Finished: Hippolytus (Euripides). Oh what snitty little beings those gods and goddesses were! So, just because Hippolytus wouldn't bow down to Aphrodite, goddess of love, she goes and causes a tragedy. Isn't that how most of these mythological stories go? I must say that I enjoyed the writing of Euripides more than Sophacles. Like when Phaedra, who has been struck by Aphrodite to fall helplessly in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, decides to starve herself to death rather than to bring dishonor upon herself by giving into her passion says:

"I am struggling to pluck honor out of shame."

Or, this from the nurse failing in her solution to ease Phaedra's pain:

"I tried to heal your pain. But failed to reach
What I had hoped for. If I had, ah then
How wise you would have called me? Wisdom's credit
Hangs merely on the luck that crowns the issue."

Then, after the nurse tells Hippolytus of Phaedra's desire, is there any sympathy or understanding? Nope there was this declared hatred for women from the chaste and honorable Hippolytus himself. Of course, I found him to be rather prickish, and his honor to be in question if he could feel so disdainfully for women.

"Ah God, why has Thou set beneath the sun
This curse of man, this counterfeit called "woman"?
If Thy will was to multiply mankind,
It should have been by other means than that!
Better if men made offering in Thy temples---
Gold, iron, or massy bronze---and bought thereby
Offspring to match its value. Then their homes
Could have been free from women's tyranny."

Ha! Believe me Hippolytus, we would have found a way to tyrannize a man like you. :-)

Then Theseus, the father of Hippolytus, and husband of Phaedra, returns home to find that Phaedra has killed herself rather than live with the dishonor of this love she doesn't understand. Theseus, thinking that Hippolytus forced himself on Phaedra causing her to take her own life, has this exchange with Hippolytus:

Theseus: Then was the time to weep and fear the future,
When first you dared to shame your father's wife.

Hippolytus: Ah walls of home, could you but cry aloud
In witness whether I am vile or no!

Theseus: Wisely you call to witness speechless things.
But without tongue the facts denounce you guilty.

Hippolytus: Ah, were I you, judging my son before me,
How I should weep for what that son endures!

Theseus: Always self-worship! That you have learnt far better
Than the honour due to those that gave you life!

And, in the end...Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, who loved Hippolytus but could not interfere with another goddess's follies, declared that even though Hippolytus had to die (which he did), she would get her revenge on the next human that Aphrodite loved! Oh those tricksters.

Finished: Oedipus the King (Sophocles). Interesting and tragic, of course. I read this in my same old high school paperback, Eight Great Tragedies, from which I read On Baile's Strand. It is so surreal to be reading the book I had in high school, with all the little notations in the margins in my high school handwriting. Obviously the teacher would tell us to underline a line and then write beside it something like "irony", because there it is in the margin. :-) I'm sure we read Oedipus the King both on our own, and in class, but I don't remember it. I couldn't have been at all interested in the words or story back then. I know I liked boys, friends and being on the volleyball team. English Lit? Not a top priority. Though, I always made good grades. So, I must have memorized it well enough back then to do well on tests.

Anyway....I enjoyed the story today. Well, the story is tragic, but the writing was nice, and sometimes similar to the method of Shakespeare's, which I like. In one scene Oedipus is questioning his brother-in-law, Creon, about whether an oracle has spoken of him (Oedipus). Creon said:

"I know not. Where I am not wise, I speak not."

If only we could all follow those words of wisdom. I must say that Oedipus was truly freaked out to find out that his wife was really his mother, and that she had born his children, hence his brothers and sisters. There wasn't any underlying boy loves his mother Oedipus complex that Freud championed. Oedipus didn't even know his wife was his mother until years later, and then he was so despondent over marrying her and killing his real father, that he put out his own eyes and banished himself from his kingdom. I found a tiny bit of humor in these lines and wondered if we were about to get our first glimpse of a bad word back somewhere in the 300 or 400 BC? But...it didn't happen. The messenger speaks of Oedipus and tells the story to the citizens of Thebes:

"He shouts, and bids open the doors, and show
To all his Thebes this father-murderer,
This mother-.... Leave the word. It is not clean.
He would be gone from Thebes, nor stay to see
His home accursed by the curse he swore;"

I love that....Leave the word. It is not clean. :-)

Off to read some Euripides.

