"and this is the wonder that'€™s keeping the stars apart"

Thanks Beverly and e.e.

"I found a poor translation - perhaps you can do it better."

No no i cannot . For me it's a good translation, the melancholy is there; even though each language has its own tone.
Poetry is as much human as universal
Thanks very much.
Waiting to read more from you and others
in that "poetic" thread. Cheers

Here is a poem that needs reading over and over, until you see all that it offers, has nothing to do with apples.

After Apple-Picking
by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

One could write a multiple page report on this works. Every line or two or three changes thoughts from past to present to future to what might be. As one said fact, dream, labor and knowledge all in one. He appears to not be content with his achievements in life and being elderly, dreams of what might have been, and not certain if what he thinks he knows, in all actuality, is or not true.
I think the woodchuck line is about resting up for a time, and return to do better than before, or die in his sleep and not care which. He evidently thinks he missed the boat numerous times calling them fallen apples that are worthless. It is quite catchy watching the tenses change as we proceed through the lines.

Just placed an order with Amazon

ISBN13: 9780871401526

Looking forward to Wednesday

Dave

--

I couldn't sleep last night. I drove to a place called Malham Tarn
Crystal clear sky, my way illuminated by the Moon.
Absolute silence.
Above me the streak of the Milky Way.
It's been years.
The clarity.


Richard E Byrd - Polar Explorer - not a poet, but an occasional poet in prose, says it best (not the first time I have quoted this on the forum)

I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead.

The day was dying, the night being born but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless.

Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it.

In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot.

It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.



That from a weather data gathering scientist at just beyond 80 degrees South(!)


Dave (again)