Stages

Elf light, bat light,
Touchwood light and toad light,
And the sea a shimmering gloom of grey,
And a small face smiling,
In a dream's beguiling
In a world of wonders far away.
Walter de la Mare

Now sleeps the crimson petal, Now the white,

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk,

Now winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;

The fireflly wakens. Waken thou with me.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Circus stages and woodland ones too.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend

xx

julie

juliewhitmorepottery.etsy.com

passionate poet

I made this shadow box because I revere the poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins. Faith and doubt in God is what he's known for, but I've always seen almost a holy reverence for nature in his words. When you read him, you can almost hear him breathing in the room, winded from one of his lengthy trapses in the wood. This stanza is from 'Insvernaid' written about 1880.

What would the world be, once bereft of wildness and wet?
Let them be left, oh let them be left,
Wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

This outdoor loving woman is standing on a rock while the river rushes by her. A speckled trout has jumped into her arms. Birds fly overhead and water rats hold everything aloft.

Gerald, who suffered from depression, but fought it bravely died of typhoid fever in 1875. His last words "I am happy, so happy."

Song Thrush nest

The shearwater lays her egg in a bare hole dug in the peat; The kingfisher gradually ammases fish bones for a bed for a tiny fist sized cave in a riverbank; the song thrush builds its nest in a thick hedge or ivy growing against a wall, and it's as tightly woven as a teacup. My bird books list song thrush along with the wood thrush. One book even shows its song in musical notes! The eggs are beach rocks I've collected from Otter Cove. Bird eggs are full of promise, like Robert Louis Stevenson says
Younger than we are
Oh children and frailer;
Soon in blue air
They'll be singer and sailor.