Waxing Poetic: Water Lilies by Sara Teasdale

     Sara Teasdale ( 1884 - 1933) was an American lyrical poet whose major themes were love, nature's beauty, and death.

Water Lilies

If you have forgotten water lilies floating
On a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon shade,
If you have forgotten their wet, sleepy fragrance,
Then you can return and not be afraid.

But if you remember, then turn away forever
To the plains and the prairies where pools are far apart,
There you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies,
And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your heart.

The Art of Reading: Woman Reading By Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Bookish Quotes #37

"A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."
~ Caroline Gordon

"A little before you go to sleep read something exquisite."
~ Desiderius Erasmus

Waxing Poetic: The Dream by Lola Ridge

 

     Lola Ridge (1873 -1941) was born in  Dublin, grew up in New Zealand and Australia, and moved to the U. S. in 1907.  She was an anarchist poet of the early modernist period.

 

The Dream

I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day....
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium...
domes
fired in sulphurous mist...
sea
quiescent as a gray seal...
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....)
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water --
where shall I pour my dream?