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| Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 4 September 2024 |
With Rue My Heart is Laden – A.E.Houseman
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
Today is September 4, 2024. It is a lovely sunny day but as always my heart is melancholic as I remember my Rosemary gone on December 9, 2020. I especially remember her and not quite smile when I see the wonderful English Rose, Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ that blooms and blooms in my back lane garden.
It was almost recently that I began to connect our roses with the fact that Rosemary’s name is about a rose.
I found myself forced to scan the blooms and fortunately I knew of this lovely poem by A.E. Houseman that fits the bill perfectly.
Ever since many, many years ago when I first heard Gerry Gilbert read his poetry and a tad later Susan Musgrave, I have been keen on poetry. From those two I went back to Argentines Jorge Luís Borges, Julio Cortázar, Alejandra Pizarnik, Alfonsina Storni and the Americans Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and many others. I found it fun to combine my plant scans or photographs with the poems of the above. Somehow after 28 years of blogging I have memorized many of them.
My absolute favourite is a line from the Borges poem La Lluvia that cannot be properly translated:
Le reveló una flor llamada rosa
Y el curioso color del colorado.
Here is all of it:
La lluvia – Jorge Luís Borges
Bruscamente la tarde se ha aclarado
Porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa.
Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa
Que sin duda sucede en el pasado.
Quien la oye caer ha recobrado
El tiempo en que la suerte venturosa
Le reveló una flor llamada rosa
Y el curioso color del colorado.
Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales
Alegrará en perdidos arrabales
Las negras uvas de una parra en cierto
Patio que ya no existe. La mojada
Tarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada,
De mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto.
