Times they are a changing

A long time BBB customer (a wonderful lady from San Fran area befriended through the BBB) invited me to write or quote 'words of wisdom' in a  'passiton' email which I normally shy from and stop short on but for her I felt obliged to contribute.  Amid all the changes this time of year:  the end of winter, climate warming or is it cooling, winter doesn't want to let go, the beginning of Lent, the changing of the clocks, Spring forward/Fall back (and actually I never changed my bedside clock in the first place last Fall - that would be back-  so I don't  have to do the Spring forward thing), I chose a poem that I believe offers the 'mood of wisdom', if you will, amidst all these ceaseless tos and fros - British poet Mathew Arnold's Dover Beach.  I googled for the words and discovered this youtube version of the poem set to music by American composer Samuel Barber as sung  by baritone  Christopher Herbert   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrez8gIVsPY .  Now this might be considered putting icing on an already iced cake but it has all the beautiful solemnity of the world before the coming of Spring.  BBB above are on the beach of Lake Erie, north shore, directly across from Cleveland,Ohio.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the {AE}gean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.