Beaux Arts Bath
Beginning with Daffodils, oil on canvas, 46 x 41 cm. £3,800

 

Nature gets away with it:
Repeats each year the same
Familiar alphabet

And utters, without shame,
The clichés she has aired
Since daffodils first came

Before the swallow dared;
Her phrases catch the breath;
We don’t ask to be spared

When, having passed through death,
We face the platitude
Of tenth – or fiftieth –

Return to life; have stood
Repeated ecstasies
In the enchanted wood.

Why, then, this quaint disease,
This fever to be new,
This fear we shall not please

With thoughts, however true,
That Man has hatched before?
Are we not Nature too?-

Or is it something more
Than Nature in our kind
Smells out the shapes that bore

At those which will remind
The dying they must die –
Which, like the solar wind

Unnoticed in the sky,
Corrode the cells, and state
With vast redundancy

The dull routine of fate?

Redundancy, by Edward Lowbury

 

Flamboyant Bird (view2), Bronze of Edition V 37 x 51 x 18 cm. £8,000

 

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,   
Whose voices make the emptiness of light   
A windy palace. Quavering from the brim   
Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,   
They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing   
Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof
Whose heart’s a haunted woodland whispering;   
Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;   
Who hears the cry of God in everything,   
And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

Thrushes, by Siegfried Sassoon

As an aside, Siegfried Sassoon is buried at St. Andrew’s church in the village of Mells, near Bath.  Another reason to visit the most beautiful town in England….

40. Large Thrown Rectangular Flask (Front View), Nuka and Tenmoku Glazes Circle Motif, Ht. 50 cm. £1,600

 

God’s first language is silence.
His second, heat.
He learned mercy next,
though he still has trouble with the pronunciations.
Then Aramaic, Igbo, Old High German.
God is a completist,
proud to understand every earthly prayer.
But if you’ve studied languages, you know
comprehension’s the easy part.
Much harder to say something back
without using
your mother tongue.

Unaccented, by Maureen Thorson

The trees are glorious in their Autumn colour.  The train journey home is at the perfect time to catch the colours of the sunset sky, shown below at Avoncliff Aqueduct next to the station. It will soon be night walks for the dog in the company of the stars. He enjoys snuffling in the abundant fallen leaves.

 

Regards,
Aidan Quinn.