| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: them when they disagree as well as when they agree?
ION: Clearly.
SOCRATES: But how did you come to have this skill about Homer only, and
not about Hesiod or the other poets? Does not Homer speak of the same
themes which all other poets handle? Is not war his great argument? and
does he not speak of human society and of intercourse of men, good and bad,
skilled and unskilled, and of the gods conversing with one another and with
mankind, and about what happens in heaven and in the world below, and the
generations of gods and heroes? Are not these the themes of which Homer
sings?
ION: Very true, Socrates.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: --
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.
Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us --
Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
And the long fall wind on the lake.
Octaves
I
To get at the eternal strength of things,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: and my . . .
The path winds forth before me, sweet and plain,
Not now; but though beneath a stone-grey sky
November's russet woodlands toss and wail,
Still the white road goes thro' them, still may I,
Strong in new purpose, God, may still prevail.
* * * * *
I and my like, improvident sailors!
* * * * *
At whose light fall awaking, all my heart
Grew populous with gracious, favoured thought,
|
