ENGL 3830 - Quotes

I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

Skunk Hour - Lowell

Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage.

Skunk Hour - Lowell

One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right.

Skunk Hour - Lowell

The season's ill-- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

Skunk Hour - Lowell

Thirsting for the hierarchie privacy of Queen Victoria's century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall.

Skunk Hour - Lowell

only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.

Skunk Hour - Lowell

An everlasting song, a singing tree, Caroling softly souls of slavery, What they were, and what they are to me, Caroling softly souls of slavery.

Song of the Son - Toomer

In time, for though the sun is setting on A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set; Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone, Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

Song of the Son - Toomer

O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums, Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air, Passing before they stripped the old tree bare One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

Song of the Son - Toomer

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, Now just before an epoch's sun declines Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee, Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

Song of the Son - Toomer

Pour O pour that parting soul in song, O pour it in the sawdust glow of night, Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night, And let the valley carry it along. And let the valley carry it along.

Song of the Son - Toomer

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton? Intervene. O descend as a dove or A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend." And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city "O no, I am not the mover; Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

Spain - Auden

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped; I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be Good, your humorous story. I am your business voice. I am your marriage. "What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will. I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

Spain - Auden

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us History the operator, the Organiser. Time the refreshing river." And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life That shapes the individual belly and orders The private nocturnal terror: "Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

Spain - Auden

and rung it around, like the articulated neck of our Sunday dinner sacrificial fowl. In her anger she stabbed at English, walked it out, abandoned it in favor of a long kiss teeth,

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

becoming her true self in that ritual bathing, that song. Turn thanks now to Miss Murry African bush healing woman.

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

had sifted down upon her and that is why she gray early. Called me "Nana." Nanny's name I have come to love. She twisted her surnamed Henry into Endry in her railing against the graceless state of her days.

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

our dirty clothes with a brown wedge of hard key soap. To Miss Murry who subverted the English language calling Barbara, Baba; my father, Tata, who desiled her mind that I was a boofuttoo, a baffan and too rampify.

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

she was speak-singing in a language familiar to her tongue which rose unfettered up and down in tumbling cadences, ululations in time with the swift sopping motion of her hands,

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

Across a city from you, I'm with you just as an August night moony, inlet - warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep, the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing - table cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight - or a salt - mist orchard, lying at your side watching red sunset through the screendoors of the cabin, G minor Mozart on the tape - recorder, falling asleep to the music of the sea. This island of Manhattan is wide enough of both of us, and narrow: I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face lies upturned, the halflight tracing your generous, delicate mouth where grief and laughter sleep together.

Twenty-One Love Poems - Rich

Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? when slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream Or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know - two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow - picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine - look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

Twenty-One Love Poems - Rich

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we're not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No prison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape - recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape - recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and these are the forces we had ranged within us within us and against us, against us and within us.

Twenty-One Love Poems - Rich

Rain on the West Side Highway, red light at Riverside: the more I live, the more I think two people together is a miracle. You're telling the story of your life for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words. The story of our lives becomes our lives. Now you're in fugue across what some I'm sure Victorian poet called the salt estarnging sea. Those are the words that come to mind. I feel estrangement, yes. As I've felt dawn pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light - ? Close between grief and anger, a space opens where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.

Twenty-One Love Poems - Rich

That conversation we were always on the edge of having, runs on in my head, at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light polluted water yet reflecting even Sometimes the moon and I discern a woman I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat and choking her like hair. And this is she with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head turning aside from pain, is dragging down deeper where it cannot hear me, and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

Twenty-One Love Poems - Rich

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones of the great round rippled by stone implements the midsummer night light rising from beneath the horizon - where I said "a cleft of light" I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge simply nor any place but the mind casting back to where her solitude, Shared, could be chosen without loneliness, not easily nor without pains to stake out the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light. I choose to be the figure in that light, half - blotted by darkness, something moving across that space, the color of stone greeting the moon, yet more than stone: a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.

Twenty-One Love Poems - Rich

And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry.

Skunk Hour - Lowell

"Mr. Pontellier's two children were there - sturdy little fellows of four and five. A quadroon nurse followed them about with a faraway meditative air"

The Awakening - Chopin

"Ah, a well-spent vacation. Why do they want to leave?" tourist wonders.

Caribbean Chameleon - Silvera

"The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa"

Carma - Toomer

"Working for a contractor, he was away most of the time"

Carma - Toomer

'If you want me look for me under your boot-soles'; when I visited him in a New Hampshire hospital where he had almost gone for a Burton with peritonitis Louis propped himself up on an ottoman and read aloud the ode to Whitman from Poeta en Nueva York

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

And were Years living at this hour it should be in some ruined tower not malachited Ballylee where he paid out to those below one gilt-edged scroll from his pencil as though he were part-Rapunzel and partly Delphic oracle. As for his crass, rhetorical posturing, 'Did that play of mind send out certain men (certain men?) the English shot...? the answer is 'Certainly not'.

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

For I have leapt with Kierkegaard out of the realm of Brunel and Arkwright with its mills, canals, and railway-bridges into this great void where Chester and I exchanged love-pledges and vowed our marriage-vows. As he lay asleep last night the bronze of his exposed left leg made me want nothing so much as to weep. I though of the terrier, of plague, of Aschenbach at the Lido. Here was my historical Mr W.H., my 'onlie begetter' and fair lady; for nothing this wide universe I call...

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

For though I would gladly return to Eden as that ambulance-driver or air raid warden I will never agin ford the river to parley with the mugwumps and fob them off with monocles and mups; I will not go back as Auden.

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

I lay there for a year, disillusioned, dirty, until a firing-party of Chinese soldiers came by, leading dishevelled ponies. They arranged a few sedimentary boulders over the body of a Japanese spy they'd shot but weren't inclined to bury, so that one of his feet stuck out. When a brindled pariah began to gnaw on it, I recognized the markings of the pup whose abscessed paw my father had lanced on our limestone doorstep.

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead would certain men have stayed in bed? For history's a twisted root with art its small, translucent fruit and never the other way round The roots by which we were once bound are severed here, in any case, and we are all now dispossessed; prince, poet, construction worker, salesman, soda fountain jerker - all equally isolated. Each loads flour, sugar and salted beef into a covered wago and strikes out for his Oregon, each straining for the ghostly axe of a huge, blond-haired lumberjack.

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir; a blizzard off the Newfoundland coast had, as we slept, metamorphosed the Champlain's decks to a wedding cake, on whose uppermost tier stood Christopher and I like a diminutive bride and groom. A heavy-skirted Liberty would lunge with her ice-cream at two small, anxious boys, and Erika so grimly wave from the quarantine-launch she might as truly have been my wife as, later that day, Barcelona was Franco's.

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

The impossible Eleanor Clark had smuggled in a pail of oysters and clams and a fifth column of Armagnac. Carson McCullers extemporized a blues harmonica on urinous pipkins and pannikins that would have flummoxed Benjamin Franklin. I left them, so, to the reign of the ear of corn and the journey-work of the grass-leaf and found my way next morning to Bread Loaf and the diamond-shaped clearing in the forest where I learned to play softball with Robert Frost.

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

There was a time when i thought it mattered what happened in Madrid or Seville and, in a sense, I haven't changed my mind; the forces of Good and Evil were indeed ranged against each other, though not unambiguously. I went there on the off-chance they'd let me try my hand at driving an ambulance; there turned out to be some bureau- cratic hitch. WHen I set out for the front on a black burro it promptly threw me in the ditch.

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

Those crucial years he tended the British wounded in Egypt, Gallipoli and France, I learned to play Isolde to my mother's Tristan. Are they now tempted to rechristen their youngest son who tuned his back on Albion a Quisling? Would their chaise-longue philosophers have me somehow inflate myself and float above their factories and pylons like a flat footed barrage balloon?

7, Middagh Street: Wystan - Muldoon

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

A Coat - Yeats

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: "Waste no compassion on these separate dead!" Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews?

A Far Cry From Africa - Walcott

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?

A Far Cry From Africa - Walcott

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization's dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

A Far Cry From Africa - Walcott

"The babe came often to this corner. He hovered about the stand and watched each detail of the business. He was fascinated by the tranquility of the vendor, the majesty of power and possession"

A Great Mistake - Crane

An' when de pinch o' time you feel A 'pur you a you' chigger heel, You lef' you' district, big an' coarse, An' come join buccra Police Force. An' now you don't wait fe you' glass But trouble me wid you' jam fas'; But wait, me frien', you day wi' come, I'll see you go same lak a some. Say wha'?—'res' me? —you go to hell! You t'ink Judge don't know unno well? You t'ink him gwin' go sentance me Widout a soul fe witness i'?

A Midnight Woman to the Bobby - McKay

I born right do'n beneat' de clack (You ugly brute, you tu'n you' back?) Don' t'ink dat I'm a come-aroun' , I born right 'way in 'panish Town. Care how you try, you caan' do mo' Dan many dat was hyah befo'; Yet whe' dey all o' dem te-day? De buccra dem no kick dem way?

A Midnight Woman to the Bobby - McKay

Ko 'pon you' jam samplatta nose: 'Cos you wear Mis'r Koshaw clo'es You t'ink say you's de only man, Yet fus' time ko how you be'n 'tan. You big an' ugly ole tu'n-foot Be'n neber know fe wear a boot; An' chigger nyam you' tumpa toe, Till nit full i' like herrin' row.

A Midnight Woman to the Bobby - McKay

No palm me up, you dutty brute, You' jam mount' mash like ripe bread-fruit; You fas'n now, but wait lee ya, I'll see you grunt under de law. You t'ink you wise, but we wi' see; You not de fus' one fas' wid me; I'll lib fe see dem tu'n you out, As sure as you got dat mash' mout'.

A Midnight Woman to the Bobby - McKay

You come from mountain naked-'kin, An' Lard a mussy! you be'n thin, For all de bread-fruit dem be'n done, Bein' 'poil' up by tearin' sun: De coco couldn' bear at all, For, Lard! de groun' was pure white-marl; An' t'rough de rain part o' de year De mango tree dem couldn' bear.

A Midnight Woman to the Bobby - McKay

...and when "the future" is uttered, swarms of micerush out of the Russian language and gnaw a pieceof ripened memory which is twiceas hole-ridden as real cheese.After all these years it hardly matters whoor what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes,and your mind resounds not with a seraphic "doh",only their rustle. Life, that no one daresto appraise, like that gift horse's mouth,bares its teeth in a grin at eachencounter. What gets left of a man amountsto a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.

A Part of Speech - Brodsky

Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness And I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London - Thomas

The majesty and burning of the child's death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth. Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London - Thomas

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

America - McKay

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

America - McKay

"A few were parading in unconcerned nakedness. Here and there were men of brawn, whose skins shone clear and ruddy. They took splendid poses, standing massively, like chiefs. When they had dressed in their ungainly garments there was an extraordinary change. They showed bumps and deficiencies of all kinds"

An Experiment in Misery - Crane

"And above all, why was he impressed, awed, overcome by a mass of materials, a collection of trophies of wealth, when he knew that to him their dominant meaning was that they represented a lavish expenditure?"

