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Pass notes

It's National Poetry Day, so I finished a draft of something I started a few months back.

  Pass Notes

When I'm not in the room with you, you're your old self. Tall and indomitable. Resolute of purpose. A firm handshake, look 'em dead in the eye. In the car I listen to the radio, and think you'd like this show.

When the lady in the next room goes, the sadness, like soot falling down a chimney, billows out across the corridor and settles for a while, Hanging in the air along with her daughters' words: "She's gone." It's only a few days before it's your turn and ours.

Since then,

Mum's face as she gave me the watch you wore every day Clutching it in her hand and mine, "Be a dreamer of dreams," she said. "A man among men, and walk the path with curiosity and joy." There's nothing more to say, it's the most beautiful quest.

Along with the small change and the comb you always kept in the pocket of your trousers, there's an old tin with a handful of fuses, radiator keys and old batteries in your drawer. I find a big list of stories and ideas, the things that you liked. I listen to your old country and western tapes in the car, wear your coat.

I'm not in the room with you, but echoes are everywhere. I try to at least act like I know what I'm doing. It's all there in how we live our lives: A firm handshake, look 'em dead in the eye. In the car I listen to the radio, and find more things you'd like.

  © me, 2012

UncategorizedJack Dysonlod, poem, poetry Comments
Russia's museum cats

Lovely piece by Sally McGrane in The New Yorker: Winding beneath the magnificent halls of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, with its Da Vincis, diamonds, Greek statuary, Egyptian parchments, enormous number of paintings, mechanical peacock clock, and other treasures, there is a catacomb of cellars. It was into this windowless nether region—far below the Winter Palace’s expansive view of the waters of the Neva—that Maria Haltunen and I had cautiously descended. As I followed her through a narrow, imperfectly-lit corridor, full of large pipes and jutting wires, Haltunen gasped. “Look!” she said.In the semi-darkness, a little being had appeared. He perched, a foot-tall shadow, on a water pipe.

“Oh, you are a fat one!” said Haltunen, jangling the chain of her I.D. pass like a talisman as she approached the pointy-eared creature. “How nice you are!”

The cat sat, perfectly still. Then he vanished.

“Some of them like to be around people,” said Haltunen, who has been the personal assistant to the museum’s director for the last eighteen years and, in addition to her regular duties, also serves as the museum’s semi-official Press Secretary to the Cats. She peered behind the pipes to see where the creature had gone, but found only a blanket, tucked against the wall, and a bowl. “Some of them prefer to be by themselves.”

Once a motley crew of frightened strays hiding, half-starving, in the palace’s basement, the Hermitage’s cats are now a well-loved, well-fed part of the museum’s family. Some seventy former street cats live at the Hermitage, where, thanks largely to Haltunen’s efforts, they have their very own underground cat infirmary and three full-time volunteers to care for them.

Underground, in their domain, there were signs of them—tiger-striped cat beds, bright pink and blue plastic bowls, places where the heating system’s pipes had been covered in soft, flowered material so that the cats could nest there. Now and then, a pair of bright eyes glanced out from a shaft; in a fenced-off corner, beneath blue and red water pipes, sprawled a little black kitten with white paws. As we passed, he jumped up, sprightly, and sidled out of the off-limits area.

“Our director is always saying they are the spirit of the place,” said Haltunen. “The museum’s genius loci.”

It wasn’t always this way. Fifteen years ago, Haltunen came upon the cats, sheltering in beleaguered prides in the museum’s heating system. Troubled by the animals’ plight, she and a colleague started feeding them, donning maintenance uniforms and lugging leftovers from the cantina to do the rounds of the extensive basements each day after work. “It was awful, after working all day, to put on ugly clothes, to carry stinky beans through these dark basements,” said the diminutive Haltunen, who, with her large, bright eyes and button nose is not entirely un-catlike, herself. “But if you start, you can’t stop.” Then, they decided to organize. They took up a collection—“A rouble for a cat”—and used it to buy food. Newspaper articles appeared. People became interested. The museum’s director gave them permission to use some little rooms in the basement to keep ill and elderly cats, and hooked up running water. “You know how it is,” said Haltunen, “You see a problem, and then you have to do something.”

