EPILOGUE1
Beauty may stay with us for just one day
Before time’s crude intrusion, like a canker,
Invades its wild rose with a sad decay,
And slights its whiteness with a glaze of amber.
And yet around its ruined purity
Always for days on end will there still linger
Something unfaded in intensity:
A haunting presence, palpable as odor.
Though this can numb us with a melancholy
Longing for that one, that rarest day,
Also it can give us new strength and holy
Resolution to move us on our way
Paying glad homage with our hearts and eyes
To every day that Beauty lives and dies.
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1 I wrote this sonnet in Scotts Bluff , Nebraska when I was there doing a two week workshop the summer of 1979. The rest of the piece was mostly written while I was on my first Caravan tour throughout Nebraska in the winter of 1978-79.
It looks forward to beauty to come, which is how Pop lived his life, not eaten up with regret, but ready to experience any happiness that the new day might offer him.
HYMN TO BEAUTY, MOTHER OF LOVE1
Highest star through all eternity
In Nature’s eye to shine;
Lamp of mystery, discerned by
Glory and grace divine;
Yesterday, today, perpetually,
O, celestial queen,
Defeat our grief, our pain defy
Thou most royal rosine;
Thou lovely lady, thou gift of Beauty,
Thou fresh flower feminine,
Lean to us, guide us by purity
Love’s root, leaf, bloom, and vine.
Beyond all price, thou my empress
Bright polished, precious stone;
Victress of vice, high genetress
Of Love, our lord sovereign;
Thy wisdom shields from enemies,
Against all troubles’ train:
Petitioness, mediatress, salvatress
Of all Nature’s domain;
Thou lovely lady, thou gift of Beauty,
Thou star meridian,
Delicious spice of paradise
That bears the precious grain.
Protecting wall, place palatial,
Nonpareil pulchritude,
Triumphal hall, high throne regal
Of Nature’s magnitude;
Mansion royal, the Light of all
From thy chamber issued;
Bright Gust crystal, original,
Full filled of spirit-food:
Thou lovely lady, thou gift of Beauty,
Thy Issue in our blood
From bleak despair’s fell, mortal pall
Us rescues by its good.
End of the Book of the Makar
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1 This is a translation and adaptation of a poem by 16th century Scots poet William Dunbar. He wrote in a unique dialect that mixed up Chaucerian English, Latin and Scots. It is highly percussive and unashamedly musical. The original of this poem is called Hale Sterne Superne, which means “hale highest star.” It is a hymn to the Virgin Mary, but here I have taken the Christian context and shifted it somewhat. My hymn is to personified Beauty, the mother and generator of Love.
I think of Pop’s dream of his mother that night when he was running away from the orphanage as a way that he contacted the great beauty of her love. The song he spontaneously made, the beauty he made for himself that redeemed his lonely walk, was a reflection of that love, a love he carried all the way through his life, that he gave to his children and that lives still in his grateful grandchildren, that they will be sure to pass on to his great-grandchildren and beyond.