An Experiment in Misery - Crane

"He was going forth to eat as the wanderer may eat, and sleep as the homeless sleep. By the time he had reached City Hall Park he was so completely plastered with yells of 'bum' and 'hobo,' and with various unholy epithets that small boys applied to him at intervals that he was in a state of the most profound dejection"

An Experiment in Misery - Crane

"There was a long counter, dimly lighted from hidden sources. Two or three men in soiled white aprons rushed here and there."

An Experiment in Misery - Crane

In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress.

An Image of Africa - Achebe

I know that I shall meet my fate, Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death - Yeats

And I say this to Kai "Look: We'll shape the handle By checking the handle Of the axe we cut with-" And he sees. And I hear it again: It's in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century A.D. "Essay on Literature"-in the Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe By cutting wood with an axe The model is indeed near at hand.- My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen Translated that and taught it years ago And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.

Axe Handles - Snyder

One afternoon the last week in April Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet One-half turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop And go gets it, and wants it for his own. A broken-off axe handle behind the door Is long enough for a hatchet, We cut it to length and take it With the hatchet head And working hatchet, to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle With the hatchet, and the phrase First learned from Ezra Pound Rings in my ears! "When making an axe handle the pattem is not far off."

Axe Handles - Snyder

"Broad shouldered, his stare holds Baboolal: the white French creole with the Indian boy"

Ballad for the New World - Scott

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no f*ggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood, Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood. The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

Byzantium - Yeats

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miraclc than bird or handiwork, Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood.

Byzantium - Yeats

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Byzantium - Yeats

"'How long were you out of the country?' 'Two weeks.' 'Purpose?' 'Vacation, mam.' 'Where did you stay?' 'Kingston, mam.' 'Did you stay with family?' 'No mam, I visit dem, but I stay in a hotel.' Suspicion. 'Hotel?' 'Yes mam.' 'Take off your glasses please.'"

Caribbean Chameleon - Silvera

"'Where have you been? 'Where have you been?' 'How long was your stay?' 'Purpose of your visit?' Tourist, white, safe every time, unless foolish to take a little collie weed, a little spliff"

Caribbean Chameleon - Silvera

But he would not be held At home by his own crowd Whatever threats were phoned, Whatever black flags waved. I see him as he turned In that bombed offending place, Remorse fused with terror In his still knowable face, His cornered outfaced stare Blinding in the flash.

Casualty - Heaney

But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew Others obeyed, three nights After they shot dead The thirteen men in Derry. PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday Everyone held His breath and trembled.

Casualty - Heaney

Dawn-sniffing revenant, Plodder through midnight rain, Question me again

Casualty - Heaney

He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming towards the lure Of warm lit-up places, The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke. How culpable was he That last night when he broke Our tribe's complicity? 'Now, you're supposed to be An educated man, ' I hear him say. 'Puzzle me The right answer to that one.'

Casualty - Heaney

He would drink by himself And raise a weathered thumb Towards the high shelf, Calling another rum And blackcurrant, without Having to raise his voice, Or order a quick stout By a lifting of the eyes And a discreet dumb-show Of pulling off the top; At closing time would go In waders and peaked cap Into the showery dark, A dole-kept breadwinner But a natural for work. I loved his whole manner, Sure-footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling tact, His fisherman's quick eye And turned observant back.

Casualty - Heaney

I missed his funeral, Those quiet walkers And sideways talkers Shoaling out of his lane To the respectable Purring of the hearse... They move in equal pace With the habitual Slow consolation Of a dawdling engine, The line lifted, hand Over fist, cold sunshine On the water, the land Banked under fog: that morning I was taken in his boat, The screw purling, turning Indolent fathoms white, I tasted freedom with him. To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, Dispraise the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond...

Casualty - Heaney

Incomprehensible To him, my other life. Sometimes on the high stool, Too busy with his knife At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye, In the pause after a slug He mentioned poetry. We would be on our own And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels Or lore of the horse and cart Or the Provisionals.

Casualty - Heaney

It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown Surplice and soutane: Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water. The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring.

Casualty - Heaney

Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek. She'd manage something hampered and askew Every time, as if she might betray The hampered and inadequate by too Well-adjusted a vocabulary. With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well - Adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye And decently relapse into the wrong Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

Clearances - Heaney

I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet's differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for.

Clearances - Heaney

So while the parish priest as her beside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives - Never closer in the whole rest of our lives.

Clearances - Heaney

Wen all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. little pleasant splashes Form each other's work would bring us to our senses.

Clearances - Heaney

Now that the triumphant march has entered the last street corners, Remember, O dancers, the thunder among the clouds... Now that laughter, broken in two, hangs tremulous between the teeth, Remember, O dancers, the lightning beyond the earth... The smell of blood already floats in the lavender-mist of the afternoon. The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors of power; And a great fearful thing already tugs at the cables of the open air, A nebula immense and immeasurable, a night of deep waters - An iron dream unnamed and unprintable, a path of stone.

Come Thunder - Okigbo

The drowsy heads of the pods in barren farmlands witness it, The homesteads abandoned in this century's brush fire witness it: The myriad eyes of deserted corn cobs in burning barns witness it: Magic birds with the miracle of lightning flash on their feathers... The arrows of God tremble at the gates of light, The drums of curfew pander to the dance of death; And the secret thing in its heaving Threatens with iron mask The last lighted torch of the century...

Come Thunder - Okigbo

An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.

Daddy - Plath

And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.

Daddy - Plath

And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through.

Daddy - Plath

Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

Daddy - Plath

But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look

Daddy - Plath

Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal

Daddy - Plath

I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Daddy - Plath

If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.

Daddy - Plath

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend

Daddy - Plath

It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene

Daddy - Plath

Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

Daddy - Plath

Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.

Daddy - Plath

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.

Daddy - Plath

There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Daddy - Plath

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy - Plath

You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who

Daddy - Plath

"Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like he letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass

Diving Into the Wreck - Rich

"my brothers - the what was called 'the Haitian Refugees"

Dream Haiti - Brathwaite

& i do not know why i was there - how i came to be on board that ship - that navel of my past w/ my nerves as I say comin & goin & my head soffly spinnin &

Dream Haiti - Brathwaite

"Bright wood; bright mahogany wood, expertly shellacked and laid out in the sun to dry, not unlike it. Beryl's stomach, a light brown tint, grew bit by bit shiny"

Drought - Walrond

"Crawling along the road to the gap, Coggins gasped at the consequences of the sun's wretched fury. There where canes spread over with their dark rich foliage into the dust-laden road, the village dogs, hunting for eggs to suck, fowls to kill, paused amidst the stalks of cork-dry canes to pant, or drop, exhausted, sun-smitten"

Drought - Walrond

"Crawling along the road to the gap, Coggins gasped at the consequences of the sun's wretched fury. There, where canes spread over with their dark rich foliage into the dust-laden road, the village dogs, hunting for eggs to suck, fowls to kill, paused amidst the stalks of cork-dry canes to pant, or drop, exhausted, sun-smitten"

Drought - Walrond

"Mahogany bed . . . West Indian peasants sporting a mahogany bed"

Drought - Walrond

"No sooner had they reached home than Sissie began, 'Eatin' marl again, like yo' is starved out,' she landed a clout on Beryl's uncombed head. 'Go under de bed an' lay down befo' I crack yo' cocoanut . . . "Running a house on dry-rot herring bone, a pint of stale, yellowless corn meal, a few spuds, yet proud, thumping the children around for eating scraps, for eating food cooked by other hands than her . . . Sissie"

Drought - Walrond

"Once a day the Rums ate. At dusk, curve of crimson gold in the sensuous tropic sky, they had tea. English to a degree, it was a rite absurdly regal. Pauperized native blacks clung to the utmost vestiges of the Crown. Too, it was more than a notion for a black cane hole digger to face the turmoil of a hoe or fork or 'bill' - zigaboo word for cutlass—on a bare cup of molasses coffee"

Drought - Walrond

"Once a day the Rums ate. At dusk, curve of crimson gold in the sensuous tropic sky, they had tea. English to a degree, it was a rite absurdly regal. Pauperized native blacks clung to the utmost vestiges of the Crown. Too, it was more than a notion for a black cane hole digger to face the turmoil of a hoe or fork or 'bill'—zigaboo word for cutlass---on a bare cup of molasses coffee"

Drought - Walrond

"no sooner had they reached home than Sissie began, 'Eatin' marl again, like yo' is starved out,' she landed a clout on Beryl's uncombed head. 'Go under de bed an' lay down befo' I crack yo' coconut..."

Drought - Walrond

Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all.

Easter 1916 - Yeats

I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Easter 1916 - Yeats

That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Easter 1916 - Yeats

Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Easter 1916 - Yeats

Medicine Dance: A body smiling with black beauty Leaping into the air Around a grotesque hyena-faced monster: The Sorcerer - A black body - dancing with beauty Clothed in African moonlight, Smiling more beauty into his body. The hyena-faced monster yelps! Echo! Silence - The dance Leaps - Twirls - The twirling body comes to a fall At the feet of the monster. Yelps - Wild - Terror filled - Echo - The hyena-faced monster jumps starts, runs, chases his own yelps back to the wilderness. The black body clothed in moonlight Raises up its head, Holding a face dancing with delight. Terror reigns like a new crowned king.

Enchantment - Alexander

Night The moonlight: Juice flowing from an over-ripe pomegranate bursting The cossack-crested palm trees: motionless The leopard spotted shade: inciting fear silence seeds sown...

Enchantment - Alexander

The tawny guttural waterspells itself: Moyolais its own score and consort, bedding the localein the utterance,reed music, an old chanter breathing its miststhrough vowels and history.A swollen river, a mating call of soundrises to pleasure me, Dives,hoarder of common ground

Gifts of Rain - Heaney

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation right across the border from the liquor store and he stays open 24 hours a day,7 days a week and the Indians come running in with jewelry television sets, a VCR, a full-lenght beaded buckskin outfit it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it all catalogues and filed in a storage room. The Indians pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin and when the last Indian has pawned everything but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks closes up the pawn shop, paints a new sign over the old calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter.

Evolution - Alexie

"In these pages, without ignoring either the fact that there are important interactions between the national and the race life, or that the attitude of American towards the Negro is as important a factor as the attitude of the Negro towards America, we have nevertheless concentrated upon self-expression and the forces and motives of self-determination. So far as he is culturally articulate, we shall let the Negro speak for himself"

Forward - Locke

"Of all the voluminous literature on the Negro, so much is the external view and commentary that we may warrantably say that nine-tenths of it is about the Negro rather than of him, so that it is the Negro problem rather than the Negro that is known and mooted in the general mind"

Forward - Locke

A man wading lost fields breaks the pane of flood: a flower of mud - water blooms up to his reflection like a cut swaying its red spoors through a basin. His hands grub where the spade has uncastled sunken drills, an atlantis he depends on. So he is hooped to where he planted and sky and ground are running naturally among his arms that grope the cropping land.

Gifts of Rain - Heaney

A man wading lost fieldsbreaks the pane of flood: a flower of mud -water blooms up to his reflection

Gifts of Rain - Heaney

Cloudburst and steady downpour now for days. Still mammal, straw-footed on the mud, he begins to sense weather by his skin. A nimble snout of flood Licks over stepping stones And goes uprooting he fords his life by sounding. Soundings.

Gifts of Rain - Heaney

The tawny guttural water spells itself: Moyola is its own score and consort, bedding the locale in the utterance, reed music, an old chanter breathing its mists through vowels and history. A swollen river, a mating call of sound rises to pleasure me, Dives, hoarder of common ground.

Gifts of Rain - Heaney

When rains were gathering there would be an all-night roaring off the ford. Their world-schooled ear Could monitor the usual confabulations, the race slabbering past the gable, the Moyola harping on its gravel beds: all spouts by daylight brimmed with their own airs and overflowed each barrel in long tresses. I cock my ear at an absence - in the shared calling of blood arrives my need for antediluvian lore. Soft voices of the dead are whispering by the shore that I would question (and for my children's sake) about crops rotted, river mud glazing the baked clay floor.

Gifts of Rain - Heaney

"I was looking down at the sounding-pole , and feeling much annoyed to see at each try a little more of it stick out of that river, when I saw my poleman give up the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in."

Heart of Darkness - Conrad

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see."

Heart of Darkness - Conrad

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

High Windows - Larkin

When I see a couple of kids And guess he's f*cking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide

High Windows - Larkin

Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers Firing over the mob, I was braced again With a grip on two sack corners, Two packed wads of grain I'd worked to lugs To give me purchase, ready for the heave - The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback, A letting go which will not come again. Or it will, once. And for all.

Human Chain - Heaney

Dear shadows, now you know it all, All the folly of a fight With a common wrong or right. The innocent and the beautiful. Have no enemy but time; Arise and bid me strike a match And strike another till time catch; Should the conflagration climb, Run till all the sages know. We the great gazebo built, They convicted us of guilt; Bid me strike a match and blow.

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz - Yeats

The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle. But a raving autumn shears Blossom from the summer's wreath; The older is condemned to death, Pardoned, drags out lonely years Conspiring among the ignorant. I know not what the younger dreams - Some vague Utopia - and she seems, When withered old and skeleton-gaunt, An image of such politics. Many a time I think to seek One or the other out and speak Of that old Georgian mansion, mix pictures of the mind, recall That table and the talk of youth, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle.

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz - Yeats

Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats - Auden

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice. With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress. In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats - Auden

He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, The snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats - Auden

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats - Auden

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats - Auden

I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I--we--were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918.

In the Waiting Room - Bishop

I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world. into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance --I couldn't look any higher-- at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps. I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen.

In the Waiting Room - Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. My aunt was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited I read the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs: the inside of a volcano, black, and full of ashes; then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire.

In the Waiting Room - Bishop

Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and pith helmets. A dead man slung on a pole --"Long Pig," the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain --Aunt Consuelo's voice-- not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman.

In the Waiting Room - Bishop

The waiting room was bright and too hot. It was sliding beneath a big black wave, another, and another.

In the Waiting Room - Bishop

Then I was back in it. The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918.

In the Waiting Room - Bishop

Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities-- boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts-- held us all together or made us all just one? How--I didn't know any word for it--how "unlikely". . . How had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't?

In the Waiting Room - Bishop

It huddled there steel tinkling its blue painted metal air, tempered in violence, like Rio's favelas, with snaking, perilous streets whose edges fell as its Episcopal turkey-buzzard fall from its miraculous hilltop shrine, down the impossible drop to Belmont, Woodbrook, Maraval, St. Clair that shrin like peddlers' tin trinkets in the sun. From a harsh shower, its gutters growled and gargled wash past the Youth Centre, past the water catchment, a rigid children's carousel of cement; we climbed where lank electric lines and tension cables linked its raw brick hovels like a complex feud, where the inheritors of the middle passage stewed, five to a room, still clamped below their hatch, breeding like felonies, whose lives revolve round prison, graveyard, church. Below bent breadfruit trees in the flat, coloured city, class escalated into structured still, merchant, middleman, magistrate, knight. To go downhill from here was to ascend.

Laventille - Walcott

The middle passage never guessed its end. This is the height of poverty for the desperate and black; climbing, we could look back with widening memory on the hot, corrugated-iron sea whose horrors we all shared. The salt blood knew it well, you, me, Samuel's daughter, Samuel, and those ancestors clamped below its grate. And climbing steeply past the wild gutters, it shrilled in the blood, for those who suffered, who were killed, and who survive. What other gift was there to give as the godparents of his unnamed child?

Laventille - Walcott

Which of us cares to walk even if God wished those retching waters where our souls were fished for this new world? Afterwards, we talk in whispers, close to death among these stones planted on alien earth. Afterwards, the ceremony, the careful photograph moved out of range before the patient tombs, we dare a laugh, ritual, desperate words, born like these children from habitual wombs, from lives fixed in the unalterable groove of grinding poverty. I stand out on a balcony and watch the sun pave its flat, golden path across the roofs, the aerials, cranes, the tops of fruit trees crawling downward to the city. Something inside is laid wide like a wound, some open passage that has cleft the brain, some deep, amnesiac blow. We left somewhere a life we never found, customs and gods that are not born again, some crib, some grille of light clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld us from that world below us and beyond, and in its swaddling cerements we're still bound.

Laventille - Walcott

Yet outside the brown annex of the church, the stifling odour of bay rum and talc, the particular, neat sweetness of the crowd distressed that sense. The black, fawning verger, his bow tie akimbo, grinning, the clown-gloved fashionable wear of those I deeply loved once, made me look on with hopelessness and rage at their new, apish habits, their excess and fear, the possessed, the self-possessed; their perfume shrivelled to a childhood fear of Sabbath graveyards, christenings, marriages, that muggy, steaming, self-assuring air of tropical Sabbath afternoons. And in the church, eyes prickling with rage, the children rescued from original sin by their Godfather since the middle passage, the supercilious brown curate, who intones healing the guilt in these rachtic bones, twisting my love within me like a knife: 'across the troubled waters of this life...'

Laventille - Walcott

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[20] And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Leda and the Swan - Yeats

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. 'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,' The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvelous as he had known it.

Lightenings viii - Heaney

Like a strong tree that in virgin earth Sends far its roots through rock and loam and clay, And proudly thrives in rain or time of dearth, When the dry waves scare rainy sprites away; Like a strong tree that reaches down, deep, deep, For sunken water, fluid underground, Where the great-ringed unsightly blind worms creep, And queer things of the nether world abound:

Like A Strong Tree - McKay

So would I live in rich imperial growth, Touch the surface and the depth of things, Instinctively responsive unto both, Tasting the sweets of being and the stings, Sensing the subtle spell of changing forms, Like a strong tree against a thousand storms.

Like A Strong Tree - McKay

"Another white man has come among us, to hunt in peace we thought, since God's forest and the deer which He put in it belong to all"

Lo! - Faulkner

"Can I do that?" "I'm afraid not, Your Excellency," the Secretary said. The President mused swiftly, "Damn," he said. "Strike out United States, then."

Lo! - Faulkner

"This man, Weddel, Vidal - whatever his name is - he and his family or clan or whatever they are - claim to own the entire part of Mississippi which lies on the west side of this river in question. Oh, the grant is in order: that French father of his from New Orleans saw to that"

Lo! - Faulkner

"not out of any desire for usufruct"

Lo! - Faulkner

"But the writer knows something no one else knows; the sea-change of the imagination"

Loot - Gordimer

"His name is well known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among the survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the ancient pirates and fisherman, there are those dropped from planes during the dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would never be found. Who recognized them that day, where they lie?"

Loot - Gordimer

"The most secret level of our world lay revealed . . . The saliva of the sea glistened upon these objects; it is given that time does not, never did, exist down here where the materiality of the past and the present as they lie has no chronological order, all is one, all is nothing - or all is possible at once"

Loot - Gordimer

As for the unusual scent when the Colonel shook out his hand- kerchief: C'est la lavande, une fleur mauve comme le ciel. They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

Meeting the British - Muldoon

And suddenly she put her hand full on my head pinching tight again with those finger tips like a television healer, young Oral Roberts half standing, quickly, half leaning those breasts swinging toward me so that I reach with both my hands to my lap protecting instinctively whatever it is that needs protection when a baseball is thrown and you're not looking but someone yells, the hand, then those breasts coming toward me like the quarter-arms of the amputee Joaquin who came back from the war to sit in the park, reaching always for children until one day he had to be held back. I sat there, no breath, and could see only hair around her left nipple, like man. Her clothes were old. Accented, in a language whose spine had been snapped, she whispered the words of a city witch, and made me happy, alive like a man: The future will make you tall.

Madre Sofia - Rios

My mother took me because she couldn't wait the second ten years to know. This was the lady rumored to have been responsible for the box-wrapped baby among the presents at that edding, but we went in, anyway, through the curtains. Loose jar-top, half turned and not caught properly in the threads her head sat mimicking its original intention like the smile of a child hitting himself. Central in that head grew unfamiliar poppies from a face mahogany, eyes half yellow half gray at the same time, goat and fog, slit eyes of the devil, his tweed suit, red lips, and she smelled of smoke, cigarettes, but a diamond smoke, somehow; I inhaled sparkles, I could feel them, throat, stomach.

Madre Sofia - Rios

She did not speak, and as a child I could only answer, so that together we were silent, cold and wet, dry and hard: from behind my mother pushed me forward. The lady put her hand on the face of a thin animal wrap, tossing that head behind her to be pressured incredibly as she sat back in the huge chair and leaned. And then I saw the breasts as large as her head, folded together, coming out of her dress as if it didn't fit, not like my mother's. I could see them, how she kept them penned up, leisurely, in maroon feed bags, horse nuzzles of her wide body, but exquisitely penned up circled by pear reins and red scarves. She lifted her arm, but only with the tips of her fingers motioned me to sit opposite. She looked at me but spoke to my mother words dark, smoky like the small room, words coming like red ants stepping occasionally from a hole on a summer day in the valley, red ants from her mouth, her nose, her ears, tears from the corners of her cinched eyes.

Madre Sofia - Rios

Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot?

Man and the Echo - Yeats

And my raw mouth a non-key of spring, a cousin sometimes source, my signature vibrational as parish flowers.

Mantilla - McGuckian

From below to above all decay I stated my contentless name and held the taste as though it were dying all over true in the one day light.

