August 2010
1 post
Changes!
Hi there!
I’m now blogging at mirandaceleste.net and excatholicgirl.net, both of which are also hosted on Tumblr. I’ll no longer be updating this account, but the posts aren’t going anywhere. Thank you so much for reading/commenting and I hope that you’ll follow me at one or both of my new sites. ♥
July 2010
23 posts
1 tag
Robert Frost's "Carpe Diem"
Age saw two quiet children Go loving by at twilight, He knew not whether homeward, Or outward from the village, Or (chimes were ringing) churchward, He waited (they were strangers) Till they were out of hearing To bid them both be happy. “Be happy, happy, happy, And seize the day of pleasure.” The age-long theme is Age’s. ‘Twas Age imposed on poems Their gather-roses burden...
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From Charles Dickens's 'Great Expectations'
In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
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From George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'
The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those...
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Robert Herrick's "To Anthea Who May Command Him...
Bid me to live, and I will live Thy Protestant to be; Or bid me love, and I will give A loving heart to thee. A heart as soft, a heart as kind, A heart as sound and free As in the whole world thou canst find, That heart I’ll give to thee. Bid that heart stay, and it will stay, To honour thy decree; Or bid it languish quite away. And ‘t shall do so...
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W. H. Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant"
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Answer to a Child's...
Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove, The Linnet and Thrush say, “I love and I love!” In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong; What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song. But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather, And singing, and loving—all come back together. But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love, The green...
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Phillip Lopate's "The Ecstasy"
You are not me, and I am never you except for thirty seconds in a year when ecstasy of coming, laughing at the same time or being cruel to know for certain what the other’s feeling charge some recognition. Not often when we talk though. Undressing to the daily logs of this petty boss, that compliment, curling our lips at half-announced ambitions. I tell you this during another night of...
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William Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With...
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! ...
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From Truman Capote's 'Other Voices, Other Rooms'
She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden’s edge, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.
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Chase Twichell's "Erotic Energy"
Don’t tell me we’re not like plants, sending out a shoot when we need to, or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers. Come to me but only when I say, that’s how plants announce the rules of propagation. Even children know this. You can see them imitating all the moves with their bright plastic toys. So that, years later, at the moment the girl’s body finally says yes to the end...
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From Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis'
Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, Or like a fairy trip upon the green, Or, like a nymph, with long dishevell’d hair, Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen: Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.
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W. S. Merwin's "Language"
Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.
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John Donne's "Break of Day"
Tis true, ‘tis day; what though it be? O wilt thou therefore rise from me? Why should we rise, because ‘tis light? Did we lie down, because ‘twas night? Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither, Should in despite of light keep us together. Light hath no tongue, but is all eye; If it could speak as well as spy, This were the worst that it could say, That being well, I...
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Charles Baudelaire's "Hymne à la Beauté"/"Hymn to...
Did you fall from high heaven or surge from the abyss, O Beauty? Your bright gaze, infernal and divine, Confusedly pours out courage and cowardice, Or love and crime. Therefore men liken you to wine. Your eyes hold all the sunset and the dawn, you are As rich in fragrances as a tempestuous night, Your kisses are a philtre and your mouth a jar Filling the child with valor and the man with fright....
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William Carlos Williams's "Danse Russe"
If when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely, I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks...
1 tag
D. A. Powell's "corydon & alexis, redux"
and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches yearning for that...
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From Douglas Adams's 'The Restaurant at the End of...
The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is...
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From Tom Stoppard's 'Travesties'
Joyce:
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan...
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From Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’
Ophelia:
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads. And recks not his own rede.
Act 1, Scene 3
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W. B. Yeats's "A Drinking Song"
Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.
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Andrei Voznesensky's "My Achilles Heart"
In these days of unheard-of suffering One is lucky indeed to have no heart: Crack-shots plug me again and again, But have no luck. Riddled with holes, I laugh At the furious pack: “Tally-ho, boys! I am a lattice. Look through me. Isn’t the landscape lovely?” But suppose a gun should locate, Tied by an aching thread, Beating a hair’s breadth off target, My Achilles heart. Beware, my darling. Hush....
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Rupert Brooke's "Libido"
How should I know? The enormous wheels of will Drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet. Night was void arms and you a phantom still, And day your far light swaying down the street. As never fool for love, I starved for you; My throat was dry and my eyes hot to see. Your mouth so lying was most heaven in view, And your remembered smell most agony. Love wakens love! I felt...
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From W. H. Auden's "Lullaby"
Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell, And fashionable madmen raise Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, Not a kiss nor look be lost. Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of...
1 tag
From Erica Jong's 'How To Save Your Own Life'
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it… It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.
June 2010
28 posts
1 tag
Robert Herrick's "To Sylvia, To Wed"
Let us, though late, at last, my Silvia, wed; And loving lie in one devoted bed. Thy watch may stand, my minutes fly post haste; No sound calls back the year that once is past. Then, sweetest Silvia, let’s no longer stay; True love, we know, precipitates delay. Away with doubts, all scruples hence remove! No man, at one time, can be wise, and love.
