--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

dune ::: n. --> A low hill of drifting sand usually formed on the coats, but often carried far inland by the prevailing winds.

dune ::: n. --> A low hill of drifting sand usually formed on the coats, but often carried far inland by the prevailing winds.

--- QUOTES [3 / 3 - 287 / 287] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

KEYS (10k)

   3 Frank Herbert

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   19 Frank Herbert

   7 Paulo Coelho

   6 Mary Oliver

   6 Andrew Sean Greer

   5 Antoine de Saint Exup ry

   5 Alice McDermott

   4 Conrad Potter Aiken

   4 Carl Sandburg

   4 Brian Herbert

   3 Susan Vreeland

   3 Ron Ripley

   3 Michael Cunningham

   3 Kevin J Anderson

   3 Frank Herbert
   3 Craig Childs

   3 Claire Vaye Watkins

   3 Bliss William Carman

   3 Anna Banks

   3 Alfred Lord Tennyson

   2 Virginia Madsen

   2 Simone de Beauvoir

   2 Samuel Beckett

   2 Rupert Holmes

   2 Richard K Morgan

   2 Paul Bowles

   2 Patrick O Brian

   2 Mary H K Choi

   2 Marguerite Yourcenar

   2 Lauren Groff

   2 Kirsty Eagar

   2 Johnny B Truant

   2 Italo Calvino

   2 Hugh Howey

   2 H P Lovecraft

   2 Henry Beston

   2 Haruki Murakami

   2 Eleanor Catton

   2 Derek Walcott

   2 Charlaine Harris

   2 Archie Randolph Ammons

   2 Anthony Doerr

   2 Anthony Bourdain

   2 Anonymous

   2 Andrew Lang

   2 Alan Dean Foster

1:There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. ~ Frank Herbert, Dune (1965) ,

2:Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ~ Frank Herbert, Dune ,

3:I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. ~ Frank Herbert, Dune ,

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:The sand dunes look like two tits. ~ Valentino Garavani

2:Books lay on the floor in literary dunes. ~ Chris Columbus

3:Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place. ~ Frank Herbert

4:Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us. ~ Craig Childs

5:The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. ~ Paulo Coelho

6:When she shouted, the gulls hidden by the dune buckshot the low clouds. ~ Lauren Groff

7:The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC. ~ Frank Herbert

8:His eyes looked at my body as if it were a drink of water on a desert dune. ~ Charlaine Harris

9:I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books. ~ Kevin J Anderson

10:This sounds worse than when Martin made us sit through that four-hour version of Dune. ~ Scott Meyer

11:I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; ~ H P Lovecraft

12:As a child, I had lived many years in Southampton and sang in the choir of the Dune Church. ~ Rachel Lambert Mellon

13:...otherwise it was barren as a desert, just long dunes of brick and cement and slate and asphalt. ~ Peter Dickinson

14:Every ripple on the ocean, every leaf on every tree, every sand dune in the desert, every power we never see. ~ Sting

15:There's something incredibly sexy about sand and sweat and dunes photographed like women's backs. ~ Kristin Scott Thomas

16:I say that I played a doorstop in Dune because I remember standing around a lot. I was down there for months. ~ Jack Nance

17:Dunellen was childless, an oddity in this milieu, where the average man had between four and ten offspring. ~ Jennifer Egan

18:There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles.    ~ Frank Herbert, Dune (1965),

19:You must think like a patch of sand. Hide beneath your cloak and become a little dune in your very essence. ~ Frank Herbert

20:Together, we will raise the dunes from the earth, and rain death from the sky. Together, we are capable of anything. ~ Hafsah Faizal

21:The dunes are changed b the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other. ~ Paulo Coelho

22:The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other ~ Paulo Coelho

23:To quote from another gospel, DUNE by Frank Herbert, 'Fear is the mind-killer.' ... Jesus was the original Muad'dib. ~ Stephen Colbert

24:The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That’s the way it will be with our love for each other. ~ Paulo Coelho

25:Dune by Christian Dior. Luca Turin, who wrote a fragrance guide, calls it ‘the bleakest beauty in all perfumery.’ Here, ~ Denise Hamilton

26:... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?' ~ Walker Evans

27:If you like making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape, you're the love that I've looked for, come with me and escape. ~ Rupert Holmes

28:I have to keep Dune perfume in my dressing room, because I always wear it, but I must never put it on in case it makes me choke. ~ Joanna Page

29:Texting is like kryptonite to women’s standards. It erodes them, like gentle ocean waves slowly, over time, destroy a beautiful dune. ~ Jessi Klein

30:The water was calm and blue today, and as they walked along the dunes they could see the hump of Poplar Island off the Eastern Shore. ~ Ken Grimwood

31:Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power. ~ Frank Herbert

32:Just as the sand-dunes, heaped one upon another, hide each the first, so in life the former deeds are quickly hidden by those that follow after. ~ Marcus Aurelius

33:Think of what this planet has done to us. Dune took my Duke and my son and shattered all our hopes and dreams as a family. It swallows people. ~ Brian Herbert

34:"I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something gleams." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

35:When I come over the top of the dune I see the ocean and I feel like I’m seeing it for the first time. Today it’s blue, straight and simple. Raw blue. ~ Kirsty Eagar

36:Dune Messiah is the most misunderstood of Frank Herbert's novels. The reasons for this are as fascinating and complex as the renowned author himself. ~ Brian Herbert

37:J’ai toujours aimé le désert. On s’assoit sur une dune de sable. On ne voit rien. On n’entend rien. Et cependant quelque chose rayonne en silence… ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry

38:At the dune line, just before the whispering stands of sea oats and dune grass began, the sand was as damp and cold as the skin of a snake under my feet. ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

39:Ciekawa rzecz, nikt nigdy nie miał morskiej choroby na lądzie. Tylko na morzu spotyka się mnóstwo ludzi chorych jak nieszczęście, cały żywy ładunek cierpiących. ~ Jerome K Jerome

40:I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery

41:Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ~ Frank Herbert, Dune,

42:The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his knees and on his forearm felt warm. ~ Alice McDermott

43:I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists? ~ John Baldessari

44:I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams... ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry

45:...heroic leaders often made mistakes ... mistakes that were amplified by the number of followers who were held in thrall by charisma. (Introduction to Dune Messiah) ~ Brian Herbert

46:Luckily, being dead had an advantage. I didn't have to actually take ever step. I could just looking at the next dune, intend to go there, and then find myself there. ~ Dennis Liggio

47:my way is in the sand flowing between the shingle and the dune the summer rain rains on my life on me my life harrying fleeing to its beginning to its end ~ Samuel Beckett

48:The bride price taught her that nothing mattered. Civilizations rose and fell. Scriptures twisted. Promised lands fell to dust. Freak rains buried sand dunes in overgrowth. ~ Tim Lieder

49:As he was about to climb yet another dune, his heart whispered, "Be aware of the place where you are brought to tears. That's where I am, and thats where your treasure is. ~ Paulo Coelho

50:Intuition enters the mind in a way Western science has yet to explain. Moses was a dowser, probably Jesus too. Though they did not have the benefit of dune buggies. ~ Claire Vaye Watkins

51:Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa. ~ Ella Leya

52:His eyes looked at my body as if it were a drink of water on a desert dune. "I don't know much," I confessed, my voice barely audible. "Don't worry. I know a lot. ~ Charlaine Harris

53:Dune Messiah is the most misunderstood of Frank Herbert's novels. The reasons for this are as fascinating and complex as the renowned author himself. (Brian Herbert's Introduction) ~ Frank Herbert

54:They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky. ~ J M G Le Cl zio

55:Even in the most barren wasteland, a flower always grows. Recognize this, and learn to adapt to your surroundings. -Dr. Bryce Haynes (planetary ecologist assigned to study Duneworld) ~ Frank Herbert

56:When you take your stand along the maker's path, you must remain utterly still. You must think like a patch of sand. Hide beneath your cloak and become a little dune in your very essence. ~ Frank Herbert

57:Nu sunt în stare să scriu poezie pentru că văd prea multă în fiecare zi. Toate poeziile din grădina asta. Cu cuvintele e ca și cum ai arunca cu pietre în rândunele. Ceva răutăcios și inutil. ~ John Fowles

58:She preferred to lie up by the dunes with the waves bursting, to listen while they crashed like the final chords of a symphony except they went on and on. There was nothing as fine as that. ~ James Salter

59:And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes. ~ Mary Oliver

60:Durerea pe care un om o poartă în suflet de pe urma unei iubiri nefericite, face ca orice lucru ce l-ar sili să-și adune gândurile și să-și cheltuiască energia, să i se pară o corvoadă îngrozitoare. ~ Stendhal

61:In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. ~ Susan Vreeland

62:Incredibly, almost every hotel I ever played in Vegas was blown up shortly afterward: The Dunes, The Sands, The Landmark, The Aladdin, The Frontier, The Hacienda, The Stardust - all were imploded. ~ Elayne Boosler

63:Because ka was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes. ~ Stephen King

64:In Dune and Dune Messiah, he [Frank Herbert] was cautioning against pride and overconfidence, that form of narcissism described in Greek tragedies that invariably led to the great fall. ~ Brian Herbert

65:Midway through, a fuzzy-chinned young man approaches the desk with a battered copy of Dune and a motley handful of coins. Mo waves him away. “Oh, just take it, Felix. Spend the money on a haircut. ~ Robin Sloan

66:And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes. ~ Mary Oliver

67:When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. ~ Mary Oliver

68:Love is the falcon’s flight over your sands. Because for him, you are a green field, from which he always returns with game. He knows your rocks, your dunes, and your mountains, and you are generous to him. ~ Paulo Coelho

69:From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

70:In illness, the world went wonderfully warped, high temperatures turning your pillow to a dune of snow and bringing the night sky, with its daisy-sized stars, so close to your bed you could touch it, and taste the moon. ~ Lauren Slater

71:Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too. ~ Kevin J Anderson

72:[...] gli parve di essere sbucato fuori non solo dagli acquitrini, ma anche dalla domenica, e di essere finito tra le dune di un ottavo, anonimo giorno della settimana che lui era l'unica persona al mondo a conoscere. ~ Jonathan Franzen

73:I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes. ~ Marisha Pessl

74:If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain. If you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain. If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape. I'm the lady you've looked for, write to me, and escape. ~ Rupert Holmes

75:If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be. ~ Kevin J Anderson

76:Dune was really my first Hollywood job. It was such a small part, but I opened the movie. I was about 19 years old and I had to make this speech, and I didn't understand most of the words because they were, you know, words from Dune. ~ Virginia Madsen

