A Winnah! Taylor Graham correctly identified yesterday's poet as George Herbert; the lines that I posted are part of his larger work, The Flower. I mailed off a copy of Karen Baker's book to TG.
Reading for today includes Midsummer Night's Dream, of course. Many a June 21 I've stayed outdoors, dodging mosquitos and swilling, well, whatever, while a few pixilated revelers plow through (for better or for worse) Will's five acts of fairy dust. Will's work can take it:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:—
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,—
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
(Theseus, Act. V, Scene I)
Hyppolyta goes on to say, of course, that apparently it takes all three to manifest the truth...
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
So tomorrow we turn, and our year will begin to diminish her days, while we poets (eyes in a "fine frenzy rolling") will continue to join with madmen and lovers (and the madmen and lovers inside us!) to try to capture things "strange and admirable".
Make the most of this: the longest day of the year.
—Medusa