OOPS

Instead of taking my new medication (temodol --chemo med) every 24 hours and my anti-nausea med every 12 hrs. I've taken both drugs every 12 hours. I'll continue to take as prescribed now. Even the mosquitoes didn't bite me last night.

Day after the appointment day

After walking with Mike last night, I went for a beautiful walk today for probably half to a quarter hour in the old Italian Ward area of Guelph where we live and really made a point of noticing and appreciating the gardens and the flowers that are blooming right now. I'm finding it difficult to classify where my head is at any moment, but I'd like to be able to say that my mind's in the present, so now I'm practicing being here in the Now or the Holy Instant as well as starting to practice surrender. I still flicker into moments of panic and fear but I'm learning that I can pull back into the present with a deep, soft drawing-in and letting go of breath. I am doing this as we speak because this reality is so new to me.

What's up the night of the appointment day

Well now Mike's in bed and I'm up with what seems to be some kind of energy boost, whether from doing this blog or awakening to something new or accepting my situation. I've had to make the switch, from off to on and permanently on, looking it in the face even if I can't make it out. And of course, that's the way I want it to be: distant, and a long way off from coming closer. And of course, it is death. God please lead me. This is my, "Even though I walk through the valley of of the shadow of death....." time.

Psalm 23 >>King James Bible

1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.


Psalm 23 >> New American Standard Bible ©

The LORD, the Psalmist’s Shepherd.
A Psalm of David.
1 The LORD is my shepherd,I shall not want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures;He leads me beside quiet waters. 3 He restores my soul;He guides me in the paths of righteousnessFor His name’s sake. 4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,I fear no evil, for You are with me;Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;You have anointed my head with oil;My cup overflows. 6 Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life,And I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

Books that have really helped me to go through this and now to face this

(Currently) A Course in Miracles http://www.acim.org/
(Currently) The Power of Now Eckhart Tolle
Love, Medecine andMiracles Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.
Peace, Love and Healing Bernie S. Siegel
Dr. Marla Shapiro's book Life in the Balance
Creating Miracles Caroline Miller, Ph.D.
Dream Healer 1 and 2
An online interview with Howard Storm (see links)
It's not about the Bike Lance Armstrong
A meditiation CD from my friend Shawna, Guided Mindful Meditation by Jon Kabat-Zin
A Healing Meditation CD by Kelly Howell (see link)
Meditation sessions a la Edgar Cayce (see link)

Some of the things I've been reading in Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now

To seek something through another is wrong.
'..."All that rises, passes away. This I know." What he meant was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general condition of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no effort or struggle on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them -- while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.(p.158)
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(That was Serene, my cat)

All inner resistance is experienced as negativity in one form or another. All negativity is resistance.(p.158)

Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life from on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it.....The only animals that may occasionally experience akin to negativity or show signs of neurotic behaviour are those that live in close contact with humans and so link into the human mind and its insanity.(p.159)

I'll stop for now.

Things that I felt while sitting in the backyard reading today after the Dr. appointment

The God who made you, made me.
I can (also) do no harm
We're the same
I have my touch therapy,
The hands of the trees giving away
Balsam fir sweeping away the negative, the fear

I balance what I could have lost
had alot of time to think
and practice
new behaviour therapy
of listening with open ears
and heart and mind
Don't get stuck on an idea
let it go and
be as honest as you feel you can
The hand that made thee, made me
We ARE alive
So I get my hair back
and my neuropathy goes away
and I accept as real
that I have these cancers in me
and now I take my best steps
step as best as I can.

I don't have to sit in the chemo room.
I get my nephrostomy internalized.
I have an excellent Dr..
God please guide me, please protect me, please rejeuvinate me, please lead me, please heal me.
Take these steps with me.
Eckhart Tolle, Power Of Now:

"What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all forms of life. What is Love? To feel the presence of that One Life deep within yourself and within all creatures. To be it. Therefore, all love is the love of God... Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective.. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. ... All you can do is create a space for transformati0n to happen, for grace and love to enter." (p.131)

I don't know if I've navigated well, thus far, in terms of my behaviour towards others and towards life itself. I'm very gullible, with myself.

