What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt...

-John Masefield, Sonnets





Obelisks of Fire

On the level quivering line
Of the water crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,
Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;

-Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Lines Written Among
the Euganean Hills
, 1819





White Radiance

Olympus, where they say there is an
abode of the gods, ever unchanging: it
is neither shaken by winds nor ever wet
with rain, nor does snow come near it,
but clear weather spreads cloudless
about it, and a white radiance stretches
above it.

-Homer, The Odyssey, 1865





Stirring Souls

There is,
one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea,
whose gently awful stirrings
seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath;

-Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick, 1851





Yellow Flutterings

Or perhaps, to show their black, and golden wings,
Pausing upon their yellow flutterings.

-John Keats, Poems, I Stood Tiptoe, 1817







previous pictures from Mono Lake




images © 1998 by Randy Wang
up | home | me | donate | email