A glimpse through the Glass

I wrote this when I was feeling so young and inexperienced after reading a book on collected poems from all the great writers. One poem by  Langston Hughes called 'Little Old Letter'. It was about a letter that he had received in the mail that had obviously brought bad news. It ends:

'Just a pencil and paper,

             You don't need no gun not knife

                                                                 A little old letter 

 Can take a persons's life '

I read it among the others while looking for inspiration but I found that I had no experiences to write of no great thoughts to tell, only the little old ones that others have thought a thousand times before me. I was feeling very small.

A book of poems
Lay on my desk
Until I gave my hand and read
My head told my heart it was lead

I was old; old was wise
Experience was mine
Then the lines came quickly
I read, they did not shout at me

But they robed me, these words
Of my experience
And the poem ended, like sleet
Youth came back to me bittersweet

I wrote another one soon after, with me poems come in twos or threes and all at once. :)

This is inspired by my FicSwap story which is a fairy tale.

A sheet of clear glass
Crystal-kike in clarity

Through it the eyes pass
From barren, bold austerity
To each golden rainbow coloured shape

The air appeared clean and fresh and bright
Blue rippled the water in its wake

There was no haze to dim the eye
But yet a veil lowered tween me and the dream
And the glass grew dim as from a sigh

And there you have it! Please feel free to critique, I need all the advise I can get, be merciless!! 

Wouldn't you love to have a room like this! 

It's a beautiful painting though I don't usually like this style. It's as if the painter was trying to express that the great wide ocean is his room. It is meaningful and intriguing because it doesn't have a stated meaning, the viewer can take his own interpretation of it for himself.

Secret Garden on Violin... 08/08/08 = Ben Chan's 26th B-Day!

I have a Violin!!!

   I have not written a new post for a while, longer than I thought. I have been busy working for my neighbour Annie with her horses and I had my 18th birthday on Monday. On Sunday we went sailing in my brothers boat and I lost my glasses overboard! Oh well, headaches for two weeks until my new ones come.

Star

But the best bit, and what is meant to be the main theme of this post, is that I got a violin for my birthday!! I have for a while thought about starting the violin, but only very recently had I decided to really play it. I was encouraged by the fiddle players in the band at the ceili we go to every month (that's Irish dancing which is similar to country dancing). I announced at the dinner table one night "I have decided I want to learn the violin!" I didn't know until my birthday, but Mum rang up Nan that very night and told her that that is what I would like for my birthday, and she went and bought one immediately, a very good one too. Nan is always encouraging her grandchildren to play instruments she taught us to play the recorder and some on the piano. So she is very glad I want to learn.
  I have tried playing it but I couldn't even get a sound out of it! But I think it is because I didn't rosin the bow properly. I have been looking at tutorials on YouTube and there are lots of helpful videos there. I will also be able to learn off Annie who my give me lessons in exchange for working with her horses. She has been playing most of her life and used to play in a band.

I am so excited! I want to begin playing at once, I shall have allot of practice to do and I am afraid my family may become slightly distracted in the next few weeks, months, years......

The Sun Before a Storm

Why shine you so bright

Above clouds of the deepest blue

(So dark as to be black)

Coming to cover you.

You yet brighten my room,

Faintly I feel

Warmth from your rays

Though close now was that peal

Thunder darkens the air

The old bull dog cowers

But you are still shining 

Not yet taken by showers

Is it bravery? Do you laugh

The storm to scorn? But oh,

Your face is fading now

And hides from us, wet, below.

 ***

In faded old daylight

I wrote in pencil, black and white.

What colour will you be 

To the world as a tree

is to me?

On Writing Poetry, Robert Frost

   "A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it and comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I suppose it finds it lying around with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full mind. That's why it oftener comes to nothing in youth before experience has filled the mind with thoughts. It may be a big big emotion then and yet finds nothing it can embody in. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. Let's say again: A poem particularly must not begin with thought first."-Robert Frost


   "I have never been good at revising. I always thought I made things worse by recasting and retouching. I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none. When I saw more than one possible way of saying a thing I knew I was fumbling and turned from writing. If I ever fussed a poem into shape I hated and distrusted it afterward. The great and pleasant memories are of poems that were single strokes ( one stroke to the poem) carried through. I won't say I haven't learned with the years something of the tinker's art. I'm surprised to find sometimes how I have just missed the word. It wasn't that I was groping for my meaning. I had that clear enough and I had thought I had said the word for it. But I hadn't said within a row of apple trees of it. "-Robert Frost


    "In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, "Oh yes I know what you mean." It is never to tell them something they dont know, but something they know and hadnt thought of saying. It must be something they recognize." Frost Letter to John Barlett

 

On Robert Frost

In researching for an essay on Robert Frost and Walt Whitman's poems I found this article Robert Frost On Writing. Part dealt with how Robert Frost used tones and every day speech in his poems. I have been interested in the way we we speak and intonation lately by listening to people communicating. Here are some quotes:

'A proper understanding of intonation, the sense of the speaking voice, opened up to Frost endless possibilities for poetic effects. At the furthest extreme, intonation alone could carry meaning, quite divorced from particular words. Frost was fond of citing the example of listening to the rise and fall of voices behind closed doors or just out of earshot, where individual words could not be discerned, yet meaning, emotion, and dramatic interaction could all be intuited. Similarly, he had a Celtic delight in listening to the limited vocabulary of hearty curses and the infinite variety of meanings they could convey, depending solely "on the tones of saying it and the situations." But intonations conveyed most when they occurred most naturally, as interdependent with the actual words, when the voice itself could add connotative to denotative meaning.' 

I too like to listen to people taking just out of clear hearing distance.  And this is what I myself was trying to say a couple of posts ago.