In theory, the cats now form a fanged, clawed army with one goal: to catch and kill mice who might want to chew on the artworks. In practice, “they are fat and lazy,” said Haltunen, with evident pride. (A security guard once took a picture of one looking on, in astonishment, as a rat drank from his bowl of milk.) Still, according to Haltunen, when an exterminator came, they found fewer rat corpses afterwards than usual. She says that the mere presence of the cats, their bodies and smells, serves as a deterrent.

There have been cats in the palace since Peter the Great’s daughter, Empress Elizabeth, issued a decree, in 1745, that the biggest cats, capable of catching mice, be sent immediately from Kazan to the court of her imperial majesty. Catherine the Great is thought to have favored Russian Blues as indoor palace cats; under the last Czar, the royal family’s pet cats, who were left behind in the palace, fared better than the dogs, who were taken along to Yekaterinburg with the family to their deaths. During the three-year siege of Leningrad, all of the animals in the city died—except for the rats, said to have been so numerous as to form a gray, moving mass in the streets. When the blockade was lifted, Haltunen said, as we continued our walk beneath the museum, Russians sent their cats to the city to help fight the vermin.

Stepping into the little cat hospital, a cozy, cluttered space that the oldest and sickest cats call home, Haltunen greeted Irina Popovetz, one of the volunteers who looks after the cats. Then she greeted Kusya (“Oh, this one has no tail!”), Jacqueline (“Look how fat we are!”), Sofiko (“You are very old!), and Assol, a tabby named for an impoverished literary heroine who waited at the seaside for a man sailing a ship with scarlet sails to come for her.

Taking a seat in the warm, pungent room and stroking Sofiko, she explained that, thanks to in part to donations from the German society Pro Animale and the pet-food company Purina, there is now an official Hermitage “cat account”—which always in the black. However, the cats are not just charity cases: last year marked the first official “Catfest,” in which all the entries for a contest for the best cat painting (there were nearly three hundred, mostly submitted by children) were exhibited for a day in the basement. For the second annual Catfest, held this spring, a scavenger hunt for children in the museum led to the museum’s only cat mummy, put on display that day only. Catfest was so popular that there is talk of extending it to two days next year. “We were astonished,” said Haltunen. “Crowds come to our dirty basement! It is really popular.”

The cats themselves, who are no longer afraid of people, have a positive effect on staff morale, she said. “People here become kinder, because they have the possibility to show this kindness,” said Haltunen, as we made our way back outside, where an orange cat was asleep in the sun beneath a classical statue. “It is very good when you have the possibility to show your best qualities.”

While cats are not allowed in the galleries or in the museum director’s wing, the people-loving felines have free rein in the former apartments of the ladies-in-waiting, where staff offices are now located. In the deputy of security’s office, “Little Hooligan,” a kitten abandoned in the countryside, where a security worker saved her from being used to train someone’s dog, was drinking milk under the Xerox machine. Frida, a black cat found in the garbage, posed on top of the bookshelf like a nineteenth-century Parisian lithograph, though—according to the photographic evidence that was immediately produced—she still likes to sleep in plastic bags. Niko, who looks like a mini-tigress, was fast asleep on a desk, with her tongue out (the desk’s putative owner assured us that this was no problem: grabbing hold of the sleeping cat’s long, bushy tail, the woman said that whenever she needed to sign anything, she just dips the tip in ink).

“People from Western countries, they say unfortunately they cannot permit cats in their offices,” said Haltunen, looking around, contentedly. “We are very lucky here.”

Photograph by Dmitry Lovetsky/AP.

UncategorizedJack Dysoncats, hermitage, museum, russiaComment
So this is where "movers and shakers" comes from...

Ode was written in 1874 by the English poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy. It is often referred to by its first line: "We are the music makers."

The Ode is the first poem in O'Shaughnessy's collection Music and Moonlight. It has nine stanzas, although it is commonly believed to be only three stanzas long. The opening stanza is:

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams;— World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems.

In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, after Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) states that "The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!", Veruca Salt responds in an arrogant tone, "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?". Willy Wonka grabs her mouth and replies, "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." It's fab.

Here's the rest of it:

With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire's glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world's worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration Is the life of each generation; A wondrous thing of our dreaming Unearthly, impossible seeming— The soldier, the king, and the peasant Are working together in one, Till our dream shall become their present, And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing Of the goodly house they are raising; They had no divine foreshowing Of the land to which they are going: But on one man's soul it hath broken, A light that doth not depart; And his look, or a word he hath spoken, Wrought flame in another man's heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling With a past day's late fulfilling; And the multitudes are enlisted In the faith that their fathers resisted, And, scorning the dream of to-morrow, Are bringing to pass, as they may, In the world, for its joy or its sorrow, The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see, Our souls with high music ringing: O men! it must ever be That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning And the suns that are not yet high, And out of the infinite morning Intrepid you hear us cry— How, spite of your human scorning, Once more God's future draws nigh, And already goes forth the warning That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers From the dazzling unknown shore; Bring us hither your sun and your summers; And renew our world as of yore; You shall teach us your song's new numbers, And things that we dreamed not before: Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers, And a singer who sings no more.

UncategorizedJack Dysonarthur o'shaughnessy, poem, poetry, willy wonka Comment
Tourist Stranger - self-portraits in Mexico

French photographer Benoit Pallé enjoys exploring the theme of the Stranger. This project, spotted on the excellent It's Nice That (a glorious soubriquet for a cultural web colander if ever I saw one), sees him wandering the beaches of Mexico allowing tourists to capture themselves, photo-booth style. They are fab. ‘Tourist Stranger Self Portraits’

[gallery]

UncategorizedJack Dysonarchitecture, arts, beach, benoit palle, culture, entertainment, french, french photographer, its nice that, mexican, mexico, photographer, photography, portraits gallery, self portrait, tourists, travel, vacation Comments
Weekends with Obama (profile)

Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Lewis spent six months hanging around the White House, aboard Air Force One, and on the basketball court grabbing five minutes here, five minutes there with President Obama, for a fascinating profile piece. Below are some of my favourite extracts, but I thoroughly recommend you see the original piece here. I’d asked to play in the president’s regular basketball game, in part because I wondered how and why a 50-year-old still played a game designed for a 25-year-old body, in part because a good way to get to know someone is to do something with him. I hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of a game it was. The first hint came when a valet passed through bearing, as if they were sacred objects, a pair of slick red-white-and-blue Under Armour high-tops with the president’s number (44) on the side. Then came the president, looking like a boxer before a fight, in sweats and slightly incongruous black rubber shower shoes. As he climbed into the back of a black S.U.V., a worried expression crossed his face. “I forgot my mouth guard,” he said. Your mouth guard? I think. Why would you need a mouth guard?

Basketball hadn’t appeared on the president’s official schedule, and so we travelled the streets of Washington unofficially, almost normally. A single police car rode in front of us, but there were no motorcycles or sirens or whirring lights: we even stopped at red lights. It still took only five minutes to get to the court inside the F.B.I. The president’s game rotates around several federal courts, but he prefers the F.B.I.’s because it is a bit smaller than a regulation court, which reduces also the advantages of youth. A dozen players were warming up. I recognized Arne Duncan, the former captain of the Harvard basketball team and current secretary of education. Apart from him and a couple of disturbingly large and athletic guys in their 40s, everyone appeared to be roughly 28 years old, roughly six and a half feet tall, and the possessor of a 30-inch vertical leap. It was not a normal pickup basketball game; it was a group of serious basketball players who come together three or four times each week. Obama joins when he can.

“We’ll sit you first, until we get a little bit of a lead.” I thought he was joking, but actually he wasn’t; he was as serious as a heart attack. I was benched. I took my place in the wooden stands, along with a few of the other players, and the White House photographer, the medical team, the Secret Service, and the guy with the buzz cut who carried the nuclear football, to watch the president play.

Obama was 20 or more years older than most of them, and probably not as physically gifted, though it was hard to say because of the age differences. No one held back, no one deferred. It’s revealing that he would seek out a game like this but even more that others would give it to him: no one watching would have been able to guess which guy was president.

Obama could find a perfectly respectable game with his equals in which he could shoot and score and star, but this is the game he wants to play. It’s ridiculously challenging, and he has very little space to manoeuver, but he appears happy. He’s actually just good enough to be useful to his team, as it turns out. Not flashy, but he slides in to take charges, passes well, and does a lot of little things well. The only risk he takes is his shot, but he shoots so seldom, and so carefully, that it actually isn’t much of a risk at all. (He smiles when he misses; when he makes one, he looks even more serious.)

