Once I Heard You




Once, I heard You
Insisting with the Moon to bring the light;
Once I heard You
With that light, a voice so clearly true
All Stars then stopped their turns at just how bright
The World beneath was made to seem that night.



(c) Intrepid Dreamer Poetry















Landscape with Stars


Henri-Edmond Cross
(Henri-Edmond Delacroix 1856–1910)

“You do not see with the lens of the eye. You see through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.”



John Ruskin
(1819-1900), English art critic.



The Grand Canal, Venice
John Ruskin

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage



[I stood in Venice]
George Gordon Byron



I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O’er the far times, when many a subject land
Looked to the wingéd Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!



She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:
And such she was–her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers:
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased.



In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone–but Beauty still is here;
States fall, arts fade–but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

The Piazzetta, Venice

JMW Turner
Photograph: National Gallery of Scotland

Rubaiyat



by Omar Khayyam
Trans by Edward Fitzgerald






LXXI.



The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

















** Lone Dove image from ArtPassions’ Dulac gallery