From 'Letters to a Young Poet' - Rilke

I read this passage today and it hit home with some force. Consequently it seems worth sharing, particularly if your artistic endeavours, like mine, have been bogged down in considerations of what others (editors, critics, peers, family)  will think of your work.  Here goes:

"...Read as few works of aesthetic criticism as possible - there are in them either partisan opinions which have become petrified and meaningless in their lifeless obduracy, or else a clever play of words, with which today one finds favour and tomorrow the opposite. 

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and nothing can reach them so little as criticism. Only love and grasp them and keep hold of them and be just to them. Always trust yourself and your own feelings as opposed to any such analysis, review or introduction; if you should be wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and in time to new realisations.

Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which like all progress must come from deep within you and cannot be forced or hastened by anything. The whole thing is to carry the full time and then give birth; to let every impression and every germ of a feeling consummate itself entirely within itself, in that which is dark, inexpressible, unconscious and unattainable by your own intelligence, and to await the hour of delivery of a new clearness of vision. That alone is to live an artistic life, in understanding, as in creating."

Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

While we wait for warmth to return, here's a poem by one of my all-time favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
   The descending blue ; that blue is all in a rush
With richness ; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
 
What is all this juice and all this joy ?
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
 
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.