Finished: Poetry by Thomas Moore, Jonathan Swift, John Donne, W.H. Auden, John Keats, Lord Byron, William Blake, John Berryman, William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire, and T.S. Eliot. I'm am thoroughly saturated with poetry after today! I've read so much, I don't know where to begin. I think I got all the poets on my list done. :-) Not that I won't go back and read more of their poems, but I think I'm done for now. Of course, I can't drag out my poetry books without reading Yeats' Brown Penny for the umpteenth time; or Frost's The Road Not Taken and Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening; or one of my all time favorites, Byron's She Walks in Beauty. The only samples of poems I'm going to put on the blog are both from Byron. She Walks in Beauty, as I said, one of my favorites and another new favorite from Byron I discovered today...Solitude. I really love everything about it. It completely grasps how I feel about being alone amidst a busy world, more so than when you're by yourself with nature. Anyway....both are below. After them, I'll talk about all the other poets whose poems I read today. :-)

She Walks in Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Solitude

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

So...might as well start with Lord Byron. I truly enjoy his poetry. I read the above two, plus When We Two Parted, Darkness, A Spirit Passed Before Me, On This Day I Complete My 36th Year (that's as old as he would get, too), Stanzas for Music and So We'll Go No More A Roving. Invariably when reading the poems, I end up reading some or all of their biographies too. I can't say I was overly impressed with the man himself, but who am I to judge? I still really enjoy his poetry. :-)

Charles Baudelaire: He wasn't really on my list, but his name did pop up a few times, so I read one of his poems called Damned Women. At first I thought he was saying, those damned women, but I'm pretty sure it was about two women, Delphine and Hippolyta, who were damned to hell. It was interesting!

William Blake...William Blake...William Blake: I'm not really getting why he's #31 on the list, but I read his two most comprehensive works, Songs of Innocence (a 19 poem compilation) and Songs of Experience (a 26 poem compilation). I think I liked his illustrations more than his poems. Maybe I just don't "get" him? I just don't think he should be so high above Yeats, Byron or Dickinson.

John Keats: I enjoyed his poems, though some of them could be confusing. His epistle to his brother George, who passed away, was really long and confusing, but I had moments of clarity where I could see what he was saying and it became a moving tribute. I read Epistle to My Brother George, On Fame, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever, To Fanny, On the Sea, His Last Sonnet (he died at only 26 of TB.), If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chained, and Lines on the Mermaid Tavern. I liked this one just for the fact that I have quite a mermaid collection, and the poem was nice too. :-)

W.H. Auden: I really enjoyed his poems too! I read Song of the Master and the Boatswain, Lullaby, In Memory of W. B. Yeats (I loved this), Stop All the Clocks and Cut Off the Telephone, and reportedly his most famous one, September 1, 1939, about the first days of World War II. He's one of those poets that I might like to go and read more works from. Definitely, he belongs above William Blake on the list too!

John Berryman: Well, he did these two poetry books called Dream Songs. My notes had told me to be sure and read Dream Song 34, so I looked and looked until I finally found it online. I was underwhelmed. I liked the others that I read better....Dream Songs 14, 52, 132, 191 and 327. In all though....I don't think I'll be seeking out more Dream Songs. I think I can give or take Berryman.

William Wordsworth: I enjoyed his poems OK. He was the 2nd to the last one I read, so I may have been getting tired. I read A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, By the Sea, Anecdote for Fathers, I Traveled Among Unknown Men, We Are Seven and She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways. I think I'd much rather read more Tennyson. I can't believe Tennyson isn't even on the list!

Thomas Moore: He's not on my list, but I couldn't read through my Mentor Book of Irish Poetry without reading some Thomas Moore. :-) I read At the Mid Hour of Night, The Time I've Lost in Wooing (love this one!), How Oft Has the Banshee Cried, Oft in the Stilly Night, and I Saw From the Beach. OK, I can't resist putting in just a snippet. I love it!

The time I've lost in wooing,
In watching and pursuing
     The light that lies
     In woman's eyes,
Has been my heart's undoing.