77:Bătrânii se dau în vânt după copii, şi copiii după bătrâni , fiindcă zeilor le place să-i adune pe cei care se aseamănă. Şi de nu luăm în seamă ridurile şi anii pe care îi poartă bătrâneţea, pot semăna două lucruri mai bine decât bătrânul cu copilul? ~ Erasmus

78:I do not expect anyone will ever have the opportunity of constructing another course like Cypress Point, as I do not suppose anywhere in the world is there such a glorious combination of rocky coast, sand dunes, pine woods and cypress trees. ~ Alister MacKenzie

79:He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds. —Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words. She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed ~ Neil Gaiman

80:Strong winds buffet the sea oats and tall dune grasses, tossing sand and seabirds where it will, winding my sister's golden hair into sunlit spirals of silk until it becomes the only good memory I have of her -- the only memory I allowed myself to keep. ~ Karen White

81:The closer you get to death, the more alive you feel. Dylan Thomas wrote, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. My dad always taught me to live like that. Dad wrote a poem too. It goes, Dune buggies. Woohoo! ~ Christopher Titus

82:Over the years, Penny inhaled the classics—Ready Player One, Dune, and Ender’s Game, though it wasn’t until she was introduced to Messiah, ironically from a guy who was the worst dude in the history of dudes, that she realized sci-fi didn’t have to be so . . . boy. ~ Mary H K Choi

83:And not just the wilds of sand and dune but the wilds of life, those years in a man’s twenties when he shrugs off the shelter of youth and before he has bothered to erect his own. The tent-less years. The bright and blinding years in which men wander as the planets do. ~ Hugh Howey

84:Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision. ~ Peter Ustinov

85:Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (5 mentions) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (4) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (4) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (4) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (4) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) Dune by Frank Herbert (3) Influence by Robert Cialdini (3) ~ Timothy Ferriss

86:Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering alternative sites in the Lake Michigan Dunes area and in the Tennessee Valley. ~ Richard Rhodes

87:Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her squint, even ~ Alice McDermott

88:This part of the Sahara was made up of kilometer upon kilometer of shifting dunes, many more than two hundred meters high. The world’s highest dunes were in the Algerian part of the Sahara, soaring over four hundred and seventy meters, taller than the Empire State Building in New York. ~ Dan Eaton

89:il existait sans doute entre les inquiétes créatures humaines des répulsions et des haines surgies du plus profond de leur nature, et qui, le jour où il ne serait plus de mode de s'exterminer pour cause de religion, se donneraient cours autrement. (La promenade sur la dune) ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

90:That's why I want you to continue toward your goal. If you have to wait until the war is over, then wait. But if you have to go before then, go on in pursuit of your dream. The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other. ~ Paulo Coelho

91:Ah, Hah! But you see, Baron, I know as a Mentat when you will send the executioner. You will hold back just so long as I am useful. To move sooner would be wasteful and I'm yet of much use. I know what it is you learned from that lovely Dune planet - waste not? True, Baron? -Piter De Vries ~ Frank Herbert

92:They were made up names in Dune that I didn't know how to pronounce, but I knew how I should sound because I was a sci-fi fan myself. I hadn't read the book, but I knew that I was the princess of the universe. I went in and sort of made her up, and David Lynch thought it matched and cast me. ~ Virginia Madsen

93:I took my little brother, and we went from Beijing to Ulan Bator, and then took a helicopter to the southern Gobi. Streams, grass, and sand dunes to climb. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Everybody needs to go to Mongolia just to see what it is to be a human being again. ~ Milla Jovovich

94:And down the dunes a thousand guns lie crouched,Unseen, beside the flood -Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouchedThat wait and watch for blood.Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade,Walk grave and thoughtful men,Whose hands may one day wield the patriot's bladeAs lightly as the pen. ~ Henry Timrod

95:He stood on the sand watching the double sunset as first one and then the other of Tatooine's twin suns sank slowly behind the distant range of dunes. In the fading light the sands turned gold, russet, and flaming red-orange before advancing night put the bright colors to sleep for another day. ~ Alan Dean Foster

96:Now the Fates are here on the beach, three shadows blacker than black, walking through the dunes and looking for their own. Just shadows, lamb-white hands beneath black robes spun of tears, glide among the celebrants on this night wherein the spirits of Thebes have found a home, if serendipitously. ~ Janet Morris

97:What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It’s precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said. ~ Michel Houellebecq

98:Where do you live, Kaznim?" "In the star tent beside the Moon Pool, beneath the long dune." Marwick looked puzzled. "So, where's that?" he asked. "Um. In the desert," said Kaznim. "The Desert of the Singing Sands." "OK... and whereabouts is that." Kaznim shook her head. "I ... I don't know. ~ Angie Sage

99:A wind started up. It began scouring our cheeks, and we lifted hands, blocking our faces from a gauze of blowing sand. So much wind came that it was hard to breathe without covering our noses and mouths. We stood and shouldered our packs to keep going. Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us. ~ Craig Childs

100:I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.    ~ Frank Herbert, Dune,

101:Menegai Crater overlooks the township and the lake. In the time of man it has breathed no brimstone, and barely a wisp of smoke. But in the annals of the Rift Valley which contains all this as a sea contains a coral atoll or a desert a dune, the time of man is too brief a period to deserve more than incidental recording. ~ Beryl Markham

102:My grandfather was an architect, and his father, and his father; one of them built houses only for millionaires in California, and that was where the family wealth came from, and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that was where the family wealth went. ~ Shirley Jackson

103:I beg your pardon, dune sea, but I am just here to get my girls. If you would kindly. This is not my first desert, you see. I am not done with my life—I’d say I’m about halfway through. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I am a young white man in America and we typically do quite well here. So if you will excuse me. ~ Claire Vaye Watkins

104:What are you chopping up?" "The trinity: onions, green peppers, and celery. Etouffee's going in the pot. Dune and Nate are on the way back from their consults, and they're bringing crawfish. So," he said, scraping bits of cut vegetables from his knife onto the side of the stainless-steel pan, "final judgement's on the way. ~ Myra McEntire

105:By the time we reach the stretch of dunes that lead to Nur, the moon is high, the galaxy a blaze of silver above. But we are all exhausted from fighting the wind. Izzi’s walk has deteriorated to a stumble, and both Keenan and I pant in tiredness. Even Elias struggles, stopping short enough times that I begin to worry for him. “I ~ Sabaa Tahir

106:When a guitar string is plucked or when children jiggle a jump rope, the shape that appears is a sine wave. The ripples on a pond, the ridges of sand dunes, the stripes of a zebra—all are manifestations of nature’s most basic mechanism of pattern formation: the emergence of sinusoidal structure from a background of bland uniformity. ~ Steven H Strogatz

107:The morning was fresh from the rain. The smell of the tide pools was strong. Sweet odors came from the wild grasses in the ravines and from the sand plants on the dunes. I sang as I went down the trail to the beach and along the beach to the sandspit. I felt that the day was an omen of good fortune. It was a good day to begin my new home. ~ Scott O Dell

108:Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization. ~ Larry Niven

109:The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. ~ Henry Beston

110:Why do we look to everyone else to see what to do? Why don't we understand that they're all as lost and scared as we are? Why do we look at a random consensus, shaped by opinions and powers that drift like dunes, as an absolute truth? If "normal" could change tomorrow, why are we such slaves to it? And where has "normal" gotten us, anyway? ~ Johnny B Truant

111:Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger. ~ Anonymous

112:When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced. ~ Frank Herbert

113:The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

114:To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with -- what else -- mica. ~ Jerry Spinelli

115:The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task: Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream. ~ David Ben Gurion

116:You sing about the things you're influenced by. So we've been big into sci-fi since we were kids, things like Star Trek etc. Then came movies like Terminator and Dune. Burton is also a really big reader and loves sci-fi novels which helps him write. It's also really cool he does that because it's through the perspective of how we see things going or possibly going. ~ Dino Cazares

117:beach. They were perfectly safe. Michael’s head crested the dune again. Then his shoulders, the rump of his blue jeans, the short barrel of his machine gun. He was crawling on his belly along the top of the dune, crushing the sea grass, filling his shirt and the pockets of his pants with sand. She would have to remember to shake him out before he got into the car. ~ Alice McDermott

118:Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses,' he held up his own little tea glass, 'were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara. ~ Paul Bowles

119:She walked the spiral corridor, running her hand along the painted horizon - sea, beach, dunes, woods, moors - the journey of her people from over the sea. The story of the Anglisc, woven with Woden back to the dawn of their songs. Ships. Fire. Bright swords. Kin and kine. Woods and wold. Hearth and home. Where was Christ in this? Christ didn't fight. Christ didn't farm. ~ Nicola Griffith

120:The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse—the way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the terrific thunderclap of the ocean. ~ Alice McDermott

121:I thought of you and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder As you and I once heard their monotone. Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me The cold and sparkling silver of the sea -- We two will pass through death and ages lengthen Before you hear that sound again with me. ~ Sara Teasdale

122:The chilly December day! two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio first felt their homemade contraption whittled out of hickory sticks, gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement, stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing machine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, soar into the air above the dunes and the wide beach at Kitty Hawk. ~ John Dos Passos

123:It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials--I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered--it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. ~ Susan Vreeland

124:It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials - I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered - it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. ~ Susan Vreeland

125:Over the years, Penny inhaled the classics—Ready Player One, Dune, and Ender’s Game, though it wasn’t until she was introduced to Messiah, ironically from a guy who was the worst dude in the history of dudes, that she realized sci-fi didn’t have to be so . . . boy. J.A.’s work was like Ender’s Game, yet where Ender was smart and getting conned ’cause he was a kid, J.A.’s hero Scan knew her worth. ~ Mary H K Choi

126:Burns, has spent years exploring the many avenues for adventure and fun in San Diego. The fact that you can experience the desert, snow, mountains and ocean in the course of a day has always been amazing to me. If you are really motivated, you can snow ski, surf, take a mountain hike, and race dune buggies all in one weekend, .. I grew up here and want to showcase San Diego to the world. I love San Diego. ~ Robert Burns

127:I've had a reoccurring dream about hanging out with Britney Spears, so maybe it would be fun to chill with her for a bit? Like, see what makes her tick. I had this dream once about Britney, that we were going to get married or something, and so I had to meet her parents but we were stuck on a beach in these sand dunes - and at this point between the dreams and self-portrait, you know way too much about me. ~ Gabriel Mann

128:We think it sufficient to say, at this juncture, that there were eight passengers aboard the Godspeed when she pulled out of the harbour at Dunedin, and by the time the barque landed on the Coast, there were nine. The ninth was not a baby, born in transit; nor was he a stowaway; nor did the ship’s lookout spot him adrift in the water, clinging to some scrap of wreckage, and give the shout to draw him in. ~ Eleanor Catton

129:When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved obviously and openly fit that description: They came with maps and glossaries and timelines - books like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I imagined that's what being a writer was: You invented a world, and you did it in a very detailed way, and you told stories that were set in that world. ~ Michael Chabon

130:Daises Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune I saw the white daisies go down to the sea, A host in the sunshine, an army in June, The people God sends us to set our hearts free. The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell, The orioles whistled them out of the wood; And all of their singing was, 'Earth, it is well!' And all of their dancing was, 'Life, thou art good!' ~ Bliss William Carman

131:The Exodus scenes were filmed in the sand dunes of Guadalupe, California, and DeMille transported hundreds of Orthodox Jews from New York, because he believed that “in appearance and in their deep feeling of the significance of the Exodus, they would give the best possible performance as the Children of Israel.” But on their first day on set, the extras were forced to fast because the commissary served ham for dinner. ~ Bruce Feiler

132:There is a saying in the Middle East that goes something like this: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a car, I travel on a jet, and my grandchild will ride a camel.” Not necessarily. The deserts of the Middle East and North Africa have more solar potential per square inch than any other region in the world—more energy potential, in fact, than all of the oil ever extracted from deep beneath its sand dunes. The ~ Jeremy Rifkin

133:I walk up a dune to a beach and look out to sea, but it's 100km away. The ships lie askew in their dry beds, at anchor for ever. Today is my son's birthday. Thousands of miles from here, his healthy lungs are blowing out candles. I should be there but I'm here with another boy, who puts his face close to mine and laughs. I smile back but realise he can't see it, because I'm wearing an antiseptic muzzles to protect me from his breath. ~ A A Gill

134:Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside Rotterdam, the long straight road beside the dunes, and the stream of refugees moving along it; saw the little aeroplane miles away, the procession stop and look towards it; and the plane coming in, nearly over the dunes; saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the bombs hit the road. “I can’t talk like this, Control,” Leamas said at last. “What do you want me to do? ~ John le Carr

135:To almost no one's surprise, Astrid said, "Dune, by Frank Herbert. 'I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that bring total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the Fear has gone there will be nothing.'" She and Lana together spoke the last phrase of the incantation. "'Only I will remain. ~ Michael Grant

136:So she sang back silently to them, as a comfort, there in the cell, and when the moonlight lay thick and bright against the gritty cheek of the sand dune, the foxes would gambol and prance for the sheer delight of it and beckon her to join them, would let her into their minds that she might know what it was to gambol and to prance on those four legs, then these four legs, to see the world from a fox’s level. It was almost like flying. Almost. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

137:A zapravo možda i ne treba da se sretnu. Gledajući u tavanicu Tengo se zapita: zar nije možda bilo bolje da je do kraja svako od njih ostao da ide svojim putem, čuvajući maštariju o ponovnom susretu u svojim grudima? Na taj način mogli su doveka da žive sa nadom u sebi. Ta nada je slabašan, ali važan žar koji im greje srž tela. Plamičak koji nežno obujmiš dlanom i zaštitiš ga od vetra. Jer, ako u njega dune vihor stvarnosti, lako se može ugasiti. ~ Haruki Murakami

138:The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellent - a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbrush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agaraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently. ~ Edward Abbey

139:Și nu mergi călare pe un drum sau printr-un parc ori peste dune, ci prin Narnia, primăvara, pe alei de fag sau prin luminișuri însorite înconjurate de stejari, prin livezi sălbatice de cireși albi ca zăpada, pe lângă cascade tumultuoase și stânci acoperite de mușchi și peșteri adânci, sus pe dealuri în bătaia vântului și peste coaste de munte acoperite de iarbă neagră și de-a lungul crestelor amețitoare și din nou prin văi sălbatice și peste covoare de flori albastre. ~ C S Lewis

140:Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune ~ Frank Herbert

141:Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune ~ Frank Herbert

142:They steered south. Gordita Beach emerged from the haze, gently flaking away in the salt breezes, the ramshackle town in a spill of weather-beaten colors, like paint chips at some out-of-the-way hardware store, and the hillside up to Dunecrest, which Doc had always thought of, especially after nights of excess, as steep, a grade everybody sooner or later wiped their clutch trying to get up and out of town on, looking from out here strangely flat, hardly there at all. ~ Thomas Pynchon

143:You have been here before. The highway winding north through dark New England forests. White dunes towering above the sides of the road, looking like the moon. You can come back. Even after you hurt each other too deeply to comprehend. Even after the impossible becomes just that. Too far out of reach even to dream. Love remembers the places where it touched down, left an invisible trail on your bodies. Follow it back. You can follow it back to them. ~ Kate Scelsa

144:Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert’s first sequel to Dune, was published in 1969. In that book, he flipped over what he called the “myth of the hero” and showed the dark side of Paul Atreides. Some readers didn’t understand it. Why would the author do that to his great hero? In interviews, Dad spent years afterward explaining why, and his reasons were sound. He believed that charismatic leaders could be dangerous because they could lead their followers off the edge of a cliff. ~ Frank Herbert

145:People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited. ~ Stephen Fry

146:The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence. ~ Salman Rushdie

147:He immediately began to de-privatize. He revoked the licences to the unpopular Imperial Continental Gas Association and fashioned it into a company owned by the municipality. The same happened with the water pipeline over the dunes and the Amsterdamse Omnibus Maatschappij (Amsterdam Omnibus Company), which had run a number of horse-drawn trams in the city since 1875. In doing all this, Treub instigated an evolutionary process that was to give a lasting social basis to city policy. From ~ Geert Mak

148:The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen... The desert is beautiful," the little prince added. And that was true. I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams... "What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well..." I was astonished by a sudden understanding of that mysterious radiation of the sands. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry

149:They were climbing now, climbing the hill of hardened mud upon which the castle stood, and once they had left the lee of the dunes the flies grew less; the heat, on the other hand, was greater still. 'You are going a very disagreeable colour,' said Stephen. 'Should not you throw off that thick coat, and loosen your neckcloth? Heavy, corpulent subjects are liable to be carried off in a twinkling, if not by a frank, straightforward apoplexy, then at least by a cerebral congestion. ~ Patrick O Brian

150:They walked side by side along the dark beach toward Monterey, where the lights hung, necklace above necklace against the hill. The sand dunes crouched along the back of the beach like tired hounds, resting: and the waves gently practiced at striking, and hissed a little. The night was cold and aloof, and its warm life was withdrawn, so that it was full of bitter warnings to man that he is alone in the world, and alone among his fellows; that he has no comfort owing him from anywhere. ~ John Steinbeck

151:And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes. ~ Barbara Davis

152:Pod koniec lata, podobnie jak podczas deszczów jesiennych, co noc skalną drogą wspinały się dziwne orszaki tramwajów bez pasażerów, kołysząc się nad morzem. Mieszkańcy dowiedzieli się w końcu, co to jest. I mimo patroli broniących wejścia na drogę ludzie dość często przedostawali się na skały sterczące nad falami i gdy przejeżdżały tramwaje, rzucali kwiaty do środka. Słychać było wówczas, jak tramwaje poskrzypują w letniej nocy, dźwigając ładunek kwiatów i trupów. ~ Albert Camus

153:Over the years, the gaze of entomologists gradually magnified, each generation scrutinizing what the previous one hadn’t bothered with or noticed. By the time Powell was surveying the dunes in the late seventies and early eighties, the insects he was bringing home included the minuscule and the nocturnal—because that’s what a scientist of his generation was accustomed to collecting, and what was left to be caught. The biodiversity of the dunes hadn’t expanded. But people’s perception of it had. — ~ Jon Mooallem

154:I was very scared when I saw it, because Dune was for me very important in my life. I was very sad I could not do it. When I saw that David Lynch would do it, I was very scared, because I admire him as a movie-maker, and I thought he would do well. But when I see the picture, I realize he never understood this picture. It's not a David Lynch picture. It's the producer who made that picture, no? Who made this horror. For David Lynch, it was a job. A commercial job. It never was that for me. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

155:features strong and her eyes green. She smiled at him, and William realized two things. First, she was probably only in her early thirties. Second, she was dead. William could see the kettle and the red glow of the burner through her. And William found himself answering her in a low, rough voice. “Someone was walking through the grass, past the house.” The woman’s smile broadened. “You’ll get used to them,” she said. “There are lots of dune walkers here.” William started to reply, but the woman vanished. ~ Ron Ripley

156:The premise of Ezequiel Morsella’s PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one’s hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you’ll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as “Human” during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert’s Dune.) ~ Peter Watts

157:The full account of what transpired during this last leg of the voyage is Moody’s own, and must be left to him. We think it sufficient to say, at this juncture, that there were eight passengers aboard the Godspeed when she pulled out of the harbour at Dunedin, and by the time the barque landed on the Coast, there were nine. The ninth was not a baby, born in transit; nor was he a stowaway; nor did the ship’s lookout spot him adrift in the water, clinging to some scrap of wreckage, and give the shout to draw him in. ~ Eleanor Catton

158:A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. To begin your study of the life of Maud'Dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. And take the most special care that you locate Maud'Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. Do not be deceived by the fact that he was born on Caladan and lived his first fifteen years there. Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place. ~ Frank Herbert

159:Extending the Airport Runway The good citizens of the commission cast their votes for more of everything. Very early in the morning I go out to the pale dunes, to look over the empty spaces of the wilderness. For something is there, something is there when nothing is there but itself, that is not there when anything else is. Alas, the good citizens of the commission have never seen it, whatever it is, formless, yet palpable. Very shining, very delicate. Very rare. ~ Mary Oliver

160:But, don’t you see, since we happened to have M. de Cambremer here, and he is a Marquis, while you are only a Baron. . . . ” “Pardon me,” M. de Charlus replied with an arrogant air to the astonished Verdurin, “I am also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, Prince d’Oloron, de Carency, de Viareggio and des Dunes. However, it is not of the slightest importance. Please do not distress yourself,” he concluded, resuming his subtle smile which spread itself over these final words: “I could see at a glance that you were not accustomed to society. ~ Marcel Proust

161:Bastian had climbed a dune of purplish-red sand and all around him he saw nothing but hill after hill of every imaginable color. Each hill revealed a shade or tint that occured in no other. The nearest was cobalt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve, turquoise blue, lilac, moss green, ruby red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, vermillion, lapis lazuli, and so on from horizon to horizon. And between the hill, separating color from color, flowed streams of gold and silver sand. ~ Michael Ende

