I Sit Beside The Fire And Think

I sit beside the fire and think
~ by J.R.R. Tolkien ~

I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green

I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know

But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door

The Road Not Taken

 

The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

---

Mountain Interval.  1920.

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The author Paulo Coelho had this poem by Robert Frost on his blog the other day (but with a different picture). On Facebook, Coelho added the comment: “ALWAYS chose the road less taken”.

Reading the poem, though, I felt less sure whether that was also Frost’s decided opinion? I searched a bit more, and then found this note:

Robert Frost on his own poetry:
"One stanza of 'The Road Not Taken' was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: Was found three or four years later, and I couldn't bear not to finish it. I wasn't thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 23 Aug. 1953

---

I too know people who are hard on themselves that way. Occasionally perhaps I also tend to be a bit hard on myself that way. But most of the time I try to tell myself that not all choices are as clear as being a choice between “right” vs “wrong”. Sometimes… we just have to choose a road and see where it takes us.

---

Look closely at the pictures at the top. Which one do you like better? Actually, one is the mirror image of the other, before I framed them (in Paint Shop). You’d have to know the spot where the photo was taken, I think, to tell which is the “right” one.   

 

 

Leisure

Earlier this week, GB at Eagleton Notes had a post about making time to "stop and stare". He also referred back to an earlier post in which he included in full the poem from which that expression comes - Leisure, by W H Davies. I liked that poem so much that I printed it out. I'd also like to repeat it here:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.


No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.


No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.


No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.


No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.


No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.


A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

This morning, I went for a walk. My plan was to go for a stroll first, and on the way back pop in at the supermarket to pick up a few things. I'm a town girl, and going to the supermarket on a Sunday doesn't usually bother me, if it happens to be practical...

But today, Nature overwhelmed me with the most spectacular show I think I ever saw. I had to stop and stare!!! I'll pay my respects to the supermarket another day. Today, by the time I got as far as that place on my walk, I could no longer bring myself to break the atmosphere of tranquility and beauty by going in there. It would actually have felt like a sacrilege...

First, there was the morning mist on the river, lifting gently...





... revealing the whole bridge railing full of spiderwebs, a long row of them, one after the other, dew drops making them look like jewellery in the low morning sunlight...








So I passed the supermarket, without going in.

Instead I turned around, and went back again along the river...

Then, under the high alder trees, suddenly there was the song and dance of hundreds of birds, high up among the branches and leaves...



They were much too high up to let me identify them properly, or catch them with the camera... They were quite small. The ones I caught a glimpse of looked like great tits. This surprised me though, because those usually stay here for the winter. At least we see some of them then, too. But I've never, at any time of the year, seen like a hundred or more of them together before, behaving like this.The overwhelming impression was a concert of praise and excitement, like a last gathering and rejoicing over the autumn colours, before leaving to go south for the winter. I have never seen anything like it. I have never heard anything like it. They were fluttering about all the time. At the same time, leaves were dropping from the trees. Sometimes, you could not distinguish whether that yellowish thing headed towards the ground was a leaf or a bird.

Again, I stopped for a long, long time and just stared!
Finally I went home, because my feet were getting cold from all the standing still...



At home, I looked up the great tit  (Parus major) in my bird book. It says most of them stay here over winter. But some do leave, "especially certain years"... because of lack of food. Made me wonder if it was that slush-attack the day before yesterday that made them decide to leave! Or if they can sense in other ways that it is going to be a bad winter...? Anyway, it was a really impressive farewell-concert...

More pictures from today's walk in my Picture Book. I took I-know-not-how-many photos of the spider webs, because it was hard to determine how they would actually come out...! More might be coming up in future posts...

In Memory Poem from 2001

I am not American, but I think the whole world remembers.

I wrote a poem a few days after the "nine eleven" events. If the perspective should seem odd to anyone, there is some personal stuff woven into it as well - some other bad news that I got while the TV images were still burning in my mind. The personal news had nothing to do with the events in New York - they just became forever fused together in my mind.

The scene from the TV news that made the most powerful impression on me was the film sequence of a man who was walking away from the towers, turned round to look when he heard the crash - and then just turned back and kept on walking at the same pace as before. What had happened was just too much to take in.


---

I was the World Trade Center
minding my own business
and other people's too, if asked
until I was run down
by an unexpected terrorist attack


I'm the man in the street
looking back over my shoulder
but continuing my walk
not able to take in
what just happened here


Now I'm just a ruin
a heap of smoking rubbish
full of chaos and destruction
fire, pain and fear
wishing everything undone


Is there an answer somewhere
a way to rise again
high above the skyline
without fear of new attacks
without the need to fight back

---
I'd also like to send you over to Wood and Pixels Narratives to look at Dan's pictures for today.
---

Dream come true...?

Two of my very first readers here have both commented on "the island of dreams". (See initial post, and interview.) In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, the island where dreams (not daydreams, but the nightly kind) come true is called the Dark Island; it is surrounded by darkness, and the man who managed to escape from it calls it a horrible place.

As I have already hinted, I find dreams and dream analysis interesting. Just recently, I had a very odd experience of déjà vu connected to a dream I dreamt many, many years ago.

Not so long ago, I moved to a new neighbourhood. Not completely new to me, and not very far from where I lived before. But new enough to make a change. One day, while walking along a road that I have walked along quite often before, I was suddenly hit by this déjà vu feeling connecting back to a dream which I hadn't thought about for quite a long time. But I did work with that dream quite a lot around the time I dreamt it, and I also used it as inspiration for a poem. What I never did before, however, was to connect the scenery in the dream to a real place. Now, suddenly, out of the blue (or maybe the grey), it struck me that I was walking along the road from my dream.

Here is a translation of my poem based on the dream (originally written in Swedish):

rain is streaming down
someone offers me a lift
no thanks, or yes please
if it's not out of your way
why can't I make up my mind


let me off here, please
not far from the town centre
I know the way now
I have seen this place before
I know where I am going


but took a wrong turn
lost again, not the first time
made the same mistake
before, in another dream
but I can correct myself


stone wall on the right
encloses the old churchyard
half an avenue
with trees on only one side
empty field on the other


darkness is falling
but now I'm on the right track
right here in between
the things buried in the past
and the future awaiting


The thing is - the place where I live now is right across "the empty field" of the dream...

Coincidence? Or did my subconscious remember the dream when I chose my new home?

Just for fun, I looked up "churchyard" in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Dreams. ("Gustavus Hindman Miller's Dictionary of Dreams first appeared in 1909, ten years after Sigmund Freuds pioneering work The Interpretation of Dreams", they note on the back of the cover.) I don't really put much trust in standard interpretations - I believe each person carries their own keys to their own dreams - but this definition did actually connect rather well to my own thoughts:

To dream of walking in a churchyard, if in winter, denotes that you are to have a long and bitter struggle with poverty, and you will reside far from the home of your childhood, and friends will be separated from you; but if you see the signs of springtime, you will walk up in into pleasant places and enjoy the society of friends.

I don't really recall the time of year in my dream, only that it was raining. Also, in my dream I was not walking in the churchyard, but alongside of it. But the dream/poem does sort of contain both winter and spring, in the sense that it contains both a sense of separation, and at the same time ends in hope.