Promises Like Pie-Crust

November 6, 2009

Promises Like Pie-Crust

Let this delightful poem inspire your day!

--Description: 19th C, Rossetti C., Disillusion, Friendship, Love--

Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?

You, so warm, may once have been
Warmer towards another one:
I, so cold, may once have seen
Sunlight, once have felt the sun:
Who shall show us if it was
Thus indeed in time of old?
Fades the image from the glass,
And the fortune is not told.

If you promised, you might grieve
For lost liberty again:
If I promised, I believe
I should fret to break the chain.
Let us be the friends we were,
Nothing more but nothing less:
Many thrive on frugal fare
Who would perish of excess.

Christina Rossetti

--Did You Know: (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) Christina was the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and like him she showed promise as a poet while still very young. She was educated at home and encouraged to write by her family; her teenage poems were printed by her grandfather on his own press. She was a devout Anglican, and refused two suitors on religious grounds: the painter James Collinson because he became a Roman Catholic; and Charles Bagot Cayley, because he was an atheist. Perhaps as a result of this self-denial, a recurrent theme in her poetry is the rejection of earthly passion in favour of spiritual devotion. Even those poems with a strong element of fantasy in them, such as 'Goblin Market' or 'The Prince's Progress' are often written with a clear moral purpose in mind. Rossetti's health was always poor, and illness had rendered her an invalid by the time she was fifty. She continued to write however, producing Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), which contained poems and thoughts for each day, and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). After her death her brother W.M. Rossetti brought out an edition of her later poetry, New Poems, in 1896, and edited her Collected Poems (1904).

--Word of the Day: sommelier \suhm-uhl-YEY; Fr. saw-muh-LYEY\, noun:
A restaurant employee who orders and maintains the wines sold in the restaurant and usually has extensive knowledge about wine and food pairings.
Example:
In the restaurant we ordered hors d'oeuvres and beer. The sommelier brought the beer, tall, beaded on the outside of the steins, and cold. There were a dozen different dishes of hors d'oeuvres.
-- Ernest Hemmingway, The Sun Also Rises

--Quote of the Day: Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
-George Bernard Shaw

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