1630 Nature poems

It takes more than a wish to catch a fish you take the hook you add the bait you concentrate and then you wait you wait     you wait but not a bite the fish don’t have an appetite so tell them what good bait you’ve got and how your bait can hit the spot this works a whole lot better than a wish if you really want to catch a fish

to crave what the light does crave to shelter, to flee to gain desire of every splayed leaf to calm cattle, to heat the mare to coax dead flies back from slumber to turn the gaze of each opened bud to ripe the fruit to rot the fruit and drive down under the earth to lord gentle dust to lend a glancing grace to llamas to gather dampness from fields and divide birds and divide the ewes from slaughter and raise the corn and bend the wheat and drive tractors to ruin burnish the fox, brother the hawk shed the snake, bloom the weed and drive all wind diurnal to blanch the fire and clot the cloud to husk, to harvest, sheave and chaff to choose the bird and voice the bird to sing us, veery, into darkness

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon; As yet the early-rising sun Has not attain'd his noon. Stay, stay, Until the hasting day Has run But to the even-song; And, having pray'd together, we Will go with you along. We have short time to stay, as you, We have as short a spring; As quick a growth to meet decay, As you, or anything. We die As your hours do, and dry Away, Like to the summer's rain; Or as the pearls of morning's dew, Ne'er to be found again.

O now you come in rut, in rank and black desire, to beat the brush, to lash the wind with your long hair. Ha! I am afraid, exceedingly afraid. But see? her path goes there, along the swaying tops of trees, up to the hills. Too long she is alone. Bypass our fields, and mount your ravages of fire and rain on higher trails. You shall have her lying down upon the smoking mountains.

To one who has been long in city pent, 'Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament. Who is more happy, when, with heart's content, Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair And gentle tale of love and languishment? Returning home at evening, with an ear Catching the notes of Philomel,—an eye Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career, He mourns that day so soon has glided by: E'en like the passage of an angel's tear That falls through the clear ether silently.

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold; Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told, Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile, And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while. Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air, Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair. Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport; Thy mount, to which the dryads do resort, Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made, Beneath the broad beech and the chestnut shade; That taller tree, which of a nut was set At his great birth where all the Muses met. There in the writhèd bark are cut the names Of many a sylvan, taken with his flames; And thence the ruddy satyrs oft provoke The lighter fauns to reach thy Lady’s Oak. Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there, That never fails to serve thee seasoned deer When thou wouldst feast or exercise thy friends. The lower land, that to the river bends, Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed; The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed. Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops, Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copse, To crown thy open table, doth provide The purpled pheasant with the speckled side; The painted partridge lies in every field, And for thy mess is willing to be killed. And if the high-swollen Medway fail thy dish, Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish, Fat aged carps that run into thy net, And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat, As loath the second draught or cast to stay, Officiously at first themselves betray; Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land Before the fisher, or into his hand. Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers, Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours. The early cherry, with the later plum, Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come; The blushing apricot and woolly peach Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach. And though thy walls be of the country stone, They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan; There’s none that dwell about them wish them down; But all come in, the farmer and the clown, And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. Some bring a capon, some a rural cake, Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make The better cheeses bring them, or else send By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend This way to husbands, and whose baskets bear An emblem of themselves in plum or pear. But what can this (more than express their love) Add to thy free provisions, far above The need of such? whose liberal board doth flow With all that hospitality doth know; Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat, Without his fear, and of thy lord’s own meat; Where the same beer and bread, and selfsame wine, This is his lordship’s shall be also mine, And I not fain to sit (as some this day At great men’s tables), and yet dine away. Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by, A waiter doth my gluttony envy, But gives me what I call, and lets me eat; He knows below he shall find plenty of meat. The tables hoard not up for the next day; Nor, when I take my lodging, need I pray For fire, or lights, or livery; all is there, As if thou then wert mine, or I reigned here: There’s nothing I can wish, for which I stay. That found King James when, hunting late this way With his brave son, the prince, they saw thy fires Shine bright on every hearth, as the desires Of thy Penates had been set on flame To entertain them; or the country came With all their zeal to warm their welcome here. What (great I will not say, but) sudden cheer Didst thou then make ’em! and what praise was heaped On thy good lady then, who therein reaped The just reward of her high housewifery; To have her linen, plate, and all things nigh, When she was far; and not a room but dressed As if it had expected such a guest! These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all. Thy lady’s noble, fruitful, chaste withal. His children thy great lord may call his own, A fortune in this age but rarely known. They are, and have been, taught religion; thence Their gentler spirits have sucked innocence. Each morn and even they are taught to pray, With the whole household, and may, every day, Read in their virtuous parents’ noble parts The mysteries of manners, arms, and arts. Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee With other edifices, when they see Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, May say their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.

