1.18.2026

ALTERED BOOK / Work in Progress by Pamm Hanson

Sentiments of beauty and pain,
audible loveliness of things
and of the sorrow of the world.

Capacity of fascination
by bright colour and choice form,
delicate unison to the things they said or sang.

“The lust of the eye.”

And he would weep,
to the surprise of older people,
relief from long-strung, childish expectation.

A treasure of fallen acorns
mingled all night
with some intimate sense of the distant forest.

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in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem;
for the property each has of affecting one
with a special, a unique,
impression of pleasure

---

Who really knows how
I am come, that they might have
life, and that they might
have it more abundantly?

How would Paolo
and Francesca have
read the lesson?

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the desire of self-portraiture

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melted into the logic of passion
which had given
the necessary completion to life

---

words are themselves thought and feeling;
not eloquent, or musical words merely,
but that sort of creative language
which carries the reality of what it depicts,
directly, to the consciousness

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And that is the last word that Pater left.

With all the curiosity, the interest,
the appreciation of life,
beauty, the world,

with all that,
yet the final note,
struck over and over again,

is harmony,
self-control,
ascesis.

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SOURCE TEXT
Edward Everett Hale Jr., ed., Selections from Walter Pater (Henry Holt and Company, 1901)

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ALTERED BOOK PAGES
7 x 4.5 inches. Watercolor, ink, graphite. 2025, 2026.

1. Pater, “The Child in the House,” p. 55

2. Pater, preface to “The Renaissance,” p. 3

3. Hale, introduction to Selections from Walter Pater, p. xxiii

4. Hale, introduction to Selections, p. lvii

5. Hale, introduction to Selections, p. lxii

6. Pater, “Wordsworth,” p. 4

7. Hale, introduction to Selections, p. lxxi

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PAMM HANSON (MFA, studio art, 2008; MA, psychology, 1980) is a painter, printmaker, and altered-book artist who divides her time between her studios in Seattle and Port Townsend, Washington. She is a practicing psychotherapist and a systems theorist as well as a teaching artist for Path With Art, an organization using art education to heal individuals, groups, and society from the effects of trauma. This is Pamm’s second appearance at Diary Poems. You’ll find an early example of her painting here, paired with my poem “Grasshoppers.”