|
The Modern Antiquarian Forum » Megalithic Poems |
Log In to post a reply
|
|
|
|
| Topic View: Flat | Threaded | |
Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 17, 2006, 22:13
|
||
|
Aye to all that. We waste so much time on 'correctness' when the important thing is to get knowledge, information and experience out there so that others can build on it - it might not be perfect but if it's sincere the future will take care of the facts.
|
|||
|
Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 18, 2006, 10:44
|
||
|
Forgot to mention (and apologies if you already have it) but Stukeley's, Stonehenge, A Temple Restor'd To the English Druids (Parts 1&2) is available as a free download from - http://kobek.com/ Haven't downloaded it myself yet so don't know what it's like.
|
|||
|
nigelswift 8112 posts |
Aug 18, 2006, 12:42
|
||
|
Some rather nice musings at Avebury .... Very like children they must have been. The same unending days. They must have thought that the world went on for ever- just as they knew it--like my damned Committee does. . . . With their fuel wasting away and the climate changing imperceptibly, century by century. . . . Kings and important men followed one another here for centuries and centuries. . . . They had lost their past and had no idea of any future. . . . They had forgotten how they came into the land . . . When I was a child I believed that my father's garden had been there for ever. . . . "This is very like trying to remember some game one played when one was a child. It is like coming on something that one built up with bricks and stones in some forgotten part of the garden. . . . " "The life we lived here," said the doctor, has left its traces in traditions, in mental predispositions, in still unanalyzed fundamental ideas." "Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond. "Presently we shall remember a lot more about all this. We shall remember what it was like to live in this place, and the long journey hither, age by age out of the south. We shall remember the sacrifices we made and the crazy reasons why we made them. We sowed our corn in blood here. We had strange fancies about the stars. Those we brought with us out of the south where the stars are brighter. And what like were those wooden gods of ours? I don't remember. . . . But I could easily persuade myself that I had been here before." They stood on the crest of the ancient wall and the setting sun cast long shadows of them athwart a field of springing wheat. "Perhaps we shall come here again," the doctor carried on Sir Richmond's fancy; "after another four thousand years or so, with different names and fuller minds. And then I suppose that this ditch won't be the riddle it is now." "Life didn't seem so complicated then," Sir Richmond mused. "Our muddles were unconscious. We drifted from mood to mood and forgot. There was more sunshine then, more laughter perhaps, and blacker despair. Despair like the despair of children that can weep itself to sleep. . . . It's over. . . . Was it battle and massacre that ended that long afternoon here? Or did the woods catch fire some exceptionally dry summer, leaving black hills and famine? Or did strange men bring a sickness--measles, perhaps, or the black death? Or was it cattle pest? Or did we just waste our woods and dwindle away before the new peoples that came into the land across the southern sea? I can't remember. . . . " Sir Richmond turned about. "I would like to dig up the bottom of this ditch here foot by foot--and dry the stuff and sift it--very carefully. . . . Then I might begin to remember things." http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/secret-places-of-the-heart/5/
|
|||
|
Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 18, 2006, 15:29
|
||
Wonderful, very wonderful - thank you.
|
|||
|
Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 20, 2006, 15:34
|
||
|
"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." Oscar Wilde Know the feeling :-( A bit of The Thorn and a Stukeley engraving to go with it now on - http://megalithicpoems.blogspot.com/
|
|||
|
Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 22, 2006, 21:54
|
||
|
"Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road into the wonder of Avebury. They found a clean little inn there kept by pleasant people, and they garaged the car in the cowshed and took two rooms for the night that they might the better get the atmosphere of the ancient place. Wonderful indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already two thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a great wall of earth with its ditch most strangely on its inner and not on its outer side; and within this enclosure gigantic survivors of the great circles of unhewn stone that, even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete. A whole village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for the most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall is sufficient to embrace them all with their gardens and paddocks; four cross-roads meet at the village centre. There are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part the destruction was already done before the Mayflower sailed. To the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons change. Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that forgotten world. These trackways, these green roads of England, these roads already disused when the Romans made their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn, and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall."* What happened to the cowshed? Is that the bit at the end of the Red Lion car-park where they now keep boxes of Walker's Crisps? :-) * http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/W/WellsHerbertGeorge/prose/secretplaces/secretplaces005.html
|
|||
|
Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 29, 2006, 20:57
|
||
|
This was posted by TomBo a couple of years ago* (and maybe written by him). It's unsigned but so friggin' good it deserves to be reposted. Today on Fendrith Hill I would speak words as stark as bones From here amongst the wind worn stones But whose words could be as stark as the sky? Or as wise as these stones? - Toppled by time, rugged, alone Today on Fendrith Hill I would sing you a song as endless as the wind It would rattle your windows at night And shriek like the naked storm But whose voice could haunt like the voice of the sky As it sighs around these stones? Forgotten, unheard it moans Today on Fendrith Hill The wind whispers a truth as old as the Earth Unutterable simplicity Spare and lean as a hare Honed down by the blasting wind To the barest of bones * http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/3657
|
|||
ryaner 679 posts |
Aug 29, 2006, 22:05
|
||
Very nice. Powerful.
|
|||
|
nigelswift 8112 posts |
Aug 30, 2006, 19:00
|
||
|
This bears comparison with anything on the list. Its high time it was added. Coming up to midnight, Friday, 2005. Car loaded, water and a sandwich in the fridge for the journey down tomorrow. Leaving Essex a little after 4am. Lock the doors, climb into the cockpit, first stop Mum and Dad at the back of Pewsey churchyard - safe now in their circle and mine. Fresh flowers and a solstice smile to them and all that went before. Then gently into the Vale of Pewsey. Windows down. Wind blowing a year's worries away. Skylarks and the still heady smell of elderflower. And before the people gather there, a quiet stroll around my favourite Avebury stones and secret bank - still mist-surrounded and expectant. We really do not live to see that many summers - certainly not that many to waste upon tiredness and misunderstanding. So, for what it's worth, I hope you enjoy what looks to be a lovely midsummer's weekend. Happy summer solstice. Littlestone
|
|||
|
Littlestone 5386 posts |
Edited Oct 09, 2006, 11:26
Sep 05, 2006, 22:04
|
||
|
Not so much a poem, more a nice piece of old prose... 'If you want to grace the burial place of these men with some lasting monument', replied Merlin, 'send for the Giants' Ring which is on Mount Killaraus in Ireland. In that place there is a stone construction which no man of this period could ever erect, unless he combined great skill and artistry. The stones are enormous and there is no one alive strong enough to move them.'* * Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, circa 1139.
|
| Pages: 97 – [ Previous | 1 … 25 26 27 28 29 30 | Next ] | Add a reply to this topic |
|
|
|
| The Modern Antiquarian Forum Index | |
