In this installment, Laure-Anne Bosselaar reads “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” by William Blake. Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and of Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001.  She is the editor of Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. Her next anthology, Never Before: Poems about First Experiences will come out from Four Way Books in the fall of 2005.  She and her husband, poet Kurt Brown, have completed a book of translations from Flemish poet, Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness, which the Field Translations Series will publish in 2006.  She teaches a graduate poetry workshop at Sarah Lawrence College.

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William Blake, “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau”

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

admin Uncategorized laure-anne bosselaar, mock on mock on voltaire rousseau, william blake

In this installment, Laure-Anne Bosselaar reads “The Garden of Love” by William Blake. Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and of Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001.  She is the editor of Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. Her next anthology, Never Before: Poems about First Experiences will come out from Four Way Books in the fall of 2005.  She and her husband, poet Kurt Brown, have completed a book of translations from Flemish poet, Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness, which the Field Translations Series will publish in 2006.  She teaches a graduate poetry workshop at Sarah Lawrence College.

download MP3

William Blake, “The Garden of Love”

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

admin Uncategorized laure-anne bosselaar, the garden of love, william blake