Nightpiece, by James Joyce
Gaunt in gloom,
The pale stars their torches,
Enshrouded, wave.
Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume,
Arches on soaring arches,
Night’s sindark nave.Seraphim,
The lost hosts awaken
To service till
In moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim,
Raised when she has and shaken
Her thurible.And long and loud,
To night’s nave upsoaring,
A starknell tolls
As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,
Voidward from the adoring
Waste of souls.
The poem above, from which the name of my old blog was taken, was first given to me by Sarah Johnson (now Webster) when she was visiting the University of British Columbia in 2001.
I have always appreciated it more for the sound than for the meaning; a trend that is shared between the music and the poetry I enjoy. I almost never engage with trying to find a meaning. I prefer to just let them suggest themselves to me, though the sound and structure of their language.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Understandably, there is some confusion about the nomenclature of this site. It can only be properly understood as a series of layered literary references. Originally, I had a site called Night’s Sindark Nave, hosted on Blogger. This was active between X and Y. During that period, the blog migrated from sindark.blogspot.com to sindark.com, and then from Blogger-based content management to WordPress.
In the run-up to my time in Oxford, I decided to start things anew. The new site was still located at sindark.com, but took its title from the Nabokov novel Lolita.