Mantilla - McGuckian

My resurrective verses shed people and reinforced each summer. I saw their time as my own time, I said, this day will penetrate those other days, using a thorn to remove a thorn in the harness of my mind where anyone's touch stemmed my dreams.

Mantilla - McGuckian

My sound world was a vassal state, a tightly bonded lattice of water sealed with cunning to rear the bridge of breathing.

Mantilla - McGuckian

We met the British in the dead of winter. The sky was lavender And the snow lavender blue. I could hear, far below, the sound of two streams coming together (both were frozen) and, no less strange, myself calling out in French across the forest - clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet could stomach our willow-tobacco. As for the unusual scent when the Colonel shook out his hand- kercheif: C'est la lavande, une fleur mauvy comme le ciel. They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

Meeting the British - Muldoon

We met the British in the dead of winter. The sky was lavender and the snow lavender-blue. I could hear, far below,

Meeting the British - Muldoon

across that forest- clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet could stomach our willow-tobacco.

Meeting the British - Muldoon

the sound of two streams coming together (both were frozen over) and, no less strange, myself calling out in French

Meeting the British - Muldoon

" . . . in all the hat shops and tailors' shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire"

Mrs Dalloway - Woolf

"Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage - forcing your soul, that was it - if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?"

Mrs Dalloway - Woolf

"When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see him. Did he indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly push before he could get past her into her husband's bedroom"

Mrs Dalloway - Woolf

" . . . on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

" . . .when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

". . . one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evenings after a day's work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilisation. Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian family which fro at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent (it's strange, he thought, what a sentiment I have about that, disliking India, and empire, and army as he did), there were moments when civilisation, even of this sort, seemed dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England; in butlers; chow dogs; girls in their security. Ridiculous enough, still there it is, he thought"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting through the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"Dr. Holmes came again . . . he brushed it all aside - headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams - nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said. If Dr. Holmes found himself even a half a pound below eleven stone six, he asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast . . But, he continued, health is largely a matter in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some hobby"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favorite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the palace"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her. If he were with me now what would he say?"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping) that the great revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The dead were with him. "'Evans, Evans!' he cried"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally Stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it . . . "

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right - and she had too - not to marry him"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"Still the future of civilization lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of men like that, he thought"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"The table drawer was full of those writings; about war; about Shakespeare; about great discoveries; how there is no death . . . He knew everything! That man, his friend who was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing behind the screen"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him and his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties"

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

"it was as if the five acts of a play had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and no it was over."

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it never would be lost. Never again would birds' song be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came.

Never Again Would Birds' Song Be The Same - Frost

" . . . I had been born on the night that El Generalissimo, Dios Trujillo, the honorable chief of state, had ordered the massacre of all Haitians living there"

Nineteen Thirty-Seven - Danticat

"The women would all dress in white. My mother would hold my hand tightly as we walked toward the water. We were all daughters of that river, which had taken our mothers from us. Our mothers were the ashes and we were the light. Our mothers were the embers and we were the sparks. Our mothers were the flames and we were the blaze"

Nineteen Thirty-Seven - Danticat

A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody's here--

Skunk Hour - Lowell

mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows his mother was no stupid woman; she could roll an R like a queen. Even a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room the bright feathers arch in a parody of greenery, as the last pale crumbs disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone

Parsley - Dove

The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ' as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, ' the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? ' and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,

On The Amtrak from Boston to New York City - Alexie

the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, ' I could have told her. 'I don't give a sh*t about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born and before his grandparents' grandparents were born. I'm tired of hearing about Don-f*cking-Henley saving it, too, because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.' But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country's history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

On The Amtrak from Boston to New York City - Alexie

"It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of the walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs. There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh"

Once Upon A Time - Gordimer

"The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock . . . The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chop and Tsonga migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. . . . men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs"

Once Upon a Time - Gordimer

Entering the Narrows at St. Johns the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship. We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs. And at St. Peter's the wind blew and the sun shone madly. Rapidly, purposefully, the Collegians marched in lines, crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants. In Mexico the dead man lay in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes glistened like Easter lilies. The jukebox went on playing "Ay, Jalisco!" And at Volubilis there were beautiful poppies splitting the mosaics; the fat old guide made eyes. In Dingle harbor a golden length of evening the rotting hulks held up their dripping plush. The Englishwoman poured tea, informing us that the Duchess was going to have a baby. And in the brothels of Marrakesh the littel pockmarked prostitutes balanced their tea-trays on their heads and did their belly-dances; flung themselves naked and giggling against our knees, asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there I saw what frightened me most of all: A holy grave, not looking particularly holy, one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldaquin open to every wind from the pink desert. An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid with exhortation, yellowed as scattered cattle-teeth; half-filled with dust, not even the dust of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there. In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused.

Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance - Bishop

Everything only connected by "and" and "and." Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.) Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? --the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, --and looked and looked our infant sight away.

Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance - Bishop

Thus should have been our travels: serious, engravable. The Seven Wonders of the World are tired and a touch familiar, but the other scenes, innumerable, though equally sad and still, are foreign. Often the squatting Arab, or group of Arabs, plotting, probably, against our Christian empire, while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand points to the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher. The branches o fthe date-palms look like files. The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry, is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits are vast and obvious, the human figure far gone in history or theology, gone with its camel or its faithful horse. Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds suspended on invisible threads above the Site, or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads. Granted a page alone or a page made up of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles or circles set on stippled gray, granted a grim lunette, caught in the toils of an initial letter, when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves. The eye drops, weighted, through the lines the burin made, the lines that move apart like ripples above sand, dispersing storms, God's spreading fingerprint, and painfully, finally, that ignite in watery prismatic white-and-blue.

Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance - Bishop

El General has found his word: perejil. Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining out of the swamp. The cane appears in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming. And we lie down. For every drop of blood there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp the cane appears.

Parsley - Dove

The word the general's chosen is parsley. It is fall, when thoughts turn to love and death; the general thinks of his mother, how she died in the fall and he planted her walking cane at the grave and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming four-star blossoms. The general

Parsley - Dove

There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General searches for a word; he is all the world there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,

Parsley - Dove

all the way from Australia in an ivory cage, is, coy as a widow, practising spring. Ever since the morning his mother collapsed in the kitchen while baking skull-shaped candies for the Day of the Dead, the general has hated sweets. He orders pastries brought up for the bird; they arrive

Parsley - Dove

calls out his name in a voice so like his mother's, a startled tear splashes the tip of his right boot. My mother, my love in death. The general remembers the tiny green sprigs men of his village wore in their capes to honor the birth of a son. He will order many, this time, to be killed for a single, beautiful word.

Parsley - Dove

dusted with sugar on a bed of lace. The knot in his throat starts to twitch; he sees his boots the first day in battle splashed with mud and urine as a soldier falls at his feet amazed— how stupid he looked!— at the sound of artillery. I never thought it would sing the soldier said, and died. Now

Parsley - Dove

pulls on his boots, he stomps to her room in the palace, the one without curtains, the one with a parrot in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders Who can I kill today. And for a moment the little knot of screams is still. The parrot, who has traveled

Parsley - Dove

the general sees the fields of sugar cane, lashed by rain and streaming. He sees his mother's smile, the teeth gnawed to arrowheads. He hears the Haitians sing without R's as they swing the great machetes: Katalina, they sing, Katalina,

Parsley - Dove

we lie down screaming as rain punches through and we come up green. We cannot speak an R— out of the swamp, the cane appears and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina. The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads. There is a parrot imitating spring.

Parsley - Dove

Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down. I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten. Naked: I've forgotten. Ni, wo: you and me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon. Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, Fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Persimmons - Lee

Finally understanding he was going blind, my father sat up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost. I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love. This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle. He's so happy that I've come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. All gone, he answers. Under some blankets, I find a box. Inside the box I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

Persimmons - Lee

He raises both hands to touch the cloth, asks, Which is this? This is persimmons, Father. Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

Persimmons - Lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision. How to choose persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet, all of it, to the heart.

Persimmons - Lee

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat but watched the other faces. My mother said every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing, warm as my face. Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper, forgotten and not yet ripe. I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill, where each morning a cardinal sang, The sun, the sun.

Persimmons - Lee

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.

Poem - Rukeyser

Hair--braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher's rope, Eyes--fagots, Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath--the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame.

Portrait in Georgia - Toomer

Cousin to Clare washing. In the win all the band beagles which have cousin lime sign and arrange a weeding match to presume a certain point to exstate to exstate a certain pass lint to exstate a lean sap prime lo and shut shut is life. Bait, bait tore, tore her clothes, toward it, toward a bit, to ward a sit, sit down in, in vacant surely lots, a single mingle, bait and wet, wet a single establishment that has a l i l y lily grow. COme to the pen come in the stem, come in the grass grown water. Lily wet lily wet while. This is so pink so pink in stammer, a long bean which shows bows is collected by a single curly shady, shady get, get set wet bet. It is a snuff a snuff to be told and have can wither, can is it and sleep sleeps knot, it is a lily scarf the pink and blue yellow, not blue not odor sun, nobles are bleeding bleeding two seats two seats on end. Why is grief. Grief is strange black. Sugar is melting. We will not swim. Preciosilla. Please be please be get, please get wet, wet naturally, naturally in weather. Could it be fire more firier. Could it be so in ate struck. Could it be gold up, gold up stringing, in it while while which is hanging, hanging in dingling, dingling in pinning, not so. Not so dots large dressed dots, bright, diamonds in the in the light, diamonds light diamonds door diamonds hanging to be four, two four, all beore, this bean, lessly, all most, as best, willow, vest, a green guest, guest, go go go go go go, go. Go go. Not guessed. Go go. Toasted susie is my ice-cream.

Preciosilla - Stein

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

Sailing to Byzantium - Yeats

O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

Sailing to Byzantium - Yeats

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Sailing to Byzantium - Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.

Sailing to Byzantium - Yeats

Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offense From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

Exciled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

Faces along the bar Cling to the their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children are afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb?

September 1, 1939 - Auden

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

The windlest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Njinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.

September 1, 1939 - Auden

Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

September 1913 - Yeats

Was it for this the wild geese spreadThe grey wing upon every tide;For this that all that blood was shed,For this Edward Fitzgerald died,And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,All that delirium of the brave?Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,It's with O'Leary in the grave.Yet could we turn the years again,And call those exiles as they wereIn all their loneliness and pain,You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hairHas maddened every mother's son':They weighed so lightly what they gave.But let them be, they're dead and gone,They're with O'Leary in the grave.

September 1913 - Yeats

What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save; Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

September 1913 - Yeats

What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone? For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

September 1913 - Yeats

Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were In all their loneliness and pain, You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair Has maddened every mother's son': They weighed so lightly what they gave. But let them be, they're dead and gone, They're with O'Leary in the grave.[1]

September 1913 - Yeats

Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were In all their loneliness and pain, You'd cry, 'Some woman's yellow hair Has maddened every mother's son': They weighed so lightly what they gave. But let them be, they're dead and gone, They're with O'Leary in the grave.

