Things We Love

Through the forest?

Exactly! That`s my preference, too. Those stupid humans can be so irritating.
PS. Said by a monkey.


No, I hate seeing how those poor humans are so ruthlessly exploited in the circus. Like monkeys in the past.

Human circus should be abolished!!! It is inhumane! Simple.

No. There are a couple of coastal paths near where I live and I usually walk in the early morning to avoid people. I also go to Dartmoor National Park quite often and I tend to pick the more remote areas to walk in:

nationalparks.uk/park/dartmoor/

A couple of pics from Dartmoor:

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  Meldon reservoir, Dartmoor
  
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  West Mill Tor and Yes Tor, Dartmoor
  

As long as there are no werewolves or Nessie there, everything is fine.

Dartmoor was the setting for The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle ( featuring Sherlock Holmes )

You live near this place? You're lucky, it looks wonderful.

It's about 80 miles away but I visit quite often. It is a wonderful place with very diverse scenery.

nationalparks.uk/park/dartmoor/

"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings."

@Atch

Nice poem. Who wrote it?

The "veils of the morning" phrase is a little off, but it doesn't ruin the poem.


Looks wonderful.

William Butler Yeats.

literatura.wywrota.pl/wiersz-klasyka/44782-william-butler-yeats-the-lake-isle-of-innisfree.html

ksiegarnia-armoryka.pl/autor/william-butler-yeats

I'll be darned.

I went through a period where I read a bunch of poetry, but never much Yeats. I might have to get better acquainted with him.

His poetry is lovely. We did a lot of it in secondary school. My mother's favourite was 'The Cloths of Heaven' - she used to quote it in the long, long twilight of Irish summer evenings :)

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light"

I'll let you discover the rest of it for yourself :)

@Atch

That is lovely.

I remember his Second Coming. That is not so lovely. 🙂

What other poets you like?

Just read it. I wonder if he wrote that for his wife or children. Desiring to give one the inherent good, yet recognizing the limits of his humanity to give such. But, still determined to provide the one(s) he loves with the good, however imperfect...and the expectation of his beloved to be a good steward of the imperfect good he gives.

Beautiful!

He wrote it for Maude Gonne, whom he pursued unsuccessfully for years. He wrote two poems for his children, one for his son and one for his daughter but he wasn't that interested in his children I think. Apparently he once encountered one of them in the hallway of their home, regarded the child with a puzzled air and enquired 'whose child are you?' 😂 I think that might have been his son Michael who was a well known figure in Dublin musical circles.

Btw. you have quite a poetic turn of speech there yourself in your analysis!

I like Byron.

'She walks in beauty
Like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that's best of light and dark
Meet in her aspect and in her eyes."

And Irish poet Austin Clarke

"Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning the silver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain."

Who but an Irishman could write so poetically about a lost cow!

and Patrick Kavanagh............

"On Raglan Road on an autumn day I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day."

He put the words to the tune of an old Irish air from the 1600s called Fáinne Geal an Lae and 'gave' the song, as we say in Ireland to Luke Kelly in the Bailey pub in Dublin, one evening.

A fascinating person. Deep esoteric interests and a friend of Henri Bergson, E Nesbitt and Arthur Machen.

My favourite Yeats poem is about the priest who fell asleep and found that he'd bilocated.


I never knew it was so wild and so green there.

🤣🤣. I guess he didn't win any Dad of the Year Awards.


That's kind of you...it must be my Irish genes.


Haha. No doubt.

A priest at a nearby parish was born and raised in Dublin. A good guy, a better priest, and an exceptional homilist. His homilies are like taking a ride on a winding road that overlooks gorgeous prairies, a majestic sea, lush forests...while running into a comic on the way.

The music you linked reminds me if American bluegrass. You familiar with it-it was influenced by Irish music?

The opening stanza of the American poet Theodore Roethke's The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

The complete poem: poetryfoundation.org/poems/43333/the-waking-56d2220f25315

Where i go to meditate after a long day.
I love this place.
Catch all the salmon you want.
Click on picture to enlarge.
See me out there in my boat at sunset.

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  20230901_1939196..jpg
  

How did you take a picture of yourself on your boat from the shoreline?

This is a illustrative photo only.

That's a lovely poem and I can definitely relate to it.


Parts of it are very wild and almost desolate. You can walk for miles without seeing anyone. There are lots of rivers and Dartmoor is rarely dry. It rains a lot too which is why it's so green. There are many bogs and mires so you definitely need a map and compass to get about. It has woods, forests, valleys, Bronze Age stone circles, over 160 granite tors dating back 280 million years, and of course, a prison!

A few more pics but not sure how they'll come out.

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  High Willhays, highest point on Dartmoor
  
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  Nine Maidens Bronze Age stone circle
  
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  A granite tor
  
• 
  Meldon Reservoir
  

Very nice, didn't know that poem.


That's probably just because of the banjo accompaniment (though of course that's not an Irish thing),

The original Irish song which provided the melody for Raglan Road is performed in the link below by a cross-section of Irish people. But yes, otherwise Irish music had an influence on American folk music of course but it was more of an Ulster-Scots influence, rather than Gaelic Irish.




However, the Ulster Scots and Gaelic Irish often used each other's tunes and there's many a heated argument over who 'owns' a particular air :) This one is a great example, it's a war song that was shared by both the Jacobite Catholic army and the opposing Ulster side under King William of Orange better known as a shower o' bastards - ;)

Sorry mate, that photo was taken on my cell phone.
Even Feniks couldn't find that one on the internet.
All that water is fresh water that I catch my freshwater salmon in.
I am telling you again, I live in Gods country.
I am so blessed.
(More to come)

@Atch

Roethke is excellent. He deserves to be included in the pantheon of the great English language poets, IMO. His poems are profoundly rich. The illusions and meaning seem to bloom exponentially. First time I read The Waking, I must've spent a week with it, re-reading and thinking about it.

This is where I go for complete solitude.
All you hear and see are the birds.
I take my canoe and fishing pole.

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  20240505_18274716.jpg
  

No blue haired climate change vandals or children of Hamas to destroy the things we love.

Look what they did to my fountain. They trashed Stonehenge as well, wft! What these punks need is a good old fashioned ass kicking.

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  th.jpeg
  
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  14975222_924storyfu.jpg
  

I know how to stop it.

How do you shrink your pictures to 150KB ?
I have so many cool ones to share but can't crop them to 150 KB without cutting out most of the picture.