Good night Greece...

Yannis Stavrou, Good night Greece, oil on canvas

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth...

Yannis Stavrou, Autumn Landscape, oil on canvas (detail)  

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ode to the West Wind
   

    I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave,until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

    
    II

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

    
    III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

    
    IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

    
    V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Knowledge is power...

Aphorisms & Greek paintings, greek artists, greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Still Life, oil on canvas

Facing every day life with wisdom...

Sir Francis Bacon
Aphorisms

• A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
• By far the best proof is experience.
• Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
• Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
• Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
• Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
• He of whom many are afraid ought to fear many.
• Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
• I have taken all knowledge to be my province.
• If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
• In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
• Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
• Read not to contradict and confute, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
• Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
• Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
• Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to the more ought law to weed it out.
• Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
• Silence is the virtue of fools.
• Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
• The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
• They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
• There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
• Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
• Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.
• Knowledge is power. ((Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est)
• In charity there is no excess.
• Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: evening with poetry...

Poetry & Greek artists, greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Trees on the Hill, oil on canvas

To enjoy the evening with poetry...

Collection: Death and Entrances
Dylan Thomas

The conversation of prayers
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Poem in October
This side of the truth
To Others than You
Love in the Asylum
Unluckily for a death
The hunchback in the park
Into her lying down head
Paper and sticks
Deaths and Entrances
A Winter’s Tale
On a Wedding Anniversary
There was a saviour
On the Marriage of a Virgin
In my craft or sullen art
Ceremony After a Fire Raid
Once below a time
When I woke
Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred
Lie still, sleep becalmed
Vision and Prayer
Ballad of the Long-legged Bait
Holy Spring
Fern Hill