R.E. Slater - Rebirth (a poem)

 

Rebirth

by R.E. Slater

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

Photo Credit: Song Bird Art



( For context to poem see link )

Richard Wilbur - Two Voices in a Meadow (Milkweed, Stone)

Two Voices in a Meadow by Richard Wilbur

1. A MILKWEED
 

Anonymous as cherubs

Over the crib of God,

White seeds are floating

Out of my burst pod.

What power had I

Before I learned to yield?

Shatter me, great wind:

I shall possess the field.

 

 

 

2. A STONE

 

As casual as cow-dung

Under the crib of God,

I lie where chance would have me,

Up to the ears in sod.

Why should I move? To move

Befits a light desire.

The sill of Heaven would founder,

Did such as I aspire.

 

- Richard Wilber

 

 

 

About the Author

 

Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.

 

Biography & Additional Poems - http://www.poemhunter.com/richard-wilbur/biography/ 

 

 

 

Review: "Hermeneutics exercise"

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2012/11/16/hermeneutics-exercise/

 

by Peter J. Leithart

Friday, November 16, 2012, 12:49 PM

 

Richard Wilbur’s “A Milkweed” has been haunting me all week. It’s a useful exercise in interpretation: Short, accessible, memorable, and profound. What is the poem “about”?

 

As meta-poetry: The poem is about the poem and the power of poetry. The great wind is also the spirit of poetic inspiration, by which Wilbur bursts open the milkweed so that the seeds posses the field of my mind – if I yield. From here on out, every time I see milkweed, it’ll burst out anew.

 

[But at another level I think its about] a plant in a field, whose seed pod is burst so that the plant reproduces. From the first line, though, we have hints of something bigger. It’s a manger scene, God in his crib with cherubs hovering over. Does Wilbur know that there are cherubs over the ark of the covenant? Even if he doesn’t, the milkweed takes us immediately beyond itself to the event that for Christians marks the center of history – the Word of God made baby flesh.

 

Why anonymous? This seems to anticipate the end of the poem, where the milkweed possesses the field. The silent seeds float away, they seem not to make a name for themselves. Yet they triumph.

 

But what is like cherubs over the crib of God? Grammatically, the answer is the “white seeds.” A troop of milkweed seeds moves through the air like angel hosts. It’s an arresting image, but it’s more than imagery. Watching milkweed seeds in the air, we are like the shepherds to whom myriads of angels sing to announce the coming of God in swaddling clothes. In Wilbur’s imagination, the milkweed bursts out to become more than a milkweed. Perhaps it’s only a bit too grand to call it a cosmology.

 

Can we push the analogy: If the white seeds are the anonymous cherubs, is the broken pod the crib of God? Is there a hint of the later story of the cribbed God, a touch almost too light to be felt concerning the later breaking of the pod of flesh to release a host of seeds? Is the crib of God a seed in the ground that dies to make much fruit? Or is the pod the earthy flesh in which God comes?

 

The milkweed speaks – or is it the poet? Does it matter? Who or whatever he is, the speaker of the second stanza reflects on the power of yielding, which appears to be nearly the only power available. Yielding has to be learned. It does not come naturally; it is nurture not nature to yield. The pod wants to stand firm, protect its vulnerable seeds, resist the great wind. Yielding seems to be a renunciation of power. But the speaker suggests the opposite, and we again, it seems, see the passing shadow of a cross.

 

If you yield, you get shattered. But Wilbur, channeling Donne (“Batter my heart”), invites the shattering. Only the shattering will release the cherub host. Only by being shattered will the milkweed reproduce. It’s the great wind that shatters: Does Wilbur know the etymologies of wind and spirit in Greek, Hebrew, and other languages? I think we can safely assume so. The great wind is the Great Spirit, a Spirit of shattering, to which everything must yield, or be destroyed.

