Rest in peace Adrienne

Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; 
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink 
And rise and sink and rise and sink again; 
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, 
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; 
Yet many a man is making friends with death 
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. 
It well may be that in a difficult hour, 
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, 
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, 
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, 
Or trade the memory of this night for food. 
It well may be. I do not think I would. 

Acquainted with the Night

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

I have been one acquainted with the night. 
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. 
I have outwalked the furthest city light. 

I have looked down the saddest city lane. 
I have passed by the watchman on his beat 
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. 

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet 
When far away an interrupted cry 
Came over houses from another street, 

But not to call me back or say good-bye; 
And further still at an unearthly height, 
One luminary clock against the sky 

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right 
I have been one acquainted with the night.



Edited to add: Just feeling my mortality. 

The Summer of Not Much Fun

Solitude

BY ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

    Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

    But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

    Sigh, it is lost on the air;

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

    But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;

    Grieve, and they turn and go;

They want full measure of all your pleasure,

    But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;

    Be sad, and you lose them all,—

There are none to decline your nectared wine,

    But alone you must drink life’s gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;

    Fast, and the world goes by.

Succeed and give, and it helps you live,

    But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure

    For a large and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

    Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Bye, Baby. I'm going to miss you so much

Do Not Stand By My Grave And Weep

Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight. 
I am the soft stars that shine at night. 
Do not stand at my grave and cry, 
I am not there; I did not die.

Source: http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/do-not-stand-by-my-grave-and-weep#ixzz30Vdi0pQv 
Family Friend Poems 

In Honor of March 4th

The Charge of the Light Brigade

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

   Someone had blundered.

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

   Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

   Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

   Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flashed all their sabres bare,

Flashed as they turned in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

   All the world wondered.

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right through the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the sabre stroke

   Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back, but not

   Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

   Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell.

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of hell,

All that was left of them,

   Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

   All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

   Noble six hundred!

 

From the Poetry Foundation. 

 

 

St Brigid's Poetry Festival 2014

To A Friend Estranged From Me

by  Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sun

That will not rise again.

Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,

Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charity

That lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.

That this could be!

That I should live to see

Most vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,

So fitted out with purple robe and crown

To stand among his betters!

Face to face With outraged me in this once holy place,

Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and hunted

Truth was harboured out of danger,

He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger!

I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:

The hills may shift, the waters may decline,

Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,

But never your love from me, your hand from mine.

Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.

Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!

You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dream

You have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.

September of Socks!

Because a mere summer is not enough. For a WHOLE PAIR. Honestly.

I did manage to knit one of the pair but......eh. It's toe up, which is not my thing, I like the magic of heel turns and the cable on the heel turned out to be an antler cable that doesn't excite me much either. It looked so much more complicated in the picture.

So the half way done second sock not only does not have the lace that the first one lacked but it's also going to be minus the cable. And it's still taking me longer to finish it.

The cuff is still pretty cool. (Ada Lovelace/Ravelry link).

In the meantime, I've cast on (about eight thousand times) (in eight thousand different patterns) a black and white variegated that refuses to be wingspan  (it just looked dingy and it was quite, quite boring to knit. Never mind that's what I was aiming for) (I need something mindless to knit on the needles for sermons, meetings, lines, TV.....) or any number of other patterns but I could really use a black and white smallish scarf.

 

To teach it a lesson, I frogged the 10-ish inches I'd knit of Fuse.

Pictured: Stuff I found in my purse looking for quarters for the vending machine. I barely wear lipstick or lipbalm so why do I have SIX tubes of the stuff? on me? Beats me.

Bah. On to books.

Binged on series this summer. I've read almost but not quite all of Lois McMasters Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series (I have Memory up next but since I'm almost caught up........I'm saving it. So it won't be done.) and then all five of David Baldacci's Camel Club books, which, by book five got a little weary.

I do love his King & Maxwell TV series on TNT though. Edgar makes it. Hard to believe he was Opie in Sons of Anarchy.

Somewhere in between I read A Reconstruction of Economics by Kenneth Boulding, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernon Vinge, Broken Harbor by Tana French, The Time In Between by Maria Duenas, Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

Just finished The Discovery of Jeanne Baret:

Currently reading The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton. So far, so good!

 

Oh, and so far (knock on wood), not on fire from the Morgan Fire.  It did creep me out and kept me up half the night when I went out Sunday night to see if I could see it - oh yeah. I could see it all right.