Laterally relative to good news

There are 2 tumors - one on my liver and one near my spleen - which have increased in size since February, while there has been no mention of another tumor that seems to have disappeared. These seedings are being treated with a new oral chemotherapy drug (5 days). I hope that this drug works.

Day of Discovery

Well, today is the day when I find out if I continue on with chemotherapy or stop, as well as if there are threatening or remaining tumors left. I don't feel as Nuala did about life. Things are very beautiful to me. Sadness is one of those things that creeps in, and then in a while it goes and there's sort of a humming quiet.
My sister is driving me in for the appointments, and the day is quite beautiful and crisp.
I give not Heav'n for lost.

Nuala O'Faolain: One perspective on death

Sunday April 13 2008 - From interview found online:

The writer Nuala O' Faolain is dying of cancer. In an emotion-charged interview with Marian Finucane broadcast on RTE yesterday she revealed that she was diagnosed six weeks ago in New York. She said the cancer, which began in her lungs but has now spread to her brain and liver, is incurable. She has turned down the option of chemotherapy, which could help prolong her life
Transcript of Interview by Marian Finucane with Nuala O'Faolain MF: Nuala O'Faolain you've been on the programme a number of times in connection with your writing and you wrote your memoir "Are You Somebody" in a way that it seemed it explained yourself to you and now you're doing this interview in a completely different context and I understand that it's to explain yourself to yourself as well as to us as well.
NO'F: Yeah, it must look as if I'm an awful divil for publicity altogether and, in a sense, since I wrote "Are You Somebody" and it reached what is truth to say was a huge response, I have in a sense put myself out there. And the interviews I gave back then 10 or 11 years ago are like one bookend in which I presented myself and lots of people didn't like me and lots of people did.
But one way or another it was company for me who happens to be a childless middle-aged woman.
Now I am actually dying and I have Metastatic cancer in three different parts of my body.
And, somehow or another, it helps me to set up the other bookend and to say to those people who were interested in me and did care about me to say to them 'well this is how it is for me now for what its worth'.
MF: When were you diagnosed?
NO'F: About six weeks ago I was in New York. I have a terrific life to be absolutely honest with you. I managed to buy a little room that I absolutely loved and the important thing about the room is that it was mine, 'cause for several years myself and this man I liked were trying to pretend that I was part of his family, him and his 14- year-old daughter who lived in a house in Brooklyn. I had at last managed to negotiate that I wasn't ever going to be any good of a stepmother, that she didn't need me, that she had a good mother and a good father.
I didn't need her, I didn't want to spend my life watching her doing her homework. So I gradually semi moved out and I used to go to music and meet my friends and eat and I was writing a book and I'd applied for a fellowship to write a book and I had Ireland. So everything was well.
But I was walking along one day after fitness class and my right side began to drag and I eventually went to A&E in a New York hospital, a thing I wouldn't wish anyone to do.
MF: Why?
NO'F: Because it is full of chaos and people who have been shot and run over and, I couldn't get over this, I spent 13 hours on a little gurney and the people beside me were there for unhappiness.
Anyway, I was sitting there waiting to hear what was wrong with my right leg when the guy came past and said that 'your CAT scan shows that you have two brain tumours and we're going to do X-rays to see where they're from, they're not primaries'. And that is the first ever I knew.
MF: He said that in the middle of A&E.
N.O'F: He just passed by and I was on my own, you know. He just passed by and a few hours later he passed by again and said the X-Rays show you have lung tumours and since then others turned up. That was New York six weeks ago and since then I stayed a few nights in hospital. I might mention a bill of €28,000, but I had some health insurance through my dear friend John, but I sort of knew that I should come back to Ireland and I was absolutely right.
MF: How did you deal with the information?
NO'F: Em, I couldn't deal with it ... I was so shocked I would pay attention to anything except what I had just been told. And it took me a long time to work my way a little bit out of shock.
MF: In terms of what people think about cancer, the shock the terror and the treatment. Did they say to you or did you even ask them at that stage, about eh treatment and your chances and those kinds of questions
