General Chat

Dafydd y Garreg Wen (David of the White Rock) is a traditional Welsh air and folk song.
David Owen the famous blind harpist and composer. Tradition has it that as he lay on hi death bed he called for his harp and composed the haunting air. The words were added nearly a hundred years lated by the poet John Ceiriog Hughes.

Bring me my harp, was David's sad sigh
I would play one more tune before I die.

Help me, dear wife, put the hands to the strings,
I wish my loved ones the blessing God brings.

Last night an angel called with heaven's breath;
David, play and come through the gates of death!
I wish my loved ones the blessing God brings.

for the Welsh speakers among your:

Cariwch medd Dafydd, fy nhelyn i mi,
Ceisiaf cyn marw roi ton arni hi
Codwch fy nwylo i gyredd y tant:
Duw a'ch bendithio fy ngweddw a'm plant

Neithiwr mi glywais lais angel felhyn
Dafydd, tyrd adref, a chwarae trwy'r glyn!

Delyn fy mebyd, ffarwel i dy dant!
Duw a'ch bendithio fy ngweddw a'm plant.

to Spanisheyes,
one for you on PM

now are you ready for part 2?
only I'm ready to go to bed.
I hope it makes you smile.

Today is looking very dark indeed, The sky is almost black and the rain is heavy, and now the thunder and lightening has started so may not be on the comp for long.
I thought that these different poems about March where rather beautiful. Hope you like them

"The air is like a butterfly
With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
And sings."
- Joyce Kilmer, Spring



"The afternoon is bright,
with spring in the air,
a mild March afternoon,
with the breath of April stirring,
I am alone in the quiet patio
looking for some old untried illusion -
some shadow on the whiteness of the wall
some memory asleep
on the stone rim of the fountain,
perhaps in the air
the light swish of some trailing gown."
- Antonio Machado, 1875-1939
Selected Poems, #3, Translated by Alan S. Trueblood



"Each leaf,
each blade of grass
vies for attention.

Even weeds
carry tiny blossoms
to astonish us."
- Marianne Poloskey, Sunday in Spring



"March is a month of considerable frustration - it is so near spring and yet across a great deal of the country the weather is still so violent and changeable that outdoor activity in our yards seems light years away."
- Thalassa Cruso

Plus a short piece about" March"

"The word 'March' comes from the Roman 'Martius'. This was originally the first month of the Roman calendar and was named after Mars, the god of war. March was the beginning of our calendar year. We changed to the 'New Style' or 'Gregorian calendar in 1752, and it is only since then when we the year began on 1st January. The Anglo-Saxons called the month Hlyd monath which means Stormy month, or Hraed monath which means Rugged month. All through Lent the traditional games played are marbles and skipping. The games were stopped on the stroke of twelve noon on Good Friday, which in some places was called Marble Day or Long Rope Day. The game of marbles has been played for hundreds of years and some historians say that it might have been started by rolling eggs. In the past, round stones, hazelnuts, round balls of baked clay and even cherry stones have been used."

Just found this thread. Two to share with you all

The first comes from a Native American Prayer

I give you this one thought to keep
I am with you still- I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the mornings hush
I am the sweet uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circled flight
I am the soft stars that shine at night
Do not think of me as gone -
I am with you in each new dawn.

I wish I had known this one when my son 23 yrs passed away nearly ten years ago.. it gives a great deal of comfort.

The other one is a little rhymme which was on a very old picture that hung on my bedroom wall when I was very small, it was of a cute dog leaning up against a chair as if in prayer and it goes like this

Oh, mistress mine remember me,
You'll soon be going out I see
I will not bark I will not stray,
I'll stay beside you all the way.
And oh I will be very good,
Just like a model doggy should.

I've never forgotten that one, who wrote it who knows

Greenfingers welcome to this thread and I hope that you enjoy reading, sharing and writing the various postings.

I will write the first of your pieces on a suitable card to give to our friends who have very recently lost a son aged 30.
I look forward to reading more favourites or items you have written

To everyone else I hope you are enjoying your day. It is a very wet day here in my part of spain.

Spanish eyes, glad that my first poem will be of use, give my love to your friends and tell them it does get easier, but they are always in one place that is important... your heart.

Yes, I am sure I will love being part of this thread.

On a light hearted note and for those who think golf is a useless game I give you by Mark Twain

Golf is a good walk ruined.

He also said

That the worst winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco.

One of my favourite places, and yes the weather can be unpredictable but is a great place.

Georgina
waiting for part two, please.
Greenfingers, delight in the Mark Twain quote, if I had read this a few years ago would not have botheerd buying the whole outfit, booked lessons and after the third lesson new it wasn't for me. Gave everything away. !!
Now I loved San Francisco I have been there several times when I was married to someone else.Now OH of 18 years this July hates traveling he tells me he has got everything he needs where he is. Always says he doesn't mind if I go away with my sister or friends but I do not do so. I was fortunate to travel to wonderful places in previous life and enjoy the memories.

The stomr here is still going on although there are some intervals now and then suddenly the rain comes down and the lightening starts again and my dogs hate it!! Must see if i can find a poem about the rain!

This poem was given to me by my granddaughter when I was visiting and we had a storm.

When a storm begins in the clouds,
It sometimes may look frightening.
You see a quick electrical spark—
Flash! goes the lightning!

Long and thin and streaky and fast,
Its glow is oh so brightening.
Watch for the electric spark—
Flash! goes the lightning!

When a storm begins in the clouds,
It truly is a wonder.
You hear a rumble loud in the sky—
Clap! goes the thunder!

Lightning bolts are heating the air,
Over clouds and under.
When the air expands enough—
Clap! goes the thunder!

nudge

spanisheyes, part 2 has been sent.

Death bed quote from Oscar Wilde.....


Either that wallpaper goes or I do !


Spike Milligan apparently said

i told them I was ill !!

Was it Voltaire? who, on his death bed was urged by a priest to renounce the devil and all his works, replied, 'that this was no time to be making enemies'!!

Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy - “If you're not enjoying your work, you should either change your attitude, or change your job.”

I should have remembered this last September, maybe then I would not ve become so umwell.

Spanisheyes, I hope you are ok. I love the poem about the storm.

Greenfingers, the Native American prayer is wonderful. I'm so sorry to hear about your son. Also I too agree with Mark Twain about a 'good walk ruined. I have only visited San Francisco once but I loved it, fabulous place.

Thanks welshbird201, my son had Cystic Fibrosis,and he was wonderful, everyone loved him, he was a jewel..


A short poem by Christina Rossetti, I love her work

Hope is like a harbell, trembling from its birth
Love is like a rose the joy of all the earth.
Faith is like a lily lifted high and white,
Love is like a lovely rose the worlds delight.
Harebells and sweet lillies show a thornless growth,
But the rose with all its thorns excels them both.

I also think that Christina wrote beautiful poems. her life history is also very interesting.

Christina (Georgina) Rossetti (1830-1894) - Pseydonym Ellen Alleyne

One of the most important of English woman poets, who was the sister of the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a member of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement. 'A Birthday,' 'When I Am Dead,' and 'Up-Hill' are probably Rossetti's best-known single works. After a serious illness in 1874, she rarely received visitors or went outside her home. Her favorite themes were unhappy love, death, and premature resignation. Especially her later works deal with somber religious feelings.

