Happy Birthday, Lord Byron!
So I am taking a little break between working on the WIP and looking at pics of Michelle Obama’s clothes to wish Lord Byron a happy birthday! He was born on this day in 1788, which would make him–225. I doubt very much he would like the idea of being quite so old and no doubt very decrepit by now….
Here is one of my favorite of his poems, Stanzas for Music (I think I just really love those opening lines). What are some of your own favorites??
There be none of Beauty’s daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sound were causing
The charmed ocean’s pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lull’d winds seem dreaming:
And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o’er the deep;
Whose breast is gently heaving,
As an infant’s asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee,
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer’s ocean.
Revisiting Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads…I love Tintern Abbey… too long to post her except in part… my favorite:
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind 30
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.