September 1913 - Yeats

Yet they were of a different kind, The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman's rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

September 1913 - Yeats

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom As the ambulance and the sandbag; Our hours of friendship into a people's army. To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the Octaves of radiation; To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

Spain - Auden

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines, Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright On the crag by the leaning tower: "O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor." And the investigator peers through his instruments At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus Or enormous Jupiter finished: "But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

Spain - Auden

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas, On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands Or the corrupt heart of the city. Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower. They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel; They floated over the oceans; They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

Spain - Auden

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe; On that tableland scored by rivers, Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises Have become invading battalions; And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Spain - Auden

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette, The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert, The masculine jokes; to-day the Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting. The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

Spain - Auden

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; To-morrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle. To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

Spain - Auden

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, the photographing of ravens; all the fun under Liberty's masterful shadow; To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician, The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome; To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers, The eager election of chairmen By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

Spain - Auden

Yesterday all the past. The language of size Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion Of the counting-frame and the cromlech; Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates. Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards, The divination of water; yesterday the invention Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Spain - Auden

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants, the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley, the chapel built in the forest; Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles; The trial of heretics among the columns of stone; Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain; Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Spain - Auden

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines, The construction of railways in the colonial desert; Yesterday the classic lecture On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle. Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek, The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero; Yesterday the prayer to the sunset And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

Spain - Auden

"Call her and see if she'll come. A woman knows her boss an' she answers when he calls"

Spunk - Hurston

"He could work again, ride the dangerous log-carriage that fed the singing, snarling, biting circle saw . . ."

Spunk - Hurston

"Lena, youse mine. From now on Ah works for you an' fights for you an' Ah never wants you to look to nobody for a crumb of bread, a stitch of close or a shingle to go over yo' head, but me as long as Ah live. Ah'll git the lumber for owah house tomorrow. Go home an' git yo' things together"

Spunk - Hurston

"Thass mah house,' Lena speaks up. 'Papa gimme that"

Spunk - Hurston

It was as if I had stepped free into space alone with nothing that I had not known already. Raindrops belw in my face as I came to. 'Old father, mother's son, there is a moment in Stephen's diary for April the thirteenth, a revelation set among my stars - that one entry has been a sort of password in my ears, the collect of a new epiphany, the Feast of the Holy Tundish. 'Who cares,' he jeered, 'any more? The English language belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires, a waste of time for somebody your age. That subject people stuff is a cod's game, infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.

Station Island XII - Heaney

Like a convalescent, I took the hand stretched down from the jetty, sensed again an alien comfort as I stepped on ground to find the helping hand still gripping mine, fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide or to be guided I could not be certain for the tall man in step at my side seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Station Island XII - Heaney

Then I knew him in the flesh out there on the tarmac among the cars, wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush. His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers came back to me, though he did not speak yet, a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's, cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite as a steel nib's downstroke, quick and clean, and suddenly he hit a litter basket with his stick, saying, 'Your obligation is not discharged by any common rite. What you must do must be done on your own

Station Island XII - Heaney

You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own frequency, echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea. The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

Station Island XII - Heaney

so get back in harness. The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don't be so earnest, let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes. Let go, let fly, forget. You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.

Station Island XII - Heaney

A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must. Drink pups. Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail. What is a nail. A nail is unison. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

Susie Asado - Stein

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller. This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy. Incy is short for incubus.

Susie Asado - Stein

"There was something about them that represented credit - their clothes, their manners, their type; but if credit is a large empty pocket in which an occasional chink reverberates, the chink at least must be audible"

The Real Thing - James

" . . . the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her"

The Awakening - Chopin

"'You are burnt beyond recognition,' he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property that has suffered some damage"

The Awakening - Chopin

"As she swam, she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself"

The Awakening - Chopin

"I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both'"

The Awakening - Chopin

"If one of the little Pontellier boys took a tumble whilst at play, he was not apt to rush crying to his mother's arms for comfort; he would more likely pick himself up, wipe the water out of his eyes and the sand out of his mouth, and go on playing. Tots as they were, they pulled together and stood their ground in childish battles with doubled fists and uplifted voices, which usually prevailed against the other mother-tots"

The Awakening - Chopin

"It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her"

The Awakening - Chopin

"On Tuesday afternoons - Tuesday being Mrs. Pontellier's reception day - there was a constant stream of callers - women who came in carriage or in the street cars, or walked when the air was soft and distance permitted. A light-colored mulatto boy, in dress coat and bearing a diminutive silver tray for the reception cards, admitted them. A maid, in white fluted cap, offered the callers liqueur, coffee, or chocolate, as they might desire. Mrs. Pontellier, attired in a handsome reception gown, remained in the drawing-room the entire afternoon receiving her visitors"

The Awakening - Chopin

"She began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked. She completely abandoned her Tuesdays at home . . ."

The Awakening - Chopin

"She could only realize that she herself—her present self - was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect"

The Awakening - Chopin

"The action was at first a little confusing to Edna, but she soon leant herself readily to the Creole's gentle caress"

The Awakening - Chopin

"The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels"

The Awakening - Chopin

"The youngsters came tumbling up the steps, the quadroon following at the respectful distance they required her to observe"

The Awakening - Chopin

I have just seen a beautiful thing Slim and still, Against a gold, gold sky, A straight cypress, Sensitive Exquisite, A black finger Pointing upwards. Why, beautiful, still finger are you black? And why are you pointing upwards?

The Black Finger - Grimke

AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES There they are. Thirty at the corner. Black, raw, ready. Sores in the city that do not want to heal.

The Blackstone Rangers - Brooks

GANG GIRLS A Rangerette Gang Girls are sweet exotics. Mary Ann uses the nutrients of her orient, but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove. (Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.) Mary is a rose in a whiskey glass. Mary's Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils fret frankly, lilac hurries on. Summer is a hard irregular ridge. October looks away. And that's the Year! Save for her bugle-love. Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion. Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger bringing an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag. "Where did you get the diamond?" Do not ask: but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips and help him clutch you. Love's another departure. Will there be any arrivals, confirmations? Will there be gleaning? Mary, the Shakedancer's child from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at her laboring lover .... Mary! Mary Ann! Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps! for sudden blood, aborted carnival, the props and niceties of non-loneliness— the rhymes of Leaning.

The Blackstone Rangers - Brooks

THE LEADERS Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop. They cancel, cure and curry. Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing the cold bonbon, the rhinestone thing. And hardly in a hurry. Hardly Belafonte, King, Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap. Bungled trophies. Their country is a Nation on no map. Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop in the passionate noon, in bewitching night are the detailed men, the copious men. They curry, cure, they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts are not divine, vivacious; the different tins are intense last entries; pagan argument; translations of the night. The Blackstone bitter bureaus (bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse unfashionable damnations and descent; and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand, construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.

The Blackstone Rangers - Brooks

And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

"When the porter's wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced "A gentleman - with a lady, sir," I had, as I often had in those days, for the wish was the father to the thought - an immediate vision of sitters"

The Real Thing - James

.... long neck, up, up with the head , eyes on the fingertips, bent leg, shift of the weight--- turn ---No, no, begin again ... What had she seen, Madame Sakaroff, at Stalingrad, now in her room of mirrors tapping her cane as the piano player begins the interrupted Minuet again and we line up right foot extended, right hand extended, the Bach mid-phrase--- Europe? The dream of Europe?---midwinter afternoon, rain at the windowpane, ceilings at thirty feet and coffered floating over the wide interior spaces ... No one must believe in God again I heard her say one time when I had come to class too soon and had been sent to change. The visitor had left, kissing her hand, small bow, and I had seen her (from the curtain) (having forgotten I was there) turn from the huge pearl-inlaid doors she had just closed, one hand still on the massive, gold, bird-headed knob, and see---a hundred feet away---herself---a woman in black in a mirrored room--- saw her not shift her gaze but bring her pallid tensile hand--- as if it were not part of her---slowly down from

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

Closeup, he's blue---streaked iris blue, india-ink blue---and black---an oily, fiery set of blacks---none of them true ---as where hate and order touch---something that cannot become known. Stages of black but without graduation. So there is no direction. All of this happened, yes. Then disappeared into the body of the crow, chorus of meanings, layers of blacks, then just the crow, plain, big, lifting his claws to walk thrustingly forward and back---indigo, cyanine, beryl, grape, steel ... Then suddenly he wings and---braking as he lifts the chest in which an eye-sized heart now beats--- ---he's up---a blunt clean stroke--- one ink-streak on the early evening snowlit scene--- See the gesture of the painter?---Recall the crow?-Place him quickly on his limb as he comes sheering in, close to the trunk, to land---Is he now disappeared again?

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

On my way to bringing you the leotard you forgot to include in your overnight bag, the snow started coming down harder. I watched each gathering of leafy flakes melt round my footfall. I looked up into it---late afternoon but bright. Nothing true or false in itself. Just motion. Many strips of motion. Filaments of falling marked by the tiny certainties of flakes. Never blurring yet themselves a cloud. Me in it and yet moving easily through it, black Lycra leotard balled into my pocket, your tiny dream in it, my left hand on it or in it to keep warm. Praise this. Praise that. Flash a glance up and try to see the arabesques and tunnels, gathering and loosening, as they define, as a voice would, the passaging through from the-other-than- human. Gone as they hit the earth. But embellishing. Flourishing. The road with me on it going on through. In- scribed with the present. As if it really were possible to exist, and exist, never to be pulled back in, given and given never to be received. The music of the footfalls doesn't stop, doesn't mean. Here are your things , I said.

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

San Nicolas and at its entrance he imagined he could see its beauty and goodness, sand right up to the land where you can put the side of the ship . He thought he saw Indians fleeing through the white before the ship ... As for him, he did not believe what his crew told him, nor did he understand them well, nor they him. In the white swirl, he placed a large cross at the western side of the harbor, on a conspicuous height, as a sign that Your Highness claim the land as Your own. After the cross was set up, three sailors went into the bush (immediately erased from sight by the fast snow) to see what kinds of trees. They captured three very black Indian women---one who was young and pretty. The Admiral ordered her clothed and returned to her land courteously. There her people told that she had not wanted to leave the ship, but wished to stay on it. The snow was wild. Inside it, though, you could see this woman was wearing a little piece of gold on her nose, which was a sign there was gold on that land"---

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

Starting home I heard---bothering, lifting, then bothering again--- the huge flock of starlings massed over our neighborhood these days; heard them lift and swim overhead through the falling snow as though the austerity of a true, cold thing, a verity, the black bits of their thousands of bodies swarming then settling overhead. I stopped. All up and down the empty oak they stilled. Every limb sprouting. Every leafy backlit body filling its part of the empty crown. I tried to count--- then tried to estimate--- but the leaves of this wet black tree at the heart of the storm---shiny--- river through limbs, back onto limbs, scatter, blow away, scatter, recollect--- undoing again and again the tree without it ever ceasing to be full. Foliage of the tree of the world's waiting. Of having waited a long time and still having to wait. Of trailing and screaming. Of engulfed readjustments. Of blackness redisappearing into downdrafts of snow. Of indifference. Of indifferent reappearings. I think of you back of me now in the bright house of your friend twirling in the living room in the shiny leotard you love. I had looked---as I was leaving---through the window to see you, slick in your magic, pulling away from the wall--- I watch the head explode then recollect, explode, recollect.

