When Larry notices the garden

you know it has to be spectacular. Mostly, he doesn’t pay any attention to it except to ask for a handful of herbs or spinach. Right now, though, after the rainy winter and a few weeks of sun, it is so dazzling that it can’t be ignored.


 

 

 

 

 

The camera on the iPhone really doesn’t do it justice. Walking out in the morning is a glimpse of paradise. This poem comes to mind:

God’s Grandure

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
xxIt will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
xxIt gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
xxAnd all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
xxAnd wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
xxThere lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
xxOh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
xxWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

If you are interested in form, this is an Italian sonnet, 4-4, 3-3, about which Robert Hass says in A Little Book on Form:

“The Italian sonnet is Sicilian in origin. It is said to have been invented at the court of Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily. and patronized poets writing in Sicilian, Provencal, Arabic, and Greek. Among them was Giacomo da Lentini…(who) supposedly hit upon the sonnet some time around 1222-1225 by adding to a pair of quatrains a pair of triplet stanzas from a Sicilian folk song form…”

This book is a must have for any serious poet.

So much for your morning lesson!

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