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​To a Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
 
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
 
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
 
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
 
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
 
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd.
 
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
 
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
 
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:
 
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aëreal hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:
 
Like a rose embower'd
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflower'd,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:
 
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awaken'd flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
 
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
 
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match'd with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
 
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
 
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
 
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
 
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
 
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
 
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
 
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
​

"I made a firm decision that I would not be influenced by the opinions of others, whether positive or negative, because this would result in a lack of freedom for me as a writer.
​
.... Who is my audience? My answer to that is that it has to be that I am the first audience.

.... The second audience , the one unknown to me, is whoever will read.

.... Reviews, analyses, critiques, these are not written for me".

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQWwprjePFU   {please copy and paste for a treat}

artists rule!!!!!!!!

Beautiful ~ Stjepan, orchestra, choir 

'The path they cut was three or four times wider than the tracks themselves, and over the years it filled itself with wildflowers and grasses - fireweed and milkweed, goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace, harebell and goat's beard - so I walked along the rails each morning as if walking through a meadow. By September everything was in seed. The seed heads shook their contents over you as you passed and the burrs clung to your clothes. Some days thousands of milkweed pods burst open together, triggered by the heat of he sun; thousands and thousands of small silent explosions repeating themselves in salvos down the miles of tracks. On those days I walked through clouds of silken down drifting about like smoke in the morning breeze.

I passed through all this as if I was sleepwalking. I was conscious of it but I did not really see it. At school it was the same; Miss Carrington would lecture us on arithmetic or grammar or history or geography, and I would sit, politely attentive, and not take in a single word. I would be watching the dust motes, perhaps, as they hung in the broad bands of sunlight that slanted through the classroom windows"

"You don't know, my Charley, that right down there, in the little valley, I fished for trout with your namesake, my Uncle Charley. And over there - see where I'm pointing - my mother shot a wildcat. Straight down there, forty miles away, our family rank was - old starvation ranch. Can you see that darker place down there. Well that's a tiny canyon with a clear lovely stream bordered with wild azaleas and fringed with big oaks. And on one of those oaks my father burned his name with a hot iron together with the name of the girl he loved. In the long years the bark grew over the burn and covered it..... In spring , Charley, when the valley is carpeted with blue lupines like a flowery sea, there's the smell of heaven up here, the smell of heaven."

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

"After you have one pitch figured out, you work on another. Eventually you put together a complete series of pitches to make a collective, massive whole"

"The discovery of a mole-sized nubbin of rock and a barely visible hairline fracture had filled me with so much energy that I knew  that I had seen a path forward for the next year. If the secret to happiness was the ability to find joy in small things that have been in front of you the entire time, then the Dawn Wall was truly the Zen-master teacher"

"Alex simply doesn't waste any energy worrying about things he can't control. Some might call this delusion, or false optimism. Some might go so far to call it reckless. Alex is the only person who I have climbed with who just calls it reality. We analysed the situations as we encountered them. Start at the beginning; see what happens. And, while we are at it we might as well have some fun"