Dormi Jesu

Anonymous

Dormi, Jesu! Mater ridet
Quae tam dulcem somnum videt,
Dormi, Jesu! blandule!
Si non-dormis, Mater plorat,
Inter fila cantans orat,
Blande, veni, somnule.

Psalm 136

הודו ליהוה כי טוב כי לעולם חסדו ׃
הודו לאלהי האלהים כי לעולם חסדו ׃
הודו לאדני האדנים כי לעולם חסדו ׃
לעשה נפלאות גדלות לבדו כי לעולם חסדו ׃
לעשה השמים בתבונה כי לעולם חסדו ׃
לרקע הארץ על המים כי לעולם חסדו ׃
לעשה אורים גדלים כי לעולם חסדו ׃
את השמש לממשלת ביום כי לעולם חסדו ׃
את הירח וכוכבים לממשלות בלילה כי לעולם חסדו ׃
למכה מצרים בבכוריהם כי לעולם חסדו ׃
ויוצא ישראל מתוכם כי לעולם חסדו ׃
ביד חזקה ובזרוע נטויה כי לעולם חסדו ׃
לגזר ים סוף לגזרים כי לעולם חסדו ׃
והעביר ישראל בתוכו כי לעולם חסדו ׃
ונער פרעה וחילו בים סוף כי לעולם חסדו ׃
למוליך עמו במדבר כי לעולם חסדו ׃
למכה מלכים גדלים כי לעולם חסדו ׃
ויהרג מלכים אדירים כי לעולם חסדו ׃
לסיחון מלך האמרי כי לעולם חסדו ׃
ולעוג מלך הבשן כי לעולם חסדו ׃
ונתן ארצם לנחלה כי לעולם חסדו ׃
נחלה לישראל עבדו כי לעולם חסדו ׃
שבשפלנו זכר לנו כי לעולם חסדו ׃
ויפרקנו מצרינו כי לעולם חסדו ׃
נתן לחם לכל בשר כי לעולם חסדו ׃
הודו לאל השמים כי לעולם חסדו ׃

Translation

On Language

by Stephen Fry

There's language, and there's speech. There's chess, and there's a game of chess. Imagine a piano keyboard: eighty-eight keys, only eighty-eight! And yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: 'Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.'

Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother. And yet, oh and yet! we all of us spend our days saying the same things, time after weary time: 'I love you', 'Don't go in there', 'Get out', 'You have no right to say that', 'Stop it', 'Why should I?', 'That hurt', 'Help', 'Marjorie is dead'. That surely is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or a handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple. It's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from an old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair. It's a sputtering match held to a frosted pane. It's a half-remembered childhood birthday party. It's the warm, wet trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

Language circumscribes beauty, confirms, confines, limns, and delineates; it colours and contains. Yet language is only a tool — a tool that we use to dig up the beauty that surrounds and is, we take, our only and absolute real. So I'm finding myself with some surprise and no little alarm hurling a paradox at you. Beauty is our only reality, and yet it is an ideal. It is the surface-tension of the membrane that stretches between us and the vision of beauty that language seeks to disperse, as a detergent might dissipate or dissolve a droplet of oil.

Let me explain, expound, expand, and exposit. I find you beautiful. But you are not beauty. Therefore you contain a property of beauty. Therefore the substance of which you exhibit a property must exist. Where is it? That is language's task.

Language pursues beauty, harries it, hounds it, courses it across the roughlands of enquiry and in so doing can itself be beautiful. Ripple on ripple, image on image, wheel within a wheel like the circles that we find in the windmills of our mind.

Language can be beautiful. 'And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.' Plenitude, dishes, martita, tumble, emolument, forage, smitten, plenum: words that have their own sonority and beauty which is extrinsic to their connotational or denotational referends.

So I'll leave you with a thought, a breath, a fruit that drops from the boughs of my imaginings. Think beauty, but be beautiful. Say beauty, but say it beautifully. Beauty is duty, and duty beauty. So there. Goodnight.

Back

by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

They ask me where I've been,
And what I've done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn't I,
But someone just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Killed men in foreign lands...
Though I must bear the blame,
Because he bore my name.

A Great Day for Freedom

by David Gilmour

On the day the wall came down
They threw the locks onto the ground
And with glasses high we raised a cry
For freedom had arrived

On the day the wall came down
The ship of fools had finally run aground
Promises lit up the night
Like paper doves in flight

Now life devalues day by day
As friends and neighbours turn away
And there's a change that, even with regret
Cannot be undone

Now frontiers shift like desert sands
While nations wash their bloodied hands
Of loyalty, of history
In shades of grey

The Dry Salvages (Pt. V)

[Pt. IV here]
by T.S. Eliot

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

[Little Gidding here]