1 tag
From Stephen Fry's 'The Liar'
For once Adrian had remained silent. Something was terribly wrong. It had taken him two painful terms to identify the symptoms. He looked them up in all the major textbooks. There was no doubt about it. All the authorities concurred: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Ovid, Keats, Georgette Heyer, Milton, they were of one opinion. It was love. The Big One. Cartwright of the sapphire eyes and golden hair,...
1 tag
Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty"
I. She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. II. One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where...
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John Keats's "I cry your mercy—pity—love!—ay,...
To Fanny. I cry your mercy—pity—love!—ay, love! Merciful love that tantalises not One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love, Unmask’d, and being seen—without a blot! O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine! That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine, That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,— Yourself—your...
1 tag
E. E. Cummings's "9."
there are so many tictoc clocks everywhere telling people what toctic time it is for tictic instance five toc minutes toc past six tic Spring is not regulated and does not get out of order nor do its hands a little jerking move over numbers slowly we do not wind it up it has no weights springs wheels inside of its slender self no indeed dear nothing of the kind. (So,when...
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W.B. Yeats's "Never give all the heart"
Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and...
1 tag
Howard Nemerov's "Because You Asked about the Line...
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
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From Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Love and Duty"
The slow sweet hours that bring us all things good, The slow sad hours that bring us all things ill, And all good things from evil, brought the night In which we sat together and alone, And to the want, that hollow’d all the heart, Gave utterance by the yearning of an eye, That burn’d upon its object thro’ such tears As flow but once a life. The trance gave way To those caresses,...
1 tag
Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know"
Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die. My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and...
1 tag
From Ian McEwan's 'Atonement'
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.
1 tag
John Berryman's "Dream Song 4"
Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying ‘You are the hottest one for years of night Henry’s dazed eyes have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon (despairing) my...
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John Keats's "When I have fears that I may cease...
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charactry, Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of...
1 tag
From Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre'
Mr. Rochester: “Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?” I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full. “Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in...
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William Carlos Williams's "The Uses of Poetry"
I’ve fond anticipation of a day O’erfilled with pure diversion presently, For I must read a lady poesy The while we glide by many a leafy bay, Hid deep in rushes, where at random play The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee Hush-throated nestlings in alarm, Whom we have idly frighted with our boat’s long sway. For, lest o’ersaddened by such woes as spring To rural...
1 tag
From Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady'
“Young girls here—in decent houses—don’t sit alone with the gentlemen late at night.”
“You were very right to tell me then,” said Isabel. “I don’t understand it, but I’m very glad I know it.”
“I shall always tell you,” her aunt answered, “whenever I see you taking what seems to me too much liberty.”
...
1 tag
Philip Larkin's "Home is so Sad"
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That...
1 tag
Pablo Neruda's "With her"
This time is difficult. Wait for me. We will live it out vividly. Give me your small hand: we will rise and suffer, we will feel, we will rejoice.
We are once more the pair who lived in bristling places, in harsh nests in the rock. This time is difficult. Wait for me with a basket, with a shovel, with your shoes and your clothes.
Now we need each other, not only for the...
1 tag
From T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred...
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 that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the...
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From Kingsley Amis's 'Lucky Jim'
As he stood in the badly-lit jakes, he was visited again, and unbearably, by the visual image that had haunted him ever since he took on this job. He seemed to be looking from a darkened room across a deserted back street to where, against a dimly-glowing evening sky, a line of chimney-pots stood out as if carved from tin. A small double cloud moved slowly from right to left. The image...
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From Ted Hughes's "18 Rugby Street"
We walked south across London to Fetter Lane And your hotel. Opposite the entrance On a bombsite becoming a building site We clutched each other giddily For safety and went in a barrel together Over some Niagra. Falling In the roar of soul your scar told me- Like its secret name or its password- How you had tried to kill yourself. And I heard Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you As...
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W. H. Auden's "Lullaby"
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. Soul and body have no bounds: To lovers as they lie upon Her tolerant enchanted slope In their ordinary swoon, Grave...
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Rainer Maria Rilke's "I, 2" from 'The Sonnets to...
And it was almost a girl who, stepping from this single harmony of song and lyre, appeared to me through her diaphanous form and made herself a bed inside my ear.
And slept in me. Her sleep was everything: the awesome trees, the distances I had felt so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring: all wonders that had ever seized my heart.
She slept the world. Singing god, how was that...
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From Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to...
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep...
1 tag
E. E. Cummings's "somewhere i have never...
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose or if your wish...
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From Viktor Shklovsky's "Form and Material in Art"
We live in a poor and enclosed world. We no more feel the world in which we live than we feel the clothes we wear. We fly through the world like Jules Verne characters, “through outer space in a capsule.” But in our capsule there are no windows. The Pythagoreans used to say that we do not hear the music of the spheres because it goes on uninterruptedly. In the same way those who live...