Mmmmmm, Just Fourteen.....

      Thought for no apparent reasons I'd dare to remind people of a quartet of good sonnets (okay, one isn't that good, but...), ones I suspect most of you won't be coming across anytime soon.   Providing, that is, any of you bother to read them while you're here.  

      I'm relatively willing to bet, though, that even those of you who consider yourselves hostile to sonnets will find at least one in these four you'll like.    Go ahead.   Prove me right.   I darez ya.   I DOUBLE-dog darez ya....   I'll even BETS ya which one mosta ya will pick.  

Finite And Infinite

The wind sounds only in opposing straits,
The sea, beside the shore; man's spirit rends
Its quiet only up against the ends
Of wants and oppositions, loves and hates,
Where, worked and worn by passionate debates,
And losing by the loss it apprehends,
The flesh rocks round, and every breath it sends
Is ravelled to a sigh.   All tortured states
Suppose a straitened place.   Jehovah Lord,
Make room for rest, around me! out of sight
Now float me, of the vexing land abhorred,
Till in deep calms of space my soul may right
Her nature, ---shoot large sail on lengthening cord,
And rush exultant on the Infinite.

      --- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Work Without Hope

All Nature seems at work.   Slugs leave their lair---
The bees are stirring---  birds are on the wing---
And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount where streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths!  bloom for whom ye may!
With lips unbrighten'd, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

      --- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Some Blaze The Precious Beauties Of Their Loves"

Some blaze the precious beauties of their loves
By precious stones, and other some by flowers,
Some by the planets and celestial powers,
Or by what else their fancy best approves;
Yet I by none of these will blazon mine,
But only say her self herself is like,
For these similitiudes I much mislike
That are much used, though they be divine.
In saying she is like herself, I say
She hath no like, for she is past compare.
Then who aright commends this creature rare
Must say, "She is"; and there of force must stay,
    Because by words she cannot be expressed;
    So say, "She is," and wond'ring owe the rest.

      --- John Davies of Hereford

Homage: Light From The Hall

It is Soul Brother Number One, James Brown,
Chanting.   "It wouldn't be nothing, noth-iiiiinnnnnggg...."
Dismembering the notes until everything hangs
On his mystical half-screech, notes skidding 'round
Your brain as you listen, rapt, thirteen,
Transistor and its single earphone tucked
With you beneath the midnight covers, station WKED,
Big Daddy Armand, The Ragin' Cajun,
"Spinning out the bossest platters for you all,"
Golden Age trance, when New Orleans stations
Traveling two thousand miles shaped distance
Into alchemy.   Beneath the door, a light from the hall
Bathing the bedroom in its stammering glow:
Cooke and Redding risen, James Brown quaking the Apollo.

        --- David Wojahn
            (from Mystery Train: A Sequence)

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      What The Blunder Said Addendum:   When I typed out the first sonnet, the Browning, the line "Till in deep calms of space my soul may right" came out as "Till in deep clams of space my soul may right."   This blog will now consider what philosophical extra-terrestrial crustaceans might say-- let alone what they might correct.   Aw shucks, perhaps?