 

And those that do yield possess the field. That is, fill the field: Milkweed is, after all, a weed, and weeds are notoriously fecund. But “possess” is also “own,” and with “the field,” possess is also “win.” There has been no hint of battle (or perhaps a slight hint in “power”), but there is a victory. Anonymous cherub seeds, released by the wind from the pod-crib, form a triumphant army.

 

So: A “cosmology”; also an “eschatology” and a “theory” of poetry. All in eight simple lines. It’s nearly miraculous.

 

 

 

Trumbull Stickney - "Mnemosyne" (poem)

Mnemosyne

It's autumn in the country I remember.
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!

And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber

During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.

 

It's cold abroad the country I remember.

 

The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain

At midday with a wing aslant and limber;

And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.

 

It 's empty down the country I remember.

 

I had a sister lovely in my sight:

Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;

We sang together in the woods at night.

 

It's lonely in the country I remember.

 

The babble of our children fills my ears,

And on our hearth I stare the perished ember

To flames that show all starry thro' my tears.

 

It's dark about the country I remember.

 

There are the mountains where I lived. The path

Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,

The stumps are twisted by the tempests' wrath.

 

But that I knew these places are my own,

I'd ask how came such wretchedness to cumber

The earth, and I to people it alone.

 

It rains across the country I remember.


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


 

Trumbull Stickney - "Song" (poem)

Song

A bud has burst on the upper bough

(The linnet sang in my heart today);

I know where the pale green grasses show

By a tiny runnel, off the way,

And the earth is wet.

(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Not yet.”)

 

I nabbed the fly in a briar rose

(The linnet to-day in my heart did sing);

Last night, my head tucked under my wing,

I dreamed of a green moon-moth that glows

Thro’ ferns of June.

(A cuckoo said in my brain: “So soon?”)

 

Good-bye, for the pretty leaves are down

(The linnet sang in my heart today);

The last gold bit of upland’s mown,

And most of summer has blown away

Thro’ the garden gate.

(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Too late.”)


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


"Song" Notes

• a linnet is melodious songbird finch
• a runnel is a narrow watercourse
• a gold bit mown is a field of hay

Analysis
by Peter @ Vukutu

http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/10/friday-poem-song/

 

Joe Stickney (1874-1904) was a student of George Santayana at Harvard and later friends with him and with Henry Adams in Paris, where Stickney received the first doctorate of letters from the Sorbonne given to an American. Adams wrote of him: ”[in Paris one could] totter about with Joe Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry” (The Education, p. 1088) and, “Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the Gotterdammerung.” (The Education, p. 1090).

 

Stickney traveled in Europe and then taught Greek at Harvard, before dying suddenly of a brain tumour. Stickney’s poetry has an elegaic, autumnal feel about it, a sense of loss; it is writing from the end of an era, rather than from the start of one, as is Pounds’ or Eliot’s. Here is “Song“, written in 1902, and very appropriate for the season we in the northern hemisphere are now in.


References

The Complete Poems of Trumbull Stickney -

http://www23.us.archive.org/stream/poemsoftrumbulls00sticuoft/poemsoftrumbulls00sticuoft_djvu.txt

 

Select Poems by Poem Hunter -

http://www.poemhunter.com/trumbull-stickney/poems/page-1/?a=a&l=1&y=

 

A More Complete Listing by Poem Hunter (.pdf) -

http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/trumbull_stickney_2004_9.pdf

 

Select Poems by Poetry Foundation -

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/trumbull-stickney#about

 

 

Biography (from Wikipedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumbull_Stickney

 

Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20, 1874 – October 11, 1904) was an American classical scholar and poet. His style has been characterised^{[by whom?]} as fin de siècle and he is known^{[by whom?]} for his sonnets in particular.

 

He was born in Geneva^[1] and spent much of his early life in Europe. He attended Harvard University from 1891, when he became editor of the Harvard Monthly and a member of Signet society, to 1895, when he graduated magna cum laude. He then studied for seven years in Paris, taking a doctorate at the Sorbonne. He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque. His was the first American docteur ès lettres.

