The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers

 

AUGARIES OF INNOCENCE

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour

William Blake

. . . in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathise not with us, we love the flowers, the grass and the waters and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring in the blue air there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. 

Shelley, On Love

Inebriate of air am I, 

And debauchee of dew, 

Reeling, through endless summer days, 

From inns of molten blue.

Emily Dickinson, from ‘I tasted a liquor never brewed’

In the Mountains: A Reply to the Vulgar

They ask me where is the sense on jasper mountains?

I laugh and don’t reply, in heart’s own quiet:

Peach petals float away in secret

To other skies and earths than those of mortals.

Li Po

The world is too much with us; 

late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste 

our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not—Great God! 

I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me 

less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his 

wreathèd horn. 

William Wordsworth, 1807 

The World Is Too Much With Us

Wordsworth again, from “Intimations of Immortality”: 

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

“A child can’t honestly admire the Maker until he first honestly admires the things he made. It’s an insult to ignore the artist’s work while praising him on hearsay, as if “by the invisible things of God we come to know the visible things of earth“ Vae fideismus! Taste and see. This thing is good, it couldn’t make itself; therefore we know He Who made it is good. Metaphysically speaking, things are good because the good God made them. But we are not metaphysical creatures; we don’t think like angels; everything we know is known in things."

John Senior (expressing the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas)

“Come out into the light of things.”

William Wordsworth

Great things are done when Men & Mountains meet 

This is not Done by Jostling in the Street 

William Blake 

I pick chrysanthemums underneath the east hedge, 

the mountains to the south are clear. 

The mountain air at sunset is so wonderful, 

and the birds coming home, one after the other. 

In all these details there are secret truths; 

but when I try to shift to language, it all slips away.

Tao Yuanming (365?-427) from Two Drinking Songs

“ONE of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."

G.K. Chesterton: "Robert  Browning." (1903)

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow 

as if it were a given property of the mind 

that certain bounds hold against chaos, 

that is a place of first permission, 

everlasting omen of what is. 

ROBERT DUNCAN

When daisies pied and violets blue,

And lady-smocks all silver white,

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight.

William Shakespeare

“There are seconds – they come five or six at a time – when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is nothing earthly. I don’t mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his earthly semblance can’t endure it...It is as though you suddenly apprehended all nature.”

Kirilov, from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (The Demons)

“I would therefore write a kind of elemental poetry that doesn’t just avoid indoors but doesn’t even see the doors that lead inward—to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf. I would talk about the owl and the thunderworm and the daffodil and the red-spotted newt as a company of spirits, as well as bodies. I would say that the fox stepping out over the snow has nerves as fine as mine, and a better courage. I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts. I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”

Mary Oliver

The temple bell stops

but I still hear the sound coming

out of the flowers

Matsuo Basho

“Every creature is a word of God and is a book about God.” 

  Meister Eckhart

“The whole creation of God preaches” Jonathan Edwards

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man...

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreathes;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

William Wordsworth (from Lines Written in Early Spring)

“Poetry demands, as it’s primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves...It implies that we understand them to be vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, Inscrutable, mysterious.”

Cardinal John Henry Newman

"In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it--just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about his person, or babbled about his work." 

MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons, The Voice of Job)

Romans 1:19-20

What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

Psalm 19 

The heavens proclaim the glory of God.       

The skies display his craftsmanship. 

Day after day they continue to speak;       

night after night they make him known. 

They speak without a sound or word; 

their voice is never heard.

Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, 

and their words to all the world.

FROM “WALDEN

“The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,—may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! 

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU / 1854

When the winter chrysanthemums go,

there's nothing to write about

but radishes.

Matsuo Basho