And he chattered constantly. “You can’t leave him open like that!” … “Money!” … “Take that shot!” His team jumped ahead, mainly because it took fewer stupid shots. When I threw one up I discovered the reason for this. When you are on the president’s basketball team and you take a stupid shot, the president of the United States screams at you. “Don’t be looking to the sidelines all sheepish,” he hollered at me. “You got to get back and play D!”

+

From the time his wife goes to bed, around 10 at night, until he finally retires, at 1, Barack Obama enjoys the closest thing he experiences to privacy: no one but him really knows exactly where he is or what he’s up to. He can’t leave his house, of course, but he can watch ESPN, surf his iPad, read books, dial up foreign leaders in different time zones, and any number of other activities that feel almost normal. He can also wrestle his mind back into the state it would need to be if, say, he wanted to write.

And so, in a funny way, the president’s day actually starts the night before. When he awakens at seven, he already has a jump on things. He arrives at the gym on the third floor of the residence, above his bedroom, at 7:30. He works out until 8:30 (cardio one day, weights the next), then showers and dresses in either a blue or gray suit. “My wife makes fun of how routinized I’ve become,” he says. He’d moved a long way in this direction before he became president, but the office has moved him even further. “It’s not my natural state,” he says. “Naturally, I’m just a kid from Hawaii. But at some point in my life I overcompensated.” After a quick breakfast and a glance at the newspapers—most of which he’s already read on his iPad—he reviews his daily security briefing. When he first became president he often was surprised by the secret news; now he seldom is. “Maybe once a month.”

When a new president is elected, the White House curatorial staff removes everything from the office the departing president put in it, unless they worry it will cause a political stir—in which case they ask the new president. Right after the last election they removed a few oil paintings of Texas. It took Obama longer than usual to make changes to the office because, as he put it, “we came in when the economy was tanking and our first priority wasn’t redecorating.” Eighteen months into the office he reupholstered the two chairs in his sitting area. (“The chairs were kind of greasy. I was starting to think, Folks are going to start talking about us.”) Then he swapped out the antique coffee table for a contemporary one, and the bust of Winston Churchill lent to Bush by Tony Blair for one of Martin Luther King Jr. And he took one look at the bookshelves, filled with china, and thought, This won’t do. “They had a bunch of plates in there,” he says, a little incredulously. “I’m not a dish guy.” The dishes he replaced with the original applications for several famous patents and patent models—Samuel Morse’s 1849 model for the first telegraph, for instance, which he pointed to and said, “This is the start of the Internet right here.” Finally, he ordered a new oval rug inscribed with his favorite brief quotations from people he admires. “I had a bunch of quotes that didn’t fit [on the rug],” he admitted. One quote that did fit, I saw, was a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

+

“When people come here, are they nervous?” I asked him, to change the subject. Even in the White House lobby you can tell who works here and who doesn’t by the sound of their conversation and their body language. The people who don’t work here have the checked-my-actual-personality-at-the-door look of people on TV for the first time in their lives. In the presence of the president himself even celebrities are so distracted that they cease to notice all else. He’d make an excellent accomplice to a pickpocket.

“Yes,” he said. “And what’s true is that it is true of just about everyone who comes here. I think that the space affects them. But when you work here you forget about it.”

+

We were on Air Force One, somewhere between North America and South America, when a hand shook my shoulder, and I gazed up to find Obama staring down at me. I’d been seated in the cabin in the middle of the plane—the place where the seats and tables can be easily removed so that if the president’s body needs to be transported after his death there’s a place to put his coffin. Apparently, I’d fallen asleep. The president’s lips were pursed, impatiently.

“What?” I said, stupidly.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, and gave me one more shake.

There are no wide-open spaces in presidential life, only nooks and crannies, and the front of Air Force One is one of them. When he’s on his plane, small gaps of time sometimes open in his schedule, and there are fewer people around to leap in and consume them. In this case, Obama had just found himself with 30 free minutes.

“What you got for me?” he asked and plopped down in the chair beside his desk. His desk is designed to tilt down when the plane is on the ground so that it might be perfectly flat when the plane is nose up, in flight. It was now perfectly flat.

“I want to play that game again,” I said. “Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president.” This was the third time I’d put the question to him, in one form or another. The first time, a month earlier in this same cabin, he’d had a lot of trouble getting his mind around the idea that I, not he, was president. He’d started by saying something he knew to be dull and expected but that—he insisted—was nevertheless perfectly true. “Here is what I would tell you,” he’d said. “I would say that your first and principal task is to think about the hopes and dreams the American people invested in you. Everything you are doing has to be viewed through this prism. And I tell you what every president … I actually think every president understands this responsibility. I don’t know George Bush well. I know Bill Clinton better. But I think they both approached the job in that spirit.” Then he added that the world thinks he spends a lot more time worrying about political angles than he actually does.