 

He then published a first book of verse Dramatic Verses (1902) and took a position as Instructor in Classics at Harvard (1903), but died in Boston of a brain tumour a year later.^[2] Stickney belongs to the number of Harvard poets (or the Harvard Pessimists) who died young, such as Thomas Parker Sanborn, George Cabot Lodge, Philip Henry Savage and Hugh McCulloch.

Poetic Works

• Dramatic Verses (1902)
• The poems of Trumbull Stickney (1905) edited by George Cabot Lodge; William Vaughn Moody, and John Ellerton Lodge
• Trumbull Stickney (1973) edited by Amberys R. Whittle

 

 

Biography(from the Poetry Foundation)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/trumbull-Stickney

Trumbull Stickney
1874–1904

Trumbull Stickney is best remembered as a promising young poet and scholar who died before his work could fully mature. As William Payne described his poems in a 1906 review for Dial: "Promise rather than fulfillment is the mark of this work as a whole, for it reveals Stickney as still groping for a distinctive manner rather than as having reached a definitive expression of his powers." A brilliant scholar and enthusiastic poet, Stickney died at the age of thirty, just as he was beginning to achieve a unique poetic voice. His friends and admirers have since mined his brief works to find what might have been, but often his poems reveal only the "promise" Payne found in 1906.

Joseph Trumbull Stickney was born in Geneva, Switzerland on June 20, 1874. His parents, Austin and Harriet Trumbull Stickney, were of impressive lineage and impressive schooling: Austin was a classics professor at Trinity College, and Harriet was a descendent of the colonial governor Jonathan Trumbull. Stickney was raised as befitted the child of such learned and lettered kin. He traveled widely, and apart from some brief studies at Walton Lodge and New York's Cutler's school, was taught entirely by his father. After this thorough, cosmopolitan education, Stickney matriculated at Harvard where he bore out the promise invested in him; he was the first freshman to be elected to the editorial board at the Harvard Monthly. Though Stickney published his verses in various college journals, his social circle was centered at the Monthly. There, he met George Cabot Lodge and William Vaughn Moody—two writers who would later edit one of Stickney's posthumous verse collections. Much of Stickney's undergraduate poetry was published in the pages of the Monthly, as well as some criticism of his beloved Greek literature.

Throughout his career, Stickney seems to have felt torn between his academic and literary passions. Nonetheless, after achieving his A.B. (magna cum laude) in 1895, Stickney pursued his studies at the Sorbonne, composing two theses, one a biography of Ermolao Barbaro and one a study of the gnomic elements of Greek poetry. His studies seemed not to nourish him, however; when George Cabot Lodge visited Stickney in 1895-96, he commented that Stickney seemed in "mute not cheerful despair." While in school, Stickney struggled to reconcile his divided interests. While hacking away at the profession he had resigned himself to pursue, he continued to write poetry, notably his long poem "Kalypso" (later published in Dramatic Verses, 1902). Though he planned to publish his work, he felt he was as yet unready, that his work "ha[d] too much thought," according to Michele J. Leggott in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

His work from this period suggests that he was attempting to rectify that failing. For example, a sonnet written in 1895 called "Cologne Cathedral" shows a shift from the cerebral, antique lines of his early work toward sensual evocations: "Prayer carved the sable flowers; a choral spun / Rose-windows in the aisle; and music stayed / So silken-long by arch and colonnade / That the lines trembled out and followed on[.]" In this passage, Stickney describes the relationship between song and architecture in a fresh way: rather than focusing on the immortality of verse compared to marble monuments, Stickney shows how the visual world can be created by the aural world. "Prayer carved the sable flowers," he writes, suggesting that spiritually infused words can shape the solid world.

