From THE TEMPEST

John Gielgud as Prospero

Act IV, Scene 1

Be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare

1564-1616

W. Raleigh commented in his book Shakespeare (1907) that "The Tempest was probably his last play - in the sense, at least, that he designed it for his farewell to the stage. The thought which occurs at once to almost every reader of the play, that Prospero resembles Shakespeare himself, can hardly have been absent from the mind of the author   ...   In all the works of Shakespeare there is nothing more like himself than those quiet words of parting  -  'Be cheerful, sir; our revels now are ended."

TO MUSIC

 

Jules-Alexandre Grün (1868 - 1934) 






Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
stillness of pictures. You speech, where speeches
end. You time,
vertically poised on the courses of vanishing hearts.

Feelings for what? Oh, you transformation
of feelings into  . . . .  audible landscape1
You stranger: Music. Space that's outgrown us,
heart-space. innermost ours,
that, passing our limits, outsurges, -
holiest parting:
where what is within surrounds us
as practised horizon, as other
side of the air,
pure,
gigantic,
no longer lived in.


Rainer Maria Rilke
1875-1926

(The property of Frau Hanna Wolff)

From the uncollected poems of 1906 to1926

AMERGIN

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am a beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am a wild boar in valour,

I am a salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of the lance in battle,

I am the God who creates in the head the fire.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

Anonymous

AND BEAUTY CAME LIKE THE SETTING SUN

Photograph by David Clapp

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away . . . O, but everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing

will never be done.

Siegfried Sassoon

1886-1967

THE FOUNTAIN

Don't say, don't say there is no water

to solace the dryness at our hearts.

I have seen

the fountain springing out of the rock wall

and you drinking there. And I too

before your eyes

found footholds and climbed

to drink the cool water.

The woman of that place, shading her eyes,

frowned as she watched - but not because

she grudged the water,

only because she was waiting

to see we drank our fill and were

refreshed.

Don't say, don't say there is no water.

That fountain is there among its scalloped

green and grey stones,

it is still there and always there

with its quiet song amd strange power

to spring in us,

up and out through the rock.

Denise Levertov

1923-1997

JUNE

Dried up old cactus

   yellowing in several limbs

sitting on my kitchen window

   I'd given you up for dead

but you've done it again overnight

   with a tasselled trumpet flower

and a monstrous blare of red!

   So it's June, June again, hot sun

birdsong and dry air;

   we remember the desert

and the cities where grass is rare.

   Here by the willow-green river

we lie awake in the terrace

   because it's June, June again;

nobody wants to sleep

   when we can rise through the beech trees

unknown and unpoliced

   unprotected veterans

abandoning our chores

   to sail out this month in nightgowns

as red and bold as yours;

   because it's June, June again.

Morning will bring birdsong

   but we've learnt on our bodies

how each Summer day is won

   from soil, the old clay soil

   and that long, cold kingdom.

Elaine Feinstein

contemporary

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manner of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

1572-1631