Lanced Hearts of Lovers & Martyrs
I'm Eric, a young poet who seems to have been swept away in the Romantic Spirit of Beethoven's Symphonies, struck by the philosophies of Plato & the Poets' lyrics, burned for love like the martyrs of Rome, and can see an honest beauty in love & faith.
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seattle theme by parker ehret
"In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. I do not think that at any rate any ‘rational being’ is wholly evil. Satan fell. In my myth Morgoth fell before Creation of the physical world. In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit.* In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Númenóreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants;† if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.
* Of the same kind as Gandalf and Saruman, but of a far higher order.
† By a triple treachery: 1. Because of his admiration of Strength he had become a follower of Morgoth and fell with him down into the depths of evil, becoming his chief agent in Middle Earth. 2. When Morgoth was defeated by the Valar finally he forsook his allegiance; but out of fear only; he did not present himself to the Valar or sue for pardon, and remained in Middle Earth. 3. When he found how greatly his knowledge was admired by all other rational creatures and how easy it was to influence them, his pride became boundless. By the end of the Second Age he assumed the position of Morgoth’s representative. By the end of the Third Age (though actually much weaker than before) he claimed to be Morgoth returned."
(Source: theringofwords)
(Source: myunderwood)
Song of Beren & Lúthien, J.R.R. Tolkien
The first— in what may be many— of audio readings of my own favorite poems and literary passages, read by myself. Starting off here with my favorite poem of all; Tolkien’s Song of Beren and Lúthien, read straight from the pages of The Fellowship of the Ring.
The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinuviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering.
There Beren came from mountains cold,
And lost he wandered under leaves,
And where the Elven-river rolled.
He walked along and sorrowing.
He peered between the hemlock-leaves
And saw in wonder flowers of gold
Upon her mantle and her sleeves,
And her hair like shadow following.
Enchantment healed his weary feet
That over hills were doomed to roam;
And forth he hastened, strong and fleet,
And grasped at moonbeams glistening.
Through woven woods in Elvenhome
She lightly fled on dancing feet,
And left him lonely still to roam
In the silent forest listening.
He heard there oft the flying sound
Of feet as light as linden-leaves,
Or music welling underground,
In hidden hollows quavering.
Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves,
And one by one with sighing sound
Whispering fell the beechen leaves
In the wintry woodland wavering.
He sought her ever, wandering far
Where leaves of years were thickly strewn,
By light of moon and ray of star
In frosty heavens shivering.
Her mantle glinted in the moon,
As on a hill-top high and far
She danced, and at her feet was strewn
A mist of silver quivering.
When winter passed, she came again,
And her song released the sudden spring,
Like rising lark, and falling rain,
And melting water bubbling.
He saw the elven-flowers spring
About her feet, and healed again
He longed by her to dance and sing
Upon the grass untroubling.
Again she fled, but swift he came.
Tinuviel! Tinuviel!
He called her by her elvish name;
And there she halted listening.
One moment stood she, and a spell
His voice laid on her: Beren came,
And doom fell on Tinuviel
That in his arms lay glistening.
As Beren looked into her eyes
Within the shadows of her hair,
The trembling starlight of the skies
He saw there mirrored shimmering.
Tinuviel the elven-fair,
Immortal maiden elven-wise,
About him cast her shadowy hair
And arms like silver glimmering.
Long was the way that fate them bore,
O’er stony mountains cold and grey,
Through halls of iron and darkling door,
And woods of nightshade morrowless.
The Sundering Seas between them lay,
And yet at last they met once more,
And long ago they passed away
In the forest singing sorrowless.
Édouard Manet,
Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868, Musée d’Orsay
Just had the pleasure of being introduced to this fine Frenchman. I can’t believe I’ve never read anything of his already. ‘Got a feeling M. Zola and I’ll be enjoying each other’s company quite a bit for the time being.
My Christmas Novel. ‘Try to read it every yuletide.
—Starting this one.
He was writing what he should have written long ago and had always wished to write but never could. Now it came to him quite easily, he wrote eagerly and said exactly what he wanted to say. Only now and then a boy got in his way, a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat worn fur-side out, as in the Urals or Siberia.
He knew for certain that this boy was the spirit of his death or, to put it quite plainly, that he was his death. Yet how could he be his death if he was helping him to write a poem? How could death be useful, how was it possible for death to be a help?
The subject of his poem was neither the entombment nor the resurrection but the days between; the title was “Turmoil.”
He had always wanted to describe how for three days the black, raging, worm-filled earth had assailed the deathless incarnation of love, storming it with rocks and rubble—- as waves fly and leap at the seacoast, cover and submerge it— how for three days the black hurricane of earth raged, advancing and retreating.Two lines kept coming into his head:
“We are glad to be near you,” and “Time to wake up.”
Near him, touching him, were hell, dissolution, corruption, death, and equally near him were the spring and Mary Magdalene, and life. And it was time to awake. Time to wake up and to get up. Time to arise, time for resurrection.
I picked up reading Les Misérables earlier in the year. I wrote this half-way through as a personal reflection, but it’s just been collecting dust in my drafts box ever since. Every time I’d work on it, it’d get too personal and I’d be overcome with anxiety to post it. But with the growth and transformation I’ve had in the past half year, a lot of these words and thoughts have lost their sensitivity, and I have little reserves of holding back.
Reading through Les Misérables, a book I adored in my adolescence, I was remembered all over again how big an impression that novel had on me growing up.
The first time reading Hugo’s novel, I was 15, back in high school. I only got a quarter through— never even saw the barricades rise. But that was fine by me. Back then, the whole epic tale of a thousand-so-pages all dissolved and faded behind nothing more than the beautiful tale between Valjean and Cossette. That was the center; everything else was relative. Marius I cared nothing for, a minor role; his love with Cossette a mere side-plot, or conclusion, to that of her and Valjean. The barricades, the revolutionaries, Javert and the social commentaries; all of it was all just added color drowned behind the relationship of the kind convict and his little orphan. The rest was all just to show what a father would go through for love of his daughter.
And I realized now this sheds a little light into the life I had as a kid.
