Jacobs Pillow, and Pillar
I recently stumbled across this poem and found it very interesting. Henry Vaugha was a Welsh physician and metaphysical poet. From Wikipedia:
Vaughan took his literary inspiration from his native environment and chose the descriptive name “Silurist,” derived from his homage to the Silures, the Celtic tribe of pre-Roman south Wales which strongly resisted the Romans. This name is a reflection of the deep love Vaughan felt towards the Welsh mountains of his home in what is now part of the Brecon Beacons National Park and the River Usk valley where he spent most of his early life and professional life.
…The period shortly preceding the publication of Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans marked an important period of his life. Certain indications in the first volume and explicit statements made in the preface to the second volume of Silex Scintillans suggest that Vaughan suffered a prolonged sickness that inflicted much pain. Vaughan interprets this experience to be an encounter with death and a wake-up call to his “misspent youth”. Vaughan believes he is spared to make amends and start a new course not only in his life but in the literature he would produce. Vaughan himself describes his previous work as foul and a contribution to “corrupt literature”. Perhaps the most notable mark of Vaughan’s conversion is how much it is credited to George Herbert. Vaughan claims that he is the least of Herbert’s many “pious converts”. It is during this period of Vaughan’s life, around 1650, that he adopts the saying “moriendo, revixi”, meaning “by dying, I gain new life”
From Silex Scintillans:
A Gift from the Sea
A Gift from the Sea, a photo by Acts of Creativity on Flickr.
Sometimes I picture Posiden deep under the ocean, resting on a throne of faded red and white Coleman ice chests.
Shiny lures are placed throughout the room, their bright colors preserved as they sit on pedastals like relics from a museum.
Strings of cowrie shell necklaces and silver watches loop and dangle, cascading down the walls.
A chandiler of silverware spins over his head.
In this setting, the King of the Sea isn’t quite as intimidating as others might presume.
Can you picture him there, too?
His eyes shaded as he scans the room, his white hair captured beneath a Calcutta hat.
His scaled fins curled into a lone Panama Jack flip-flop.
His fingers adorned with the tarnished metal rings from keychains lost overboard so long ago.
I wonder if his coral castle smells like Banana Boat?
Happy October, Everyone!
I’m still here, plugging away. I’ve got a major project that I’ve been working on, something that is sucking up all my free time. It’s a pretty exciting project, but not something associated with anything I’ve ever spoken about here before.
Anyway, I wanted to come by my site and post something today because, well October is my FAVORITE month! My two oldest were both born in October (OCT 16 of 1995 and OCT 16 of 1997) and I am a HUGE Halloween fan. I’m actually working on a Halloween blog theme…but that’s another story..lol
But for now, I’ll just leave you with a poem:
It Was One of Those Fine October Days
It was one of those fine October days
free from summer’s heat and haze
but not yet gripped by autumn chill.
It was one of those fine October days
when the sky’s so clear
you can see the moon
through the atmosphere
at midday.
It was one of those fine October days
when the trees sport yellow and red
instead of everyday summer green.
It was one of those fine October days
when one draws a deep breath
and is grateful
to be resident on Earth.
Richard Greene