Where reality is poetry and
Stars are arbiters, where gates of splendour
Open to admit the dawn, and golden
Pillars are the living earth’s foundation,
There I live, in silent exultation.
Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
Aristotle is worth reading. The Poetics is no exception even though is fragmentary nature means that there is much that is lost to us. The style, in fact, resembles nothing so much as a speaker’s notes. But there is much to be gained from the man who was known for many years simply as The Philosopher.
Read more on Aristotle on homiletics and Biblical criticism…
Grenville Kleiser is a name that will doubtless continue to be revered in many years time. His pretensions are apparent in his bibliography (here considerably abbreviated): Business Building and Speech Efficiency; Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases: A Practical Handbook Of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary, Commercial, Conversational, And Oratorical Terms, For The Embellishment Of Speech And Literature, And The Improvement Of The Vocabulary Of Those Persons Who Read, Write, And Speak English; How to Build Mental Power; How to Develop Power and Personality in Speaking; How to Develop Self Confidence in Speech and Manner; Make Your Life Worth Living; Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study; Talks on Talking; Talking for Results; The Training of a Public Speaker; and Training for Power and Leadership.
Tiara 2
Maybe the sun is governor of day
And prince of all his light-sprung satellites,
In bright blue skies, at noon, in golden crown
But darken blue to azure, light to dark
And place that radiance in a window frame
And you will see what I saw Sunday night.
Cycle 0
Through the silence and the night the troublous song
Is sung by whirring wheel and tender wind,
The crisp refrain of trodden sons of trees
That carpet, colourful, the path to spring.
As cinder smoke swirls in the breeze
And throws the journeyman in delirium,
Caressing boughs reach dawn through misty night
And dampen all to silence in the fall.
As he dreamt, it seemed he saw a kingdom mighty in expanse, that stretched across the space of the lands to the uttermost end of the world. The king of that place was puissant of will and deed, and greatly was given to the right dividing of justice. Beside the waters of his kingdom he bestirred himself to walk one day, and he saw the most royal of all birds coming forth from the ocean: a gryphon white as wrung darkness. He loved the gryphon and called it his own. He would not suffer to pen its wildness, but came to the dark cliffs beside the stormy sea to see her throw herself across the sky. And he fashioned a diamond for himself that the flight of the bird that he might always see in the limpid stone her fit marvellous beauty. The jewel was wrought with a most wondrous magic, for the gryphon could draw upon its brightness and shine like unto a star; or again, bind itself to the stone and gaze upon the visage of the king. So the king presented the stone as a royal gift to the gryphon, whom he loved.
The Man continued on his way in the land of Aram. Wandering intently across a broad flat plain the colour of the sky, at last he arrived beside a stream where another cast his nets.
Now it so happened that in the land of Aram there lived a man whose name was unknown. From his earliest years he lived in agony, unable to know himself yet acquainted with every other. Even those that he called friends were unable to admit his existence for one reason alone: no description could be pinned to his frame.
The red of newest, maiden mountains parts
For purple fragrance in the sleepy sky,
For time has lost its deepest urge, and thinks,
And thinks, amid the golden light that slips
From deepest rift in cloud-enfolded sky.
“Is it time?”
Adim leaned back against the hard veins of the tree. “No,” he said slowly, feeling the life pulsing through the tree as he did so. He looked up briefly, into the golden-green eyes of the Watcher. “I don’t think it is.” Silently, the sunlight glowed through the leaves that intertwined over their heads. There was utter stillness here, in the clearing in the heart of the most ancient forest in Barac.
