A Clear Midnight
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.
-Walt Whitman
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
-Anonymous
The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but by a spiritual journey a journey of one inch, very humbling and peaceful by which we arrive at the ground by our own two feet, and learn to be home within ourselves.
-Wendell Berry
Now the cricket is hurrying
His song. Is there yet more spring?
Whoever loses all this, loses himself.
So much green, and the field mine!
Heaven that the eye cannot fathom:
It is love that wins you.
Don’t I deserve such a morning?
My heart earns it.
-Jorge Guillén
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.
-Archimedes
EDIT: I have received a request to remove this Robert Frost poem as it is still under copyright.
Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,–
And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul.
-Robert Browning
What lifts the heron leaning on the air
I praise without a name. A crouch, a flare,
a long stroke through the cumulus of trees,
a shaped thought at the sky – then gone. O rare!
Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees,
would have cried Father! Cry anything you please
But praise. By any name or none. But praise
the white original burst that lights
the heron on his two soft kissing kites.
When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays,
I sit by pond scums till the air recites
It’s heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.
-John Ciardi