Jonathan Swift: I wonder if I can cross Swift off the list because I've read some of his poetry? I have absolutely NO desire to read Gulliver's Travels. I've even read the first chapter and I just can't get into it. However....his poems were delightful. I read Phillis, or, The Progress of Love and A Gentle Echo on Women. Both were very cute and I recommend reading them. :-)

John Donne: Back when I was reading and writing "romantic" poetry, I really loved John Donne's The Good Morrow, which I read again today. After reading some of his other poems, I wasn't as enthralled over 10 years later. I read The Ecstasy, The Sun Rising, The Good Morrow, The Anniversary (I liked this one!), The Indifferent Song, The Funeral, and then his epic, An Anatomy of the World. I think it was that one that did me in. I really didn't understand it all that much, except that it was a bit depressing. Anyway....I can say I've read enough John Donne.

T. S. Eliot: Last, but not least, I read Eliot's big claim to fame, The Waste Land. It was over 400 lines, most of which I didn't understand. I'm going to have to read up on it more I think and see if it sinks in. There were lines within stanzas that I understood and thought were pretty writing. I just didn't get the poem as a whole entity.

Whew! I'm poetry'd out. :-)

Finished: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) and The Charge of the Light Brigade & others (Tennyson). I think I'll spend today reading some of the poetry by the authors on the list, and then get into some of the beginning works by Sophocles, etc.

I really enjoyed the Tennyson poems I read. One of his most famous is The Charge of the Light Brigade, about soldiers who make a charge into a battle due to a mistaken order given. Most of them don't survive. The poem is vivid, and sad in its depiction of the military blindly following orders. The poem has these famous lines in the middle of this stanza that I never knew the origin of 'til now:

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blundere'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

I also read Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, which is sentimental. We had it read at my dad's funeral. He always told us he'd want to be buried like a Viking...floating out on a funeral pyre in the ocean. We'd always say, yeah, yeah dad...you know that's illegal, right?? The best we could do was a poem about going back to the sea. He spent many a fishing trip in Oregon with my husband and son crossing the bar of the Columbia River Gorge, so I think he would have appreciated the sentiment. I also enjoyed Break, Break, Break, A Farewell, Ulysses, The Poet's Song, Kate and two others that moved me. The first was a happy feeling. I could just see and hear the water in Song of the Brook:

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

And the second, was an ode to days gone by, maybe thinking of the good times from the past that can't really be recaptured, Tears, Idle Tears. I just really, really love this stanza:

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Next, I read Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I feel like this poem was one we probably read in high school, but it was not familiar to me. I'm glad I had little notes in the book to explain some of what was going on. I enjoyed the poem, but it wasn't my favorite. My main thought....serves the old mariner right for killing the albatross (who was flying along with their ship) for no reason. After he kills the albatross with his crossbow and the ship starts encountering foul weather, the crew hangs the dead albatross around his neck, blaming him for their dire circumstances. There it stays until he is truly remorseful. He lives to forever tell his tale, but the crew isn't so lucky!

One after one, by the Star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.

Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.

The souls did from their bodies fly, --
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross-bow!

I decided I better start combining the Top Author lists I've been working off of and make a serious Top 100 Authors List. So, I spent most of today doing that! I have 5 different top 100 lists I've been working from, so quite a variety. I made a spreadsheet today and listed all the authors and their ranking on each of the lists. If authors were on all five lists, then I averaged their rankings on those lists and came up with a number, and put them at the top. Then, I did the same for authors on 4 out of the 5 lists, then 3 out of the 5, then 2 out of the 5, then, finally, authors who were just on one list. Finally, the 100 mark came while I was doing the 1's.

Many authors were left off the top 100! I was surprised. Even some I've read recently didn't make the cut. Authors like...Rudyward Kipling, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Mitchell, Edith Wharton, and some more contemporary authors, Dan Brown, Ken Follet, Frank McCourt and Larry McMurtry. However, my goal has become more than to just read at least one book from each of the Top 100 Authors, because there are so many good books! I've also been making lists of the top novels, and taking serious recommendations from others...so my list of books to read is far more than just 100.

