| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: The priests with hooves, the lovers with horns,
Rise in the starlight, one by one,
They draw their knives on the spurting throats,
They smear the column with blood of goats,
They dabble the blood on hair and lips
And wait like stones for the moon's eclipse.
They stand like stones and stare at the sky
Where the moon leers down like a half-closed eye. . .
In the green moonlight still they stand
While wind flows over the darkened sand
And brood on the soft forgotten things
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: Where people smiled to see one happy thing,
And they were proud and glad to raise me high;
They only asked that I should be right fair,
A little kind, and gowned wondrously,
And surely it were little praise to me
If I had pleased them well throughout my life.
I was a queen, the daughter of a king.
The crown was never heavy on my head,
It was my right, and was a part of me.
The women thought me proud, the men were kind,
And bowed right gallantly to kiss my hand,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: wholly won over.
There would be much to say, if I had space, about the way her
behaviour, as I caught gleams of it, ministered to the image that
had taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, while that
other night I listened to George Gravener in the railway-carriage.
I watched her in the light of this queer possibility--a formidable
thing certainly to meet--and I was aware that it coloured,
extravagantly perhaps, my interpretation of her very looks and
tones. At Wimbledon for instance it had appeared to me she was
literally afraid of Saltram, in dread of a coercion that she had
begun already to feel. I had come up to town with her the next day
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