Listening to Garrison Keillor;

The Writer's Almanac
        For Friday
August 17th
        2012

And the heat of an August day
        Comes over
Dusty and dry around the edges
        Lush and green
In the middle of corn and beans
        Something of Minnesota
The Midwest, and Minneapolis
        In the familiar lilt
A way of life, and a world view
        And not just the voice
Of Ted Hughes, English poet
        Silent on the Perfect Light
Snuffed out when I was three
        Until the curtain was
Closing on his own.

Desolation inconsolable.
        Yes, Hughes, you are correct.
"The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words,
         is at bottom, in every recorded case,
the voice of pain — and the physical body,
         so to speak, of poetry,
is the treatment by which the poet tries
         to reconcile that pain with the world."

But only partially.  For some, few perhaps
         The few of a narrow way
The few required for the glory of the
         Once and Coming One
The joy is unquenchable in the driest
         Realm.  However great, however
Many the desolations. Consummation
         And consolation are heard,
Smelt.  Water illimitable onrushing
         Rain and brook and sea. 

But yes, all beauty is born, through pain.