| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring,
That my songs do not show me at all?
For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,
I am an answer, they are only a call.
But what do I care, for love will be over so soon,
Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,
For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,
It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.
Meadowlarks
In the silver light after a storm,
Under dripping boughs of bright new green,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by
the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade,
in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly
exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments
of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that
compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they
set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished
status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass
scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual
The Communist Manifesto |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: twenty-five is absolutely the same thing if she merely respects him.
The important things in marriage are the benefits to be derived from
it. If Mademoiselle Beauvisage wants to go to Paris and shine there--
and in her place I should certainly feel so--she ought not to take a
husband in Arcis. If I had the fortune she will have, I should give my
hand to a count, to a man who would put me in a high social position,
and I shouldn't ask to see the certificate of his birth."
"It would satisfy you to see his toilet," whispered Vinet in her ear.
"But the king makes counts," said Madame Marion, who had now joined
the group and was surveying the bevy of young ladies.
"Ah! madame," remarked Vinet, "but some young girls prefer their
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