Greeting of the Season !

Christmas stockings near a decorated Christmas tree. ©iStockphoto.com/DNY59

Merry Christmas!

Froehliche Weinachten! 

 счастливого Рождества!

Selamat Hari Natal!

Shub Naya Baras! 
 
Joyeux Noël!

¡Feliz Navidad!

Boldog Karácsonyt!
 
Wesołych Świąt

. . . and thank you for your frequent visits to 
The Wonderful Boat.

Love and Peace,

Catherine Chandler

"December" by Eric Ormsby

Photo by Ian Britton (www.freefoto.com)

December

December rings in the chill mouths of bells,
The shadowy solicitude of grasses
Eyelashed with precarious snow.
There is a crystalline insistence in the black
Repetitious roof-tops with their shock
Of snow. The ragged chimneys seem
To pray with fingers pinched
Together in entreaty while the luscious
Clouds of winter wallow on grey
Organzas of sundown.

                                            December bows
Under threadbare memories. The spider
In the corners of the house shrivels
To a small, dark claw. At night
Our dreams infringe and pool,
Our common terrors shake us in sleep.

Upriver there are remote
Oceans whose cold waves will ring
Like freezing echoes in the mouths of bells.



- Eric Ormsby (from Bavarian Shrine and other poems, 1990) 
[reprinted with Eric Ormsby's written permission] 

   
 

"Vermont Passage"

The Green Mountains of Vermont (Photo: Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images )

This year, the earliest winter since 1896 will arrive Friday morning, December 21, 2012, with the solstice at 6:12 A.M.

In his recent review of my poetry collection Lines of Flight, Richard Wakefield had this to say about my poem "Vermont Passage":

“Vermont Passage” also transforms a landscape, describing the profuse flowers of summer that linger in memory after summer gives way to cold: “I breathe in honeyed memories of clover, / and winter, for a while at least, is over.” We live in two worlds, or many worlds: the literal “bitter night” of winter, along with our memory of what was, which is also our expectation of what will be. Chandler gives texture to the flat world. If there’s any truth to the cliché that poetry reminds us to stop and smell the roses, Chandler’s poetry reminds us that we can also revel in the smells and sights that linger in our recollection. It is the remembered roses we smell most poignantly.

Richard Wilbur also had a few choice words for the poem when he wrote:

Catherine Chandler's poems — I think particularly of the sonnet "Vermont Passage" — offer the reader a plain eloquence, a keen eye, and a graceful development of thought. (Back cover, Lines of Flight)

Here is "Vermont Passage", which I wrote after a drive through Vermont on my way to Newburyport, Massachusetts in July 2006. The poem was originally published in Mezzo Cammin, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2006.


Vermont Passage

For Deborah Warren


Wildflowers thrive and form, in mid-July,
a buoyant blue and gold receiving line
the length of Interstate Route 89,
as if to welcome friends and passersby.

But high up in the hillside meadow teems
a purple floret whose divine perfume
makes one forget that roses are in bloom--
mellifluous, the stuff of summer dreams.

And when Vermont's Green Mountains turn to white,
when northern folk see little of the sun,
before the sugar maple sap can run,
when better days attend each bitter night,
I breathe in honeyed memories of clover,
and winter, for a while at least, is over.

Source: Wikipedia

"Lines of Flight" Reviewed in NYQ

Lines of Flight by Catherine Chandler

Posted on December 15, 2012

Lines of Flight
by Catherine Chandler
Able Muse Press 2011
ISBN:  978-0-9865338-3-9
Pages: 98
Reviewed by: Richard Wakefield



Whatever else our brains do – or our hearts, if you prefer a more figurative view – they seem as ineluctably dedicated to reading meaning into the world as our lungs are evolved to separate oxygen from air. It’s as natural as breathing, this process of seeing things in the fourth dimension of significance. Call it the confluence of the outer and inner worlds.

Catherine Chandler is one of the skilled and discerning few who help us navigate the resulting stream. In place of the fragments of meaning glimpsed by most of us most of the time, Chandler gives us a coherent view of the course along which we speed. The view sometimes enlarges us, makes us more at home in the world, and at others forces us to look a little more soberly at the vast and frightening void toward which we are hurled.

