Something Wondrous

Turning and Turning
12" x 12" mounting 15" x 15'

Leslie challenged us to make a quilt experiment inspired by a poem. Naturally, I thought of the most depressing poem: W. B. Yeats' s The Second Coming. I love this poem. I tried to expel it from my mind and think of something chipper, but instead found myself  experimenting with mad turnings. I had too much fun drawing this thread picture of the end of the world, or society's descent to corruption, or whatever Yeats meant by his glorious words. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15527#sthash.NvSF9nkY.dpuf

Something Wondrous Will Happen
12"  x 12" mounting 15" x 15'

Naturally, I felt guilty and compelled to cheer, so I created this thread drawing of my second-favorite poem:

It’s the Dream by Olav H. Hauge

It’s the dream we carry

that something wondrous will happen

that it must happen

time will open

hearts will open

doors will open

spring will gush forth from the ground–

that the dream itself will open

that one morning we’ll quietly drift

into a harbor we didn’t know was there.

from Borealis (March/April 2002), translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hadin

http://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/olaf-h-hauge-its-the-dream/

Of several translations online, this is my favorite. But I just ordered a collection of Hauge's poems, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin.