quoted

You’re the driver

You know the Model of your Car.
You know just what its powers are.
You treat it with a deal of care,
Nor tax it more than it will bear.
But as to self — that’s different.
Your mechanism may be bent,
Your carburetor gone to grass,
Your engine just a rusty mass.
Your wheels may wobble and your cogs
Be handed over to the dogs,
And on you skip, and skid, and slide,
Without a thought of things inside.
What fools indeed we mortals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne’er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!

—John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922), “Motors,” The Cheery Way: A Bit of Verse For Every Day, 1920

An Explanation

You need not think
It’s vanity that makes me prink,
And take much care
To keep myself both fit and fair.
‘Tis not false pride or vain conceit
That keeps me trying to be neat,
But just the plain and simple truth
That I have held to since my youth
That this old frame in which I dwell
Is nothing more than the hotel
In which my Soul and Hopes must stay
Until I’m called to move away,
And for their dwelling-place I plan
To give them quite the best I can,
And keep the place up spick and span.

—John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922), “An Explanation,” The Cheery Way: A Bit of Verse For Every Day, 1920

Leaden Echo & Golden Echo

THE LEADEN ECHO

How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep

Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,… from vanishing away?

Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep,

Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?

No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none,

Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,

Do what you may do, what, do what you may,

And wisdom is early to despair:

Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done

To keep at bay

Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,

Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;

So be beginning, be beginning to despair.

O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:

Be beginning to despair, to despair,

Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

         Spare!

There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);

Only not within seeing of the sun,

Not within the singeing of the strong sun,

Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,

Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,

One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,

Where whatever ’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,

Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet

Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,

The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,

Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth

To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,

Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—

Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,

And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver

Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.

See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair

Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould

Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,

This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold

What while we, while we slumbered.

O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,

When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,

Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept

Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder

A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—

Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes, yonder, yonder,

Yonder.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” maidens’ song from the unfinished tragedy St. Winefred’s Well, in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, now first published, edited and with notes by Robert Bridges, 1918

That dreadful moment

“Growing old… that dreadful moment when we first realize that we are ourselves no longer young. It is an extraordinary moment: pain, denial, rebellion, hopelessness. It arrives in many different ways. It used to come with spectacles — but nowadays the babe wears spectacles; sometimes it creeps upon us with a little stiffening of the joints; one does not run upstairs quite as lightly as one did. It may even reveal itself in the impatience that is felt because people do not speak quite as distinctly as they should — an impatience to which the younger generation rudely refers as deafness. These are gradual intimations that we are not as young as we were.

“There are abrupt ones — especially there is the glance into the mirror some morning, after a sleepless night. Probably every woman over forty-five has known the start of astonishment and dismay that comes with that glance… The woman who has had this slight shock before breakfast glances at her looking-glass many times that day, and always with a growing comfort, for as the day passes things change; her face is more alert, her eyes brighten, her double chin is, somehow, firmer. No; it was only fatigue from a bad night; not age, oh no!”

—Margaret Deland, “The Wickedness of Growing Old,” 1905

Real life

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin — real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. I was always rolling these stones from my grave.”

—Bette Howland, W-3, 1974

An Artist’s Sorrows

As the nightingale went home in the morning and hung his golden harp on the peg, he said in a bitter tone — ’Let them be sure of this, I will not sing again.’

And his wife came up to him with chirpings and hoppings to soothe him:  but nothing availed; it was clear to all that he was bitterly affronted.

Every night he went out and sang his loves to the rose; the night air throbbed and quivered to the sound.

His wife sat at home, and was contented if he was happy; moreover, she thought that, however his love raged, no harm could possibly come of it.

And now at her entreaty he told her of his sorrows, and how deeply he was wounded by what had passed.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! the rose opened her leaves; it seemed to me that the moon rose earlier than her wont.

‘All things listened — all things near and far off listened, save only the youth and maiden who were close to me.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! but they only turned and whispered to each other…’

—V. A. R., “An Artist’s Sorrows,” from the Kamschatskan, Poems, 1867

Blind cheerfulism

“At any rate, I remain cheerful — if only through some inner necessity. Cheerfulness will prevail. I believe it in my bones… While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he was sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.”

—H. G. Wells, Apropos of Dolores, 1938

So tired!

“I have been awfully busy… And it tires me so that generally I go to bed again the next minute after I get up:  and sometimes I go to bed again a minute before  I get up!  Did you ever hear of any one being so tired as that ?”

—Lewis Carroll, 1879

Now, in a Later Spring

Once, long ago, I heard an old man say,
      “Two pounds of sorrow is the price you pay
      For every pound of bliss.”
But I was young and such a reckoning
      Seemed far too steep; now, in a later spring,
      I’d gladly offer far, far more than this.

—Alice Mackenzie Swaim, “Now, in a Later Spring,” Crickets Are Crying Autumn, 1960