In “66” she contemplates a coincidence of toponymy: “Along Route 66, connected by / a six-mile stretch of road, two towns align; / one bears his family name, the other mine.” A charming bit of chance, it seems, a bit of geography that reflects an emotional connection, the kind of thing we might notice and recall as an anecdote. But Chandler traces its meaning far beyond the trivial. “The decommissioned highway’s gone to hell,” she continues, and the fading connection between the two towns becomes a metaphor for the complex ambivalence of human relationships. The road connects; the road separates. We find that we and those we love inhabit “universes spinning parallel.” That may not be the meaning we wanted, but it’s more true to experience than the facile sentimentality we might have preferred.

Someone noted once that poetry gives us tools for living. A poem like “66” does exactly that, nudging us out of complacency and into an awareness that will better serve us. The poem acknowledges the separateness that we work so hard to ignore, and yet, paradoxically, it makes us a little less alone by assuring us that we are not alone in our loneliness.

What better occasion for sentimentality than Mother’s Day? And what can be more oppressive than the narrow, mass-produced emotions that holidays can impose on us? In “Mother’s Day” Chandler opens a woman’s heart to reveal wounds that the woman herself cannot express; in fact, as she weeps, the tyranny of expectations makes others blind to the real meaning of her tears. There must be no more profound loneliness than that. We understand the woman better than those closest to her, and perhaps we understand ourselves and our own loved ones a little better for it.

“Supernova” begins by asking why we should “dull” the beauty of nature with “a lapse to metaphor / or scientific fact, or myth.” A telling word, that “lapse.” Our need to analyze, to probe beneath the surface of beauty, can feel like a fall from grace (perhaps it was that very need that drove Eve to eat the forbidden fruit which, after all, was from the tree of knowledge). At the conclusion of three stanzas that seem to celebrate the “burnished afternoon” in preference to what she will later call “logic, reason, purpose, cause,” the poet asks, “Why resort to words / when hush will do?” The answer comes in the second half of the poem, where we learn that the speaker has come to scatter a loved-one’s ashes: “…I find / it’s easier to release you, as I must, / less harrowing by far, / knowing that all human dust / was once a star.” How do we live through loss? The Book of Common Prayer, with its “dust to dust,” assures us that our senses get it wrong when we see mortal remains as mere elemental dust; science, teaching us that all elements had their origins in the fires of supernovas, assures us that there is nothing “mere” about dust. Either way, our consolation – dare we say our salvation? — comes in our ability to see more than motes.

A big part of a writer’s inner life is, of course, literature. It is no surprise to find that the meaning Chandler finds in the world is informed in part by her wide reading, just as there’s no doubt that her own poetry will become part of many readers’ inner lives. The epigraph to “Journey” comes from Robert Frost’s “Hyla Brook,” a poem about how memory conditions our view of what we care deeply about: “We love the things we love for what they are.” What they are, inevitably, is a palimpsest, one impression written over another and over yet another – the sum of our experience of them.

“New Hampshire Interval” pays explicit homage to Frost. At the farm to which Frost returned after his desperate (and successful) quest for recognition in England, Chandler sees the tangible objects, “his Morris chair,” “the woodstove,” “the frosted trees” he tapped for maple sugar (delightful trope, that “frosted"), and she sees them all transformed by her knowledge of Frost’s life and work, hears him “speaking to God about the world’s despair.” Just as Frost himself wrote meaning into the landscape, Chandler writes another page of her own, and for us.

“Vermont Passage” also transforms a landscape, describing the profuse flowers of summer that linger in memory after summer gives way to cold: “I breathe in honeyed memories of clover, / and winter, for a while at least, is over.” We live in two worlds, or many worlds: the literal “bitter night” of winter, along with our memory of what was, which is also our expectation of what will be. Chandler gives texture to the flat world. If there’s any truth to the cliché that poetry reminds us to stop and smell the roses, Chandler’s poetry reminds us that we can also revel in the smells and sights that linger in our recollection. It is the remembered roses we smell most poignantly.

