Wednesday Classics: Longfellow

“A Psalm of Life,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
    ”Life is but an empty dream!”
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
    And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
    And the grave is not its goal;
“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”
    Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
    Is our destined end or way;
But to act to each to-morrow
    Finds us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
    And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
    Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
    In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
    Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
    Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living Present!
    Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
    We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
    Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
    Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
    Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
    With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
    Learn to labor and to wait.

T.C.

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Saturday Six – 5 December 2009

one: NPR’s Top Picks from Indie Booksellers
I think I already have my Christmas wishlist made…

two: AcademicEarth.org
This may just be my new favorite website.

three: Trailblazing, by Royal Society
Alright, this might be my new favorite website.

four: Letters of Note
I love real letters. I love writing them, receiving them, and especially reading those of strangers. In fact, I just acquired a copy of the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams, which I am very excited to begin reading. Anyway, I was introduced to Letters of Note by a link to this letter of David Bowie’s. Now I can’t wait to get going on the rest.

five: spreeder.com
I was browsing through The Art of Manliness a few days ago, when I came across an article about speed reading. Spreeder seems like a great way to doff one’s cap to Teddy Roosevelt.

six: mnmlist.com
No need to say more.

T.C.

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Wednesday Classics: Coleridge

“What is Life?,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
    Too ample in itself for human sight ?
An absolute Self–an element ungrounded–
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
    By encroach of darkness made ?–
Is very life by consciousness unbounded ?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death ?

T.C.

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Wednesday Classics: Horace

“Book 1, Ode 5,” by Horace
translation by John Milton

What slender youth bedewed with liquid odours
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
    Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou
    In wreaths thy golden hair,
Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
On faith and changèd gods complain: and seas
    Rough with black winds and storms
    Unwonted shall admire:
Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,
Who always vacant always amiable
    Hopes thee; of flattering gales
    Unmindful? Hapless they
To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me in my vowed
Picture the sacred wall declares t’ have hung
    My dank and dropping weeds
  To the stern god of the sea.

T.C.

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The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled

“The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled,” by Leontia Flynn

Like many folk, when first I saddled a rucksack,
feeling its weight on my back –
the way my spine
curved under it like a meridian –

I thought: Yes. This is how
to live. On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow
and Zagreb, or the Siberian white
cells of scattered airports;

it came clear as over a tannoy
that in restlessness, in anony
mity:
was some kind of destiny.

So whether it was the scare stories about Larium
– the threats of delirium
and baldness – that lead me, not to a Western Union
wiring money with six words of Lithuanian,

but to this post office with a handful of bills
or a giro; and why, if I’m stuffing smalls
hastily into a holdall, I am less likely
to be catching a greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee

than to be doing some overdue laundry
is really beyond me.
However,
when, during routine evictions, I discover

alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway
comment – on a post–it – or a tiny stowaway
pressed flower amid bottom drawers,
I know these are my souvenirs

and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest distances I’ve travelled
have been those between people. And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their lives.

T.C.

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