"Take, for instance, the expression 'oh.' The American poets use it in practically one tone, that of grandeur: 'Oh Soul!' 'Oh Hills! ' - 'Oh Anything! ' That's the way they go. But think of what 'oh' is really capable: the 'oh' of scorn, the 'oh' of amusement, the 'oh' of surprise, the 'oh' of doubt - and there are many more." 

I liked this quote especially (the emphasis is mine).

 'Art consists not in creating new variations (for that would place the artist outside nature) but in listening for tones that have not been stereotyped by literary expression, in collecting and arranging. Appreciation rests in recognition, not discovery.'

 One of my favorite poems of Frost's is Nothing Gold Can Stay:

My brother, Peter, took the photo of the sunset at a beach near us.

Robert Frost: Lovers' Quarrel With the World (clip)

From a Corner of My Room

I took some photos tonight:
My cat Cappie was a bit scared of the camera. His real name is Captain Courageous, but the opposite is true. He is scared of people he doesn't know particularly little children and adults. But he is my boy! He climbs up the tree outside my window each morning to say hello and where's breakfast. He is loosing his winter coat for summer at the moment, but in the winter he is stunning in his great fur ruff.

I really got the camera out to take a photo of a drawing it did of my sister when she was about 13 about 20 years ago.!.

 

 Then I did a photo shoot of my butterfly wind chime.
I am so sorry about the pictures on the side they won't stay right side up!

 I think I could use some of them for a background for something.

The Tone of Our Voice

  Last night as I was falling asleep I began to think of the way we express our meanings by the tone of our voice and how when writing it is a challenge to convey a certain tone. ( because at night is the time I think)

  I came to be thinking that thought because that day I had asked my little brother to wash the dishes so that I could make dinner, only I was trying to do it in a way that would not offend him, as he at 14 can be touchy and teenagery if you get him the wrong way. I was trying to say 'please' in a way that was not too pleading or too commanding but just friendly (I have found that friendly is the best way to approach him with a request). 

  And then I thought of how many ways you can say 'please' or any other way for that matter. And then, again, (because I have been writing a novel, just for the fun of it) I thought how limited writers are when they try to convey how their characters speak a work, a sentence, and how that character generally speaks all the time. I we had a different symbol for each intonation of each word it could make writing easier. But them I thought again and concluded that that would take all the art and allot of skill out of writing so really it is well enough how it is.

And this was just a thought that began and has ended.

........

I have recently come  to know of the regency artist Sir Thomas Lawrence from the many blog post of him now because of the opening of the new exhibition of his paintings in England. The ones above and below are two of my favorite of his works. He was a self taught portrait painter more about him here.

 Queen Charlotte 1744-1818

Better quality detail which I love!

Jane Austen Heroines

"Austen is not against social conventions. In fact, she’s fairly conservative. But she’s conservative in the deepest and best way."

This is from an article I have just read about how Jane Austen films underestimate her characters as she really portrays them in her books. I agree with the article, I have always found that in allot of Austen movies the heroines are portrayed as feminists and 'rebel against the oppressive circumstances and rigid social conventions in which she has been placed'. I have always thought of this as inevitable in a movie where modern trends and issues must predominate and the public must be catered to. But read this article and you may understand more of what I'm trying to say:Austen Films Underestimate Her Heroines

FicSwap 2010

  I have only just found out about this event and I think it is a great idea.  

Have a look on Wickfield.

Teach Me

Teach me the song of the trickling brook      
Bursting her banks, tumbling from her nook
 
Teach me to sing neath the sigh of the willow
Whose weeping shades the silent meadow 

Teach me the rustle of the leafs on an oak
Where birds made their nests as the spring awoke

Teach me to bear the joys and sorrows
As summer greens 'come golden tomorrows

Teach me to trace in the lines of a leaf
The beauty of  life's perfect belief

And then I shall know love

A Vintage Wedding

(I have my first follower! Thank you Melee!)

I have been scanning old photos into the computer for my Nans 80th birthday early next year. Among them were some of her wedding photos and I thought I would share them here. The dress is so beautiful!

I never meet my grandfather, he died when dad was just a child.

 Just married!

 My aunt, Nan, and Dad. Wasn't he a cutie!

Claude Monet

   It must be a rather good thing that we were made to be able avoid things which we do not admire, because then we remove ourselves from that thing and consequently can prevent ourselves becoming something we do not like. It is true that how we are brought up and and the people around us lend something to our character, but they do not entirely make us who we are. We make choices every day and each one no matter how small has an affect on ourselves.
   I do not mean to make this an essay on what makes us ourselves, for then I would have many other aspects to consider, I just wanted to share a thought. It is so apparent in my own life, I who am so different from the people around me. I used to almost hate who I was and try and blame things on others, but now I am so glad, glad, glad that I am me and that God did it with a purpose in mind.

   I wrote this in the middle of the night a few days ago with such a feeling of content and joy:
I have nothing to be unthankful for. I am so blessed, I have everything I ever wanted and more. Why is my life so happy and peaceful while so many others must live in sorrow. Perhaps is a training ground for some hardship ahead in my life, but I can look forwards to that with joy for as he cares for me now he will never forsake me.

   I have been reading about famous artists and there works. It is very interesting to learn of their lives and and their art. I am at the moment reading about Claude Monet. He has some very beautiful and inspiring works.
I have been just reading now part of his autobiography which I expected to a bit dry as everything I had been reading just before that was beginning to bore me with facts, but this was really interesting and I got drawn into it. I will finish reading it when I have posted this.

 " The subject is of secondary importance to me ; what I want to reproduce is that which is in between the subject and me."--Claude Monet