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine . An inside thing. Once I was.... once, once. It settles, in my head, the wavering white sleep, the instances---they stick, accrue, grip up, connect, they do not melt, I will not let them melt, they build, cloud and cloud, I feel myself weak, I feel the thinking muscle-up--- outside, the talk-talk of the birds---outside, strings and their roots, leaves inside the limbs, in some spots the skin breaking--- but inside, no more exploding, no more smoldering, no more, inside, a splinter colony, new world, possession gripping down to form, wilderness brought deep into my clearing, out of the ooze of night, limbed, shouldered, necked, visaged, the white--- now the clouds coming in (don't look up), now the Age behind the clouds, The Great Heights, all in there, reclining, eyes closed, huge, centuries and centuries long and wide, and underneath, barely attached but attached, like a runner, my body, my tiny piece of the century---minutes, houses going by---The Great Heights--- anchored by these footsteps, now and now, the footstepping---now and now---carrying its vast white sleeping geography---mapped--- not a lease--- possession ---"At the hour of vespers in a sudden blinding snow, they entered the harbor and he named it Puerto de

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

Then I heard it, inside the swarm, the single cry of the crow. One syllable---one---inside the screeching and the skittering, inside the constant repatterning of a thing not nervous yet not ever still---but not uncertain---without obedience yet not without law---one syllable--- black, shiny, twirling on its single stem, rooting, one foot on the earth, twisting and twisting--- and then again---a little further off this time--- down the ravine , voice inside a head, filling a head.... See, my pocket is empty now. I let my hand open and shut in there. I do it again. Two now, skull and pocket with their terrified inhabitants. You turn the music up. The window nothing to you, liquid, dark, where now your mother has come back to watch.

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

the ridged, cold, feathered knob and, recollected, fixed upon that other woman, emigrée, begin to move in stiffly towards her ... You out there now, you in here with me---I watched the two of them, black and black, in the gigantic light, glide at each other, heads raised, necks long--- me wanting to cry out---where were the others?---wasn't it late? the two of her like huge black hands--- clap once and once only and the signal is given--- but to what?---regarding what?---till closer-in I saw more suddenly how her eyes eyed themselves: no wavering: like a vast silver page burning: the black hole expanding: like a meaning coming up quick from inside that page--- coming up quick to seize the reading face--- each face wanting the other to take it--- but where? and from where?---I was eight--- I saw the different weights of things, saw the vivid performance of the present, saw the light rippling almost shuddering where her body finally touched the image, the silver film between them like something that would have shed itself in nature now but wouldn't, couldn't, here, on tight, between , not thinning, not slipping off to let some seed-down through, no signal in it, no information ... Child, what should I know to save you that I do not know, hands on this windowpane?---

The Dream of the Unified Field - Graham

". . . they surely could have been turned to better account for advertising purposes. . . . There was something in them for a waistcoat-maker, an hotel-keeper, or a soap-vender. I could imagine 'We always use it' pinned to their bosoms with the greatest effect; I had a vision of the promptitude with which they would launch a table d'hôte"

The Real Thing - James

You weren't well or really ill yet either; just a little tired, your handsomeness tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead. I knew that to be true still, even in the dream. You'd been out--at work maybe?-- having a good day, almost energetic. We seemed to be moving from some old house where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things in disarray: that was the story of my dream, but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative by your face, the physical fact of your face: inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert. Why so difficult, remembering the actual look of you? Without a photograph, without strain? So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face, your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth and clarity of you--warm brown tea--we held each other for the time the dream allowed. Bless you. You came back, so I could see you once more, plainly, so I could rest against you without thinking this happiness lessened anything, without thinking you were alive again.

The Embrace - Doty

The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.

The Gift Outright - Frost

She: Each from his stand of mountain-ash will cry out over valley farms spotlit with pear-bloosom. He: There some young Absalom picks his way through cache after cache of ammunition and small arms hidden in grain wells, while his nap tugs at a rein caught on a snag.

The Grand Conversation - Muldoon

She: Mine once controlled the sugar trade from the islets of Langerhans and were granted the deed to Charlottesville. He: Indeed? My people called a spade a spade and were admitted to the hanse of pike-and pickax-men, shovels leaning to their lean-to hovels.

The Grand Conversation - Muldoon

She: Mine were trained to make a suture after the bomb and the bombast have done their very worst. He: Between fearsad and verst we may yet construct our future as we've reconstructed our past and cry out, my love, each to each from his or her own quicken-queach.

The Grand Conversation - Muldoon

She: Mine would lie low int he shtetl when they heard the distant thunder stolen by the Cossacks. He: It was potato sacks lumped together on a settle mine found themselves lying under, the Peep O'Day Boy from Loughgall making Defenders of us all.

The Grand Conversation - Muldoon

She: My people came from Korelitz, where they grew yellow cucumbers and studied the Talmud. He: Mine pored over the mud of mangold - and potato-pits of flicked through kale plants from Comber as bibliomancers of old went a-flicking throuh deckle-mold.

The Grand Conversation - Muldoon

"It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially changer her first name from Grace to Afamefuna"

The Headstrong Historian - Adichie

"Nwamgba had no desire to speak such a thing herself [English], but she was suddenly determined that Anikwenwa would speak it well enough to go the white men's court with Obierika's cousins and defeat them and take control of what was his"

The Headstrong Historian - Adichie

"She complained to the Women's Council, and twenty women went at night to Okafo and Okoye's home, brandishing pestles, warning them to leave Nwamgba alone"

The Headstrong Historian - Adichie

"She felt her son slipping away from her, and yet she was proud that he was learning so much, that he could become a court interpreter or letter writer, and that with Father Lutz's help he had brought home some papers that showed that their lands belonged to him and his mother. Her proudest moment was when he went to his father's cousins Okafo and Okoye and asked for his father's ivory tusk back. And they gave it to him"

The Headstrong Historian - Adichie

"She felt her son slipping away from her, and yet she was proud that he was learning so much...Her proudest moment was when he went to his father's cousins Okafo and Okoye and asked for his father's ivory tusk back. And they gave it to him"

The Headstrong Historian - Adichie

It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially change her first name from Grace to Afemefuna

The Headstrong Historian - Adichie

"This artistic discovery of African art come at a time when there was a marked decadence and sterility in certain forms of European plastic art and expression, due to generations of the inbreeding of style and idiom"

The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts - Locke

And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions And for a hundred visions and revisions Before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

And indeed there will be time To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— [They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"] My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— [They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"] Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet-and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

For I have known them all already, known them all; Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question. . . Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . . I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Eliot

"But after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression - she herself had no sense of variety. You may say that this was my business, was only a question of placing her. I placed her in every conceivable position, but she managed to obliterate their differences. She was always a lady certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing"

The Real Thing - James

"But what the Negro artist of to-day has most to gain from the arts of the forefathers is perhaps not cultural inspiration or technical innovations, but the lesson of a classical background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery"

The New Negro - Locke

"Our greatest rehabilitation may possibly come through such channels, but for the present, more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective"

The New Negro - Locke

" . . . I always do everything to the best of my ability sir but God is my Witness I never find a night watchman work like this so much writing I dont have time to do anything else, I dont have four hands and six eyes and I want extra assistance with Mr Wills and party sir"

The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book - Naipaul

"You are not to decide what is necessary to mention in this night watchman's occurrence book. Since when have you become sole owner of the hotel as to determine what is necessary to mention?"

The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book - Naipaul

"Your interest in the morals of our guests seems to be distracting your attention from your duties. Save your preaching for your roadside prayer meetings"

The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book - Naipaul

But I have kept a smile for fate, I neither cry, nor cringe, nor hate, Intrepidly, I strive to bear This handicap. The planets wear The Maker's imprint, and with mine I swing into their rhythmic line; I ask - only for destiny, Mine, not thine.

The Ordeal - Johnson

Ho! my brother, Pass me not by so scornfully I'm doing this living of being black, Perhaps I bear your own life-pack, and heavy, heavy is the load That bends my body to the road.

The Ordeal - Johnson

"On the bare floor, dismal gore spots on various parts of their crash and crocus bag - eyes watering at them - were men, white men. In the dead of night, chased by the crimson glow of dawn, intense white faces, streaming red in the burning tropics, few madly, fiercely across the icy-flows of the Zone to the luxurious solitude of the Palm Porch"

The Palm Porch - Walrond

"She was like a singularly bad illustration"

The Real Thing - James

"She would accuse me at such moments of taking away her 'reputytion'"

The Real Thing - James

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

The Red Wheelbarrow - Williams

"Their good looks had been their capital, and they had good-humoredly made the most of the career that this resource had marked out for them. It was in their faces, the blankness, the deep intellectual repose of twenty years of country-house visiting which had given them pleasant intonations. I could see the drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn't read, in which Mrs. Monarch had continuously sat . . ."

The Real Thing - James

" . . . the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent for imitation"

The Real Thing - James

"'Now the drawings you make from us, they look exactly like us,' she reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognized that this was indeed their defect. When I drew the Monarchs I couldn't, somehow, get away from them - get into the character I wanted to represent; and I had not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture"

The Real Thing - James

"'Oh, you think she's shabby, but you must allow for the alchemy of art'"

The Real Thing - James

White men's children spread over the earth- A rainbow suspending the drawn swords of birth, Uniting and blending the races in one The world man-cosmopolite-everyman's son! He channels the streams of the red blood and blue, Behold him! A Triton-the peer of the two; Un-riddle this riddle of "outside in" White man's children in black men's skin.....

The Riddle - Johnson

Here, in the room of my life the objects keep changing. Ashtrays to cry into, the suffering brother of the wood walls, the forty-eight keys of the typewriter each an eyeball that is never shut, the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest, the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde, the sockets on the wall waiting like a cave of bees, the gold rug a conversation of heels and toes, the fireplace

The Room of My Life - Sexton

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart. Each day I feed the world out there although birds explode right and left. I feed the world in here too, offering the desk puppy biscuits. However, nothing is just what it seems to be. My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.

The Room of My Life - Sexton

a knife waiting for someone to pick it up, the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a *****, the phone two flowers taking root in its crotch, the doors opening and closing like sea clams, the lights poking at me, lighting up both the soil and the laugh.