Many of Stickney's poems from this period relate to an affair he may have had between 1896 and 1899. (After Stickney's death, his family destroyed all letters relating to unseemly love affairs or requests for funding, so his romantic life will forever be private.) As these lines from poems of that period suggest, however, Stickney became focused on the despair of love: "I heard a dead leaf run. It crossed / My way. For dark I could not see. / It rattled crisp and thin with frost / Out to the lea." By the time the affair ended in 1899, however, Stickney had composed much of his first volume of poetry—but he was unable to find a publisher for it. He wrote despondently to his sister, according to Leggott, "with some resignation I put off the hope of my life. Bay [George Cabot] Lodge publishes a novel and another volume this year." The "hope of [Stickney's] life" did not have to wait long, however: by 1902, he located a publisher for his verses: Charles E. Goodspeed in Boston.

The volume, Dramatic Verses, includes many of Stickney's poems from his Paris days, as well as some work written earlier. In Reference Guide to American Literature, Earl Rovit wrote of this early work that "Stickney's tempered musicality sustains the conventional form structures, raising these poems above the level of similar lamentations that the Mauve Decade manufactured in wholesale lots." One year later, Stickney graduated from the Sorbonne, thus becoming the first American to win the prestigious Doctorat es Lettres there. He took a brief tour of Greece—"a sort of bacchanal," as he described it, according to Leggott—before returning to an academic post at Harvard.

His life as an instructor proved as unfulfilling as his life as a student, however. As quoted by Leggott, he wrote to Henry Adams in 1903: "You refer to the last thing excavated on classic soil, my own torso. It proves not to be an antique at all, but a work of a New England sculptor who was wrecked in a dory off the Peloponnesian Coast. On being presented to Harvard University, it was found the torso had convulsions and couldn't be kept in place. So it is being packed for further travel."

Not only was Stickney unhappy in his work, but he also began to experience terrible headaches as well as periodic "blind spells." He continued to teach and write, but on October 11, 1904 he died of a brain tumor. Like some other poets who have died young, Stickney produced some of his best works in the months leading up to his death. One late fragment, "Sir, say no more," hints tantalizingly at what future was lost when Stickney died: "Sir, say no more. / Within me 'tis as if / The green and climbing eyesight of a cat / Crawled near my mind's poor birds." Like many poets who died young, too, Stickney found his greatest fame after death. His friends Lodge and Moony soon published an edition of his collected poetry, in which critics recognized a "romantic and wistful temper."

Later readers of Stickney's poetry similarly found his work intriguing. Stickney was praised by such notables as Conrad Aiken, William Rose Benet, Louis Untermeyer, Allen Tate, Mark Van Doren, W. H. Auden, Oscar Williams, and John Hollander. Hollander, writing for the New York Times Book Section, suggested that "his work appears more central than ever.... The interest is not in style, but in the grasp of the visionary moment." As a writer for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English remarked, "Stickney was steeped in Greek thought and literature, yet his poems exhibit a curiously tortured modern sensibility." Indeed, he has become in some ways representative of his period. As Rovit wrote, "he exhibited a cultural impulse that was later followed more extensively by writers like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot." Stickney's poetry shows glimmers of what it might have become: intellectually intense, given to emotional plunges, rhythmically daring. His few verses offer the raw elements of a finely balanced poetic gift, but those elements are, as Payne noted, "promise rather than fulfillment."

Career

Instructor of Greek at Harvard University, 1903-04. Writer.

Bibliography

• Dramatic Verses, Charles E. Goodspeed (Boston), 1902.
• Les Sentences dans la Poesie Grecque d'Homere a Euripedes, Societe Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition (Paris), 1903.
• De Hermolai Barbari vita atque ingenio dissertationem, Societe Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition, 1903.
• The Poems of Trumbull Stickney, edited by George Cabot Lodge, William Vaughn Moody, and John Ellerton Lodge, Houghton (Boston), 1905.
• Homage to Trumbull Stickney: Poems, edited by James Reeves and Sean Haldane, Heinemann (London), 1968.
• The Poems of Trumbull Stickney, edited by Amberys R. Whittle, Farrar, Straus (New York City), 1972.

Other

• (Translator with Sylvain Levi) Bhagavad-Gita, Librairie d'Amerique et d'Orient (Paris), 1938.