NO'F: Well I saw some people in New York and they are not very different from here. The thing about my cancers are they are incurable and that's the central fact about them. There is a great cancer hospital in New York just up the road from my beloved room which I will never see again, but anyway, I might have gone to Sloane Kettering if there had been a chance of a cure, but from the beginning to the end I have been very lucky.
There is no chance of a cure. There's a chance of aggressive treatment that will gain you time, often good time. And I came back to Ireland and did 14 brain radiations and the idea was that I would move on to chemotherapy and I don't doubt that what I have been advised here is at least as good.
The question arrived. I was supposed to start chemotherapy. I was supposed to start 18 weeks of it, six goes of it. After three gos they would know if it was working .
But whether it was the disease or the brain radiation I don't know or care, [it] reduced me to such feelings of impotence and wretchedness and sourness with life... and fear that I decided against it.
MF: Very often you hear of people being told 'oh, you have got to have a positive attitude' and 'a positive attitude is what gets you through' and I have betimes thought that this put a lot of pressure on the person that was told to have a positive attitude. What's your own view on that?
NO'F: Yeah, I was just reading about some best-selling man who says 'Live your dream to the end' and so on and I don't despise anyone who does, but I don't see it that way. Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy it isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life.
MF: I think that's a very interesting thing. Because, as I understood it, for you life was very sweet, you had sorted out your American life, you had your life in Ireland, you had your life in universities, then you were going to write. So life was very sweet for you at that point. Why does it not seem to you that if you went through treatment life could not be sweet again?
NO'F: It's the time that I would get at the end of the treatment. I'm not even thinking about the treatment itself. It amazed me, Marian, how quickly life turned black, immediately almost.
For example, I lived somewhere beautiful, but it means nothing to me anymore -- the beauty. For example, twice in my life I have read the whole of Proust. I know it sounds pretentious, but it's not a bit. It's like a huge soap opera. But I tried again the week before last and it was gone, all the magic was gone from it.
And I'm not nice or anything -- I'm not getting nicer. I'm sour and difficult you know. I don't know how my friends and family are putting up with me, but they are, heroically. And that is one of the things you learn.
But, in general, every year since I was 60 me and the sisters and brother and sister-in-law have gone to Italy and sat on a beach. And I thought: 'Well, I will keep that goal', but now I am wondering if I would sit on the beach thinking what? I would be thinking 'God, was I a bit breathless last night? Am I going to choke? Is my right leg swelling and is it hurting?' There's so much you can't know.
You see, the cancer is a very ingenious enemy and when you ask somebody how will I actually die? How do you actually die of cancer ?... I don't get an answer because It could be anything.
It can move from one organ to the other, it can do this that or the other. It's already in my liver, for example. So I don't know how it's going to be. And that overshadows everything. And I don't want six months or a year. It's not worth it .
MF: Do you believe in an afterlife.?
NO'F: No, I do not.
MF: Or a God.
NO'F: Well that's a different matter somehow. I actually don't know how we all get away with our unthikingness. Often last thing at night I walk the dog down the lane and you look up at the sky illuminated by the moon and behind the moon the Milky Way and, you know, you are nothing on the edge of one planet compared to this universe unimaginably vast up there and unimaginably mysterious.
And I have done that for years, looked up at it and given it a wink and thought 'I don't know what's going on' and I still don't know what's going on, but I can't be consoled by mention of God. I can't.
MF: Would you like it?
NO'F: No. Oh no I wouldn't. If I start doing that something really bad is happening to my brain, though I was baptised and I remember my First Communion and I went to Catholic schools and I was in the legion of Mary and I tried to stick to my pledge.
And though I respect and adore the art that arises from the love of God and though nearly everybody I love and respect themselves believe in God, it is meaningless to me, really meaningless.
MF: The reason I asked you is because it is a source of comfort for many people?
NO'F: Well, I wish them every comfort, but it is not even bothering me. I don't even think about it. I have never believed in the Christian version of the individual creator... how could I know far too many Buddhists and atheists and every kind of thing?
