Night

    

    OMG, it's Monday already. Where do the days go?  My poem today is by poet, artist and art critic, John Ruskin. His words are ghostly and discriptive. Two of my photographs were taken in Dunfermline Abbey, Scotland and hopefully add a little to the atmosphere.

NIGHT 

 

Faint from the bell the ghastly echoes fall
That grates within the grey cathedral tower
Let me not enter through the portal tall
Lest the strange spirit of the moonless hour
Should give a life to those pale people, who
Lie in their fretted niches, two and two
Each with his head on pillowy stone reposed
And his hands lifted, and his eyelids closed

From many a mouldering oriel, as to flout
Its pale, grave brow of ivy-tressed stone
Comes the incongruous laugh, and revel shout
Above, some solitary casement, thrown
Wide open to the wavering night wind
Admits its chill, so deathful, yet so kind
Unto the fevered brow and fiery eye
Of one, whose night hour passeth sleeplessly

Ye melancholy chambers! I could shun
The darkness of your silence, with such fear
As places where slow murder has been done
How many noble spirits have died here
Withering away in yearnings to aspire
Gnawed by mocked hope-devoured by their own fire
Methinks the grave must feel a colder bed
To spirits such as these, than unto common dead 

 

John Ruskin 1819-1900