The mountain ridge on FIRE and firetrucks dotting the hillside. We're 7or 8 miles from it but it's bone dry (I heard 4% which is roughly drier than killed sawn wood at Home Depot) and close to a greenbelt if the winds pushed it that way.

I had library books to pick up and return last night (my branch is actng as the local emergency shelter). Coming in with me was a guy with five pizzas. Not something I see every day at the library.....

 

Summer of Socks

There. The Sock of Summer is cast on. It doesn't look very summery out. In fact, it's raining.

And yes. This will undoubtedly be THE sole sock of summer. I'm hoping to really hustle and have a PAIR. Whooooo.

Huh. i have to type in the HTML codes? Linking later. I type with one, maybe two fingers on the phone. Can you guess my age? Go ahead, but just say old.

Reading: "Quiet: The Power of Introverts In a World That Can't Stop Talking". So far not much on an introvert that can't stop talking.

Did you know bees are responsible for coffee?

SAVE THE BEES.Well, actually that's the why. This is the how. Well, one of the hows. Google it. But pretty fascinating! 20,000 species of bees. I watched this clip So Many Kinds of Bees from Cornell University for a STEM class while filing the updated replacement pages for tax deskbooks.

THANK YOU, FISCAL CLIFF and possibly SEQUESTRATION.  Next year I think I'll cave to technology and switch to the online library. 

I've been knitting! Very little finishing, of course. Restarted the breadbasket liner. started another Tudor Rose project to go with my Mary Tudor before the reprint hits the stores in November and I will probably cast on a pair of socks if summer ever gets here because Cookie will make me do it.

Lilacs before the wind and the frost got to them.

Lots of reading lately even if I gave up on David Drake's Hammer's Slammers: The Warrior. I read the begining and the end but not so much the middle. The Heretic, outlined by David Drake and written by Tony Daniel  is more my speed. Hey. That's a series. From 1991. Argh.

Still have History of the Modern Fact on my nightstand but am currently slogging through How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Slogging not because it isn't interesting because it is, but because I had an entirely different notion of what memetics/memes meant.

I did finish One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson and enjoyed it despite the whiplash POV's. I love a good policeman turned private detective turned millionaire story and the differing narration worked reasonably well flesh to out the scenes, but it was a bit confusing. I'm glad I didn't try to read it over tax season. Also way too much animal abuse. She was clearly against it, but I skimmed more than a few paragraphs. Yes, abusing an animal is shorthand for evil to me too but I don't want to read about it or hear about it unless I can actually do something about it. We can barely convict/intervene for human on human cruelty.

 

The garden is planted, the gophers have checked it out and given their seal of - disappoval? They can't dig from the bottom up because of the chicken wire, but apparently they can dig the middle. Idiots. The tomatos and the marigolds are all on the edges.

Hopefully the marigolds will do a bit better soon. The weather is veering from hot to cold (60's to 80's) which is actually quite nice but means I still can't put away my winter clothes.

Because yes, 60 degree weather is WINTER weather. And COLD. COLD.

 

 

 

 

March Madness

aka Tax Season.

Those frilly daffodils are really pretty and seem to be a lot hardier. Of course, it's entirely possible that the frillier daffodils are some other flower entirely, what do I know? I can usually tell a rose from a daisy.

 

Hez isn't allowed in the back yard (as if I could actually enforce that,the truth is, she finds the backyard dull compared to the excitement of the street) which is a good thing because the quail really really really do not like her around.

Yesterday morning there was a California Woodpecker in the birdbath, a pair of mourning doves (morning?) on the fence, quail under the oleanders and some little black throated birds I think are chickadees.

I'm sure the blue jays were somewhere, but uncharacteriscally quiet.

 

 

Wanting is -- What?

by Robert Browning

 

 

                Wanting is -- what?
                Summer redundant,
                Blueness abundant,
                 -- Where is the blot?
Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same,
-- Framework which waits for a picture to frame:
What of the leafage, what of the flower?
Roses embowering with naught they embower!
Come then, complete incompletion, O comer,
Pant thro' the blueness, perfect the summer!
                Breathe but one breath
                Rose-beauty above,
                And all that was death
                Grows life, grows love,
                     Grows love!

 

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