Poetry on Nature’s Wisdom

Selected extracts of some quality timeless poetry exploring the wisdom of Life:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

— T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 4 Quartets

The flute of interior time is played whether we hear it or not,

What we mean by ‘love‘ is its sound coming in.

When love hits the furthest edge of excess, it reaches a wisdom.

And the fragrance of that knowledge!

It penetrates our thick bodies,

it goes through walls –

Its network of notes has a structure as if a million suns were arranged inside.

This tune has truth in it.

Where else have you hard a sound like this?

— Robert Bly, 16, The Kabir Book

Sing, my heart, of unknown gardens poured in glass,
transparent and unattainable.
Fountains and roses of Ispahan or of Shiraz,
Praise and joyfully sing of them, incomparable.

Show, my heart, that you could never truly miss them, since
it is you, alone, for whom their figs have ripened.
That in your revery, envisioning powers heightened,
you are kin to each flowering branch the sweet breezes evince.

Avoid the error of thinking something dear was shed
in the transaction of your grave decision to be!
You are part of the very weave, o silken thread.

Whatever the motif constricting you internally
(if only for a moment in the painful life you lead)
intuit the full meaning of the glowing tapestry.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets of Orpheus

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