The Room of My Life - Sexton

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packed cries, the shit, the moaning: Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow, that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women,

The Sea is History - Walcott

and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills into marl and cornmeal, and that was Lamentations - that was just Lamentations, it was not History; then came, like scum on the river's drying lip, the brown reeds of villages mantling and congealing into towns, and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spires lancing the side of God as His son set, and that was the New Testament. Then came the white sisters clapping to the waves' progress, and that was Emancipation - jubilation, O jubilation - vanishing swiftly as the sea's lace dries in the sun, but that was not History, that was only faith, and then each rock broke into its own nation; then came the synod of flies, then came the secretarial heron, then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote, fireflies with bright ideas and bats like jetting ambassadors and the mantis, like khaki police, and the furred caterpillars of judges examining each case closely, and then in the dark ears of ferns and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo of History, really beginning.

The Sea is History - Walcott

and those were the ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages looking for History. Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs, brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore, then the foaming, rabid maw of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, and that was Jonah, but where is your Renaissance? Sir, it is locked in them sea sands out there past the reef's moiling shelf, where the men-o'-war floated down; strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself. It's all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral, past the gothic windows of sea fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen; and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are our cathedrals,

The Sea is History - Walcott

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming - Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming - Yeats

"But as the policeman came to her, and she spelled out her name for him, she looked up and saw the faces of the African onlookers who stood nearest to her. . . When she looked back, they met her gaze. And she felt, suddenly, not nothing but what they were feeling, at the sight of a white girl, taken - incomprehensibly, as they themselves were used to being taken - under the force of the white men's wills, which dispensed and withdrew life, which imprisoned and set free, fed or starved, like God himself"

The Smell of Death and Flowers - Gordimer

"She felt neither pity nor distaste at the sight. It was as if, dating from this day, her involvement in action against social injustice had purged her of sentimentality; she did not have to avert her gaze"

The Smell of Death and Flowers - Gordimer

"...when the Government first begun to interfere with how a man farmed his own land and raised cotton. Stabilizing the price, using up the surplus, they called it, giving a man advice and help, whether he wanted it or not."

The Tall Men - Faulkner

"And sitting in the lamplit hall beside the old marshal, the bedroom door closed now, he heard to truck start up and back and turn and go down the road, the sound of it dying away, ceasing, leaving the still, hot night—the Mississippi Indian summer, which ahd already outlasted half of November—filled with the loud last shrilling of the summer's cicadas, as though they, too, were aware of the imminent season of cold weather and death."

The Tall Men - Faulkner

"Growned men kissing one another without hiding and without shame."

The Tall Men - Faulkner

"He had been right. The doddering old officer was not only at bottom one of these people, he had been corrupted anew to his old, inherent, shiftless sloth and unreliability merely by entering the house."

The Tall Men - Faulkner

"I been trying to tell you something for you not to forget. But I reckon it will take these McCallums to impress it upon you."

The Tall Men - Faulkner

"Take yourself, now," he said, in that same kindly tone, chatty and easy; "you mean all right. You just got yourself all fogged up with rules and regulations. That's our trouble. We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we can't see anything else can't be fitted to an alphabet or a rule, we are lost. We have come to be like critters doctor folks might have created in laboratories that have learned to slip off their bones and guts and still live, still be kept alive indefinite and forever maybe even without even knowing the bones and the guts are gone. We have slipped our backbone; we have about decided a man don't need a backbone any more; to have one is old-fashioned. But the groove where the backbone used to be is still there, and the backbone has kept alive, too, and someday we're going to slip back into it...."

The Tall Men - Faulkner

"Yes, sir. A man gets around and he sees a heap; a heap of folks in a heap of situations. The trouble is, we done got into the habit of confusing the situations with the folks."

The Tall Men - Faulkner

"a fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA and a dozen other three-letter reasons for a man not to work"

The Tall Men - Faulkner

As at the loophole there The daws chatter and scream, And drop twigs layer upon layer. When they have mounted up, The mother bird will rest On their hollow top, And so warm her wild nest. I leave both faith and pride To young upstanding men Climbing the mountain-side, That under bursting dawn They may drop a fly; Being of that metal made Till it was broken by This sedentary trade.

The Tower - Yeats

Before that ruin came, for centuries, Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs, And certain men-at-arms there were Whose images, in the Great Memory stored, Come with loud cry and panting breast To break upon a sleeper's rest While their great wooden dice beat on the board. As I would question all, come all who can; Come old, necessitous. half-mounted man; And bring beauty's blind rambling celebrant; The red man the juggler sent Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French, Gifted with so fine an ear; The man drowned in a bog's mire, When mocking Muses chose the country wench.

The Tower - Yeats

Did all old men and women, rich and poor, Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door, Whether in public or in secret rage As I do now against old age? But I have found an answer in those eyes That are impatient to be gone; Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan, For I need all his mighty memories. Old lecher with a love on every wind, Bring up out of that deep considering mind All that you have discovered in the grave, For it is certain that you have Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing plunge, lured by a softening eye, Or by a touch or a sigh, Into the labyrinth of another's being; Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or woman lost? If on the lost, admit you turned aside From a great labyrinth out of pride, Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought Or anything called conscience once; And that if memory recur, the sun's Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

The Tower - Yeats

Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn; And when that ancient ruffian's turn was on He so bewitched the cards under his thumb That all but the one card became A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards, And that he changed into a hare. Hanrahan rose in frenzy there And followed up those baying creatures towards - O towards I have forgotten what - enough! I must recall a man that neither love Nor music nor an enemy's clipped ear Could, he was so harried, cheer; A figure that has grown so fabulous There's not a neighbour left to say When he finished his dog's day: An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

The Tower - Yeats

I pace upon the battlements and stare On the foundations of a house, or where Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth; And send imagination forth Under the day's declining beam, and call Images and memories From ruin or from ancient trees, For I would ask a question of them all. Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once When every silver candlestick or sconce Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine. A serving-man, that could divine That most respected lady's every wish, Ran and with the garden shears Clipped an insolent farmer's ears And brought them in a little covered dish.

The Tower - Yeats

"She died during the famous '37 strike which began shortly after we left. On the day of her death England sent planes flying low over the island as a show of force - so low, according to my aunt's letter, that the downdraft from them shook the ripened mangoes from the trees in Da-duh's orchard. Frightened, everyone in the village fled into the canes. Except Da-duh"

To Da-Duh, in Memoriam - Marshall

It is time that I wrote my will; I choose upstanding men That climb the streams until The fountain leap, and at dawn Drop their cast at the side Of dripping stone; I declare They shall inherit my pride, The pride of people that were Bound neither to Cause nor to State. Neither to slaves that were spat on, Nor to the tyrants that spat, The people of Burke and of Grattan That gave, though free to refuse - pride, like that of the morn, When the headlong light is loose, Or that of the fabulous horn, Or that of the sudden shower When all streams are dry, Or that of the hour When the swan must fix his eye Upon a fading gleam, Float out upon a long Last reach of glittering stream And there sing his last song. And I declare my faith: I mock plotinus' thought And cry in plato's teeth, Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul, Aye, sun and moon and star, all, And further add to that That, being dead, we rise, Dream and so create Translunar paradise. I have prepared my peace With learned Italian things And the proud stones of Greece, Poet's imaginings And memories of love, Memories of the words of women, All those things whereof Man makes a superhuman, Mirror-resembling dream.

The Tower - Yeats

Now shall I make my soul, Compelling it to study In a learned school Till the wreck of body, Slow decay of blood, Testy delirium Or dull decrepitude, Or what worse evil come - The death of friends, or death Of every brilliant eye That made a catch in the breath - . Seem but the clouds of the sky When the horizon fades; Or a bird's sleepy cry Among the deepening shades.

The Tower - Yeats

Some few remembered still when I was young A peasant girl commended by a Song, Who'd lived somewhere upon that rocky place, And praised the colour of her face, And had the greater joy in praising her, Remembering that, if walked she there, Farmers jostled at the fair So great a glory did the song confer. And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes, Or else by toasting her a score of times, Rose from the table and declared it right To test their fancy by their sight; But they mistook the brightness of the moon For the prosaic light of day - Music had driven their wits astray - And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

The Tower - Yeats

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind; Yet, now I have considered it, I find That nothing strange; the tragedy began With Homer that was a blind man, And Helen has all living hearts betrayed. O may the moon and sunlight seem One inextricable beam, For if I triumph I must make men mad. And I myself created Hanrahan And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages. Caught by an old man's juggleries He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro And had but broken knees for hire And horrible splendour of desire; I thought it all out twenty years ago:

The Tower - Yeats

WHAT shall I do with this absurdity - O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible - No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly, Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back And had the livelong summer day to spend. It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack, Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend Until imagination, ear and eye, Can be content with argument and deal In abstract things; or be derided by A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

The Tower - Yeats

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit, Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

The Tropics in New York - McKay

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; A wave of longing through my body swept, And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

The Tropics in New York - McKay

Set in the window, bringing memories Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies In benediction over nun-like hills.

The Tropics in New York - McKay

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag -It's so elegantSo intelligent "What shall I do now? What shall I do?"I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street"With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?"What shall we ever do?"

The Waste Land - Eliot

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,Glowed on the marble, where the glassHeld up by standards wrought with fruited vinesFrom which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabraReflecting light upon the table asThe glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,From satin cases poured in rich profusion...

The Waste Land - Eliot

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hairSpread out in fiery pointsGlowed into words, then would be savagely still. "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me."Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak."What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?"I never know what you are thinking. Think." I think we are in rats' alleyWhere the dead men lost their bones.

The Waste Land - Eliot

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway . . . To the tune o' those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man's soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— "Ain't got nobody in all this world, Ain't got nobody but ma self. I's gwine to quit ma frownin' And put ma troubles on the shelf."

The Weary Blues - Hughes

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— "I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can't be satisfied— I ain't happy no mo' And I wish that I had died." And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

The Weary Blues - Hughes

"As she she stood gazing at the circular darkness which had swallowed them, tears gushed from her eyes, and she swore within her that if she heard Ezinma cry she would rush into the cave and defend her against all the gods in the world. She would die with her"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

"It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of even and capricious gods of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

"It's true that a child belongs to his father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother's hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is here to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

"It's true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother's hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is here to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

"Looking at a king's mouth," said an old man, "one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

"The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

"The night was very quiet. It was always quiet except on moonlight nights. Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

Turn thanks to MIss Mirry ill-tempered domestic helper who hated me. She said that she had passed through hell bareheaded and that a whitening ash from hell's furnace

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

Who said pussbrukokonatinnadalikklegalnanayeye. Miss Murry versus English against the west once assured me that for every sickness there exists a cure growing in the bush.

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

"The old man bore no ill will towards Okonkwo. Indeed he respected him for his industry and success. But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo's brusqueness in dealing with less successful men. Only a week ago a man had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they held to discuss the next ancestral feast. Without looking at the man Okonkwo had said: "This meeting is for men." The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man's spirit. "Everybody at the kindred meeting took sides with Osugo when Okonkwo called him a woman"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

"Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a great man indeed"

Things Fall Apart - Achebe

A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Stevens

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

This Is Just to Say - Williams

"Following her apprehensively down the incline amid a stand of banana plants whose leaves flapped like elephants ears in the wind, I found myself in the middle of a small tropical wood - a place dense and damp and gloomy and tremulous with the fitful play of light and shadow as the leaves high above moved against the sun that was almost hidden from view. It was a violent place, the tangled foliage fighting each other for a chance at the sunlight, the branches of the trees locked in what seemed an immemorial struggle, one both necessary and inevitable. But despite the violence, it was pleasant, almost peaceful in the gully, and beneath the thick undergrowth the earth smelled like spring"

To Da-Duh, In Memoriam - Marshall

"All the fight went out of her at that. The hand poised to strike me fell limp to her side, and as she stared at me, seeing not me but the building that was taller than the highest hill she knew, the small stubborn light in her eyes (it was the same amber as the flame in the kerosene lamp she lit at dusk) began to fail"

To Da-Duh, in Memoriam - Marshall

"By the time I mailed her the large colored picture postcard of the Empire State building, she was dead"

To Da-Duh, in Memoriam - Marshall

"She died and I lived, but always, to this day even, within the shadow of her death. For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugar-cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly-plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts"

To Da-Duh, in Memoriam - Marshall

a furious fanning of her shift tail, a series of hawks at the back of her throat, a long extended sigh, a severing cut eye, or a melancholy wordless moaning as she squatted over her wooden washtub soaping

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

"She remained in the house at the window so my aunt said, watching as the planes came swooping and screaming like monstrous birds down over the village, over her house, rattling her trees and flattening the young canes in the field. It must have seemed to her lying there that they did not intend pulling out of their dive, but like the hard-back beetles which hurled themselves with suicidal force against the walls of the house at night, those menacing silver shapes would hurl themselves in an ecstasy of self-immolation onto the land, destroying it utterly"

To Da-Duh, in Memoriam - Marshall

"Some huge monolithic shape had imposed itself, it seemed, between her and the land, obstructing her vision"

To Da-Duh, in Memoriam - Marshall

I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate

Tollund Man - Heaney

I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines.

Tollund Man - Heaney

In the flat country near by Where they dug him out, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach,

Tollund Man - Heaney

Naked except for The cap, noose and girdle, I will stand a long time. Bridegroom to the goddess,

Tollund Man - Heaney

Out here in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home.

Tollund Man - Heaney

She tightened her torc on him And opened her fen, Those dark juices working Him to a saint's kept body,

Tollund Man - Heaney

Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap.

Tollund Man - Heaney

Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country near by Where they dug him out, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach, Naked except for The cap, noose and girdle, I will stand a long time. Bridegroom to the goddess, She tightened her torc on him And opened her fen, Those dark juices working Him to a saint's kept body, Trove of the turfcutters' Honeycombed workings. Now his stained face Reposes at Aarhus.

Tollund Man - Heaney

Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me, driving, Saying the names

Tollund Man - Heaney

Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me, driving, Saying the names Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue. Out here in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home.

Tollund Man - Heaney

Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines.

Tollund Man - Heaney

The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards,

Tollund Man - Heaney

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue.

Tollund Man - Heaney

Trove of the turfcutters' Honeycombed workings. Now his stained face Reposes at Aarhus.

Tollund Man - Heaney

"Accustomed as is squalid adversity to reign unchallenged in these quarters, yet in this room is was more than usually triumphant, sitting, as it were, high on a throne of regal estate, so depressed was the woman and so depressing her surroundings"

Triumph - James

"Sunday morning in barrack-yards is pot-parade. Of the sixteen tenants in the yard twelve had their pots out, and they lifted the meat with long iron forks to turn it, or threw water into the pot so that it steamed to the heavens and every woman could tell what her neighbour was cooking --- beef, pork, or chicken. It didn't matter what you cooked in the week, if you didn't cook at all. But to cook salt fish, or hog-head, or pig-tail on a Sunday morning was a disgrace. You put your pot inside your house and cooked it there"

Triumph - James

"Where people in England and America say slums, Trinidadians said barracks-yards. Probably the word is a relic of the days when England relied as much on garrisons of soldiers as on her fleet to protect her valuable sugar-producing colonies"

Triumph - James

"Yet Celestine was grieved that she could do nothing to help Mamitz in her trouble, which she attributed to the evil and supernatural machinations of Irene, their common enemy"

Triumph - James

I thank her for giving me a bath in her washtub which she had filled with water heated in a kerosene tin and in it she had strewed the fringed leaves of emancipation tamarind.

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

I turn thanks for the calming bath that she gave to me which quelled effectively the red itching measles prickling my skin. As she sluiced the atringent waters over me.

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

She said that she came from "Ullava" in the parallel universe of Old Harbor. She could not read or write a word in English but took every vowel and consonant of it

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

She was the repository of 400 years of resentment for being uprooted and transplanted, condemned to being a stranger on this side of the world where most words would not obey her tongue.

Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry - Goodison

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

We Real Cool - Brooks

"'It's a ghastly place. How in God's name did you survive living their. I don't think I can last out more than another few months, and I've always got my flat in Cape Town to escape to on Sundays, and so on'"

Which New Era Would That Be? - Gordimer

"'Oh, I don't know. Because I don't see why anyone else - any one of the people who live there - should have to, I suppose.' She laughed before anyone else could at the feebleness, the philanthropic uselessness of what she was saying. 'Guilt, what-have-you . . .'"

Which New Era Would That Be? - Gordimer

"Jennifer said closely, biting her lower lip, as if this were a problem to be solved psychologically"

Which New Era Would That Be? - Gordimer

"There was no escaping their understanding. They even insisted on feeling the resentment you must feel at their identifying themselves with your feelings"

Which New Era Would That Be? - Gordimer

"These were white women who, Jake knew, persisted in regarding themselves as your equal. That was even worse, he thought, than the parsons who persisted in regarding you as their equal. The parsons had ten years at school and seven years at a university and theological school; you had carried sacks of vegetables from the market to white people's cars from the time you were eight years old until you were apprenticed to be a printer . . . Yet the good parson insisted that your picture of life was exactly the same as his own: you felt as he did. But these women - oh, Christ! - these women felt as you did"

Which New Era Would That Be? - Gordimer

'Oh, so now he remembers his family at last!' he said, shaking me off his feet. 'Has he though about us at all?'

White Tiger - Adiga

A handful of men in this country have trained the reamining 99.9 percent - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hand and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

White Tiger - Adiga

And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 - the day the British left - the cages had been left open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly. It didn't matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up. My father's father must have been a real Halwai, a sweet-maker, but when he inherited the shop, a member of some other caste must have stolen it from him with the help of the police. My father had not had the belly to fight back. That's why he had fallen all the way to the mud, to the level of a rick-shaw puller. That's why I was cheated of my destiny to be fat, and creamy-skinned, and smiling.

White Tiger - Adiga

I love my start-up - this chandelier, and this silver laptop and these twenty-six Toyota Qualises - but honestly, I'll get bored of it sooner or later. I'm a first gear man, Mr. Premier. In the end, I'll have to see this start-up to some other moron - entrepreneur, I mean - and head into a new line. I'm' thinking of real estate next. You see, I'm always a man who sees 'tomorrow' when others see 'today.' The whole world will come to Bangalore tomorrow. Just drive to the air-port and count he half-built glass-and-steel boxes as you pas them. Look at the names of the American companies that are building them. And when all these Americas come here, where do you think they're all going to sleep? ON the road? ha! Anywhere there's an empty apartment, I take a look at it, I wondr, How much can I get from an American for this in 2010? If the place has a future as the home of an American, I put a down payment on it at once. The future of real estate is Bangalore, Mr. Jiabao. You can join in the killing you want - I'll help you out!

White Tiger - Adiga

I should explain a think or two about caste. Even Indians get confused about this word, especially educated Indians in the cities. They'll make a mess of explaining it to you. But it's simple, really. Let's start with me. See: Halwai, my name, means 'sweet-maker.' That's my caste - my destiny. Everyone in the Darkness who hears that name knows all about me at once. That's why Kishan and I kept getting jobs at sweetshops wherever we went. The owner though, Ah, they're Halwais, making sweets and tea is in their blood. But if we were Halwais, then why was my father not making sweets but pulling a rickshaw? Why did I grow up breaking coals and wiping tables, instead of eating gulab jamunsand sweet pastries when and where I chose to? Why was I lean and dark and cunning, and not fat and creamy-skinned and smiling, like a boy raised on sweets would be?

White Tiger - Adiga

If they notice the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I keep things clean, they'll go up in life. If they don't, they'll be drivers all their lives. I leave the choice up to them. When the work is done I kick them out of the office: no chitchat, no cups of coffee. A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous.

White Tiger - Adiga

Pinch your neck and swear -- you'll send every rupee you make every month back to Granny.

White Tiger - Adiga

See, this country in its days of greatness, when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his pace, everyone happy. Goldsmiths here. Cowherds here. Landlords there. The man called a Halwai made sweets. The man called a cowherd tended cows. The untouchable cleaned feces. Landlords were kind to their serfs. Women covered their heads with a veil and turned their eyes to the ground when talking to strange men.

White Tiger - Adiga

To sum up - in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up.

White Tiger - Adiga

White men will be finished within my lifetime. Ther are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they're up to - the radio never talks about them. My humble prediction: in twenty years' time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we'll rule the whole world.

White Tiger - Adiga

"It was a perfectly calm and reasonable and factual letter saying that he would not return, but she saw that it was indeed a love letter, a love letter about someone else, a love letter such as he had never written to her. She put it back in the creased and stained envelope and tore it up, and then she went out to the gate and wandered down to the bus stop, where there was a lamp-post bin, and dropped the bits of paper into its square mouth among the used tickets"

Why Haven't You Written? - Gordimer

"Sometimes the idea of it came to him as a wild hope, like the sound of her voice suddenly in the room, from Florida. Sometimes it was a dry anxiety: what a childish, idiotic thing to have done, how insane to risk throwing everything away when, as the Professor's wife often said, nobody was being hurt: Professor Malcolm, the children, Willa - none of them. Resentment flowed into him like unreasonable strength - I am being hurt!"

Why Haven't You Written? - Gordimer

"Yet, of course, he was afraid of Willa, ranged there with two pretty children and a third with glasses blacked out all over one eye to cure a squint. What could you do with that unreasonable, life-saving strength? - Against that family group?"

Why Haven't You Written? - Gordimer

"nothing could bear down against resistance without being worn away in the process?"

Why Haven't You Written? - Gordimer

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, And did He stoop to quibble could tell why The little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die, Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never-ending stair. Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Yet Do I Marvel - Cullen