Begone, Dull Care!

Begone, dull care!
I prithee, begone from me
Begone, dull care!
You and I shall never agree
Long time hast thou been tarrying here
And fain thou wouldst me kill
But in faith, dull care
Thou never shall have thy will.

Too much care
Will make a man turn grey
And too much care
Will turn an old man to clay
My wife shall dance and I shall sing
So merrily pass the day
For I hold it one of the wisest things
To drive dull care away.

Traditional ballad, author unknown.

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Books: John Milton

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

John Milton 1608-1674

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Love: Alphonse de Lamartine

To love for the sake of being loved is human;
but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

Alphonse de Lamartine 1790-1869

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O Dreams, O Destinations: C Day Lewis

Children look down upon the morning-grey
Tissue of mist that veils a valley’s lap:
Their fingers itch to tear it and unwrap
The flags, the roundabouts, the gala day.
They watch the spring rise inexhaustibly—
A breathing thread out of the eddied sand,
Sufficient to their day: but half their mind
Is on the sailed and glittering estuary.
Fondly we wish their mist might never break,
Knowing it hides so much that best were hidden:
We’d chain them by the spring, lest it should broaden
For them into a quicksand and a wreck.
But they must slip through our fingers like the source,
Like mist, like time that has flagged out their course.

C. Day Lewis

This is the second of a sequence of nine sonnets called ‘O Dreams O Destinations’. You can hear the poet read it himself in the You Tube video below.

Vandals In A Green And Pleasant Land?: Benvenuto Solomon

Do hikers’ feet in these our times
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And are there noisy picnickers
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And do the hordes from coach and car
Turn grassy hills to rubbish-dumps?
And were there trees and hedges once
Where leer these rows of petrol-pumps?

Bring we great store of paper bags!
Bring cartons, bottles, tons no less!
Litter, be spread! Wrappers, unfold!
Bring me more things to make a mess.

I will not cease from graceless ways,
Nor stay my devastating hand,
Until we have a dust-bin made
Of England’s green and pleasant land.

‘Benvenuto Solomon’

(Google can find no trace of this gentleman, which I presume is a nom de plume, assumed in defence against  those doughty ladies of the Women’s Institute, for whom Blake’s ‘Jerusalem‘ is their national song)

‘Vandals’ (with apologies to William Blake)

From ‘The Perfect Holiday’ by Rose Henniker Heaton

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The Family: D H Lawrence

Of late years, the family has got hold of man, and begun to destroy him. When a man is clutched by his family, his deeper social instincts and intuitions are all thwarted, he becomes a negative thing.

D H Lawrence

Assorted Articles

I suspect that here DHL does not mean mankind when he says ‘man’. This is a verbalised version of the famous Thurber cartoon where the house and the housewife are one and the same, a looming, threatening presence.

What do you think? In my view, it is a wise woman who gives her man plenty of rope….

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I Feel Pretty: West Side Story – and Adam Sandler

Jut for fun, I am putting up the parody first… Jack Nicholson persuades Adam Sandler to try and use this song for anger management.

With apologies to the original:

Personality: J B Yeats

Personality is born out of pain. It is the fire shut up in the flint.

J B Yeats 1839-1922

Letters to His Son, W B Yeats, And Others

The image of the Rorshach ink blot personality test is copyright: Kovalchuk Oleksandr via Shutterstock

Anything For A Good Cause: William James

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

William James  1842-1910

The Letters of William James Vol II

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Music: Karl Kraus

What is the Ninth Symphony compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory?

Karl Kraus 1874-1936

The image is via Wikimedia