“Lines of Flight” ranges far and deeply. The poems display a craft that is all the more impressive for the way it never distracts us from the scene but, rather, adds a dimension of music and, yes, memorable texture.

Catherine Chandler, an American poet born in New York City and raised in Pennsylvania, completed her graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, where she has lectured in the Department of Languages and Translation for many years. She is the winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems, interviews, essays and English translations from French and Spanish have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia.

This entry was posted in Poetry Book Reviews and tagged Catherine Chandler, Lines of Flight, Poetry Book Reviews, Richard Wakefield by mhuber. Bookmark the permalink.

Shortlisted !

Announced today: My online mini-collection, "Coming to Terms", (ten poems in ten different forms) has been shortlisted for the ATYYS award (competitor category). A judging panel has sent all finalists' work to the final contest judge, Margaret Atwood.

There were 3,730 entries (of ten poems each) in the competitor category.

Wish me luck !

All Said and Done (ASD)

I'm thrilled to have been approached by David Sollis, editor of All Said and Done, a wonderful anthology of light poetry, to contribute my poem "Take Off" (page 67). I'm in the company of stellar poets such as John Whitworth, Julie Kane and Wendy Cope, to name only a few.

Proceeds to the National Autistic Society. You can buy it on Amazon for a little over $13.00 (paperback) or the Kindle edition for $7.00. If you're a member of Amazon Prime you can read it for free.

Published only last week, it is already #18 on the Amazon (UK) best seller's list for poetry anthologies (#45 in the US).

Read more about ASD by clicking here.

Why not put it on your Christmas list?

 

 

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2012

 

This unique anthology contains a smörgåsbord of the best in light verse and will have you laughing out loud, or at the very least, raise a wry smile. Throughout the book there are also some more poignant and thought provoking pieces. The poems have been chosen to provide a snapshot of modern life and cover topics we're all familiar with (e.g. Relationships, Communication and Empathy). It is no coincidence that these themes encompass some of the main areas of difficulty for autistic individuals.

Contributions from: Alanna Blake, Andy White, Anna Evans, Attila The Stockbroker, Bill Greenwell, Brendan Beary, Catherine Chandler, Charles Ghigna, D A Prince, David Axton, David Hedges, Dave Spicer, Dean Parkin, Diane Zoller-Ciatto, Donna Williams, Gillian Ewing, Helena Nelson, Joanne Neill, John Whitworth, Julie Kane, Kate Gladstone, Laura Ledbetter, Mae Scanlan, Martin Parker, Matty Angel, Melinda Smith, Murray Lachlan Young, Nicole Nicholson, Patrick Winstanley, Peter Goulding, Rick Lupert, Scott Emmons, Steve Morris, Susan McLean, Wendy Cope & Wendy Lawson.

Attila The Stockbroker ??????  Yep.

Winterbourne

 

Winterbourne

 by Catherine Chandler

December at this latitude is stark,

the woods a snarl of black and brown and gray.

By five o’clock the west’s already dark.

On the sandpit pond, now set along its edges,

straggling greylags land then hie away

while redpolls huddle deeper in the hedges.

Whitetail forage in the field and browse

on brittle forbs untouched by moldboard plows.

Then every year, around this time, a stream

loosens from the underlime of summer’s

stranglehold. And when the morning steam

dissipates above the flinty bed

like idle gossip or unfounded rumors,

a song arising from its fountainhead

trips over still, impenetrable stones

into my house, my heart, my blood, my bones.

It babbles things which in July lie laden

with sunny dispositions; things that cry

out from lengthened shadows; things forbidden;

of many-splendored things; of things that wilt,

weep, bleed and ultimately die.

And though the rivulet retreats to silt

come spring, it sings me all I need to know,

flanked though I be by behemoths of snow.

LightenUp Online

My light poem, "A Different Art" is online today at LightenUp Online HERE.


My apologies to Elizabeth Bishop . . .

Of Ink and Blood

Photo by ellirra (123rf.com)

Bequeathal

For Caitlin and Steven

Unlike the lilac bush that knows

its spikes will weather winter’s snows,

I’ve yet to find the wherewithal

to rightly come to terms with fall.

