It's A Devil-Duck World . . . .

(Sand and pebbles from Monastery Beach.)

Byron: "Cunning In Mine Overthrow"

   If my inheritance of storms hath been
   In other elements, and on the rocks
   Of perils, overlook’d or unforeseen,
   I have sustain’d my share of worldly shocks,
   The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen
   My errors with defensive paradox;
   I have been cunning in mine overthrow,
The careful pilot of my proper woe

   Mine were my faults, and mine be their reward.
   My whole life was a contest, since the day
   That gave me being, gave me that which marr’d
   The gift—a fate, or will, that walk’d astray;
   And I at times have found the struggle hard,
   And thought of shaking off my bonds of clay:
   But now I fain would for a time survive,
If but to see what next can well arrive.

   Kingdoms and empires in my little day
   I have outliv’d, and yet I am not old;
   And when I look on this, the petty spray
   Of my own years of trouble, which have roll’d 
   Like a wild bay of breakers, melts away:
   Something—I know not what—does still uphold
   A spirit of slight patience; not in vain,
Even for its own sake, do we purchase pain.

--Lord Byron, 

from the "Epistle [To Augusta],

composed in 1816 

(in exile, as it were)

"There Is A Tide In The Affairs of Women . . ."

Or, "But Actium, Lost For Cleopatra's Eyes"
--Byron's opening to Canto VI of Don Juan:


'There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood'--you know the rest,
And most of us have found it, now and then;
At least we think so, though but few have guessed
The moment, till too late to come again.
But no doubt every thing is for the best--
Of which the surest sign is in the end:
When things are at the worst they sometimes mend.


There is a tide in the affairs of women
'Which taken at the flood leads'--God knows where.
Those navigators must be able seamen
Whose charts lay down its current to a hair;
Not all the reveries of Jacob Behmen
With its strange whirls and eddies can compare:--
Men with their heads reflect on this and that--
But women with their hearts or heaven knows what!


And yet a headlong, headstrong, downright she,
Young, beautiful, and daring--who would risk
A throne, the world, the universe, to be
Beloved in her own way, and rather whisk
The stars from out the sky, than not be free
As are the billows when the breeze is brisk--
Though such a she's a devil (if that there be one)
Yet she would make full many a Manichean.


Thrones, worlds, et cetera, are so oft upset
By commonest Ambition, that when Passion
O'erthrows the same, we readily forget,
Or at the least forgive, the laving rash one.
If Anthony be well remembered yet,
'Tis not his conquests keep his name in fashion,
But Actium, lost for Cleopatra's eyes,
Outbalance all the Caesar's victories.


He died at fifty for a queen of forty;
I wish their years had been fifteen and twenty,
For then wealth, kingdoms, worlds are but sport--I
Remember when, though I had no great plenty
Of worlds to lose, yet still, to pay my court, I
Gave what I had--a heart:--as the world went, I
Gave what was worth a world; for worlds could never
Restore me those pure feelings, gone for ever.


--Lord Byron

Minerva, Mermaid: sculpture mix: sea foam glazing; copper wire.