Steve_Bamlett_blog

Thoughts Before my Seventieth Birthday on Thursday 24th October 2024: An Acrostic: ‘Does Steven Fear Being Seventy‘

Do larks ascending raise up such volume
Of song as the rich racket in his heart
Each time Steven's shaken with sonic boom
Some tolling bells of time, seem to shock-start;

Surprised, that such a sage and serious 
Timorous soul has reached an age thought wise,
Even now's stupidly delirious,
Verging on mad. Round rolling baleful eyes,
Eager his apocalyptic realm to see,
Now Steven’s nearly seventy years old.

For long leagues around, there is not a tree.
Each dry riverbed overruns with cold                                             
And anxious feeling that he’ll not feel warm,
Rough love strike again, no animal urge

Break out and make his mind to roughly form 
Each placid sea into big waves that surge
In on a beach of sleek bathers in sun.
Nothing for some moments seems to be good:
Good for nothing perhaps, lacking in fun,

Some leisure without pleasure, understood, 
Except by one, by none. Thoughts pulse with beats;
Variously they speed up and then slow,
Each thick throb a sordid thing he meets -
Next beats him up. Cannot an old man grow
The wings he needs to transcend darker thoughts?
Yet some Steve’s are angels by all reports.

_____________________________

As always I lean heavily on poets I love, such as:

The Lark Ascending by George Meredith

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discern’d
An ecstasy to music turn’d,
Impell’d by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine;
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flush’d to white with shivers wet;
And such the water-spirit’s chime
On mountain heights in morning’s prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

John Donne’s Sermons upon Emergent Occasions

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.[22] [Donne's original spelling and punctuation]

Paradise Lost Book 1 By John Milton

Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe
Confounded though immortal: But his doom
Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
That witness’d huge affliction and dismay
Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:
At once as far as Angels kenn he views
The dismal Situation waste and wilde,
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar’d
For those rebellious, here their Prison ordain’d
In utter darkness, and their portion set
As far remov’d from God and light of Heav’n
As from the Center thrice to th’ utmost Pole.

Some thoughts arose from the content of this paragraph:

From David Mikics (1999) ‘Review: [Untitled]: Reviewed Work: Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England by  Richard Mallette’ in Modern Philology Vol. 97, No. 2 (Nov., 1999), pp. 252-255 (4 pages)