Mountain Life
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Transcript of Mountain Life
Mountain Life by Mats Størkersen
MOUNTAIN LIFE
by: Henrik Ibsen
N summer dusk the valley lies With far-flung shadow veil; A cloud-sea
laps the precipice Before the evening gale: The welter of the cloud-waves
grey Cuts off from keenest sight The glacier, looking out by day O’er all
the district, far away, And crowned with golden light.
But o’er the smouldering cloud-wrack’s flow, Where gold and amber
kiss, Stands up the archipelago, A home of shining peace. The mountain
eagle seems to sail A ship far seen at even; And over all a serried pale Of
peaks, like giants ranked in mail, Fronts westward threatening heaven.
Look: mute the saeter-maiden stays, Half shadow, half aflame; The deep, still
vision of her gaze Was never word to name. She names it not herself, nor knows.
What goal my be its will; While cow-bells chime and alp-horn blows.
It bears her where the sunset glows, Or, maybe, further still.
Too brief, thy life on highland wolds. Where close the glaciers jut; Too soon the
snowstorm’s cloak enfolds. Stone byre and pine-log hut. Then wilt thou ply with
hearth ablaze. The winter’s well-worn tasks; -- But spin thy wool with cheerful
face: One sunset in the mountain pays. For all their winter asks.
Emily Dickinson. Complete Poems
(1924).
Part Four: Time and Eternity
The sun kept setting, setting still;
No hue of afternoon
Upon the village I perceived,—
From house to house ’t was noon.
The dusk kept dropping, dropping still;
No dew upon the grass,
But only on my forehead stopped,
And wandered in my face.
My feet kept drowsing, drowsing
still,
My fingers were awake;
Yet why so little sound myself
Unto my seeming make?
How well I knew the light before!
I could not see it now.
T is dying, I am doing; but
I ’m not afraid to know.
At That Hour
by James Joyce
At that hour when all things have
repose,
O lonely watcher of the skies,
Do you hear the night wind and the
sighs
Of harps playing unto Love to unclose
The pale gates of sunrise?
Play on, invisible harps, unto Love,
Whose way in heaven is aglow
At that hour when soft lights come
and go,
Soft sweet music in the air above
And in the earth below.
Poem by Philip Levine.
An Abandoned Factory, Detroit
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing
stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather.
Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.
Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
In the sure margin of eternity.
The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the
spokes
Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,
And estimates the loss of human power,
Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
The gradual decay of dignity.
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
Which might have served to grind their eulogy.
Bjornstjerne Bjornson.Alone And Repentant
A friend I possess, whose whispers just said, “God’s peace!” to my night-
watching mind. When daylight is gone and darkness brings dread, He
ever the way can find. He utters no word to smite and to score; He,
too, has known sin and its grief. He heals with his look the place that
is sore, And stays till I have relief. He takes for his own the deed that
is such That sorrows of heart increase. He cleanses the wound with so
gentle a touch, The pain must give way to peace.
He followed each hope the heights that would scale Reproached not a
hapless descent. He stands here just now, so mild, but so pale; -- In time
he shall know what it meant.
Jowl and listen lad (Old West Virginia coal miner song, unknown
author).
Jowl, Jowl and listen lad
Ye’ll hear the coalface working
There’s many a marrer missing lad
Because he wadn’t listen lad.
Me Father always used to say
Pit work’s more than hewing
You’ve got to coax the coal along
And not be riving and chewing
The deputy crawls from flat to flat
The putter rams the chummins
And the man at the face must kna his place
Like a mother kna’s her young un.