“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”
– William Blake, from Proverbs of Hell.
“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”
– William Blake, from Proverbs of Hell.
“How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year?
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen?
What old December’s bareness everywhere?”
– William Shakespeare, from Sonnet 97.
“I walked abroad in a snowy day;
I asked the soft snow with me to play.”
– William Blake, from Soft Snow.
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
– R.S. Thomas.
“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.”
– Bertolt Brecht, motto from the Svendborg Poems.