Glance In The Reliquary; Dry Pastels. More Ascender’s Dry Pastels. Purchase a small print.

~~~

And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

To My Mother by Wendell Berry

~~~

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

There Will Come Soft Rains By Sara Teasdale

The imagery in the poem is dreamlike; the idiosyncratic use of the adjective ’shimmering’ in the second line to describe sound rather than light, and the phrase ‘wild plum trees in tremulous white’ makes the image seem ambiguous and hard to imagine, as plum trees are not white (plum tree blossoms are however white, so it seems rather likely that this refers to a blooming plum tree in spring) and ‘tremulous’ suggests a kind of shaking movement which we would not normally associate with trees (probably tremulous is used in a figurative manner here, as for example ‘a tremor of excitement went through the audience’, so it is simply used to describe a feeling associated with the vision of a plum tree in full bloom).

The use of metaphor in the poem to further illustrate the image of the robins wearing ‘their feathery fire’ implies the idea not just of the colour of the feathers but also how warm they keep the birds. The robins are also personified; their birdsong is described as ‘whims’, which contrasts them with the swallows whose appearance, despite the unusual way their sound is described, is far more naturalistic. This draws attention to them and perhaps suggests they are emblematic of something more than birds which have outlived humanity; they are perhaps a symbol of the leaders who have led humanity to its destruction. The poet also places them on a fence rather than a more organic perch, further connecting them with humans rather than the natural world. Some have suggested substituting on a low fence-wire with over a glowing myre to eliminate this connotation.

The poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” from her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow inspired and featured in a famous short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury.

Little Robin Redbreast; Dry Pastel. Purchase a small print.

Eye Opening For Rose; Dry Pastels.More Ascender’s Dry Pastels. Print Purchase.

~~~

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind
A shadow fleeting; she is never plain.
She is a visitor who leaves behind
The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

Beauty Is Ever to the Lonely Mind by Robert Nathan

Many of Nathan’s stories seem to have an other-worldly air about them, though he was never classed as a writer of science fiction as much as a writer of fantasy. In 1940, he wrote his most successful book, Portrait of Jennie, about a Depression-era artist and the woman he is painting, who is slipping through time.

“Time was when Robert Nathan toyed gently and amiably with his congenital melancholia. Always a writer who preferred fantasy to strict realism, he once put his deepest convictions into the mouths of dancing dogs, unwed mice and such philosophical creatures as Isaiah, the stoic horse of The Woodcutter’s House. When he was not bringing wisdom out of the mouths of baby tumblebugs and suckling pigs, he was engaged in mild satires on religion (The Bishop’s Wife, There Is Another Heaven). But Depression, if it did not quite succeed in bringing him down to solid earth, at least caused him to desert the seraphim and the kingdom of talking brutes. His first real commercial success, One More Spring, followed the fortunes of a group of indigent outcasts who sought shelter in a street cleaner’s tool shed in Central Park. Still in the realm of fantasy, this rueful little fable cut close enough to the essence of lean-year reality to please those who detest animals that behave like humans… (read more at Time)

Pink Swallow; Dry Pastels. More Ascender’s Dry Pastels. Purchase Print.

~~~

Birds.

Oh yes, you admire our plumage; though whether you commonly recognise in the black of the crow a variety of tint to rival the display of the rainbow rosella I take leave to doubt. Not that it is a question of sensitivity or its lack, but rather that your sensitivities lean to the subtractive: that you can comfortably separate colour from function, function from aspiration. You can, in a word, admire us when we are dead; and that is something with which we have difficulty.

Difficulty. It is not astonishing when our origins differ so sharply. Our first cells divide and multiply not swaddled in the blood-throb of a gently clenched womb but poised within a perfect hard calcium geometry, pre-existent in its dimensions, pale as the sky and seemingly as remote: a bounded universe which, rather than its growing to accommodate our growth, we find ourselves inexorably filling until only by an act of violence, violence of beak and claw, can we miraculously reverse that primal geometry to find ourselves on the outside of the egg of the world. That is why we constantly spread our wings towards the unreachable heavens: for what is heaven if not the pre-natal projected into the unattainable? It is also, perhaps, why every transition in our lives, indeed it must seem to you our every act, is marked by that violence, that abruptness, that property of the irrevocable. Once we have taken courage to launch ourselves from the nest, we never return to it. … (full text)

by Dai Vaughan. The Dai Vaughan’s collection, Germs, has not yet found a publisher. His two novels, The Cloud Chamber and Moritur, are published by Quartet and his twelve essays, For Documentary, by the University of California Press.