Contributor to Harvard Monthly.

 

Further Reading

 

Books

• Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, HarperCollins, 1991.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 54: American Poets, 1880-1945, Third Series, Gale, 1987.
• Gale, Robert, The Gay Nineties in America, Greenwood Press, 1992.
• Modern American Literature, St. James, 1999.
• The Oxford Companion to American Literature, Oxford University Press, 1995.
• The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Reference Guide to American Literature, St. James, 1994.

Periodicals

• Dial, July 16, 1903.
• New York Times, July 16, 1972, p. 5.

 

R.E. Slater - Autumn Memories (a collection of Haiku-like poems)

Autumn Memories

by R.E. Slater


Green leaves fell hard

One sunny frosted morning

When all was death and quiet.

* * *

A large leafed tree stood proud

Late in the rising autumn sun

Then quickly became undressed.

* * *

The morning quiet was loud

But not as loud as nearby tree

Exploding leaves into the ground.

* * *

By the hundreds the leaves fell

Without air to hold them up

Falling noisily to the ground below.

* * *

One frosted, chilly morning

I stood breathless to watch

The sudden death of autumn.

* * *

When all was peace and wonder

I laid me down in leafy bed

Resting in pillowed content.

* * *

Dead leaves crunched under my step

The woodland did not stop nor care

Nor did I – filled with its brilliance.

* * *

Hunters once were here

And now were gone

And life spread round-and-round.

* * *

Youth was once all I had -

Before the wonders of fall

The improbable beauty of winter.

* * *

Hickory nuts rested in a battered pail

Freshly picked from the cold ground

While grandma chattered in delight.

* * *

Dark shadows crossed the hillocks

Dimming autumn’s lingering lights

Orange moonrise brought all back.

* * *

My chilly breath like a chimney stack

Lifted and rose into the autumn airs

On friendship’s many dappled wings.

* * *

The red tractor’s large black tires

Were muddy and packed tight –

Dad did not care and went to bed.

* * *

We left in early morning’s cold darks

Carrying heavy guns in small hands

Watching wet dogs sniff and run.

* * *

The cotton band uniform held the cold

Wet winter rain pressed against my skin

Brightly stepping to drums and bugles!

* * *

Autumn sunrise met autumn sunset

Orangish yellows blazed dusky reds

Not one day ended as it began.

* * *

Autumn days warm the soul

Autumn evenings clear the head

Decay and rot sweetly fill the air.

* * *

The clasp of cold autumn air

Pulls at my jacket’s warm collar

Lifts my face to its breath.


- R.E. Slater
November 5 & 19, 2012;
March 3, 2014

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

T.S. Eliot - Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat

There's a whisper down the line at 11.39
When the Night Mail's ready to depart,
Saying "Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?
We must find him or the train can't start."
All the guards and all the porters and the stationmaster's daughters
They are searching high and low,
Saying "Skimble where is Skimble for unless he's very nimble
Then the Night Mail just can't go."
At 11.42 then the signal's nearly due
And the passengers are frantic to a man—
Then Skimble will appear and he'll saunter to the rear:
He's been busy in the luggage van!

He gives one flash of his glass-green eyes
And the signal goes "All Clear!"
And we're off at last for the northern part
Of the Northern Hemisphere!

You may say that by and large it is Skimble who's in charge
Of the Sleeping Car Express.
From the driver and the guards to the bagmen playing cards
He will supervise them all, more or less.
Down the corridor he paces and examines all the faces
Of the travellers in the First and the Third;
He establishes control by a regular patrol
And he'd know at once if anything occurred.
He will watch you without winking and he sees what you are thinking
And it's certain that he doesn't approve
Of hilarity and riot, so the folk are very quiet
When Skimble is about and on the move.
You can play no pranks with Skimbleshanks!
He's a Cat that cannot be ignored;
So nothing goes wrong on the Northern Mail
When Skimbleshanks is aboard.

