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Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth

Chapter 38: MY THEME: Continued.
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About This Book

A varied collection of lyrics and sonnets that celebrates the sensory life of earth while probing larger moral and philosophical questions. Poems evoke woodlands, meadows, and pastoral music, employ classical and mythic allusion, and meditate on love, change, and the tension between wild impulse and cultivated wisdom. Ballads and shorter lyrics supply narrative motion and vivid imagery; sonnets compress reflective argument about time, art, and the self. The overall tone moves between exuberant celebration and guarded instruction, using musical diction and dense metaphor to connect natural perception with human feeling and ethical awareness.

MY THEME: Continued.

’Tis true the wisdom that my mind exacts
Through contemplation from a heart unbent
By many tempests may be stained and rent:
The summer flies it mightily attracts.
Yet they seem choicer than your sons of facts,
Which scarce give breathing of the sty’s content
For their diurnal carnal nourishment:
Which treat with Nature in official pacts.
The deader body Nature could proclaim.
Much life have neither. Let the heavens of wrath
Rattle, then both scud scattering to froth.
But during calms the flies of idle aim
Less put the spirit out, less baffle thirst
For light than swinish grunters, blest or curst.