Let poor human beings believe what they want, but to me its meaningless. I waited on the radio the other day to hear poor John O'Donoghue knowing that he is very important to many people, but to me it is utterly meaningless to someone it isn't meaningful to.
And yet I want to mention one thing that you might play at the end, particularly for dying people, but I picked up little bits here and there about Ireland, largely at the Merriman Summer School, which is one of the great things in my life, a song I heard a few years ago 'Thois I Lar an Glanna'-- a kind of modern song sung by Albert Fry and other Donegal singers. And the last two lines are two things, asking God up there in the heavens, even though you don't believe in him, to send you back even though you know it can't happen. Those two things sum up where I am now. (Crying)
MF: When you realised the seriousness of the situation what did that do to your concept of your family, your friends, your enemies should you have them, to make all that right.
NO'F: Yes. For example, I lived for years with Nell McCafferty and let's say, 15 years and lets say 12 of those were the greatest fun and I owe so much to them and in fact as far as I am concerned Irish women owe so much to Nell and I was dead lucky to live with her. But then again it ended up not so hot, but now it is my great pleasure to be in e-mail contact with Nell and to thank her (crying).
MF: And other people you might have lost connection with...
NO'F: Well, funny enough, there is at least one person who was very unkind to me and he can stay that way as far as I am concerned. I always find it hard to forgive people who are unkind and I don't forgive them.
My God, my sisters and my brother and my sisters-in-law, I bet you there are loads of people like me get on grand with their family, but it never occurs to them that their family will go to the ends of the Earth for them. I am even embarrassed by all they do for me. What can I do with that goodness of theirs? If I was a religious person I would see it as the spirit in action, but I just see it as inexplicably good.
MF: You decided that in the time you have that you would see or examine what is that gives life quality or gives meaning or significance for you. Tell me the kinds of things you might do and have done.
NO'F: Well I couldn't do anything for the first weeks because I had to get this brain radiation every day. Then they told me I would have three weeks between it and starting the chemo... if I wanted to start the chemo, because they say we offer you the chemo because we think it will help you a great deal and I don't doubt them.
Well, anyway, I thought if I am going to do chemo it is to win time. What do I want to win time for? What is the quality left in life. And then, so, I arranged to go by myself to Paris and I thought 'I'll stay in the best hotel in Paris' and up to a point it worked.
In the morning, in a ridiculous piece of economy, I didn't have their €40 breakfast and I wandered out and I sat in a café and I had a tartine and milky coffee and I thought -- 'Well this is it. I love this'.
MF: Did that work? Did that do what it is you wanted to find out about or experience.
NO'F: Yes it did, once .But I wouldn't want to try it again. I wouldn't dream of it. It was such a miracle that it came together with the right people and in the right weather. A few days later I went to New York and that was overdoing it.
MF: Again, you are supposed to be sick.
NO'F: WelI I am sick, but I am trying to say goodbye. So much has happened and it seems such a waste of creation that with each death all that knowledge dies.
I think there's a wonderful rule of life that means that we do not consider our own mortality. I know we seem to, and remember, 'man thou art but dust', but I don't believe we do. I believe there is an absolute difference between knowing that you are likely to die, let's say within the next year, and not knowing when you are going to die -- an absolute difference.
MF: So people don't move away from you? Or how do people deal with you, I mean friends. Do they crowd you out?
NO'F: Obviously sometimes, in fact often, I pray for them to go away for the very essence of this experience is aloneness and, anyway, it is the steroids keep you awake at night. So it is 2 in the morning or four in the morning and you're walking around and all you know is that whatever it is you are feeling or thinking is yours and nobody else's. And there is nobody else to lay it off on and that aloneness is the centre and the thing that you never know when you are well ...
The two things that keep me from the worst of self-pity are that everyone's done it so that ordinary people are as brave as I could ever be or as less brave as I could ever be.
The second thing that really matters to me is that in my time, which is mostly the 20th century, people have died horribly, billions of people have died horribly, in Auschwitz, in Darfur, or dying of starvation or dying multiply raped in the Congo or dying horribly like that.
I think look how comfortably I am dying, I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except dying.