Having desired little more than the arrival of the little more that arrives, outside our window a cypress of model proportions. Its patience seems to widen the nights we sleep in Rome. Warm flags draw a tortoise, it scrapes too near. Our friends hurry over when they hear, exclaiming over its mute resolute distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee. Density pours into swallows and shadows: spilled with abandon each morning, begins then the slow work of receding. The joints announce their new allegiances. Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things. Night broken into, it's the sub rosa singling out I ought to have expected from Fra Angelico's small panel among others, the souped-up full-spectrum wings combined with a mood of reverent submission in both figures warning of experience yet to come. Starting now she'll reason with herself deliberately (imagine bulbs expecting stars for effort!), aware of being always overheard, subject to unprecedented measures of integrity, like an author. While a substance of landscape, mineral, leaches into blood vessels quietly steadily, meaning in this case nothing is damaged; extravagance of umbrella pines propping their fingers under the bonus horizons of the hills, redundancies boosting the city's resemblance to itself. A painter once squared himself against a difficult question and said no one could just create a landscape, but isn't it true that expectation builds a neighborhood and there is nowhere else that you can live. It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention touched the first body alone, a body changed again precisely to its own form, a very special intention. Alloyed discretion, the grit of a damp trowel explores my mouth, at leisure determining the candor that cavity is good for.

One against the other across the fleetingly infinite field: that dry crackling of pallid corn stalks clacking comes close to it. behind them mountains range like steppes between the tiers of fog they coddle. it's autumn coming close again and you need to compare this one to autumns past, recall the other sputters of color too good to last. something you need to say, something you come close to: wind in its limitless visits— especially in fall when it cleans the overblown trees— wind in possession of you says it best. but you go on anyway, trying to pen the breeze: this fall phenomenon different from summer's in its macabre celebration of the lifeless, in its forever rewritten memory of what comes next. sorrel leaves swirling in a whirlwind mimic your own compulsive repetition, its own circle of yearning so close to a kind of comfort. quickening conversations of geese flocking south chill through your thin skin: behind it a choir of silence undefined rows you closer to what you'll never forget, what you almost remember this time. closer to its name. the heart overtaken. the bare staves waving at boughs' ends, the musical red wings: something they almost say, more like a sense hunched in darkness, an ache, a suspicion: every time, closer to it, closer. hear hard light on the hillside flatten the visible scale into two dimensions, and you're in love with the flatted third: the way it breaks you down, over and over, to mean you are alive. the way you rub it in the wound that you never come close to wanting to close— as if you could scrub away the whirling of everything else and come down like snow to the center, the eye, so close to the purity of knowing inside this present pain, that searing white place without wind or words.

I came to you one rainless August night. You taught me how to live without the rain. You are thirst and thirst is all I know. You are sand, wind, sun, and burning sky, The hottest blue. You blow a breeze and brand Your breath into my mouth. You reach—then bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. You wrap your name tight around my ribs And keep me warm. I was born for you. Above, below, by you, by you surrounded. I wake to you at dawn. Never break your Knot. Reach, rise, blow,Sálvame, mi dios, Trágame, mi tierra. Salva, traga, Break me, I am bread. I will be the water for your thirst.

When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later you who fly with them you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew