ENGL 3002 Exam 2 Passage IDs
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
Eliot The Waste Land
From morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer's day; and with the setting sun Dropped from the zenith like a falling star.
Milton Paradise Lost (talking about Lucifer)
"Are you telling me that's not stealing?" "No, sir. It ain't." "What is it then?" "Improving your property, sir." "What?" "X plant rye to give the high piece a better chance. X take and feed the soil, give you more crop. X take and feed X give you more work"
Morrison Beloved
"By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss. Beloved."
Morrison Beloved
X: A—. What are you insinuating? That we've come to the wrong place? Y: He should be here. X: He didn't say for sure he'd come. Y: And if he doesn't come? X: We'll come back tomorrow. Y: And then the day after tomorrow. X: Possibly. Y: And so on. X: The point is— Y: Until he comes. X: You're merciless.
Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot X= Vladimir Y= Estragon
I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding. When I first met Joyce, I didn't intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn't teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce's heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That's what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn't go down that same road.
not a passage, but Samuel Beckett talking about James Joyce
X: "We're surrounded! [Y makes a rush towards the back.] Imbecile! There's no way out there. [He takes Y by the arm and drags him towards the front.] There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go! Quick! [He pushes Y towards auditorium. Y recoils in horror.] Well I can understand that. Wait till I see. [He reflects.] Your only hope left is to disappear.
Beckett Waiting for Godot
X: Charming evening we're having. Y: Unforgettable X: And it's not over. Y: Apparently not. X: It's only the beginning. Y: It's awful. X: Worse than the pantomime. Y: The circus. X: The music-hall. Y: The circus.
Beckett Waiting for Godot
X: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other . . . [He searches for the contrary of saved.] . . . damned. Y: Saved from what? X: Hell. Y: I'm going. [He does not move.] X: And yet . . . [pause] . . . how is it--this is not boring you I hope -- how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there -- or thereabouts -- and only one speaks of a thief being saved. [Pause.] Come on, X, return the ball, can't you, once in a way? Y. [with exaggerated enthusiasm] I find this really most extraordinarily interesting. X: One out of four. Of the other three two don't mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him.
Beckett Waiting for Godot
X: Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with ___ my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for ____? That ____ passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? [_____, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. _____ looks at him.] He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. [Pause.] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. [He listens.] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at _____.] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep. [Pause.] I can't go on! [Pause.] What have I said?
Beckett Waiting for Godot
X: Where were you? I thought you were gone for ever.
Beckett Waiting for Godot
It should be done very simply, without long passages, to give confusion shape, he says, a shape through repetition, repetitions of themes -- not only themes in the script, but also themes of the body. When at the beginning X is asleep leaning on the stone, that is a theme, that repeats itself a few times. There are fixed points of waiting, in which everything stands completely still, in which silence threatens to swallow everything up. Then the action starts again.
Beckett directing Waiting for Godot in Berlin in 1974
I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling downPoi s'ascose nel foco che gli affinaQuando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallowLe Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolieThese fragments I have shored against my ruinsWhy then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
Eliot The Waste Land
In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, only the wind's home, It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain
Eliot The Waste Land
Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowed flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many.
Eliot The Waste Land
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound (the "make it new" guy) In a Station of the Metro
She said, "Have you ever seen daffodils pushing their way up out of the ground? And when they're in bloom and all massed together, a breeze comes along and makes them do a curtsy to the lawn stretching out in front of them. Have you ever seen that? When I see that I feel so glad to be alive." And I thought, So X is made to feel alive by some flowers being in the breeze. How does a person get to be that way?
Jamaica Kincaid Lucy
It's not Wordsworth's fault that colonial education forced us to memorize a poem about a flower that we have never seen....My garden has at least 10,000 daffodils because I wanted to redeem Wordsworth. Sometimes I have friends come over and we have a daffodil party, and we recite Wordsworth and drink champagne. ---- I'm very much against people denying their history. There was an attempt, successful, by English colonization to make a certain kind of person out of me and it was a success, it worked, it really worked. My history of domination culturally in all the ways it had existed is true... I do not spend my present time trying to undo it. I do not for instance spend my life now attempting to have some true African heritage. My history is that I came from African people who were enslaved and dominated by European British people and that is it. And there is no attempt to erase it.
Jamaica Kincaid in interviews
A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end....lay a great ham.... Beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow, a shallow dish for of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers, and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks....a pyramid of oranges and American apples....
James Joyce The Dead
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.
James Joyce The Dead
--Well, I'm ashamed of you, said Miss X frankly. To say you'd write for a rag like that. I didn't think you were a West Briton.... --O, Mr X, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer?
James Joyce The Dead (remember themes of Irish v. British and Irish nationalism)
Along the paths and underneath the trees were many, many yellow flowers the size and shape of play teacups, or fairy skirts. They looked like something to eat and something to wear at the same time; they looked beautiful; they looked simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea....I wanted to kill them.
Kincaid Lucy
As soon as I said this, I felt sorry that I had cast her beloved daffodils in a scene she had never considered, a scene of conquered and conquests; a scene of brutes masquerading as angels and angels portrayed as brutes. . . . It wasn't her fault. It wasn't my fault. But nothing could change the fact that where she saw beautiful flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness.
Kincaid Lucy
Early that morning, X left her own compartment to come and tell me that we were passing through some of those freshly plowed fields she loved so much. She drew up my blind, and when I saw mile after mile of turned-up earth, I said, a cruel tone to my voice, 'Well, thank God I don't have to do that.' I don't know if she understood what I meant, for in that one statement I meant many different things.
Kincaid Lucy
I had forgotten all of this until X mentioned daffodils, and now I told it to her with such an amount of anger I surprised both of us. We were standing quite close to each other, but as soon as I had finished speaking, without a second of deliberation we both stepped back.... X reached out to me, and rubbing her hand against my cheek, said "What a history you have." I thought there was a little bit of envy in her voice, and so I said, "You are welcome to it if you like."
Kincaid Lucy
I knew well the Book of Genesis, and from time to time I had been made to memorize parts of Paradise Lost. The stories of the fallen were well known to me, but I had not known that my own situation could even distantly be related to them. X, a girl's name for Lucifer. That my mother would have found me devil-like did not surprise me, for I often thought of her as god-like, and are not the children of gods devils? I did not grow to like the name X—I would have much preferred to be called Lucifer outright—but whenever I saw my name I always reached out to give it a strong embrace.
Kincaid Lucy
X gave me a photograph he had taken of me standing over a boiling pot of food. In the picture I was naked from the waist up; a piece of cloth, wrapped around me, covered from the waist down. That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.
Kincaid Lucy
I remembered an old poem I had been made to memorize when I was ten years old and a pupil at Queen Victoria Girls' School. I had been made to memorize it, verse after verse, and then had recited the whole poem to an auditorium full of parents, teachers and my fellow pupils.... inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem. The night after I had recited the poem, I dreamt, continuously it seemed, that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down from exhaustion they all piled on top of me, until I was buried deep underneath them and was never seen again.
Kincaid Lucy
In my own mind, I called myself other names, Emily, Charlotte, Jane. They were the names of the authoresses whose books I loved.
Kincaid Lucy
"He was talking to his pupils and I heard him say, 'Which one are you doing?' And one of the boys said, 'X.' That's when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. [. . . ] I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, 'No, no. That's not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animals ones on the right. And don't forget to line them up"
Morrison Beloved
"Here," she said, "in this hear place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. [ . . . ] And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it you!"
Morrison Beloved
"I can't do anything, but I would learn it for you if you have a little extra." "Extra?" "Food. My ma'am, she doesn't feel good." "Oh, baby," said Mrs. X. "Oh baby." X looked up at her. She did not know it then, but it was the word 'baby,' said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman.
Morrison Beloved
"It made him dizzy. At first he thought it was her spinning. Circling him the way she was circling the subject. Round and round, never changing direction, which might have helped his head" --- "X knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off--she could never explain."
Morrison Beloved
"It was a little thing to pay, but it seemed big to X. Nobody was going to help her unless she told all of it. It was clear Janey wouldn't and wouldn't let her see the Xs otherwise." --- "X had lost her wits, finally, as Janey knew she would--trying to do it all alone with her nose in the air."
Morrison Beloved
"Nighttime. X holding her with her good arm, waving the stump of the other in the air. 'Telling you. I am telling you, small girl X,' and she did that. She told X that her mother and X were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. 'She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl X.'"
Morrison Beloved
"Schoolteacher'd wrap that string all over my head, 'cross my nose, around my behind. Number my teeth. I thought he was a fool. And the questions he asked was the biggest foolishness of all"
Morrison Beloved
"Shackled, walking through the perfumed things honeybees love, X hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has always known, or believed he did, his value -- as a hand, a laborer who could make profit on a farm -- but now he discovers his worth, which is to say he learns his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future"
Morrison Beloved
"She didn't know what she looked like and was not curious. But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, 'These hands belong to me. These my hands.' Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud"
Morrison Beloved
"Slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them. Still, they were not supposed to have pleasure deep down. She said for me not to listen to all that. That I should always listen to my body and love it"
Morrison Beloved
"Somebody had to be saved, but unless X got work, there would be no one to save, no one to come home to, and no X either. It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve"
Morrison Beloved
"Whatever X had one, Ella didn't like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. X's crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy. . . . She didn't mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion"
Morrison Beloved
"X is my sister. I swallowed her blood right long with my mother's milk"
Morrison Beloved
"X, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing" --- "Think what a spring this will be for us! I'll plant carrots just so she can see them. And turnips. Have you ever seen one, baby? . . . We'll smell them together, X. X. Because you mine and I have to show you these things, and teach you what a mother should" (237).
Morrison Beloved
"You had that baby by yourself?" "No. Whitegirl helped." "Then we better make tracks."
Morrison Beloved
All the time, I'm afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again. I don't know what it is, I don't know who it is, but maybe there is something else terrible enough to make her do it again. I need to know what that thing might be, but I don't want to. Whatever it is, it comes from the outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard, so it can't happen again and my mother won't have to kill me too. Not since X's house have I left 124 by myself. Never.
Morrison Beloved
From X's two thrilled eyes it grew to a feast for ninety people. 124 shook with their voices far into the night. Ninety people who ate so well, and laughed so much, it made them angry. --- And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.
Morrison Beloved
I cannot lose her again my dead man was in the way like the noisy clouds when he dies on my face I can see hers she is going to smile at me she is going to her sharp earrings are gone the men without skin are making loud noises they push my own man through they do not push the woman with my face through she goes in they do not push her she goes in the little hill is gong she was going to smile at me she was going to a hot thing
Morrison Beloved
I come out of the blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me I come up I need to find a place to be the air is heavy I am not dead I am not there is a house there is what she whispered to me I am where she told me I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost X's is the face that left me X sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing
Morrison Beloved
On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue. They never expected to see each other again in this world and a the moment couldn't care less. But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws -- a slave and a barefooted whitewoman with unpinned hair--wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. But no pateroller came and no preacher. The water sucked and swallowed itself beneath them. There was nothing to disturb them at their work. So they did it appropriately and well.
Morrison Beloved
The twenty-eight days of having women friends, a mother-in-law, all her children together; of being part of a neighborhood; of, in fact, having neighbors at all to call her own -- all that was long gone and would never come back. No more dancing in the Clearing or happy feeds. No more discussions, stormy or quiet, about the true meaning of the Fugitive Bill, the Settlement Fee, God's Ways and Negro pews; anti-slavery, manumission, skin voting, Republicans, Dred Scott, book learning, Sojourner's high-wheeled buggy, the Colored Ladies of Delaware, Ohio, and the other weighty issues that held them in chairs, scraping the floorboards or pacing them in agony or exhilaration. No anxious wait for the North Star or news of a beat-off. No sighing at a new betrayal or hand-clapping.
Morrison Beloved
They were the ones whose eyes said, 'Help me, 's bad'; or 'Look out,' meaning this might be the day I bay or eat my own mess or run, and it was this last that had to be guarded against, for if one pitched and ran -- all, all forty-six, would be yanked by the chain that bound them and no telling who or how many would be killed. A man could risk his own life, but not his brother's. So the eyes said, 'Steady now,' and 'Hang by me'
Morrison Beloved
X abandoned his efforts to see about X . . . . When X locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds. "Almost. Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to X, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken"
Morrison Beloved
X used different words. Words X understood then but could not recall or repeat now. She believed that must be why she remembered so little before Sweet Home except singing and dancing and how crowded it was. What X told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma'am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message -- that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest, she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood.
Morrison Beloved
X walked over to a chair, lifted a sheet and stretched it as wide as her arms would go. Then she folded, refolded, and double-folded it. She took another. Neither was completely dry but the folding felt too fine to stop. She had to do something with her hands because she was remembering something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross
Morrison Beloved
___X___ You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me You are my __X__ You are mine You are mine You are mine
Morrison Beloved
some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we have none at night I cannot see the dead man on my face day-light comes through the cracks and I can see his locked eyes I am not big small rats do not wait for us to sleep someone is thrashing but there is no room to do it in if we had more to drink we could make tears we cannot make sweat or morning water so the men without skin bring us theirs one time they bring us sweet rocks to suck we are all trying to leave our bodies behind the man on my face has done it it is hard to make yourself die forever you sleep short and then return in the beginning we could vomit now we do not
Morrison Beloved
All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked.
Morrison Beloved (weird spacing is intentional)
"The day X saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like X, and none that he knew of, including X, had lived a livable life"
Morrison Beloved
Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged. In that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet, sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him
Morrison Beloved
My mama worked for these here people to pay for her passage. But then she had me and since she died right after, well, they said I had to work for em to pay it off. I did, but now I want me some velvet
Morrison Beloved
A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother's wreck And on the king my fathers death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sounds of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water. Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
T.S. Eliot The Wasteland
"When Lily's husband got demobbed, I said— I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you."
T.S. Eliot The Wasteland (notice there's a Lily in The Dead too)
. . . and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world
Toni Morrison Beloved
"There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the railing!" --- "Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself— 'For God's sake don't come!' X cried out. For he could not look upon the dead. But the branches parted. A man grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans!"
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
. . . 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.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
. . . if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
. . . she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish . . . It made her angry still.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
. . .when X was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, X, 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
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilisation. Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian family which for 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.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She was not enjoying it. It was too much like being -- just anybody, standing there; anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire, couldn't help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked a stage, this post that she felt herself to have become, for oddly enough she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself a stake driven in at the top of the stars. Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every one was unreal in one way; much more real in another.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
Didn't that give her a very odd idea of English husbands? Didn't one owe perhaps a duty to one's wife? Wouldn't it be better to do something than lying in bed? . . . there was nothing whatever the matter with him
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like X 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 X who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, X, her favorite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the palace
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and X; 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?—some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward for having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning—indeed they did
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background, it was possible to say things you couldn't say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper. But not for her; not yet anyhow.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman's dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped X, X, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
She and X fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. X 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 X. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it . . .
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
She could not get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light . . .
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making it out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry him
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
Still the future of civilisation 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.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion . . .
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
X said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought X, what a morning -- fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges she could hear now, she burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
X 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.
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
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. 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?
W.B. Yeats The Second Coming
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W.B. Yeats The lake Isle of Innisfree
Who will go drive with Fergus now,And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,And dance upon the level shore?Young man, lift up your russet brow,And lift your tender eyelids, maid,And brood on hopes and fear no more. And no more turn aside and broodUpon love's bitter mystery;For Fergus rules the brazen cars,And rules the shadows of the wood,And the white breast of the dim seaAnd all dishevelled wandering stars.
W.B. Yeats Who Goes with Fergus?
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.
Wordsworth Daffodils
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;Beside the lake, beneath the trees,Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Wordsworth Daffodils
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!
Wordsworth Lucy poems
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. 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.
Yeats Easter 1916
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 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?
Yeats Leda and the Swan
End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take, Bussofthlee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a last a loved a long the ---- riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
final lines & ---- first lines of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake
"For on one occasion I myself saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sybil hanging in a cage, and when some boys said to her "What do you want?" she responded 'I want to die.' For Ezra Pound the better craftsman"
the translated dedication in Eliot's "The Waste Land"