162:When Children of Dune came out in hardback in 1976, it was an instant best seller. True to the prediction of David Hartwell and the gut feeling of my father, it became the top-selling hardback in science fiction history up to that time . . . more than 100,000 copies in a few months. When the novel came out in paperback the following year, Berkley Books initially printed 750,000 copies. That wasn’t half enough, and they went back to press. Six months after the release of the paperback, Dad said paperback sales were approaching two million copies. ~ Frank Herbert

163:Still all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind. ~ Italo Calvino

164:Tutte le “realtà” e le “fantasie” possono prendere forma solo attraverso la scrittura, nella quale esteriorità e interiorità, mondo e io, esperienza e fantasia appaiono composte della stessa materia verbale; le visioni polimorfe degli occhi e dell’anima si trovano contenute in righe uniformi di caratteri minuscoli o maiuscoli, di punti, di virgole, di parentesi; pagine di segni allineati fitti fitti come granelli di sabbia rappresentano lo spettacolo variopinto del mondo in una superficie sempre uguale e sempre diversa, come le dune spinte dal vento del deserto. ~ Italo Calvino

165:You know the myth of the Great Spice Hoard? Yes, I know about that story, too. A majordomo brought it to me one day to amuse me. The story says there is a hoard of melange, a gigantic hoard, big as a great mountain. The hoard is concealed in the depths of a distant planet. It is not Arrakis, that planet. It is not Dune. The spice was hidden there long ago, even before the First Empire and the Spacing Guild. The story says Paul-Muad’Dib went there and lives yet beside the hoard, kept alive by it, waiting. The majordomo did not understand why the story disturbed me. ~ Frank Herbert

166:Strange,” he murmurs. “What’s strange?” “It’s just . . .” He pushes his hair back. “You’re not like the jinni in the stories and songs. That jinni was a monster. You seem . . . different.” Then he turns and begins trudging up the next dune, wrapping his cloak around him to keep the wind from tearing at it. I stand still a moment longer, watching him. “Zahra.” He pauses and looks over his shoulder. “What?” “My name,” I stammer. “I mean . . . one of them. You can call me Zahra.” He turns around fully, his grin as wide and as bright as the moon. “I’m Aladdin. ~ Jessica Khoury

167:We went into the night and for the first time in my life I saw the stars hanging low over the desert, for the atmosphere above us contained no moisture, no dust, no impediment of any kind. It was probably the cleanest air man knows and it displayed the stars as no other could. Not even at Qala Bist, which stood by the river, had the air been so pure. The stars seemed enormous, but what surprised me most was the fact that they dropped right to the horizon, so that to the east some rose out of dunes while to the west other crept beneath piles of shale.” pg 172 Caravans, Michener, 1963. ~ James A Michener

168:What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever. Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. ~ Richard K Morgan

169:I loved you when you wore that hideous yellow gown. I loved you later that evening, when you stood amongst the dunes with the wind rippling through your glorious hair and the moon reflected in your eyes. I loved you when you burst into my bedchamber the following day. I loved you even more when you appeared at the inn that evening.’ He allowed a brief smile to curve his lips. ‘I loved and adored you when I held you in my arms and made love to you. Like Whitney with his Janette, I have loved everything about you in every moment of every day since the moment I first laid eyes on you, Jane! ~ Carole Mortimer

170:I took a walk on the cool sand dunes, brittle grass overgrown, and above me, in the night sky, above me, I saw. Bitter taste of unripe peaches and a smell I could not place, nor could I escape. I remembered other times that I could not escape. I remembered other smells. The moon slunk like a wounded animal. The world spun like it had lost control. Concentrate only on breathing and let go of ideas you had about nutrition and alarm clocks. I took a walk on the cool sand dunes, brittle grass overgrown, and above me, in the night sky, above me, I saw. This message brought to you by Coca-Cola. ~ Joseph Fink

171:I need not remind you that this was David Lynch's version of Dune, in which all of the characters were sexy and deformed at the same time. There was a character called the 3rd Stage Guild Navigator, which was a kind of giant floating fetus creature, that lived in a giant tank, with his orange mist of psychedelic spice swirling around him allowing him to bend space and time. He could never leave the tank or interact with the outside world. He had become, in his isolation, so deformed and so sexy that he had to talk through a kind of old-timey radio to the outside world and could never touch them. ~ John Hodgman

172:In 1909 a Jewish town was established on the sand dunes just north of Jaffa—it was called Tel Aviv, the Hebrew for ‘Hill of Spring’. It came to be known as ‘the first all-Jewish city’. The Jewish population of nearby Jaffa, originally about 1,000 strong, had risen by immigration to more than 8,000. As a result, conditions of life in Jaffa had become as crowded and uncomfortable as in the Russian towns from which most of the immigrants had come—sometimes even more so. The new town provided welcome space. It also freed the immigrants from dependence on Arab landlords, who could raise rents at whim. ~ Martin Gilbert

173:It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

174:The northern shore was gray, grim, and inhospitable, and Diana knew every inch of its secret landscape, its crags and caves, its tide pools teeming with limpets and anemones. It was a good place to be alone. The island seeks to please, her mother had told her. It was why Themyscira was forested by redwoods in some places and rubber trees in others; why you could spend an afternoon roaming the grasslands on a scoop-neck pony and the evening atop a camel, scaling a moonlit dragonback of sand dunes. They were all pieces of the lives the Amazons had led before they came to the island, little landscapes of the heart. ~ Leigh Bardugo

175:Back in the day, the story goes, four science fiction writers - Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and L Ron Hubbard - were hanging out late at night in 1940 in LA, drinking and putting the world to rights. They made a bet, who could dream up the best religion? Asimov explained in a TV interview in the 1980s that it was more of a dare than a true bet, and the goal was not a religion proper but ‘who can make the best religious story.’ The results were ‘Nightfall’ by Asimov, ‘Dune’ by Herbert, ‘Job’ by Heinlein and ‘Dianetics’ by Hubbard. If the first version of the story is true, Hubbard won the bet. They ~ John Sweeney

176:Do you like to read?” I asked, pointing at my little shelf. Moses eyed my books. “Yes.” His answer surprised me. Maybe it was his reputation as a gang banging delinquent. Maybe it was because of the way he looked. But he didn’t seem like the type who enjoyed sitting quietly with a book. “What’s your favorite book?” I sounded suspicious and his eyes tightened. “I like Catcher in the Rye. The Outsiders, 1984, Of Mice and Men, Dune, Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings. Anything by Tom Clancy or JK Rowling.” He said JK Rowling quickly, like he didn’t want to admit to being a Potter fan. But I was stunned. ~ Amy Harmon

177:But on the voluptuous stone of the Colorado Plateau nothing is ever as it appears. There is constant potential. The desert is not dried up and empty as if it might blow away like the seeds of brittle grass. It is the bones of the earth brought to daylight, half stuck out of the ground so that winds and flash floods constantly reveal more. Just as it is beneath our flesh, the bones are the sturdiest, most lasting parts. With their hollowed sockets and deliberate lines, they set a foundation upon which the flesh of forests, mountains, and oceans might accumulate. Only here, the flesh is gone, the last of it turned to dune sand. ~ Craig Childs

178:He stepped on to the balcony and looked out over the desert, at the red dunes rolling to the windows directly below. For the fourth time he had moved up a floor, and the sequence of identical rooms he had occupied were like displaced images of himself seen through a prism. Their common focus, that elusive final definition of himself which he had sought for so long, still remained to be found. Timelessly the sand swept towards him, its shifting contours, approximating more closely than any other landscape he had found to complete psychic zero, enveloping his past failures and uncertainties, masking them in its enigmatic canopy. ~ J G Ballard

179:The building was small, painted white with dark green trim with the Atlantic behind it. The ocean was gray and harsh, whitecaps breaking upon dark sands while a cold, northern wind battered at the dunes and seagrass. William smiled at the dark clouds. Behind them, the sun had begun its slow descent, and soon William would be alone with the ocean and his thoughts. Closing the truck’s door, he walked around to the side, reached into the bed and pulled out his sea-bag. He threw it over his shoulder and walked up to the house. He bent down and moved aside a loose paving stone to find the key to the house, as Jeremy’s mother had said. ~ Ron Ripley

180:Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children's book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they've ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa—two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season. ~ Meg Donohue

181:The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry

182:Titan’s upper atmosphere is a nonstop factory of complex organics, which both shroud this world in its permanent smoggy haze and snow down on the icy surface. There they gather in vast dune fields that blow around in the nitrogen winds and dissolve in the methane lakes. The presence of all these organics on Titan resembles our picture of the primordial Earth and the conditions that led to the origin of life. It seems to present a freeze-dried portrait of a crucial lost phase in our own biological origin story. This is one reason we astrobiologists are obsessed with Titan. Another is the fascinating and complex climate balance. Like ~ David Grinspoon

183:How I go to the woods Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much. ~ Mary Oliver

184:My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. ~ Henry Beston

185:It's hard to explain, but it's related to me know that for every moment of beauty this place gives me, I probably miss a thousand more. And I want them all. I swear I'd live on the dunes if I could. I was born out of my time. I should have been around during the end of the eighteenth century, when the Romantic Era kicked off, and writers and artists were obsessed with nature: the ocean, the mountains, the sky. And they believed in following their own path, experimenting, not blindly obeying rules. I found a quote by Henry David Thoreau- "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life"...It made me cry. Urgency is so beautiful. ~ Kirsty Eagar

186:But Michael was out of sight. She waited. Were it not for the ballast of her big belly, she would casually stand, stretch a bit, casually stretch her neck until she got a glimpse of him. Casually because her husband said she worried too much, fretted too much, and would eventually infect their boys with her fearfulness—had, perhaps, already, in Jacob’s case, infected them with her fearfulness. So she waited, trusting, but feeling, too, the pins-and-needles prick of blown sand on her cheek and her forearm (was the wind changing?) until, sure enough, there was the top of his head, the tip of his plastic machine gun, just over the next dune. ~ Alice McDermott

187:As a child I’d believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever. ~ Richard K Morgan

188:Dunes What do we see here in the sand dunes of the white moon alone with our thoughts, Bill, Alone with our dreams, Bill, soft as the women tying scarves around their heads dancing, Alone with a picture and a picture coming one after the other of all the dead, The dead more than all these grains of sand one by one piled here in the moon, Piled against the sky-line taking shapes like the hand of the wind wanted, What do we see here, Bill, outside of what the wise men beat their heads on, Outside of what the poets cry for and the soldiers drive on headlong and leave their skulls in the sun for—what, Bill? ~ Carl Sandburg

189:There on the dune, beside the table, one of the camel boys has his arm around the other, and they sit there like that as they watch the sun. The dunes are turning the same shades of adobe and aqua as the buildings of Marrakech. Two boys, arms around each other. To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other’s embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

190:We shouldn’t have tried to create new symbols,” he said. We should’ve realized we weren’t supposed to introduce uncertainties into accepted belief, that we weren’t supposed to stir up curiosity about God. We are daily confronted by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions to grow more rigid and controlled, more conforming and oppressive. What is this shadow across the highway of Divine Command? It is a warning that institutions endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa of all attainable knowledge. "Admission" of C.E.T. Chairman Toure Bomoko, in "Appendix II: The Religion of Dune ~ Frank Herbert

191:Buckwheat THERE was a late autumn cricket, And two smoldering mountain sunsets Under the valley roads of her eyes. There was a late autumn cricket, A hangover of summer song, Scraping a tune Of the late night clocks of summer, In the late winter night fireglow, This in a circle of black velvet at her neck. In pansy eyes a flash, a thin rim of white light, a beach bonfire ten miles across dunes, a speck of a fool star in night's half circle of velvet. In the corner of the left arm a dimple, a mole, a forget-me-not, and it fluttered a hummingbird wing, a blur in the honey-red clover, in the honey-white buckwheat. ~ Carl Sandburg

192:Natural selection has been described as an environment selectively screening for those who will have progeny. Where humans are concerned, though, this is an extremely limiting viewpoint. Reproduction by sex tends toward experiment and innovation. It raises many questions, including the ancient one about whether environment is a selective agent after the variation occurs, or whether environment plays a pre-selective role in determining the variations which it screens. Dune did not really answer those questions: it merely raised new questions which Leto and the Sisterhood may attempt to answer over the next five hundred generations. —THE DUNE CATASTROPHE AFTER HARQ AL-ADA ~ Frank Herbert

193:What is going on inside me I cannot tell. In the sky a thousand stars are magnetized, and I lie glued by the swing of the planet to the sand. A different weight brings me back to myself. I feel the weight of my body drawing me towards so many things. My dreams are more real than these dunes, than that moon, than these presences. My civilization is an empire more imperious than this empire. The marvel of a house is not that it shelters or warms a man, nor that its walls belong to him. It is that it leaves its trace on the language. Let it remain a sign. Let it form, deep in the heart, that obscure range from which, as waters from a spring, are born our dreams. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry

194:Cloves Where is the scent of cloves coming from? her hair? armpit? or her dress thrown on the Tunisian rug? From the third step in the house? Layla makes everything smell of cloves. Layla is the orchard when it’s wet. She is what the orchard breathes when it’s watered at night. Layla knows now that I am drunk with the scent of cloves, she stiches together my clouds and then scatters them together in a sky like a sheet as she clasps me. Layla feels that my fingers are numb, over the dunes she knows my pulse is hers, my water is hers. Layla leaves me sleeping, rocking between clouds and cloves. ~ Saadi Youssef

195:Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

196:Among my father’s most important messages were that governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions. Years after the publication of Dune, Richard M. Nixon provided ample proof. Dad said that Nixon did the American people an immense favor in his attempt to cover up the Watergate misdeeds. By amplified example, albeit unwittingly, the thirty-seventh president of the United States taught people to question their leaders. In interviews and impassioned speeches on university campuses all across the country, Frank Herbert warned young people not to trust government, telling them that the American founding fathers had understood this and had attempted to establish safeguards in the Constitution. ~ Frank Herbert

197:In Answer To A Request You ask me for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear, Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon? Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere? For your sake, I would go and seek the year, Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune, Blown sands of drifted hours, which the moon Streaks with a ghostly finger, and her sneer Pulls at my lengthening shadow. Yes, 'tis that! My shadow stretches forward, and the ground Is dark in front because the light's behind. It is grotesque, with such a funny hat, In watching it and walking I have found More than enough to occupy my mind. I cannot turn, the light would make me blind. ~ Amy Lowell

198:William Engberg sat in his truck and finished his cigarette. He exhaled and then he stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and pulled the key out of the ignition.  He got out of his truck, stuffed his keys in a back pocket and looked at the house before him. The building was small, painted white with dark green trim with the Atlantic behind it.  The ocean was gray and harsh, whitecaps breaking upon dark sands while a cold, northern wind battered at the dunes and seagrass. William smiled at the dark clouds.  Behind them, the sun had begun its slow descent, and soon William would be alone with the ocean and his thoughts.  Closing the truck’s door, he walked around to the side, reached into the bed and pulled out his sea-bag.  ~ Ron Ripley

199:It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more impatiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost any sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

200:They had nothing to eat but Ryan's food, and they ate little of that because it was so dry, but it seemed to sustain them. Their greatest worry was water. Though they drank only a little each day, Westerly's flask was empty and the bottle in Cally's pack now only half-full. "I wish I was a camel," Cally said. Westerly said, "I wouldn't want to spend this much time with a girl who looked like a camel." She tried to laugh, but her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and her mind full of hopelessness. "When this is gone, we shall just die of thirst." "We'll be out of the dunes by then," Westerly said encouragingly. But he knew that the mountains, though nearer now on the hazy horizon, were far more than a day's walk away. ~ Susan Cooper

201:Woburn … same old coat … he goes on … stops … not a soul … not yet … night too bright … say what you like … he goes on … hugging the bank … same old stick … he goes down … falls … on purpose or not … can’t see … he’s down … that’s what counts … face in the mud … arms spread … that’s the idea … already … there already … no not yet … he gets up … knees first … hands flat … in the mud … head sunk … then up … on his feet … huge bulk … come on … he goes on … he goes down … come on … in his head … what’s in his head … a hole … a shelter … a hollow … in the dunes … a cave … vague memory … in his head … of a cave … he goes down … no more trees … no more bank … he’s changed … not enough … night too bright … soon the dunes … no more cover … not a soul … not– ~ Samuel Beckett

202:In a famous passage of his book The Sciences of the Artificial, AI pioneer and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon asked us to consider an ant laboriously making its way home across a beach. The ant’s path is complex, not because the ant itself is complex but because the environment is full of dunelets to climb and pebbles to get around. If we tried to model the ant by programming in every possible path, we’d be doomed. Similarly, in machine learning the complexity is in the data; all the Master Algorithm has to do is assimilate it, so we shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be simple. The human hand is simple—four fingers, one opposable thumb—and yet it can make and use an infinite variety of tools. The Master Algorithm is to algorithms what the hand is to pens, swords, screwdrivers, and forks. ~ Pedro Domingos

203:I went up above the quay past the steps to the hotel. I saw a man through the window with a beer in his hand, and another man with a basket full of eggs. I was feeling heavy now, and tired, and I stood there leaning backwards with my hands crossed behind my back at the end of the breakwater before I walked on to the beach on the other side and some way along on the hard-frozen white sand. It had started to blow a bit, and it was still cold with no snow, so I took off my scarf and tied it round my head and ears and sat down in the shelter of a dune and blew into my hands to warm them before I lit a cigarette. Poker ran along the edge of the water with a seagull’s wing in his mouth, and I was so young then, and I remember thinking: I’m twenty-three years old, there is nothing left in life. Only the rest. ~ Per Petterson

204:The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn—an illusion still in the land—rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence. ~ N Scott Momaday

205:Lily liked the fog, and didn't even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, wind-swept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff's dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor's garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry. ~ Christopher Moore

206:I sat on a somewhat higher sand dune and watched the eastern sky. Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale, [...] than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could comprehend. As I sat and watched, the feeling overtook me that my very life was slowly dwindling into nothingness. There was no trace here of anything as insignificant as human undertakings. This same event had been occurring hundreds of millions - hundreds of billions - of times, from an age long before there had been anything resembling life on earth. ~ Haruki Murakami

207:Poem (Faithful To Your Commands, O Consciousness) Poem Faithful to your commands, o consciousness, o Beating wings, I studied the roses and the muses of reality, the deceptions and the deceptive elation of the redness of the growing morning, and all the greened and thomed variety of the vines of error, which begin by promising Everything and more than everything, and then suddenly, At the height of noon seem to rise to the peak or dune-like moon of no return So that everything is or seems to have become nothing, or of no genuine importance: And it is not that the departure of hope or its sleep has made it inconceivable That anything should be or should have been important: It is the belief that hope itself was not, from the beginning, before believing, the most important of all beliefs. ~ Delmore Schwartz

208:I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies ~ Anthony Bourdain

209:Zohra's voice comes loudly from her camel: "Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!" It is , after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

210:So I Said I Am Ezra So I said I am Ezra and the wind whipped my throat gaming for the sounds of my voice I listened to the wind go over my head and up into the night Turning to the sea I said I am Ezra but there were no echoes from the waves The words were swallowed up in the voice of the surf or leaping over the swells lost themselves oceanward Over the bleached and broken fields I moved my feet and turning from the wind that ripped sheets of sand from the beach and threw them like seamists across the dunes swayed as if the wind were taking me away and said I am Ezra As a word too much repeated falls out of being so I Ezra went out into the night like a drift of sand and splashed among the windy oats that clutch the dunes of unremembered seas ~ Archie Randolph Ammons

211:Winterton It is a sinking into sand; marram grass too sharp to lie on; eyes stinging in the wind, and a nerve in the cheek jumping like an actor playing Dostoevsky. A few memories remain: the seal pup dragging its wound up the beach showing a ripped belly and crying for help; terns dive-bombing the air above their nests; the flotsam fox bitten and chewed scourged and scraped but still recognisable and always the grey North Sea disappearing into a grey sky. Beachcombing between the season's limbs to discover loneliness or coming off the frost-crisp dunes rejoicing in ownership. Sixty-eight years should burst the walls of a skull with this; but mostly it drifts like fine sand, or bangs against the groynes whenever the wind blows towards the land. ~ Edwin Brock

212:Je suis cette fille solaire qui court sur le sable tiède de Palombaggia. Je suis le vent qui fait claquer les voiles d'un bateau en partance. La mer infinie de nuages qui donne le vertige derrière le hublot. Je suis un feu de joie qui brûle à la Saint-Jean. Les galets d'Étretat qui roulent sur la plage. Une lanterne vénitienne résistant aux tempêtes. Je suis une comète qui embrase le ciel. Une feuille d'or que les rafales emportent. Un refrain entraînant fredonné par la foule. Je suis les alizés qui caressent les eaux. Les vents chauds qui balaient les dunes. Une bouteille à la mer perdue dans l'Atlantique. Je suis l'odeur vanille des vacances à la mer et l'effluve entêtant de la terre mouillée. Je suis le battement d'ailes du Bleu-nacré d'Espagne. Le feu follet fugace qui court sur les marais. La poussière d'une étoile blanche et trop tôt tombée. ~ Guillaume Musso