Anyway....below is the final list after combining the five lists. Shakespeare came out on top with a score of 2.2! Only 17 authors made all five lists. And, the authors who made at least 3 of the lists made the top 50 perfectly. So...everything after the top 50 were either on one or two lists. P.S. I don't know why my list is so out of kilter, but I'm not retyping all those names!

1	Shakespeare, William
2	Dostoevsky, Fyodor
3	Dickens, Charles
4	Alighieri, Dante
5	Tolstoy, Leo
6	Faulkner, William
7	Kafka, Franz
8	Proust, Marcel
9	Cervantes, Miguel
10	Chekhov, Anton
11	Melville, Herman
12	Twain, Mark
13	Hemingway, Ernest
14	Woolf, Virginia
15	Poe, Edgar Allan
16	Marquez, Gabriel G.
17	Joyce, James
18	Orwell, George
19	Homer
20	Austen, Jane
21	Nabokov, Vladimir
22	Steinbeck, John
23	Goethe, Johann
24	Camus, Albert
25	Hugo, Victor
26	Bronte, Charlotte
27	Eliot, George
28	Wilde, Oscar
29	Conrad, Joseph
30	de Balzac, Honore
31	Blake, William
32	Tolkien, J.R.R.
33	Milton, John
34	Chaucer
35	Dumas, Alexander
36	Sophocles
37	Hardy, Thomas
38	Doyle, Arther Conan
39	Keats, John
40	Salinger, J.D.
41	Eliot, T.S.
42	Fitzgerald, F. Scott
43	Beckett, Samuel
44	Bronte, Emily
45	Stevenson, Robert L.
46	Flaubert, Gustave
47	Verne, Jules
48	Dickinson, Emily
49	Shaw, George B.
50	Hawthorne, Nathanial
51	Pushkin, Alexander
52	Yeats, William B.
53	Euripides
54	Virgil
55	Rowling, J.K.
56	Lee, Harper
57	Christie, Agatha
58	Adams, Douglas
59	Ovid
60	Lewis, C.S.
61	King, Stephen
62	Molaire
63	Vonnegut, Kurt
64	London, Jack
65	Byron, Lord
66	Woodsworth, William
67	Rand, Ayn
68	Maugham, W. S.
69	James, Henry
70	Turgenev, Ivan
71	Bradbury, Ray
72	Whitman, Walt
73	Heller, Joseph
74	Picoult, Jodi
75	Ibsen, Henrik
76	Swift, Jonathan
77	Huxley, Aldous
78	Morrison, Toni
79	Miller, Henry
80	Pynchon, Thomas
81	Palahiuk, Chuck
82	Ashberry, John
83	Donne, John
84	Aeschylus
85	Coleridge, Samuel
86	Kerouac, Jack
87	Murdoch, Iris
88	Dahl, Roald
89	Pullman, Philip
90	O'Neill, Eugene
91	Wells, H.G.
92	Pope, Alexander
93	Williams, Tennesse
94	Seuss, Dr.
95	Hosseini, Khalid
96	Auden, W.H.
97	Grisham, John
98	Baldwin, James
99	Irving, John
100	Berryman, John

Finished: In Cold Blood (Capote). Well, that was chilling. Not a book I enjoyed reading in the late night hours! I had heard about this book, but never really knew the details. I didn't even know it was based on a true story. It was awful to get to know the family who was so brutally murdered, but to know what was in store for them. Truman Capote was sure to let the reader know as each of the family members was introduced that it was his or her last day on earth. The backstories of the killers were, I guess, supposed to make you feel a little bit of sympathy that they turned out the way they did because of bad childhoods and/or circumstances they couldn't overcome. That doesn't fly with me because I've heard of too many people who have grown up with difficult circumstances who rise above and go on to become productive, good citizens. The last section of the book was about all the legal maneuverings that kept the murderers on death row through endless appeals. It dragged a bit. The rest of the book, which is supposed to be considered the epitome of a crime novel, was good, but it didn't blow me away. Seriously, no pun intended at all.

Finished: The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas). I loved it! One of my favorites so far! It was so long, but so worth every page. I can't imagine a chapter being left out. Finally, there were some characters to love, as well as the ones who always seem prominent in novels to loath! The characters were rich, the conversations were detailed and lively, the historical references made me actually put down the book and take a small lesson in some French history, the scenic descriptions were vivid, and the emotions evoked were quite worthy.

I don't usually like to read a book, or see a movie, about an innocent person who is unjustly accused and punished by evil people. And, this was no exception in that I hated the suffering that Edmond went through, and that his father and fiance were left so heartbroken at his circumstances. Then, to have him despairing away in prison for so many years was hard to read. However, I just knew that he would somehow get out and take his vengeance. He had to because there were so many pages left to read. :-) And, the vengeance was yummy on all counts!

I wasn't completely satisfied with the ending, and who he ended up with...or with the fact that he made Maximillian wait so long in his grief. But...overall, I do believe this book is going on the favorites list! It would be really hard to pinpoint so many of my favorite snippits of writing, but here is one example of the writing I found so delightful:

"It happened that on that particular night the minister's box was placed at the disposal of Lucien Debray, who offered it to the Comte de Morcerf, who again, upon his mother's rejection of it, sent it to Danglars, with an intimation that he should probably do himself the honour of joining the baroness and her daughter during the evening in the event of their accepting the box in question. The ladies received the offer with too much pleasure to dream of a refusal. To no class of person is the presentation of a gratuitous opera-box more acceptable than to the wealthy millionaire, who still hugs economy while boasting of carrying a king's ransom in his waist-coast-pocket."

Love that! :-)

I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo and loving it!! I'm on page 910 out of 1462. It's so good and so intricate! I can't even imagine reading the abridged version. I scanned through that to see what chapters were left out and there are so many chapters that are KEY to what's going on! Anyway...I'm loving "The Count"! :-)

Finished: Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald). Eh, it was ok, but not my favorite of the three Fitzgerald's I've now read. All of his characters are so flawed (but then I guess most humans are flawed). But...what I mean is, almost everyone in the Fitzgerald novels I've read is unfaithful to his or her spouse, without too much grappling with guilt. Maybe that was his lifestyle back then? It is said that Tender is the Night might be somewhat autobiographical about his marriage to Zelda, her mental illness and his alcoholism. There was certainly all that! I do love his descriptive writing, though. Like this description of an old dowager returning from a late night party the next morning, who disturbs the serenity of the sunbathing main characters as she walks by telling her tale about the night before:

"The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder."

I love that..."discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder"! Can't you just picture that lady vividly in your mind? Well, done with Fitzgerald for awhile!

Finished: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery). It's a poem about what is says...a self-portrait in a convex mirror, but oh so long and complicated. I just read several poems by John Ashbery, actually, including this one, one of his most famous, and included in his Pulitzer Price winning poetry collection of the same name, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. As I said, it was long and complicated, and I'm not sure I understand it all. Every so often I would read a section of lines and "get it". I'd get those few lines...but then, the poem would travel off on a wordy tangent I didn't quite grasp. That happened quite a bit. :-)

I went and looked at the actual self-portrait which the poem was about, Italian artist of the 1500's, Francesco Mazzola. It helped me when I read the poem a second time! I also read Ashbery's My Philosophy of Life, Just Walking Around, At North Farm (which I really liked), Glazunoviana, Crossroads in the Past, Paradoxes and Oxymorons, and Sleepers Awake (which I chuckled at).

I've included a few of my favorite lines from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Sleepers Awake, and then the entire short, but sweet, At North Farm below. :-)

From Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:

The glass chose to reflect only what he saw
Which was enough for his purpose: his image
Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle.
The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.
Pope Clement and his court were "stupefied"
By it, according to Vasari, and promised a commission
That never materialized. The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible.

And this from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:

As philosophers have often pointed out, at least
This thing, the mute, undivided present,
Has the justification of logic, which
In this instance isn't a bad thing
Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling
Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result
Into a caricature of itself. This always
Happens, as in the game where
A whispered phrase passed around the room
Ends up as something completely different.
It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike
What the artist intended. Often he finds
He has omitted the thing he started out to say
In the first place. Seduced by flowers,
Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though
Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining
He had a say in the matter and exercised
An option of which he was hardly conscious,
Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions.
So as to create something new
For itself, that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.

From Sleepers Awake:

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.

Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.

Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey.

Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him.

Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick.

Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising,

but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.

Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.

No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.

At North Farm

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?