Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
―
Satiety in a saddest thought,
Soil crumbles deep down as a naught
By dint of tree piercing clouds like banshee,
Tattered remains of my impish glee.
Glee I found in throbbing pain,
Frailing heart hoping for warmth in vain,
Jaded spirit defies its steadfast might,
Tangerine dreams to persevere my plight.
Plight of mirages like the forlorn moon,
Crawling into the prelude of Bach, I begin to swoon,
Esse of Mutability in a fraught silence,
Moments of raging tempest I hold onto my self-reliance.
Life, oh the ludicrous tyrant
Void of my existence, immutably vibrant…
2 comments On #SymphonyofMelancholy
I don’t know where to even start, on this wonderful share by you, Gayathri. Your flair for Rainer Maria Rilke is pretty infectious. In the lede verse, “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act” almost immediately took me back to the way the Stoic philosophers used to take on the challenges and the fears that they had to fathom, without being slayed by those dragons. In fact, in the recent bestseller by Prof. William Irvine, in his “Stoic Challenge,” he playfully comes up with his own notion of trying to face those disappointments and trudging the unchartered waters, as though the “Stoic Gods” want to see how one responds to those challenges. Just akin to the “dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act.”
Likewise, the final portion of the lede verse, “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love,” reminded me of the mutual exclusivity between two opposing forces that could be dominant and dormant in self: love and fear. It’s like fire and water, IMHO. One’s presence exhausts, preempts, and completely supplants the other. They just cannot coexist, even though, one’s torments may all be owing to this ongoing battle between the two!
And most importantly, the midway part of the lede verse, “just once, with beauty and courage.” reminded me of the lamentation of the great Russian poet Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko, which goes like this: “that time so strange, when simple honesty looked like courage!” I believe, this is so apposite for the zeitgeist of our times, when, expediency, artifice, duplicity and all such vices are somehow elevated in the field of public-opinion as pragmatic virtues, in of itself, that those, who would subscribe, live-by, and stick by their personal credo of honesty, courage, and beauty is somehow jettisoned as old-fashioned and passe! Yet, it takes a special kind of “beauty” to spot this “beauty” of “courage” in the one standing before us!
So, this is what I wanted to say. Just a lede verse from Rainer Maria Rilke is mustering these many thoughts…If so, how much more is laying dormant there, to be masticated and imbibed!
Thank you for introducing me to this writer. He is already in my #TBR, thanks to you!
That was quite good anecdotes you shared. Of course Courage is a beauty and only comes with integrity(no matter what the world lay rules, we ll stick to it with all means). Keep on reading him 🙂
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