When I think of how privileged I am. I had two brothers who died of drink and they died miserably and under- privileged and here I am as usual the lucky one in the family (crying).
MF: One of the things that you wrote about and wrote about is that what you thought mattered in life was passion?
NO'F: That seems a bit silly now. What matters now in life is health and reflectiveness. I just shot around. I would like it if I had been a better thinker.
MF: What about the passion?
NO'F: The passion can go and take a running jump at itself, that's what it can take.
MF: And love?
NO'F: Well, love's different, but I always [get the] two mixed up anyway. Well here I am, I am glad I didn't have a child, that's all. One of the reasons why is that since I heard about this I have been thinking about men and women, parents who are trailing around their houses with Methastatic cancer like me, trying to hide it from them, trying to say goodbye, even though they are too tired to move. And it seems to me to die leaving children behind is so bad.
MF: It is natural.
NO'F: I don't know, to me it seems the most terrible thing. I would have been a terrible mother. My mother was a terrible mother and I was very close to her and I drank too much 'til I was 40, which was a waste of my one and only life. The whole family, family life was predicated on drink. We'd meet our father in a pub or our mother in a pub, everything was done through a pub.
Nobody realises until they move outside Ireland just how abnormal Ireland is that way. If I had my life again I wouldn't drink and I, of course, I wouldn't smoke and I would try to think better although where drink would get me I don't know. Its about 16 years since I had a cigarette.
MF: Did it start in the lung?
NO'F: Yes it did. It makes no difference. I remember Charlie Haughey showing me his X-Rays and you could see at the edge of them a big pale grey expanse. That was where he had smoked.
MF: If there are people who have cancer or loved ones who have cancer and passionately believe that the treatments are going to work for them, there is the possibility that this could cast a despair over them.
NO'F: My despair is my own, their hope is their own. Their spirituality is their own. My way of looking at the world is my own. We each end up differently facing this common fate.
I wish everybody out there a miracle cure.
Every single professional will tell you that they cannot say how long it will be... and it is my choice not to go the route of chemotherapy.
Funnily enough I don't care about losing the hair. What I do care about is that sometimes I see people frightened or repulsed and that is why I went and got a wig in which I look like a rather striking but elderly chorus girl.
Now I am beginning to put the auld bald head out there and I still have a few eyebrows, but what do I want them for? I don't care about anything any more. I know everyone says the hair matters, but that is not true. You can put a little cap on or something for the hair. That is irrelevant compared with having to leave the world behind.
MF: You said it wasn't so much you leaving the world as the world leaving you.
NO'F: I thought there would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me, the world said to me that's enough of you now and what's more we're not going to give you any little treats at the end.
MF: Like...
NO'F: Like, let's say, adoring nature. Music is not quite gone, but I'm afraid it will go if I overdo it. So I'm trying to listen to as little as possible.
One of the reasons I went to New York was to hear live music, which I did the night before last -- a wonderful string quartet, and thanks be to God my heart responded because if I had had to sit there listening to Schubert's quartet Death and the Maiden meaning nothing to me I really think I would have thought I am going to throw myself under the subway train, but it wasn't. I came out elated. There's things left.
I still occasionally like food and above all I like sleep and what I am hoping for, and I don't think this is going to happen, but if I could have this I kinda hoped there was some kind of way of fading away, that you lay on your bed and you were really a nice person and everyone came and said goodbye and wept and you wept and you meant it and you weren't in any pain for discomfort and that you didn't choke and didn't die in a mess of diarrhoea and you just go weaker and they say you might emigrate into some other organ.
Mine is already in my liver and I don't know what that means, but if that means that sometime in the middle of the night on your own as you must be, you know you are just about to go into the dark that's what I want.
(Weeping)
NO'F: It was well worth doing, you are sure it won't give people despair.
MF: Well, just on that point, because you have travelled your journey now in your head and in your heart, and I don't want to give other people despair because people do get cured from cancer, many many people, the majority of people do and I don't know if you can give people advice.
NO'F: No.

