Edmund Spenser
SONNET 75
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize!
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name;
Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
Sara Teasdale
ENOUGH
It is enough for me by day
To walk the same bright earth with him
Enough that over us by night
The same great roof of stars is dim
I do not hope to bind the wind
Or set a fetter on the sea
It is enough to feel his love
Blow by like music over me
PEACE
PEACE flows into me
AS the tide to the pool by the shore;
It is mine forevermore,
It ebbs not back like the sea.
I am the pool of blue
That worships the vivid sky;
My hopes were heaven-high,
They are all fulfilled in you.
I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies,--
You are my deepening skies,
Give me your stars to hold.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
From A Gift From the Sea
"When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to
moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life,
of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow and tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never
return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in
love, is in growth, in fluidity--in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass,
but partners in the same pattern.
"The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even.
Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it
might be in dread and anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. For
relationships, too, must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their
limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.
One must accept the security of the winged life, of the ebb and flow, of intermittency."