Category: poetry

Love’s Philosophy

some Shelley for my sweetheart on her birthday

THE fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain’d its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

sonnet 116

some Shakespeare for my sweetheart on our 15th wedding anniversary

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Missive

As I reflect on 14 joyous, adventurous years of marriage to my very beautiful and still remarkable wife, my mind goes back to where it all began (almost). Herewith a missive delivered at our engagement party by the highly gregarious, generally unhinged ‘Stamps’, a dear old Dutch guy at our church back in Brisbane. I miss Stamps.

Many thanks to Mic C for digging this up. A little taste : “The most prominent party, roaring with laughter remains the taxman who does his utmost to raise taxation, not only in cigars and tobacco and cigarets, but also in ale, that most prosperous and popular drink in warm Australia.”

This was one of his better almost completely off-topic speeches; I still see tears of joy rolling down Mic’s cheeks. No doubt John was rolling around outside on the grass in fits of laughter too.

A touch of Frost

Sure it’s cliché, but the hint of spring and coming close to finishing postdoc brings to mind Frost’s “The road not taken”:

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.