Giving not Heaven for Lost

I'm not sure what the new amitryptaline is doing to me, other than right now I'm sleeping like a log and I still have insane peripheral neuropathy as well as being bunged up. I've had 2 pills so far and I'm not sure if it's sinking ijn.
The neuropathy is like a stiffening of my joints in my hands and toes/ankles, as well as a numbness creeping up my arms and legs. Sometimes it feels as if there are raw nerve endings in my fingers, behind my finger nails, definitely in my feet. It seems as if it's been so long since my body has felt normal, and while I'm happy that I look normal on the outside, the physical difficulty I'm having doing everyday things is crazy, such as opening up a creamer for a coffee, lifting a lid off of a cottage cheese or other container, maintaining a grip on something, holding a fork, getting cutlery from a drawer, etc. etc..
This is a tiring process and I really hope that it is leading to recovery.

Another Milton

The happier state
In Heav'n, which follows dignity, might draw
Envy from each inferior; but who here
Will envy whom the highest place exposes
Formost to stand against the Thunderers aime
Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share
Of endless pain?
10/25/2006 1:06 PM

Living in the present

This is a new growing strength developing within me but it doesn't get full-time access to now because fears keep cropping up and I have to keep meditating/medicating/praying them away. Even sometimes when I do this the fear keeps swirling around and shifting its form. I have all this time to relax and I have to either read or remind myself to relax. This has to be the most difficult time of my life, and even that I'm struggling against realizing that it's real, and realizing that it's real. If you know what I mean.
There are ideas, there's living in the Now, the Holy Instant, the ego and what seems real at the time. There are sounds that go deep into the background, there's buzzing sometimes in my ears. Once upon a time my memories did happen and I cannot predetermine all future events. (Notice I didn't say any future events. I don't know, can we, or do we have to surrender that?) I know what I do now counts for later.
And I know sunny days are nicer than gloomy days.

As I get closer to knowing do I live or do I die, and even then do I live or do I die, I find that there's not much joy in pretending. Old roles have changed for me, or they're accellerated to now, blown up for view, studied and thrown away. I could cry all the time or I can really really do anything I can to bring myself into the now and stay here for a while, more and more. I guess that's how we or I accept things.

I have found that in moments of clarity I like to be with Mike, and that he makes the moment fun and good. Being present with him is great. I have had clarity with my family I think only because Mike's there and I feel safe, or because someone in my family has come forward to be present with me in love and understanding. I love my friends but I find that it can be awkward to be in this state around them, even though they would do anything to be helpful or loving.
I'm just so sad. But I become okay.

Today marks a new therapy in addition to my new therapy. I am sometimes/reminded to be in/in the present. I am making a simple decision put forth by Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now):

(To focus your attention on the one thing that you can do now)
"When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision:
no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems.....And [I] won't be able to go through with it unless [I] access the power of the Now.
If you create no more pain for yourself then you create no more pain for others. "

The Now seems to be the same thing as the Holy Instant in A Course in Miracles. Both the same things really need a lot of practice.

I give not Heav'n for lost, too.

More Milton from lblog set-up

http://preview-minima.blogspot.com/

Sunday, July 02, 2006
More glorious and more dread than from no fall
Mee though just right, and the fixt Laws of Heav'n
Did first create your Leader, next, free choice,
With what besides, in Counsel or in Fight,
Hath bin achievd of merit, yet this loss
Thus farr at least recover'd, hath much more
Establisht in a safe unenvied Throne Yeilded with full consent.


Labels: literature
Saturday, July 01, 2006
imaginations thus displayed
Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heav'n,
For since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigor, though opprest and fall'n,
I give not Heav'n for lost.


Thursday, June 01, 2006
And with persuasive accent thus began
I should be much for open war, O Peers,
As not behind in hate, if what was urged
Main reason to persuade immediate war
Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
Ominous conjecture on the whole success;
When he who most excels in fact of arms,
In what he counsels and in what excels
Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair
And utter dissolution, as the scope
Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.

Monday, May 01, 2006
Book I
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of ORMUS and of IND,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings BARBARIC Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav'n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displaid.


John Milton

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John Milton

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poetry

Great poems in Minima template set-up by John Milton.