There is something in the sound of drum and fife
That stirs all the savage instincts into life.
In the old times of peace we went our ways,
Through proper days
Of little joys and tasks. Lonely at times,
When from the steeple sounded wedding chimes,
Telling to all the world some maid was wife—
But taking patiently our part in life
Where, like a pillow on a bed A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest The violet's reclining head, Sat we two, one another's best. Our hands were firmly cemented With a fast balm, which thence did spring; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string; So to'intergraft our hands, as yet Was all the means to make us one, And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation. As 'twixt two equal armies fate Suspends uncertain victory, Our souls (which to advance their state
As rising from the vegetable World My Theme ascends, with equal Wing ascend, My panting Muse; and hark, how loud the Woods Invite you forth in all your gayest Trim. Lend me your Song, ye Nightingales! oh pour The mazy-running Soul of Melody Into my varied Verse! while I deduce, From the first Note the hollow Cuckoo sings,
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!
I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together
...and a decrepit handful of trees. —Aleksandr Pushkin
And I matured in peace born of command, in the nursery of the infant century, and the voice of man was never dear to me, but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand. The burdock and the nettle I preferred, but best of all the silver willow tree. Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams; it lived here all my life, obligingly. I have outlived it now, and with surprise. There stands the stump; with foreign voices other willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies, and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.
Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless.
I'm Ramón González Barbagelata from anywhere, from Cucuy, from Paraná, from Rio Turbio, from Oruro, from Maracaibo, from Parral, from Ovalle, from Loconmilla, I'm the poor devil from the poor Third World, I'm the third-class passenger installed, good God! in the lavish whiteness of snow-covered mountains, concealed among orchids of subtle idiosyncrasy.
I've arrived at this famous year 2000, and what do I get? With what do I scratch myself? What do I have to do with the three glorious zeros that flaunt themselves over my very own zero, my own non-existence? Pity that brave heart awaiting its call or the man enfolded by warmer love, nothing's left today except my flimsy skeleton,
(from As You Like It, spoken by Jaques)
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
When he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow: When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it in a knob behind —O act of fearful temerity! When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven, their eyes revealed: When they left the light of heaven brandished like a knife at their defenceless eyes
(from Henry V, spoken by King Henry) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility:
Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada. I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew.
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic?
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