213:He’d decided to keep a journal in the hope that this might help. He looked at the recent entries. Probably Tuesday: hot, flies. Dinner: honey ants. Attacked by honey ants. Fell into waterhole. Wednesday, with any luck: hot, flies. Dinner: either bush raisins or kangaroo droppings. Chased by hunters, don’t know why. Fell into waterhole. Thursday (could be): hot, flies. Dinner: blue-tongued lizard. Savaged by blue-tongued lizard. Chased by different hunters. Fell off cliff, bounced into tree, pissed on by small grey incontinent teddy bear, landed in a waterhole. Friday: hot, flies. Dinner: some kind of roots which tasted like sick. This saved time. Saturday: hotter than yesterday, extra flies. V. thirsty. Sunday: hot. Delirious with thirst and flies. Nothing but nothing as far as the eye can see, with bushes in it. Decided to die, collapsed, fell down sand dune into waterhole. ~ Terry Pratchett

214:What does a camel love? I would guess nothing in the world. Not the sand that scours her, or the sun that bakes her, or the water she drinks like a teetotaler. Not sitting down, blinking her lashes like a starlet. Not standing up, moaning in indignant fury as she manages her adolescent limbs. Not her fellow camels, to whom she shows the disdain of an heiress forced to fly coach. Not the humans who have enslaved her. Not the oceanic monotony of the dunes. Not the flavorless grass she chews, then chews again, then again, in a sullen struggle of digestion. Not the hellish day. Not the heavenly night. Not sunset. Not sunrise. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. And surely not the heavy American, a few pounds overweight but not bad for his age, taller than most and top heavy, tipping from side to side as she carries this human, this Arthur Less, pointlessly across the Sahara. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

215:The Mariner "Wreck and stray and castaway."--SWINBURNE. Once more adrift. O'er dappling sea and broad lagoon, O'er frowning cliff and yellow dune, The long, warm lights of afternoon Like jewel dustings sift. Once more awake. I dreamed an hour of port and quay, Of anchorage not meant for me; The sea, the sea, the hungry sea Came rolling up the break. Once more afloat. The billows on my moorings press't, They drove me from my moment's rest, And now a portless sea I breast, And shelterless my boat. Once more away. The harbour lights are growing dim, The shore is but a purple rim, The sea outstretches grey and grim. Away, away, away! Once more at sea, The old, old sea I used to sail, The battling tide, the blowing gale, The waves with ceaseless under-wail The life that used to be. ~ Emily Pauline Johnson

216:Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential. ~ Junot D az

217:I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung River to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks- the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I'd yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I'd found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world- and I wanted the world to be just like the movies. Unreasonable? Over-romantic? Uniformed? Foolhardy? Yes! ~ Anthony Bourdain

218:If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say? What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight out into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of the father facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide, what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam? If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the rocks what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a bottled message from the sunken slaveships? what of the huge sun slowly defaulting into the clouds what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the moon, the basket with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood all picnics are eaten on the grave? ~ Adrienne Rich

219:That she intended to swim alone, and had ridden alone to such a deserted place, puzzled him. Though the countryside around Rome was neither Sicily nor Calabria, it was not safe for an unaccompanied woman, it never had been, and it never would be. He turned almost blue with the thought that she might have—indeed, must have—met a lover on the road, in which case his triple race would have been for nothing, and his shame would drive him to emigrate to Argentina. He began to think about Argentina, and it was not unpleasant, but before he left he would stand by the stream that flowed into the sea and watch as Lia and her lover emerged from the dunes. What an exquisite look he would give them. His expression would be that of a spurned horseman on foot in a Budapest cafe, who, about to shoot himself in the head, would glance at the woman he loved, and smile. All was forgiven, if only because everything was so magnificently bittersweet. ~ Mark Helprin

220:Lest we forget, we say, Bonox Baker said. Isn’t that what we say, sir? We do, Bonox. Or incant. Perhaps it’s not quite the same thing. So that’s why it should be saved. So it’s not forgotten. Do you know the poem, Bonox? It’s by Kipling. It’s not about remembering. It’s about forgetting—how everything gets forgotten. Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Dorrigo Evans nodded to a pyre maker to set the bamboo alight. Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame shadows tiger-striping his face. If we can’t remember that Kipling’s poem was about how everything gets forgotten, how are we going to remember anything else? A poem is not a law. It’s not fate. Sir. No, Dorrigo Evans said, though for him, he realised with a shock, it more or less was. ~ Richard Flanagan

221:Why do we look to everyone else to see what to do? Why don't we understand that they're all as lost and scared as we are? Why do we look at a random consensus, shaped by opinions and powers that drift like dunes, as an absolute truth? If "normal" could change tomorrow, why are we such slaves to it? And where has "normal" gotten us, anyway? We live in a society that can't stop pollution or environmental destruction, that can't raise educational standards, can't stay healthy and non-obese, can't balance a budget, has no sense of fiscal responsibility, is in an economic tailspin, and is rife with crime and murder and violence. Most people in this "normal" society of ours begin sitting still in a room for six to eight hours beginning in childhood. They continue that for twelve years and then begin sitting still in a different room for another forty years, at which point they hope to retire and sit still in a chair in front of the TV until they die. ~ Johnny B Truant

222:Coming home When we’re driving, in the dark, On the long road To Provincetown, which lies empty For miles, when we’re weary, When the buildings And the scrub pines lose Their familiar look, I imagine us rising From the speeding car, I imagine us seeing everything from another place-the top Of one of the pale dunes Or the deep and nameless fields of the sea- And what we see is the world That cannot cherish us But which we cherish, And what we see is our life Moving like that, Along the dark edges Of everything- the headlights Like lanterns Sweeping the blackness- Believing in a thousand Fragile and unprovable things, Looking out for sorrow, Slowing down for happiness, Making all the right turns Right down to the thumping Barriers to the sea, The swirling waves, The narrow streets, the houses, The past, the future, The doorway that belongs To you and me. ~ Mary Oliver

223:Monologue Of A Commercial Fisherman “If you work a body of water and a body of woman you can take fish out of one and children out of the other for the two kinds of survival. The fishing is good, both kinds are adequate in pleasures and yield, but the hard work and the miseries are killing; it is a good life if life is good. If not, not. You are out in the world and in in the world, having it both ways: it is sportive and prevenient living combined, although you have to think about the weathers and the hard work and the miseries are what I said. It runs on like water, quickly, under the boat, then slowly like the sand dunes under the house. You survive by yourself by the one fish for a while and then by the other afterward when you run out. You run out a hooky life baited with good times, and whether the catch is caught or not is a question for those who go fishing for men or among them for things.” ~ Alan Dugan

224:Rosa, Rosa mia, non riesco a credere che mi odiassi, perché non c'è odio dove ti trovi adesso, qui in mezzo a noi, e tuttavia lontana. Sono solo un ragazzo, Rosa, e il mistero del luogo in cui ti trovi non è più un mistero se ripenso alla bellezza del tuo volto e agli scoppi di risa delle tue calosce quando scendevi nell'ingresso. Perché tu eri un tesoro, Rosa, eri una gran brava ragazza, e io ti volevo, e un ragazzo non può essere cattivo se s'innamora di una brava ragazza come te. E se adesso mi odii, Rosa, e non posso credere che adesso mi odii, allora guarda il mio dolore e credi che io ti voglio qui, perché anche questo è buono. So che non puoi tornare, Rosa mio vero amore, ma in questa chiesa gelida, oggi pomeriggio, c'è un sogno della tua presenza, un conforto nel tuo perdono, una tristezza di non poterti toccare, perché ti amo e ti amerò per sempre, e quando un giorno si raduneranno per me, lo avrò saputo ancora prima che si radunino e non sarà strano per noi... ~ John Fante

225:Flanders Flanders, the name of a place, a country of people, Spells itself with letters, is written in books. "Where is Flanders?" was asked one time, Flanders known only to those who lived there And milked cows and made cheese and spoke the home language. "Where is Flanders?" was asked. And the slang adepts shot the reply: Search me. A few thousand people milking cows, raising radishes, On a land of salt grass and dunes, sand-swept with a sea-breath on it: This was Flanders, the unknown, the quiet, The place where cows hunted lush cuds of green on lowlands, And the raw-boned plowmen took horses with long shanks Out in the dawn to the sea-breath. Flanders sat slow-spoken amid slow-swung windmills, Slow-circling windmill arms turning north or west, Turning to talk to the swaggering winds, the childish winds, So Flanders sat with the heart of a kitchen girl Washing wooden bowls in the winter sun by a window. ~ Carl Sandburg

226:I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again. At ~ Sarah Bakewell

227:I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again ~ Simone de Beauvoir

228:W. Lloyd Garrison Standard Vegetarian, non-resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian; Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll. Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan. Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain, Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter; With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair; Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame of defeat; I, child of the abolitionist idealism -A sort of Brand in a birth of half-and-half. What other thing could happen when I defended The patriot scamps who burned the court house, That Spoon River might have a new one, Than plead them guilty? When Kinsey Keene drove through The card-board mask of my life with a spear of light, What could I do but slink away, like the beast of myself Which I raised from a whelp, to a corner and growl? The pyramid of my life was nought but a dune, Barren and formless, spoiled at last by the storm. ~ Edgar Lee Masters

229:It would take another twenty-seven years before the first government-authorized lifesaving stations were erected on Cape Cod. In all, nine stations were built from Race Point in Provincetown to Monomoy Island in Chatham. These two-story wooden structures were put up in the sunbaked dunes away from the high-water mark, thus protecting them from floods. They were painted a deep red and carried sixty-foot flags to make them easily recognizable from the ocean. The stations were manned by up to seven surfmen from August 1 to June 1 of the following year. The station’s keeper kept a watchful eye for the remaining two months. The keeper earned $200 per year for his duties while the surfmen were paid $65 a month. Each surfman, no matter how many years of service, was obligated to pass a strenuous physical examination at the dawn of each new season. Writer J. W. Dalton described the surfman’s weekly routine in his 1902 book, The Life Savers of Cape Cod: “On Monday the members of the crew are employed putting the station in order. ~ Michael J Tougias