Oh, it's very pleasant when you have found your little den
With your name written up on the door.
And the berth is very neat with a newly folded sheet
And there's not a speck of dust on the floor.
There is every sort of light-you can make it dark or bright;
There's a handle that you turn to make a breeze.
There's a funny little basin you're supposed to wash your face in
And a crank to shut the window if you sneeze.
Then the guard looks in politely and will ask you very brightly
"Do you like your morning tea weak or strong?"
But Skimble's just behind him and was ready to remind him,
For Skimble won't let anything go wrong.
And when you creep into your cosy berth
And pull up the counterpane,
You ought to reflect that it's very nice
To know that you won't be bothered by mice—
You can leave all that to the Railway Cat,
The Cat of the Railway Train!

In the watches of the night he is always fresh and bright;
Every now and then he has a cup of tea
With perhaps a drop of Scotch while he's keeping on the watch,
Only stopping here and there to catch a flea.
You were fast asleep at Crewe and so you never knew
That he was walking up and down the station;
You were sleeping all the while he was busy at Carlisle,
Where he greets the stationmaster with elation.
But you saw him at Dumfries, where he speaks to the police
If there's anything they ought to know about:
When you get to Gallowgate there you do not have to wait—
For Skimbleshanks will help you to get out!
He gives you a wave of his long brown tail
Which says: "I'll see you again!
You'll meet without fail on the Midnight Mail
The Cat of the Railway Train."

 

 

 

R.E. Slater - Sea Change (a poem)

Sea Change

by R.E. Slater

It was there. Seen almost immediately in the

greying disappointment pooling in her eyes -

shading a sullen face wrenched in faraway muse.

Seen in the profound sadness wasting away,

leaving me feeling lost and alone. Refusing

chaste solace when dully looking away, guardedly

watching the cold, heavy tides break - entwining

castaway lovers until dawn’s early lights.

A familiar feeling sounding lost souls, plunged

love’s deepest fathoms cast its hastening bights.

Constant as the endless tide’s fey running seas -

ebbing and flowing enchanted shoreline lees.

Adrift true loves that never truly abides -

eternally searching forlorn worlds fled a’flight.

Pierced Venus’ oft scouring shoals, chastened

bright coral’d reefs of valiant dreams dispelled.

Drowned in dark melancholy’s deepest waters -

(whose old despairs I fought vainly to avoid).

Overwhelmed in the lostness of my kindred soul

alive the brimming haunts of betrayal’s sad eyes.

Bravely resisting time’s cruel, crooked hand -

numbed a greying sea’s massing rolling pitch.

Casting long and low against its swelling pride -

washing in-and-out, tide-upon-tide, too gladly

exhausted upon a sandy surf’s glistening foams.

Abroad, it was, that I found myself discovered

(almost immediately as I discovering looked).

Transfixed a nethering shoal’s nearest redoubts,

cradling fey promising songs of virginal rebirth.

Like quicksilver’d flashes lit a ruddy dawn’s rays,

whispering demurely ’neath morning’s low hums.

Flashing on lifted waves thrusting ashore, met

a lifting fog’s muted, misty skirt, casting astern.

A’ sudden plunged love o’er the face of the deep,

slipping, sliding, unbroken its vast running tides.

Cast a turbulent ocean’s moaning deep loss -

awash blissful songs sung amid carefree daze.

Making me know no other place so safe -

cradled within my castaway lover’s moiling gaze.

Bearing me up even as I was birthed, across

undying storms bursting Atlantic’s grey bows.

Once a’ locked hoary time’s toiling, carnal seaways -

(bestirr’d sirens’ healing songs of blackest depths).

Offering wanton treasures flung flotsam’d regrets

lest thrust upon carrying seas I wouldst forever sail.

Where no wind nor trouble could rightly prevail -

so deep, and great, this thrice-bound love brought.

Newborn into the shadows of my riparian haunts -

bending southwards bound upon steady rhythm

safely haven’d within heaven’s flaming descents.