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
(from 'Up-Hill', 1861)

Christina Rossetti was born in London, one of four children of Italian parents. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), professor of Italian at King's College from 1831. He resigned in 1845 because of blindness. All the four children in the family became writers, Dante Gabriel also gained fame as a painter. Christina was educated at home by her mother, Frances Polidori, a former governess, an Anglican of devout evangelical bent. She shared her parents' interest in poetry and was portrayed in the paintings and drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites. Christina was the model for his brother's picture The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), which was the first picture to be signed P.R.B. Jan Marsh has proposed in her biography Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life (1995) that Christina was sexually abused by her father, but "perhaps like many abuse victims she banished the knowledge from conscious memory." However, this kind of speculative claims become highly popular in biographies in the 1990s.

part 2 re Christina Rossettii

Rossetti's first verses were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which was founded by her brother William Michael and his friends. When the family was in a financial trouble, she helped her mother to keep a school at Frome, Somerset. The school was not a success, and they returned in 1854 to London. Except for two brief visits abroad, she lived with the mother all her life.

Rossetti's deeply religious temperament left its marks on her writing. She was a devout High Anglican, much influenced by the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement. Rossetti broke engagement to the artist James Collison, an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, when he joined the Roman Catholic church. She also rejected Charles Bagot Cayley for religious reasons.

By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder, had made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a governess. Rossetti's illness restricted her social life, but she continued to write sonnets and ballads. Especially she was interested the apocalyptic books, and such religious writers as Augustine and Thomas à Kempis. She also admired George Herbert and John Donne. Among her later works are A PAGEANT AND OTHER POEMS (1881), and THE FACE OF THE DEEP (1892). She was considered a possible successor to Alfred Tennyson as poet laureate. To accept the challenge, she wrote a royal elegy. However, Alfred Austin was appointed poet laureate in 1896. Rossetti developed a fatal cancer in 1891, and died in London on December 29, 1894.

In 'After Death', which she wrote in 1849, the poet-speaker lays on a bed, with a shroud on her face, observing the surroundings before the burial. "He did not love me living; but once dead / He pitied me; and very sweet it is / To know he still is warm tho' I am cold." The theme of death appears next year also in her brother's poem 'My Sister's Sleep', (1850), in which death visits a family on a Christmas Eve. Rossetti's best-known work, GOBLIN MARKET AND OTHER POEMS, was published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant voice in Victorian poetry. The title poem is a cryptic fairy-tale and tells the story of two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who are tempted the eat the fruit of the goblin men. After eating the fruit, Laura cannot see the goblins. Lizzie, whose refusal have angered the goblins, is attacked by them, and she saves her sister in an act of sacrifice. Laura, longing to taste again the fruit, licks the juices with which Lizzie is covered. "For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather." THE PRICE'S PROGRESS, AND OTHER POEMS, appeared in 1866. SING SONG. A NURSERY RHYME BOOK was illustrated by Arthur Hughes in 1872. Rossetti also wrote religious prose works, such as SEEK AND FIND (1879), CALLED TO BE SAINTS (1881) and THE FACE OF THE DEEP (1892).

Part three

Rossetti's brother William Michael edited her complete works in 1904. He once said that "Christina's habits of composing were eminently of the spontaneous kind. I question her having ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write something or other, and then, after thinking out a subject, having proceeded to treat it in regular spells of work. Instead of this, something impelled her feelings, or "came into her head," and her hand obeyed the dictation. I suppose she scribbled lines off rapidly enough, and afterwards took whatever amount of pains she deemed requisite for keeping them in right form and expression." Rossetti's work has suffered from reductive interpretations, but she is increasingly being reconsidered as a major Victorian poet. Typical for her poems was song like use words and short, irregularly rhymed lines.

A birthday

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose heart is in a watered shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That Paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this.

Some quotes to read, if you enjoy quotes that is. I will not be on here again today as we have visitors, will be back tomorrow
Enjoy your day everyone.


A clever man commits no minor blunders.

How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

It’s good to be clever, but not to show it.

God is clever, but not dishonest.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties.

They have to be clever, cunning, imaginative, dogged and wily, whereas society merely has to lean its weight a little.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

always loved this by Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very very like me from his heels up to his head,
And I see him jump before me when I jump into my bed