one life animating everything and nothing is really separate. I am sure we learn more by simply being amid such beauty, than we can learn in a thousand hours of study.

The image is not of Temple Newsam but another of André's beautiful photographs of Virginia - http://andrehilliard.com/ - Autumn is equally beautiful here.