In forests full of empty nests,

withered boughs, November guests,

I seek but find no feathered thing,

no green remembrances of spring.

All that I have, now summer’s gone,

are love notes from a lexicon.

My gift to you, this fragile bud —

inheritance of ink and blood. 

(by Catherine Chandler, first published in The Raintown Review, December 2008)

Thank you for this day . . .

Missing you.

6th Pushcart Prize Nomination !

My sonnet "Avaritia: If the Shoe Fits" has been nominated by the editors of The Raintown Review for a 2012 Pushcart Prize.

This is my sixth nomination.

Thanks, Anna and Quincy!

Avaritia: If the Shoe Fits

They say Imelda owned three thousand pair
of shoes. The ones with Duracells would flash
as she merengued on the dance floor. She
would buy, with tidy sums of laundered cash,
Gucci platforms, pumps from Givenchy,
Ferragamo flip-flop leisurewear;
not to mention Halston golden calf-
skin spike-heeled boots. Her size, eight-and-a-half.

She ran the Beatles out of town, pell-mell,
then fled herself, accused of gross misdeeds.
Back in Manila now, she struts, undaunted,
in cap-toe slingback sandals by Chanel.
Lennon was right. Love’s all one really needs.
Perhaps that’s all Imelda’s ever wanted.

(by Catherine Chandler, from "SALIGIA: Seven Deadly Sonnets", originally published in The Raintown Review, 2012)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thanksgiving Song (sung by Mary Chapin Carpenter HERE)
 
Grateful for each hand we hold
Gathered round this table.
From far and near we travel home,
Blessed that we are able.

Grateful for this sheltered place
With light in every window,
Saying “welcome, welcome, share this feast
Come in away from sorrow.”

Father, mother, daughter, son,
Neighbor, friend and friendless;
All together everyone
in the gift of loving-kindness.

Grateful for what’s understood,
And all that is forgiven;
We try so hard to be good,
To lead a life worth living.

Father, mother, daughter, son,
Neighbor, friend, and friendless;
All together everyone,
let grateful days be endless.

Grateful for each hand we hold
Gathered round this table.

14,000 and counting!

The Wonderful Boat

In the past six months, visits to my blog have doubled, from 7,000 to 14,000. 

My most loyal readers are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Indonesia, France, India and Australia, though I've had visitors from all continents.

Thank you, readers!

"November is a season all its own —"

Late afternoon sky over my front yard, November 8, 2012 (Catherine Chandler)

November

by Catherine Chandler

November is a season all its own —

a month of saints and souls and soldiers. Snow

will soon white-out a fallacy of brown.

It is a month of waiting, lying low.

November is a season all its own —

a time for turning back the clock as though

it’s useless to pretend. A dressing-down.

Thin ice entices me to touch and go.

November’s neither there nor there, but here

in dazzling dawns that dissipate to grey;

here in the tilting asymmetric branch

and sharp note of a towering white pine where

the pik and churlee of a purple finch

can either break a heart or make a day.

Click HERE to hear the lovely song of the purple finch

November Sky

"The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of.  The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July."

 
-   Henry David Thoreau  

"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?"

Election Day
by William Carlos Williams (1940)


Warm sun, quiet air
an old man sits

in the doorway of
a broken house—

boards for windows
plaster falling

from between the stones
and strokes the head

of a spotted dog



**************************** 

Some Halloween Poems

HERE

Farewell, Friend

Chola — May 23, 1998 - October 29, 2012

 (Below is "Dogwood" from the poem sequence "Days of Grass" in my book, The Frangible Hour)

Dogwood  

—in memory of Chola

 

 

We have the last appointment of the day.

That’s how it’s done—

they don’t want anyone

to see the dog they’ll have to put away,

hear muffled sobs, feel ill at ease,

fearing a transmissible disease.

 

For days she wouldn’t touch her food or water.

Nearly fifteen,

there was so much she’d seen—

the previous summer’s turmoil when my daughter

had nearly died, then father had.

