Book I of Paradise Lost compares Lucifer’s massive army to scattered autumn leaves:

            His legions—angel forms, who lay entranc’d             Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks             In Vallombrosa, where th’ Etrurian shades             High over-arch’d embow’r; or scatter’d sedge             Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion arm’d             Hath vex’d the Red-Sea coast, whose waves

o’erthrew             Busiris and his Memphian chivalry,             While with perfidious hatred they pursu’d             The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld             From the safe shore their floating carkases             And broken chariot-wheels: so thick bestrown,             Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood,             Under amazement of their hideous change.

Cease, then, nor Order imperfection name; Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree Of blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee.Submit: in this or any other sphere,Secure to be as bless'd as thou canst bear; Safe in the hand of one disposing Power, Or in the natal or the mortal hour.All Nature is but Art unknown to thee;All chance direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good:And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

John 3:8

“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

~ words of Jesus (KJV)

Aeolian Harp

Aeolian Harp

“Drive your cart and your plow over the

bones of the dead.”~ Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”

P7 L2: Do not give over importance to dead matter. This could be linked to the doctrine of mortalism -- the soul dies with the body so don't worry about the dead souls of your friends and relatives.

logical structure

There are usually three elements: • the description of a particularized outer natural

scene; • an extended meditation, which the scene

stimulates, and which may be focused on a private problem or a universal situation or both;

• the occurrence of an insight or vision, a resolution or decision, which signals a return to the scene originally described, but with a new perspective created by the intervening meditation.

To a Skylarkpp. 739+

We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.

Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. …No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.

1 John 4:6-8. 12-13

The heavens declare the glory of God;

and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

~ Psalm 19:1

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!

~ Psalm 139:17

Upon the lonely links, above the abundant rough, you mount with ragged, insistent song heavenward, far heavenward, then fall, by staged descent, seeking a level of air that sets your spirit off to best advantage--a most congenial perch in breezy nothingness, a perch from which you fall, aflutter, to a lower and cling there like a leaf on thread-thin stem.

Some spot on earth holds you, some phantom nest that roots your flighty, singing vertical. Like cries of a crowd of children unseen, your lone song floods the grass-floored void. I stand rapt, lifted from my earthbound plight--my life, my game--and freed by empathy with blind blithe being.

~ John Updike’s “To a Skylark”

Violin and Candlestick

Georges Braque

1882-1963

French Cubism