230:Filled with a reverent notion (for which he would have been put to death on any of the public squares of Christendom or the lands of Mohammed), he reflected that the most adequate symbols of a conjectural Supreme Good are those very ones which are held, absurdly, to be the most idolatrous: the fiery globe above is the only God visible for us creatures, who would perish without it. Likewise, the most real of angels was this seagull, which possessed what Seraphim and Thrones did not have, the clear evidence of existing. In this world unburdened by concepts, even ferocity was pure: the fish wriggling beneath the wave would soon be only a choice morsel, bleeding under the beak of the bird fishing here, but the bird was giving no false pretext for its hunger. Both fox and hare (trickery and fear) inhabited the dune where he slept, but the killer did not evoke laws promulgated long ago by some wise fox, or handed down by a fox-god. The victim did not suppose itself punished for its crimes or, when dying, protest to the end that it had remained loyal to its prince. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

231:Provincetown is by nature a destination. It is the land’s end; it is not en route to anywhere else. One of its charms is the fact that those who go there have made some effort to do so. Provincetown is three miles long and just slightly more than two blocks wide. Two streets run its entire length from east to west: Commercial, a narrow one-way street where almost all the businesses are, and Bradford, a more utilitarian two-way street a block north of Commercial. Residential roads, some of them barely one car wide, run at right angles on a semiregular grid between Commercial and Bradford streets and then, north of Bradford, meander out into dunes or modest hollows of surviving forest, as the terrain dictates. Although the town has been there since before 1720 (the year it was incorporated) and has survived any number of disastrous storms, it is still possible that a major hurricane, if it hit head-on, would simply sweep everything away, since Provincetown has no bedrock, no firm purchase of any kind. It is a city of sand, more or less the way Arctic settlements are cities of ice. ~ Michael Cunningham

232:Rumi I escaped from the city barefooted. I escaped from the fires naked, except for the bag of ancient books slung over my back. I ran into the desert. The horsemen chased. Their torches had coloured the tenements. I ran for months. Finally on a glorious night I stopped. The raiders had given up on me. I was alone with the moon and the sand-dunes. I looked down at my feet. They were skinned. I looked at my trace: red footprints dark on the glowing plain. I thought about my tribe butchered as sacrificial beasts. I remembered their smiles before the flames. On the holy night I knelt before the moon and wept. In the desert tears are elixir. From their pool a fountain bubbled. I cleaned my scars in the water. The books 67 weighed on my body. I took them out and one by one dipped them into the spring. All knowledge, all art, and all history drowned before my eyes. Freed from the clutch of paper words’ ink dissolved in the lake. I then drank. I was saved. ~ Ali Alizadeh

233:He has always loved to read aloud, to hear words float about a room, to swim in stories and breathe in poetry. And he has a powerful voice, a beautiful voice, as deep, thick and rich as melted chocolate. Characters seem to come alive when he speaks, sliding off the page to stalk the bookshop aisles and relive their fictional lives in 3-D and Technicolor. At night, after Walt flips over the "closed" sign on the front door, he sits back behind the counter and opens doors to other worlds: bookshelves transmute into swamp trees, floors into muddy marshes, the ceiling into a purple sky cracked with lightning as he floats down the Mississippi with Huck Finn. When he meets Robinson Crusoe, the trees become heavy with coconuts, the floorboards a barren desert of sand dunes whipped by screeching winds. When he fights pirates off the coasts of Treasure Island, the floors dip and heave, the salty splash of ocean waves stings his eyes and clouds of gunpowder stain the air. As a rule Walt sticks with adventures and leaves romances untouched, preferring to escape his own aching heart rather than being reminded of it. ~ Menna van Praag

234:Ballade Of The Royal Game Of Golf There are laddies will drive ye a ba' To the burn frae the farthermost tee, But ye mauna think driving is a', Ye may heel her, and send her ajee, Ye may land in the sand or the sea; And ye're dune, sir, ye're no worth a preen, Tak' the word that an auld man'll gie, Tak' aye tent to be up on the green! The auld folk are crouse, and they craw That their putting is pawky and slee; In a bunker they're nae gude ava', But to girn, and to gar the sand flee. And a lassie can putt--ony she, Be she Maggy, or Bessie, or Jean, But a cleek-shot's the billy for me, Tak' aye tent to be up on the green! I hae play'd in the frost and the thaw, I hae play'd since the year thirty-three, I hae play'd in the rain and the snaw, And I trust I may play till I dee; And I tell ye the truth and nae lee, For I speak o' the thing I hae seen Tom Morris, I ken, will agree Tak' aye tent to be up on the green! ENVOY. Prince, faith you're improving a wee, And, Lord, man, they tell me you're keen; Tak' the best o' advice that can be, Tak' aye tent to be up on the green! ~ Andrew Lang

235:The Sea-Change Where river and ocean meet in a great tempestuous frown, Beyond the bar, where on the dunes the white-capped rollers break; Above, one windmill stands forlorn on the arid, grassy down: I will set my sail on a stormy day and cross the bar and seek That I have sought and never found, the exquisite one crown, Which crowns one day with all its calm the passionate and the weak. When the mad winds are unreined, wilt thou not storm, my sea? (I have ever loved thee so, I have ever done thee wrong In drear terrestrial ways.) When I trust myself to thee With a last great hope, arise and sing thine ultimate, great song Sung to so many better men, O sing at last to me, That which when once a man has heard, he heeds not over long. I will bend my sail when the great day comes; thy kisses on my face Shall seal all things that are old, outworn; and anger and regret Shall fade as the dreams and days shall fade, and in thy salt embrace, When thy fierce caresses blind mine eyes and my limbs grow stark and set, All that I know in all my mind shall no more have a place: The weary ways of men and one woman I shall forget. ~ Ernest Christopher Dowson

236:To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks. ~ Anthony Doerr

237:March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul. ~ H P Lovecraft

238:I Ask You What scene would I want to be enveloped in more than this one, an ordinary night at the kitchen table, floral wallpaper pressing in, white cabinets full of glass, the telephone silent, a pen tilted back in my hand? It gives me time to think about all that is going on outside-leaves gathering in corners, lichen greening the high grey rocks, while over the dunes the world sails on, huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake. But beyond this table there is nothing that I need, not even a job that would allow me to row to work, or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4 with cracked green leather seats. No, it's all here, the clear ovals of a glass of water, a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin, not to mention the odd snarling fish in a frame on the wall, and the way these three candles-each a different height-are singing in perfect harmony. So forgive me if I lower my head now and listen to the short bass candle as he takes a solo while my heart thrums under my shirt-frog at the edge of a pond-and my thoughts fly off to a province made of one enormous sky and about a million empty branches. 19 ~ Billy Collins

239:As soon as she releases me, Galen grabs my hand and I don't even have time to gasp before he snatches me to the surface and pulls me toward shore, only pausing to dislodge his pair of swimming trunks from under his favorite rock, where he had just moments before taken the time to hide them. I know the routine and turn away so he can change, but it seems like no time before he hauls me onto the beach and drags me to the sand dunes in front of my house. "What are you doing?" I ask. His legs are longer than mine so for every two of his strides I have to take three, which feels a lot like running. He stops us in between the dunes. "I'm doing something that is none of anyone else's business." Then he jerks me up against him and crushes his mouth on mine. And I see why he didn't want an audience for this kiss. I wouldn't want an audience for this kiss, either, especially if the audience included my mother. This is our first kiss after he announced that he wanted me for his mate. This kiss holds promises of things to come. When he pulls away I feel drunk and excited and nervous and filled with a craving that I'm not sure can ever be satisfied. And Galen looks startled. "Maybe I shouldn't have done that," he says. "That makes it about fifty times harder to leave, I think. ~ Anna Banks

240:Promontory Golden dawn and shivering evening find our brig lying by opposite this villa and its dependencies which form a promontory as extensive as Epirus and the Peloponnesus, or as the large island of Japan, or as Arabia! Fanes lighted up by the return of the _theories_; prodigious views of a modern coast's defenses; dunes illustrated with flaming flowers and bacchanalia; grand canals of Carthage and Embankments of a dubious Venice; Etnas languidly erupting, and crevasses of flowers and of glacier waters; washhouses surrounded by German poplars; strange parks with slopes bowing down the heads of the Tree of Japan; and circular facades of the 'Grands' and the 'Royals' of Scarborough and of Brooklyn; and their railways flank, cut through, and overhang this hotel whose plan was selected in the history of the most elegant and the most colossal edifices of Italy, America, and Asia, and whose windows and terraces, at the moment full of expensive illumination, drinks and breezes, are open to the fancy of the travelers and the nobles who,-during the day allow all the tarantellas of the coast,-and even the ritornellos of the illustrious valleys of art, to decorate most wonderfully the facades of Promontory Palace. ~ Arthur Rimbaud

241:Not yet.” “Have you talked to Andrea’s neighbors to see if they’ve seen him around?” “No. We came here right after the salon.” Russell Morrison considered what he’d been told. “Just because he ran doesn’t mean he’s the one who assaulted Andrea. Neither does anything you’ve learned about him.” “But—” Morrison held up his hands to cut her off. “I’m not saying I think he’s innocent. Hell, he tried to kill an officer, and that doesn’t happen on my watch.” He glanced at Pete. “You sure you’re okay?” “Yeah. Pissed off, but I’m okay.” “Good. You’re the lead on this investigation, but I’m going to put everyone on it.” Pete nodded as they were interrupted by a shout from Fred Burris, one of the officers who’d been in the house. He was approaching them rapidly. “Captain?” he called out. Morrison turned toward him. “Yeah?” “I think we’ve got something,” he announced. “What is it?” “Blood,” he said simply. Henry’s beach house was on Topsail Island, a slit of land half a mile offshore, about forty minutes from Swansboro. Covered by rolling dunes speckled with sawgrass and white sand, the island was popular with families during the summer, though few people lived there year-round. During spring, visitors seemed to have the island all to themselves. Like all homes there, the main floor of the house had been ~ Nicholas Sparks

242:Songs Of The Grass On The Dunes HERE all night on the dunes In the rocking wind we sleep; Watched by the sentry stars, Lulled by the drone of the deep. Till hark, in the chill of the dawn A field lark wakes and cries, And over the floor of the sea We watch the round sun rise. The world is washed once more In a tide of purple and gold, And the heart of the land is filled With desires and dreams untold. II Lord Of Morning Lord of morning, light of day, Sacred color-kindling sun, We salute thee in the way, — Pilgrims robed in rose and dun. For thou art a pilgrim too, Overlord of all our band. In thy fervor we renew Quests we do not understand. At thy summons we arise, At thy touch put glory on, And with glad unanxious eyes Take the journey thou hast gone. III The Traveller Before the night-blue fades And the stars are quite gone, I lift my head At the noiseless tread Of the angel of dawn. I hear no word, yet my heart Is beating apace; Then in glory all still On the eastern hill 140 I behold his face. All day through the world he goes, Making glad, setting free; Then his day's work done, On the galleon sun He sinks in the sea. ~ Bliss William Carman

