Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall...
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour;
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast
That, whether there be shine or gloom o'ercast,
They always must be with us, or we die.
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimmed and white,
Hide in deep herbage;
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finished: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end!
And now at once, adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness:
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with green, that I may speed
Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed.
~ John Keats, from Endymion, 1818
Amidst the trials of the weekend glimmered the beauty of Sara & Caleb's wedding. The beauty of my girls, twirling at the dance in their red-white-and-blue cotton dresses; Cab's bright eyes as he watched the lights and the blurred shapes of the dancers; the love of the bride and groom, secret and beautiful but shared with us for an afternoon; conversation with a dear Pastor who has been gone for years to Germany, touching to see so clearly that he cares for us deeply still; my parents and brothers, Aaron's parents...family surrounding us. Even in the heat, and ill to boot, everyone was smiling! I wrote parts of this poem in calligraphic text for Sara and Caleb. Keats captures the haunting, fleeting, yet ever surrounding nature of beauty in this world in these lines from Endymion, his epic poem based on the Greek myth of the same name. I am so thankful for beauty. What a wretched life this would be without it!
"The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters. Lift up your heads, O you gates; be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in." ~ Psalm 24:1-2, 7 KJV
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