Shakespeare's Measure of Civility

SILENCE


If gentleness is the quality of civility, acceptance of choice in the judge and allowance of choice in the judged is Shakespeare’s ultimate measure of civility.-W.G. Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare’s Thought, Yale UP, London, 1974, p.257.

Listen to the silence of this garden
in the early morning where the sun
touches everything with its tint of gold.
Birds fly high into the blue sky and their
notes of song dance over this golden-green
here before my eyes in nature’s theatre.

Where are we here? Some garden of Eden
where the tree of knowledge has brought
endless fruits beyond my dreaming? Some
fruits of communion in these green gardens
which grow in the land of knowledge
bring a deep down peace, a joy of the flashing
light in the Centre of Realities.

I am lifted to a plane where I soar
with those birds in the air even as I am
rooted as these trees in this brown earth.
But even with this upligting beauty,
even with this golden tint of joy as deep
as the very rock of ages Precambrian
I can not, yet, take leave of self,
nor reach that ocean of nearness
just down the road and across the sands,
nor can I drink the peerless wine from
goblets just within my reach. I have yet
many valleys to cross and the long journey
has seemingly endless roads.

Meanwhile, birds will sing in this garden
and golden lights will delight my eyes
in the morning in this green garden
near a great, immeasureable ocean.

Ron Price
8 October 1995

*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, Introduction.
_________________________________________ :banana: