Song

(Sprig of Almond Blossoms in Glass
by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890,
Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

“Most people really believe that the Christian commandments (e.g., to love one’s neighbor as oneself) are intentionally a little too severe — like putting the clock ahead half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning.” ~ Søren Kirkegaard (1813-1855), Danish theologian and philosopher, one of the fathers of Existentialism

SONG

That tree with trembling leaves
is longing for something.

That tree, so lovely to look at,
seems to want to give away flowers:
it is longing for something.

That tree, so lovely to see,
seems to want to flower:
it is longing for something.

It seems to want to give away flowers:
they are already showing; come and look at them:
it is longing for something.

It seems to want to flower:
they are already showing; come and see them:
it is longing for something.

They are already showing; come and look at them.
Let the women come to pick the fruit:
it is longing for something.

~ Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, 1364-1404, poet and Admiral of Castile, Spain

The World Was Warm and White When I Was Born

(The Roofs of Paris, by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890,
Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

To mark my birthday today, I’ve chosen one of my favorite images of Paris, the city where I was born. Van Gogh painted it three years before the installation of the Eiffel Tower in 1889.

THE WORLD WAS WARM AND WHITE WHEN I WAS BORN

The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light.
Although the whiteness was almond and was bone
In midnight’s still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite
All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known
All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.

How like a summer the years of youth have passed!
— How like the summer of 1914, in all truth! —
Patience, my soul, the truth is never known
Until the future has become the past
And then, only, when the love of truth at last
Becomes the truth of love, when both are one,
Then, then, then, Eden becomes Utopia and is surpassed:
For then the dream of knowledge and knowledge knows
Motive and joy at once wherever it goes.

~ Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), American poet and writer of short stories

After the Winter

(Irises by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890, Dutch
Post-Impressionist painter)

“In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), English poet, from his poem Locksley Hall

AFTER THE WINTER

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
And ferns that never fade.

~ Claude McKay (1889-1948), American poet and novelist, active in the Harlem Renaissance

Answer to a Child’s Question

(Child with an Orange by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890,
Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

A wonderful question. And a sensible answer.

ANSWER TO A CHILD’S QUESTION

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet, and Thrush say, “I love and I love!”
In the winter they’re silent — the wind is so strong;
What it says I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving — all come back together.
Then the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings, and for ever sings he —
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me.”

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English Romantic poet

His Alms

(Shoes by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890, Dutch
Post-Impressionist painter)

A gentleman came to our house and he told me, “There is a Hindu family with about eight children who have not eaten for a long time.” So I took some rice quickly and went to their family and I could see real hunger on the small faces of these children and yet the mother had the courage to divide the rice into two and she went out.

When she came back, I asked her, “Where did you go? What did you do?”

And she said, “They are hungry also.”

“Who are they?”

“The Muslim family next door with as many children.”

She knew that they were hungry. What struck me most was that she knew and because she knew she gave until it hurt. This is something so beautiful. This is living love. She gave until it hurt. I did not bring more rice that night because I wanted them to enjoy the joy of giving, of sharing. You should have seen the faces of those little ones. They just understood what their mother did. Their faces were brightened up with smiles. When I came in they looked hungry, they looked so miserable. But the act of their mother taught them what true love was. This is the greatness of our poor.

~ Mother Teresa (1910-1997), Albanian-born Indian Catholic nun, in Daily Readings with Mother Teresa, edited by Teresa de Bertodano

HIS ALMS

Here, here I live,
And somewhat give,
Of what I have,
To those, who crave.
Little or much,
My alms is such:
But if my deal
Of oil and meal
Shall fuller grow,
More I’ll bestow:
Meantime be it
E’en but a bit,
Or else a crumb,
The scrip* hath some.

~ Robert Herrick (1591-1674), English poet

* scrip - temporary certificate of money

The Bright Field

(Wheatfield with Rising Sun by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890, Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

“Her father had put up a swing for the younger children in the wash-house. She could hear one of them now, crying, ‘Higher! Higher!’ Except for the baby asleep in the cradle, her mother and she were alone in the room, which, on that dull day, was aglow with firelight. Her mother’s pastry board and rolling-pin still stood on a white cloth on one end of the table, and the stew for dinner, mostly composed of vegetables but very savory-smelling, simmered upon the hob. She had a sudden impulse to tell her mother how much she loved her; but in the early ’teens such feelings cannot be put into words, and all she could do was to praise the potato cake.” ~ Flora Thompson (1877-1947), Over to Candleford

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the burning bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

~ R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet

Starry Night

(Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890, Dutch
Post-Impressionist painter)

Van Gogh painted this scene from the window of his room in the mental asylum at Saint-Rémy thirteen months before his death.

At least three poets have written about this most familiar image. Each speaks from a different point of view. All empathize with the artist’s anguish.

Anne Sexton puts herself in the mind of the artist. Later, she would make the same tragic decision as van Gogh, and take her own life. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, on the other hand, stands outside the asylum and looks up at the celestial wonders. Don McLean writes an elegiac tribute to the artist. He put the verses to music, creating a hit song across the world.

To listen to McLean’s performance, accompanied by a slide show of van Gogh's paintings, click on this link (you may have to cut and paste it):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OtK_sP6_fM&feature=related


THE STARRY NIGHT

“That does not keep me from having a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”
~ Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

~ Anne Sexton (1928-1974), American poet


THE STARRY NIGHT

What laughter booms across the night sky
from the bellies of heavenly beings? Few hear it,
but sometimes the breath of heaven curls like a bard’s beard
and what has only twinkled begins to beat and throb.

Behind it all a drumbeat calls over the mountains.
The villagers think it’s thunder, those who are not asleep.
Only a few remain awake to see the starry, starry night
and witness what they can barely imagine how to tell.

Some nights the roar breaks the silence. One was there
when it happened, and saw, and tried to tell the secret,
and died young. How much of life he gave for this
we cannot know. We know only that something precious
as nard* was poured out at the foot of these hills,
the blue, the yellow bought with solitary tears.

~ Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, born 1949, American poet and essayist

(*nard - costly aromatic balsam)


VINCENT

Starry, starry night,
Paint your palette blue and gray,
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen,
They did not know how,
Perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry, starry night,
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of China blue.
Colors changing hue,
Morning fields of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand.

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen,
They did not know how,
Perhaps they'll listen now.

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true,
And when no hope was left in sight,
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night,
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget.
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes,
The silver thorn, the bloody rose
lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

And now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
They’re not listening still,
Perhaps they never will.

~ Don McLean, born 1945, American singer and songwriter

An Hour

(Trees and Undergrowth, Paris, Summer 1887, by Vincent
van Gogh, 1853-1890, Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

Czeslaw Milosz was an eloquent witness of history, who testified in his poetry to the totalitarian “isms” that plundered through his homeland of Poland in the twentieth century. He also wrote of his search, “after a day of varied activities, to feel at dawn my oneness with remembered people, despite a thought about my person separated from others.”

AN HOUR

Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees,
From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices
And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me.
They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals,
So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.

~ Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, essayist, and translator, and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature

The Stars

(Starry Night drawing by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890,
Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

I know better — but my memories of watching the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, as a youngster in Manitoba have me almost convinced that the night skies crackled as the fluorescent waves of color spun above me.

THE STARS

When night comes
I stand on the steps and listen.
Stars swarm in the yard
and I stand in the dark.
Listen, a star fell with a clang!
Don’t go out in the grass with bare feet;
my yard is full of shards.

~ Edith Södergran (1892-1923), Finnish-Swedish poet