If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if th' other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
The firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
-John Donne (1572-1631),
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
|
Pursuit
(Point Reyes)
|
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never thought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance, suppose The self-same Power that brought me there brought you. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), The Rhodora On Being Asked, Whence is The Flower? |
|
Shadowy Twin
(Zion)
|
Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything Prepared a sinister mate For her--so gaily great-- A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, -Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), The Convergence of the Twain |
|
Phantom Towers
(New York)
|
But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry's tower of the Old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely and spectral and sombre and still. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), Paul Revere's Ride |
|
Kindred Lights
(New York)
|
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight Making earth bare and veiling heaven; and when It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
|
Kiss in the Night
(New Orleans)
|
"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again! Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live! And in my heartless breast and burning brain That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive, With food of saddest memory kept alive, Now though art dead, as if it were a part Of thee, my Adonais! I would give All that I am, to be as though now art:-- But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart. -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais |
|
Company
(Shanghai)
|
We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way. -Frank Moore Colby, The Margin of Hesitation, "Thinking It Through in Haste", 1921 |
previous pictures of companions