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

The other aspect of his job I have trouble getting comfortable with is its bizarre emotional demands. In the span of a few hours, a president will go from celebrating the Super Bowl champions to running meetings on how to fix the financial system, to watching people on TV make up stuff about him, to listening to members of Congress explain why they can’t support a reasonable idea simply because he, the president, is for it, to sitting down with the parents of a young soldier recently killed in action. He spends his day leaping over ravines between vastly different feelings. How does anyone become used to this?

As I was still a little groggy and put my question poorly, he answered a question it hadn’t occurred to me to ask: Why doesn’t he show more emotion? He does this on occasion, even when I’ve put the question clearly—see in what I’ve asked some implicit criticism, usually one he’s heard many times before. As he’s not naturally defensive, it’s pretty clearly an acquired trait. “There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing,” he said. “For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I’m dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I’m not taking the American people seriously. I’m absolutely positive that I’m serving the American people better if I’m maintaining my authenticity. And that’s an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I’m at my best when I believe what I am saying.”

That was not what I had been after. What I had wanted to know was: Where do you put what you actually feel, when there is no place in your job to feel it? When you are president you are not allowed to go numb to protect yourself from whatever news might happen. But it was too late; my time was up; I returned to my seat in the cabin.

+

But if you happen to be president just now, what you are faced with, mainly, is not a public-relations problem but an endless string of decisions. Putting it the way George W. Bush did sounded silly but he was right: the president is a decider. Many if not most of his decisions are thrust upon the president, out of the blue, by events beyond his control: oil spills, financial panics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, coups, invasions, underwear bombers, movie-theater shooters, and on and on and on. They don’t order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically. Aboard Air Force One, I’d asked him what he would do if granted a day when no one knew who he was and he could do whatever he pleased. How would he spend it? He didn’t even have to think about it:

When I lived in Hawaii, I’d take a drive from Waikiki to where my grandmother lived—up along the coast heading east, and it takes you past Hanauma Bay. When my mother was pregnant with me she’d take a walk along the beach. . . . You park your car. If the waves are good you sit and watch and ponder it for a while. You grab your car keys in the towel. And you jump in the ocean. And you have to wait until there is a break in the waves. . . . And you put on a fin—and you only have one fin—and if you catch the right wave you cut left because left is west. . . . Then you cut down into the tube there. You might see the crest rolling and you might see the sun glittering. You might see a sea turtle in profile, sideways, like a hieroglyph in the water. . . . And you spend an hour out there. And if you’ve had a good day you’ve caught six or seven good waves and six or seven not so good waves. And you go back to your car. With a soda or a can of juice. And you sit. And you can watch the sun go down …

When he was done, he thought again and said, “And if I had a second day … ” But then the airplane landed, and it was time for us to get off.

“If I were president I think I might keep a list in my head,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “That’s my last piece of advice to you. Keep a list.”

Now, standing on the Truman Balcony, little came between him and the outside world. Crowds milled about on Constitution Avenue, on the other side of the south gate. Had he waved, someone might have noticed him and waved back. He motioned to the place from which, last November, a man with a high-powered rifle fired at the White House. Turning, with only the slightest trace of annoyance, Obama pointed to the spot directly behind his head where the bullet struck.

UncategorizedJack Dysonobama, profile, vanity fair contributing editor, writingComment
The truth about dishonesty? It's all about rationalisation

[youtube=http://youtu.be/XBmJay_qdNc&w=700] Are you more honest than a banker? Under what circumstances would you lie, or cheat, and what effect does your deception have on society at large? Dan Ariely, one of the world's leading voices on human motivation and behaviour is the latest big thinker to get the RSA Animate treatment.

Taken from a lecture given at the RSA in July 2012 . Watch the longer talk here.

UncategorizedJack Dysonclimate, dan ariely, dishonesty, entertainment, human motivation, learning, lecture, morals, politics, rationalisation, rsa, science, society, thinkerComment
Ode on Melancholy

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

- By John Keats

UncategorizedJack Dysonkeats, melancholy, poem, poetryComment