- R.E. Slater

Oct 22, 2012

rev. Oct 25, Nov 5-6, 19, 2012; Jan 8, 2013

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

Nicholas Sparks & Gabriel Yared - Message in a Bottle - Letters, Quotes, Videos

[Edited for Video June 22, 2021; if the

videos expire please let me know by comment]

Gabriel Yared - Message in a bottle soundtrack - Theresa & Garrett

Message in a bottle - Catherine's letter

Catherine's Letter to Garrett

To all the ships on the sea and to all the ports. To all my friends, my family and strangers. This is a message and a prayer. The message is that during my trips I found a great truth. I have already found what everybody is looking for… and few find: the person for whom I was born to love. Somebody like me, from Outer Banks county… from the mysterious Atlantic. A person rich in simple values… a person who learnt on his own. A port in which I am always at home. The wind, the problems… or a little death can’t destroy this house. I pray for all the people to know such love and to recover from it. If my prayer is listened to, there won’t be guilt any more, or regrets. Neither anger. Please, God. Amen!

Catherine 

Message in a bottle Catherine's letter

(as read by Catherine)

Wikiepedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_in_a_Bottle_(movie)

Garrett's 1st Letter to Catherine

Dear Catherine,

 Imdb - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139462/

I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you in so long. I feel I’ve been lost… no bearings, no compass. I kept crashing into things, a little crazy, I guess. I’ve never been lost before. You were my true North. I could always steer for home when you were my home. Forgive me for being so angry when you left. I still think some mistake’s been made… and I’m waiting for God to take it back. But I’m doing better now. The work helps. Most of all, you help me. You came into my dream last night with that smile… That always held me like a lover… rocked me like a child. All I remember from the dream…is a feeling of peace. I woke up with that feeling… and tried to keep it alive as long as I could.

I’m writing to tell you that I’m on a journey toward that peace. And to tell you I’m sorry about so many things. I’m sorry I didn’t take better care of you… so you never spent a minute being cold or scared or sick. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to find the words… to tell you what I was feeling. I’m sorry I never fixed the screen door. I fixed it now.

I’m sorry I ever fought with you. I’m sorry I didn’t apologize more. I was too proud. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you more compliments… on everything you wore and every way you fixed your hair. I’m sorry I didn’t hold on to you with so much strength that even God couldn’t pull you away.

All my love,

Garrett

Music from "Message in a bottle" Gabriel Yared
Where the Boundries Are

Teresa

Message in a Bottle ... my favorite scene (3/5) second letter

Garrett's 2nd Letter to Catherine

My Darling Catherine,

Where are you? And why, I wonder as I sit alone in a darkened house, have we been forced apart?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, no matter how hard I try to understand. The reason is plain, but my mind forces me to dismiss it and I am torn by anxiety in all my waking hours. I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.

I try to remember the way we once were, on the breezy deck of Happenstance. Do you recall how we worked on her together? We became a part of the ocean as we rebuilt her, for we both knew it was the ocean that brought us together. It was times like those that I understood the meaning of true happiness. At night, we sailed on blackened water and I watched as the moonlight reflected your beauty. I would watch you with awe and know in my heart that we’d be together forever. Is it always that way, I wonder, when two people are in love? I don’t know, but if my life since you were taken from me is any indication, then I think I know the answers. From now on, I know I will be alone.

I think of you, I dream of you, I conjure you up when I need you most. This is all I can do, but to me it isn’t enough. It will never be enough, this I know, yet what else is there for me to do? If you were here, you would tell me, but I have been cheated of even that. You always knew the proper words to ease the pain I felt. You always knew how to make me feel good inside.

Is it possible that you know how I feel without you? When I dream, I like to think you do. Before we came together, I moved through life without meaning, without reason. I know that somehow, every step I took since the moment I could walk was a step toward finding you. We were destined to be together.

But now, alone in my house, I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless him, and I find myself wondering why—out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved—I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.