Night terrors when I thought I might go mad.

 

But mostly good times. As the years stacked up,

I failed to multiply

by seven. In my mind’s eye

she would always be the playful pup

who barked at birds, chased squirrels, scratched the dirt

and loved to nip the edges of my skirt.

 

She lies on the examination table

in this white room,

a steadfast friend with whom

I had entrusted secrets. Are you able

to stay?  I nod. He shaves a spot,

inserts a catheter. Before the shot

 

of pentobarbital, a sedative.

She sees me. Knows.

And as her brown eyes close,

I wonder if I’m able to forgive

myself for ever thinking she

was just a dog. This vital part of me.

Thank you for over fourteen years of love, loyalty, companionship and happy memories.

♥ ♥ ♥

Salamander Cove

Salamander Cove

A brief entry to report that two of my poems, "Upheavals" and "The End" are now online at the Salamander Cove poetry blog .

The poems are permission-secured and were chosen on an invitational basis.  I'm thrilled to have my work appear alongside poetry by Allison Joseph, Kurt Brown, Ruth Bavetta, James Tate and Lorna Crozier.

Thank you, Annie Wyndham!

New York Quarterly Review

"Lines of Flight" by Catherine Chandler

I just received some very good news.

Able Muse Press Editor, Alex Pepple, has just let me know that Richard Wakefield's review of my poetry collection, Lines of Flight (Able Muse Press, 2011), will be published in the New York Quarterly in November.

Thank you, Alex! Thank you, Richard!

"With aster-blur and ferns of toasted gold . . .."

"Aster Blur" by Mike McRoberts a photo by phoGARDEBtog on Flickr.

Late October Musing

In October of 2003, after I had returned to writing poetry after a hiatus of several decades, that is, when I decided to be faithful to my true vocation, I rather brazenly sent a letter to US Poet Laureate and my favorite poet, Richard Wilbur, along with twenty-one poems, asking if he wouldn't mind letting me know if my poetry "is any good".

Two weeks later, Mr. Wilbur wrote back to me: "Well, it seems to me that your poems are very good indeed; formally accomplished, well-paced, witty, and full of the right words."

He went on to mention three of my sonnets in particular, as poetry of "a transcendent realm which reaches out of the mere everyday."

I've been blessed since then to have met, heard, and spoken briefly with Mr. Wilbur, both in Newburyport, Massachusetts at their annual literary festival and at West Chester University's poetry conference in 2011. He has subsequently written that my translation of Verlaine's Ars poetica is "excellent", and wrote an endorsement of my first full-length collection, Lines of Flight, for the book's back cover, the manuscript having been sent to him by Alex Pepple of Able Muse Press.

Since October is quickly coming to a close, I wanted to include Mr. Wilbur's extraordinary and unforgettable poem, "Elsewhere", in my poetry blog.

My letter to Mr. Wilbur, written nine years ago, ends by stating "Mr. Wilbur, poetry is the underpinning of my life. It sustains me. And I dearly want to share mine with the world, but have no idea of how to go about it . . . What I am trying to ask is that you kindly read over some of the poems I've included in this package (whenever you have the time and/or inclination), and then please let me know your opinion of them. For this I would be eternally grateful."

And I am, Mr. Wilbur. I truly am.




Elsewhere

The delectable names of harsh places:
Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.
In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,
We hear no ill of brittle parch and glare.

So late October’s pasture-fringe,
With aster-blur and ferns of toasted gold,
Invites to barrens where the crop to come
Is stone prized upward by the deepening freeze.

Speechless and cold the stars arise
On the small garden where we have dominion.
Yet in three tongues we speak of Taurus’ name,
And of Aldebaran and the Hyades,

Recalling what at best we know,
That there is beauty bleak and far from ours,
Great reaches where the Lord’s delighting mind,
Though not inhuman, ponders other things.




 - Richard Wilbur (from his book Mayflies)

I meet Richard Wilbur for the first time - Fall 2007

" . . . slant or straight and narrow — "

Two months to Christmas Eve! Hundreds of geese are now landing on the local sandpit pond here in Saint-Lazare, Quebec, stopping by on their way to warmer climes. Starlings have formed and gone weeks ago. Hopefully, I'll be following my feathered friends eleven weeks from now.

