| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to carry off its
unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both poets have
achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one
another to a pitch otherwise unattainable.
Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a
prodigiously gifted and arduously trained musician who is also,
by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Mohere, the
obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does
not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought. No
matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show
himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his
surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had
only to wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his
attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for
anyone to humiliate him.
He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting room to go
to bed that night, and sat long watching the raging storm from
his turret window. When he went to sleep it was with the lights
turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity, and
partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: I can answer spring at last,
Love is near me!
The Wanderer
I saw the sunset-colored sands,
The Nile like flowing fire between,
Where Rameses stares forth serene,
And Ammon's heavy temple stands.
I saw the rocks where long ago,
Above the sea that cries and breaks,
Swift Perseus with Medusa's snakes
Set free the maiden white like snow.
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