Winter, by François Boucher

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The Months of the Year, by Sara Coleridge

January brings the snow;
Makes the toes and fingers glow.

February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen ponds again.

March brings breezes loud and shrill,
Stirs the dancing daffodil.

April brings the primrose sweet,
Scatters daises at our feet.

May brings flocks of pretty lambs,
Skipping by their fleecy dams.

June brings tulips, lilies, roses;
Fills the children’s hands with posies.

Hot July brings cooling showers,
Strawberries and gilly-flowers.

August brings the sheaves of corn,
Then the Harvest home is borne.

Warm September brings the fruit,
Sportsmen then begin to shoot.

Fresh October brings the pheasant;
Then to gather nuts is pleasant.

Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves are falling fast.

Chill December brings the sleet,
blazing fire and Christmas treat.

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Somehow, not only for Christmas,
But all the long year through,
The joy that you give to others
Is the joy that comes back to you.

And the more you spend in blessing
The poor and lonely and sad,
The more of your heart's possessing
Returns to you glad. (John Greenleaf Whittier)

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The New Year is a good time for new ideas, new plans and new beginnings. I’ve been re-thinking my blogs and making some changes.

With the exception of Christmas and New Year week-ends, Quiet Corner will continue on Mondays, A Touch of Culture on Fridays, and Wise Men Say daily.
80 plus will become an occasional blog appearing every so often on Thursdays.
The Pre-Raphaelite site will come to an end this week, when 80 paintings will have been collected.
And a new weekly blog The Poetry Path will start on Wednesday 5th January. You can have a look at that website now at -
http://thepoetrypath.blogspot.com

BEST WISHES TO EVERYONE FOR CHRISTMAS AND THE NEW YEAR

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change (Buddha)

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When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. (Georgia O’Keefe)

And ‘tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes. (William Wordsworth)

Lilacs in a Window, by Mary Cassatt

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Observe this dew-drenched rose of Tyrian gardens a rose today. But you will ask in vain tomorrow what it is; and yesterday it was the dust,
the sunshine, and the rains. (Christina Rossetti)

Where flowers bloom so does hope (Lady Bird Johnson)

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Finally, this is a colourful slide show of photographs taken at Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island.



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A MOON REVERIE

[Image by FreeFoto.com]

The moon pulled off her veil of light,
That hides her face by day from sight,
(Mysterious veil of brightness made,
That’s both her lustre and her shade)
And in the lantern of the night
With shining horns hung out her light. (Samuel Butler)

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The moon is a white, strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tide, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomer. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness. (D.H. Lawrence)

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Untitled (Archip Iwanowitsch Kuindshi)

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. (Joseph Conrad)

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And I raise my eyes to the moon, with tears blurring my vision.
I ask Her why, what’s the reason, what’s my mission?
My toes going numb with the frost on the ground,
My arms spread out wide as I circle around.
When I fall to the earth, my energy spent at last,
I ask Her again with one final gasp,
Where did I come from and where shall I be,
What will be left when there’s nothing of me? (Anon)

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Moon Nymph (Luis Ricardo Falero)

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I see the moon, the moon sees me
Under the shade of the old oak tree;
Please let the light that shines on me
Shine on the one I love. (Popular Song)



Moon on the Delaware River (Thomas B. Griffin)

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