My poem, "Delineations", was first published in Able Muse Journal (Winter 2010) and is included in my collection, Lines of Flight.

Delineations

Wild geese flee the coming cold and ice,

 sketching the sky with epic Vs;

no roundabout for these –

their route precise.

Starlings in formation never jostle –

            aggregates of living art,

                        together yet apart

                                    in graceful rustle.

Patterns of exuberant design,

            cadenza, cadence, wavelength, arrow,

                        slant or straight and narrow –

                                    theirs, mine.

                                    

 

 

Fitful Alternations

The Fitful Alternations Of The Rain

The fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.

by Percy Bysshe Shelley


Note:
These are among the many short fragments from Shelley's MSS. published by Mary Shelley, the poet's wife, in her editions of 1824 and 1839. There she entitles this poem Rain. 

"The hue—of it—is Blood—"

The name—of it—is "Autumn"

656

The name—of it—is "Autumn"—
The hue—of it—is Blood—
An Artery—upon the Hill—
A Vein—along the Road—

Great Globules—in the Alleys—
And Oh, the Shower of Stain—
When Winds—upset the Basin—
And spill the Scarlet Rain—

It sprinkles Bonnets—far below—
It gathers ruddy Pools—
Then—eddies like a Rose—away—
Upon Vermilion Wheels—

Emily Dickinson

" . . . the truth of his joy . . ."

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is one of my favorite poems . . .

Poem in October

By Dylan Thomas

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood   

      And the mussel pooled and the heron

                  Priested shore

            The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall   

            Myself to set foot

                  That second

      In the still sleeping town and set forth.

      My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name   

      Above the farms and the white horses

                  And I rose   

            In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

            Over the border

                  And the gates

      Of the town closed as the town awoke.

      A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling   

      Blackbirds and the sun of October

                  Summery

            On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly   

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened   

            To the rain wringing

                  Wind blow cold

      In the wood faraway under me.

      Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail   

      With its horns through mist and the castle   

                  Brown as owls

            But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales   

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.   

            There could I marvel

                  My birthday

      Away but the weather turned around.

      It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky   

      Streamed again a wonder of summer

                  With apples

            Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother   

            Through the parables

                  Of sun light

      And the legends of the green chapels

      And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.   

      These were the woods the river and sea

                  Where a boy

            In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy   

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

            And the mystery

                  Sang alive

      Still in the water and singingbirds.

      And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true   

      Joy of the long dead child sang burning

                  In the sun.

            It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon   

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.   

            O may my heart’s truth

                  Still be sung

      On this high hill in a year’s turning.



*****************************************

"The dearest hands that clasp our hands . . ."

Bernard F. Chandler, Sr. and Catherine Chandler Oliveira, July 2011

The Autumn  by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Go, sit upon the lofty hill, And turn your eyes around, Where waving woods and waters wild Do hymn an autumn sound. The summer sun is faint on them — The summer flowers depart — Sit still — as all transform’d to stone, Except your musing heart. How there you sat in summer-time, May yet be in your mind; And how you heard the green woods sing Beneath the freshening wind. Though the same wind now blows around, You would its blast recall; For every breath that stirs the trees, Doth cause a leaf to fall. Oh! like that wind, is all the mirth That flesh and dust impart: We cannot bear its visitings, When change is on the heart. Gay words and jests may make us smile, When Sorrow is asleep; But other things must make us smile, When Sorrow bids us weep! The dearest hands that clasp our hands, — Their presence may be o’er; The dearest voice that meets our ear, That tone may come no more! Youth fades; and then, the joys of youth, Which once refresh’d our mind, Shall come — as, on those sighing woods, The chilling autumn wind. Hear not the wind — view not the woods; Look out o’er vale and hill — In spring, the sky encircled them — The sky is round them still. Come autumn’s scathe — come winter’s cold — Come change — and human fate! Whatever prospect Heaven doth bound, Can ne’er be desolate.