The last day of October, Botany Pond, the University of Chicago:
Metamorphosis, by Wallace Stevens
Yillow, yillow, yillow,
Old worm, my pretty quirk,
How the wind spells out
Sep – tem – ber. . . .Summer is in bones.
Cock-robin’s at Caracas.
Make o, make o, make o,
Oto – otu – bre.And the rude leaves fall.
The rain falls. The sky
Falls and lies with the worms.
The street lampsAre those that have been hanged,
Dangling in an illogical
To and to and fro
Fro Niz – nil – imbo.
Lovely scene. Stuck in grey, dreary England, I am jealous.
If you are a Leyton fan you must like grey – in footballing performance terms! 😉 (Sorry – cheap shot – especially as you beat my team Norwich last season!)
At least you don’t have to worry about the Mighty Orient this season. Ssturday’s performance was noticeably bright, mostly due to turning on the floodlights.
And you have Stephen Fry as a celeb supporter! While we have to make do with Andrew Lloyd Webber! Again, intensely jealous.
Nice now, but it will suck in a couple of months. It’ll still be pretty, though. I’d like to see a pic of the same scene after the first snow.
The greatest lawyer/investment banker/poet ever. EVER!
You are free to disparage this one and substitute your own, but please NO T.S. Eliot.
Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath.
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.
Arrgh!! I’m collapsing under the derivative-gee-ain’t-I-bookish prose of Mr. Eliot.
Eliot’s laborious ponderings over the weightiest esoteric topics bespeak the gravity he so laboriously manifests.
He is also an anagram of toilets – does that count with the extra ‘t’? Probably not…
I don’t care what you say, “Prufrock” is a fantastic poem.
And what’s so bookish about buttocks?
I’m just messin’ wichya. I am big fan of Stevens however…
But given the time I spend in front of a computer I’m sad to say that my buttocks are quite bookish as of late.
NO!
by Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
No sun–no moon!
No morn–no noon!
No dawn–no dusk–no proper time of day–
No sky–no earthly view–
No distance looking blue–
No road–no street–no “t’other side the way”–
No end to any row–
No indications where the Crescents go–
No top to any steeple–
No recognitions of familiar people–
No courtesies for showing ’em–
No knowing ’em!
No traveling at all–no locomotion–
No inkling of the way–no notion–
“No go” by land or ocean–
No mail–no post–
No news from any foreign coast–
No park, no ring, no afternoon gentility–
No company–no nobility–
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member–
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds–
November!
Very pretty & showing that within that biologist’s breast beats the heart of a poet!
“In Britain it had been a year without summer. Wet spring had merged imperceptibly into bleak autumn. For months the sky had remained a depthless gray. Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware. And here suddenly the sun was dazzling in its intensity. Iowa was hysterical with color and light. Roadside barns were a glossy red, the sky a deep, hypnotic blue; fields of mustard and green stretched out before me. Flecks of mica glittered in the rolling road. And here and there in the distance mighty grain elevators, the cathedrals of the Middle West, the ships of the prairie seas, drew the sun’s light and bounced it back as pure white.”
Bill Bryson – The Lost Continent.
A Swedish guy I know moaned about London’s lowering grey winter skies contrasting them with sunny Stockholm. Actually I like grey, but then I grew up in East Anglia & the North Sea is a bootiful unremitting grey – the First World War Admiral Beatty moaned about it – “Grey ships, grey sea, grey sky!”
Autumn is my favorite time of year. Very nice picture.
This is a great photograph, because it makes the Botany Pond look like a scene from Paradise. (The Botany Pond isn’t bad, but it ain’t Paradise.)
Botany Pond is actually much nicer than it used to be before the renovation. I was dubious but now I’m a convert.
Oh, man, that is just begging for all kinds of quote-mining trouble.
Hey you goddam atheist scientists are supposed to be robotically indifferent to stuff like fall colors and poetry. Go back and read the instructions.
I really miss Chicago. And coffee break by the pond. <sigh>
Two by Robert Frost:
October
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost–
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.
My November Guest
MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
I kind of like the Tom Waits ‘November’ (actually it’s much better look up the actual song with the melancholy music behind it)
http://www.lyricsdomain.com/20/tom_waits/november.html