| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: Against black silences I waked to see
A shower of sunlight over Italy
And green Ravello dreaming on her height;
I have remembered music in the dark,
The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach's,
And running water singing on the rocks
When once in English woods I heard a lark.
But all remembered beauty is no more
Than a vague prelude to the thought of you --
You are the rarest soul I ever knew,
Lover of beauty, knightliest and best;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: In that magical wood in the land of sleep.
HUMAYUN TO ZOBEIDA
(From the Urdu)
You flaunt your beauty in the rose, your glory in the dawn,
Your sweetness in the nightingale, your whiteness in the swan.
You haunt my waking like a dream, my slumber like a moon,
Pervade me like a musky scent, possess me like a tune.
Yet, when I crave of you, my sweet, one tender moment's grace,
You cry, "I SIT BEHIND THE VEIL, I CANNOT SHOW MY FACE."
Shall any foolish veil divide my longing from my bliss?
Shall any fragile curtain hide your beauty from my kiss?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a cigarette
hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.
After her mother's death Caroline assumed the management of
that bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid,
and Auguste's pupils had been frightened away by the shock of
successive disasters and the general atmosphere of wretchedness
that pervaded the house. Auguste himself was writing a symphonic
poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son. Caroline was
barely twenty when she was called upon to face this tangle of
difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly. The house
had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague, distressing,
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