Garrett

Message in a Bottle ... my favorite scene (4/5) third letter

Garrett's 3rd and Final Letter to Catherine (Undelievered)

Dear Catherine,

My life started when I knew you and it ended when you died. I thought that keeping our memories we would both live. But I was wrong. A woman called Theresa showed me that if I opened my heart I could love again, irrespective of the intensity of suffering. 

Storm - Gabriel Yared - Message in a Bottle - Soundtrack - (1999)

Message in a Bottle ... my favorite scene (5/5) final scene

Message in a Bottle Quotes

If you like her, if she makes you happy, and if you feel like you know her---then don't let her go.

True love is rare, and it's the only thing that gives life real meaning.

Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. I love you, T.

Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.

Someday you'll find someone special again. People who've been in love once usually do. It's in their nature.

But because they didn't see each other very often, their relationship had more ups and downs than either of them had experienced before. Since everything felt right when they were together, everything felt wrong when they weren't.

There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore.

I know that somehow, every step I took since the moment I could walk was a step towards finding you.

The ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together...

Things changed, people changed, and the world went rolling along right outside the window.

If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.

But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing.

That initial anger she had felt turned to sadness, and now it had become something else, almost a dullness of sorts. Even though she was constantly in motion, it seemed as if nothing special ever happened to her anymore. Each day seemed exactly like the last, and she had trouble differentiating among them. 

New Dream

Message in a Bottle-Soundtrack: Gabriel Yared

I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless them, and I find myself wondering why--out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved--I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.

It is at moments like these that I know my what my purpose is in life. I am here to love you, to hold you in my arms, to protect you. I am here to learn from you and to receive your love in return.I am here because there is no other place to be.

She was everything I wanted. She was beautiful and charming, with a quick sense of humor, and she supported me in everything I did.

It's impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.

If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.

Theresa, I know there's a part of you that believes you can change someone, but the reality is that you can't. You can change yourself, and Garrett can change himself, but you can't do it for him.

As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist.

At night, when I am alone, I call for you, and whenever my ache seems to be the greatest, you still seem to find a way to return to me.

And suddenly she knew exactly why Catherine had fallen in love with him. It wasn't that he was unusually attractive, or ambitious, or even charming. He was partly those things, but more important, he seemed to live life on his own terms.

Life passes by now like the scenery outside a car window. I breathe and eat and sleep as I always did, but there seems to be no great purpose in my life that requires active participation on my part...I do not know where I am going or when I will get there.

Theresa Osborne: If some lives form a perfect circle, other take shape in ways we cannot predict or always understand. Loss has been part of my journey. But it has also shown me what is precious. So has love for which I can only be grateful.

I am here to love you, to hold you in my arms, to protect you.

I watch with breaking heart as you slowly fade away.

Love is Love no matter old you are, and I knew if I gave you enough time, you'd come back to me.

To all the ships at sea, and all the ports of call. To my family and to all friends and strangers. This is a message, and a prayer. The message is that my travels taught me a great truth. I already had what everyone is searching for and few ever find. The one person in the world who I was born to love forever. A person, like me, of the outer banks and the blue Atlantic mystery. A person rich in simple treasures. Self-made. Self-taught. A harbor where I am forever home. And no wind, or trouble or even a little death can knock down this house. The prayer is that everyone in the world can know this kind of love and be healed by it. If my prayer is heard, there will be an erasing of all guilt and all regret and an end to all anger. Please, God. Amen.

I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.

...if they were meant to be together they would find a way to do it.

I wish we didn't live so far apart... You're kind of addicting.

Who do you think it was that brought the bottle to her?

I think... that when it comes to us, anything is possible.

They continued to watch each other from across the room, both frozen for a moment by the shadow of distant possibilities.

There are lots of real men out there - men who could fall in love with you at the drop of a hat.

I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless him.

Real people had real agendas, real demands, real expectations about how other people should behave.

Someday you'll find someone special again. People who've been in love once usually do. It's in their nature.

The ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together...

I watch with breaking heart as you slowly fade away.

Each recognized the fact that real commitment could be proven only through the passage of time.