"The Moon is a Ghostly Galleon tossed upon cloudy seas........................."
| The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes |
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| | "The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door."
When I was in 6th grade our teacher gave us an assignment-we had to memorize a stanza or two from a poem and then recite it to the class. I chose "The Quality of Mercy" from The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare and to this day I can remember, maybe, the first two or three lines. Another student memorized a couple stanzas from Alfred Noyes poem, "The Highwayman". This poem has stayed with me over the years and when "the wind is a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees" and "the moon (is) a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas" I think of this poem. One Saturday night a few weeks ago it was such a night. I stopped to take some pictures in an attempt to capture those two lines. It was a very cold night, made colder by the strong wind that was blowing.
Years and years ago WITF, our local public radio station, played a piece of music along with one of the local radio personalities reading this poem and I had the presence of mind to record it. It was the perfect marriage of music and spoken word. I've been looking for that cassette tape and didn't find it in order to include the name of the piece of music. Since the video is STILL uploading I continued to look for the music and it is "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" by Vaughan Williams.
The video is still uploading and taking forever to do so. It is about 5 minutes long and my thought was to include the name of the music so, if you wanted, you could play the music, read the poem and have the video playing. Otherwise it's just a boring video of the moon and clouds at night.
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This is a picture of one of the new lamps we bought. I've been married 32 years and up until now I've chosen pretty traditional lamps for the living room. We've typically had cut glass lamps. Either one of the cats or the wind knocked over the one lamp and cracked it. But it was still together and if I turned it the right way the crack didn't show. Then, months or maybe a year later, the wind finished the job, knocked it over and broke the lamp completely so into the trash it went. Just a couple weeks ago we were shopping and I saw these lamps. I picked out four different styles of lamps and had Tom choose the one he would pick for the living room. He chose the traditional style we have had and was surprised at my choice, which if course we went with..... :)I still haven't gotten the hang of putting the pictures on the blog in the order that I want them to appear. The video should have been up with the moon/night pictures.
Evidently the video didn't upload and I'm going to bed-after I read the weekly update from Adrienne and look at my sweet grandchildren. And that's all the news that isn't......................................
This is a picture of one of the new lamps we bought. I've been married 32 years and up until now I've chosen pretty traditional lamps for the living room. We've typically had cut glass lamps. Either one of the cats or the wind knocked over the one lamp and cracked it. But it was still together and if I turned it the right way the crack didn't show. Then, months or maybe a year later, the wind finished the job, knocked it over and broke the lamp completely so into the trash it went. Just a couple weeks ago we were shopping and I saw these lamps. I picked out four different styles of lamps and had Tom choose the one he would pick for the living room. He chose the traditional style we have had and was surprised at my choice, which if course we went with..... :)