243:Bethany stands in the middle of the enormous, apparently endless beach surrounded by square miles of damp sand, the surf still some hundred yards off, the light pearly and uniform, the horizon a blurry, darker grey line shading into the clouds. Turning, she sees the black-green jagged stripe of the pines behind the dunes and, beyond that, more unchanging grey sky. A kind of dizziness afflicts her – she senses her insignificance, a small two-legged homunculus in the midst of all this space, a mere speck, a tiny crawling gnat in this elemental simplicity of sand, water and sky. She squats on her haunches, worried she might fall over, and to distract herself takes out her camera and frames a shot of the beach, the sea and the packed clouds – it looks like an abstract painting. Click. It looks like an abstract painting by – what was his name? Colour-field paintings they are called, the three layers of colour-fields in this case being broad, horizontal bands of dark taupe, slate grey, nebulous tarnished silver. It is rather beautiful. She stands up, feeling equilibrium return – maybe she was hungry, and felt faint for a second or two or maybe, she wonders, maybe she has experienced an actual existential moment – an epiphany – and has seen clearly the reality of her place in the world and has felt the nothingness, the vast indifference of the universe… ~ William Boyd

244:Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape—had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years. That cannot amount to more than a night of geological time. Perhaps this is why Provincetown is so beautiful. Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in the dawn with the moist primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first time. Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old, and one’s ghosts had no roots. We did not have old Martha’s Vineyard’s fossil remains to subdue each spirit, no, there was nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down the two long streets of our town which curved together around the bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church.   NORMAN MAILER, from Tough Guys Don’t Dance ~ Michael Cunningham

245:The Open Sea From my window I can see, Where the sandhills dip, One far glimpse of open sea. Just a slender slip Curving like a crescent moon— Yet a greater prize Than the harbour garden-fair Spread beneath my eyes. Just below me swings the bay, Sings a sunny tune, But my heart is far away Out beyond the dune; Clearer far the sea-gulls’ cry And the breakers’ roar, Than the little waves beneath Lapping on the shore. For that strip of sapphire sea Set against the sky 16 Far horizons means to me— And the ships go by Framed between the empty sky And the yellow sands, While my freed thoughts follow them Out to other lands. All its changes who can tell? I have seen it shine Like a jewel polished well, Hard and clear and fine; Then soft lilac—and again On another day Glimpsed it through a veil of rain, Shifting, drifting grey. When the livid waters flee, Flinching from the storm, From my window I can see, Standing safe and warm, How the white foam tosses high 17 On the naked shore, And the breakers’ thunder grows To a battle-roar… Far and far I look—Ten miles? No, for yesterday Sure I saw the Blessed Isles Twenty worlds away. My blue moon of open sea, Is it little worth? At the least it gives to me Keys of all the earth ~ Dorothea Mackellar

246:Marie-Laure isi imagineaza undele electromagnetice intrand si iesind din aparatul lui Michel, arcuindu-se in jurul lor, asa cum descria Etienne, doar ca acum sunt de o mie de ori mai multe unde care strabat aerul in toate directiile decât pe vremea lui - sau poate de un milion de ori mai multe. Torente de mesaje scurte, oceane de conversatii pe mobil, de programe de televiziune, de e-mailuri, retele vaste de fibra si cabluri impletite deasupra si dedesubtul orasului, traversand cladiri, arcuindu-se intre transmitatoare din tuneluri de metrou, intre antene de pe cladiri, reclame la Carrefour, Evian si pateuri semipreparate scaparand in spatiu, apoi revenind pe pamant [...]zburand nevazute peste Ardeni, peste Rin, peste Belgia si Danemarca, peste peisajele pline de cicatrici si mereu in schimbare pe care le numim natiuni. Si chiar atat de greu de crezut ca sufletele umbla pe aceleasi cai? Ca tatal ei, Etienne, Madame Manec si baiatul neamt pe nume Werner Pfennig iau cerul cu asalt in stoluri precum egretele, precum randunelele-de-mare, precum graurii? Ca niste uriase navete pline cu suflete zboara de colo-colo, ba chiar se si aud, chiar daca slab, daca deschizi bine urechile? Zboara peste hornuri, trec peste trotuare, iti strapung haina, bluza, osul pieptului si plamanii, iesind prin partea cealaltă, aerul ca o biblioteca in care reverbereaza inca ecoul tuturor vietilor traite vreodata, al fiecarei fraze rostite, al fiecarui cuvant transmis. [...] Renastem in iarba. In flori. In cantece. ~ Anthony Doerr

247:Did I ever tell you about Asin? She is the wild woman of the woods. It's an old story of the People. My mom used to tell me about Asin. Asin couldn't bear being married or having children or having friends. She always wanted to run wild. She ran wild through the woods. If you saw her running you had to run to water as fast as you could and drink or her restlessness would come into you like a thirst that could never be quenched. She was happy and unhappy. She had wild long hair and she was very tall and she ran like the wind. When you saw dunegrass rippling in a line she was running through it. When the wind changed direction suddenly that was Asin. She was never satisfied or content and so she ran and ran and ran. She would grab men who were fishing alone and make love to them and then throw them down on the ground and run away weeping. She would grab children who wandered too far alone in the woods but she would return them to the same spot after three days and run away again. She would listen to women talking by the fire or working in the village or gathering berries but if they invited her to join them she ran away. You could hear her crying sometimes when the sun went down. She wanted something but she never knew what it was so she had nothing. She was as free as anyone ever could be and she was trapped. When I was young I wanted to be Asin. Many times I wanted to be Asin. So do you, Nora. I know. It's okay. It's alright. My sweet love. Poor Asin. Sometimes I think to be Asin would be the saddest thing in the world. Poor thing. ~ Brian Doyle

248:Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all. ~ Bruce Catton

249:Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue. Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You are unworthy of her. Yes. No. Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination. Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turns skyward. Is this drizzle? It is. Sound of small sheers closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty and here it is, the separation. ~ Lauren Groff

250:Le isole sono diverse. E se l'isola è piccola è ancora più vero. Guardate l'Inghilterra, è quasi inconcepibile che questa stretta distesa di terra sorregga tanta diversità: il cricket, il tè alla panna, Shakespeare, Sheffield, il fish and chips nel giornale imbevuto d'aceto, Soho, Oxford e Cambridge, il lungomare di Southend, le sedie a sdraio con le righe a Green Park, i Beatles e i Rolling Stone, Oxford Street, i pigri pomeriggi domenicali. Tutte contraddizioni, che marciano tutte insieme come dimostranti ubriachi che non si sono ancora resi conto che la principale causa di protesta sono proprio loro. Le isole sono pionieri, gruppi divisi, malcontento, pesci fuor d'acqua, isolazionisti naturali. Come ho detto, diverse. Quest'isola, per esempio. Da un capo all'altro soltanto una corsa in bicicletta. Un uomo che camminasse sull'acqua riuscirebbe a raggiungere la costa in un pomeriggio. L'isola di Le Devin, uno dei molti isolotti intrappolati come granchi nelle secche lungo il litorale della Vandea, oscurata da Noirmoutier dal lato prospiciente la costa, dall'Ile d'Yen a sud; in una giornata nebbiosa si potrebbe non notarla affatto. Le carte la citano a malapena. In effetti non merita quasi lo status di isola, essendo poco più che un grappolo di banchi di sabbia con qualche pretesa, una dorsale rocciosa che la solleva dall'Atlantico, un paio di villaggi, un piccolo stabilimento dove mettono il pesce in scatola, un'unica spiaggia. Al capo estremo, casa mia, Les Salants, una fila di casette, appena sufficienti per chiamarlo paese, distribuite fra rocce e dune verso un mare che guadagna terreno a ogni brutta marea. Casa, il posto da cui non si può fuggire, il posto verso cui ruota la bussola del cuore. ~ Joanne Harris

251:If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details suddenly become part of the ship, and indissolubly fused with it. As I approached, I did not perceive resemblances or proximities which finally came together to form a continuous picture of the upper part of the ship. I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering, that something was imminent in this tension, as a storm is imminent in storm clouds. Suddenly the sight before me was recast in a manner satisfying to my vague expectation. Only afterwards did I recognize, as justifications for the change, the resemblance and contiguity of what I call ‘stimuli’— namely the most determinate phenomena, seen at close quarters and with which I compose the ‘true’ world. ‘How could I have failed to see that these pieces of wood were an integral part of the ship? For they were of the same colour as the ship, and fitted well enough into its superstructure.’ But these reasons for correct perception were not given as reasons beforehand. The unity of the object is based on the foreshadowing of an imminent order which is about to spring upon us a reply to questions merely latent in the landscape. It solves a problem set only in the form of a vague feeling of uneasiness, it organizes elements which up to that moment did not belong to the same universe and which, for that reason, as Kant said with profound insight, could not be associated. By placing them on the same footing, that of the unique object, synopsis makes continuity and resemblance between them possible. An impression can never by itself be associated with another impression. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

252:A beginning is a very delicate time. Know then, that is is the year 10191. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam the Fourth, my father. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. A product of the Spive, the red Sapho juice, stains the lips of the Mentats but allows them to be human computers, as thinking machines have been outlawed. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of the universe without moving. Because the Guild controls all interplanetary travel, they are the highest power in the Universe. The Spice also plays a very secret role in the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, of which I am a part. The sisterhood has been interfering with the marriages, and the children thereof, of the great Houses of the Universe, cleverly intermixing one bloodline with another to form the Kwisatz Haderach, a super being. They plan to control this super being and use his powers for their own selfish purposes. The breeding plan has been carried out in a strict manner for 90 generations. The goal of the super being is in sight. But now, so close to the prize, a Bene Gesserit woman, Jessica, the bound concubine of Duke Leto Atreides, who has been ordered to bear only daughters, has given birth to a son. Oh, yes. I forgot to tell you. The spice exists on only one planet in the entire universe. A desolate, dry planet with vast deserts. Hidden away within the rocks of these deserts are a people known as the Fremen, who have long held a prophecy that a man would come, a messiah, who would lead them to true freedom. The planet is Arrakis, also known as Dune. ~ Frank Herbert

253:The Glory Trumpeter Old Eddie's face, wrinkled with river lights, Looked like a Mississippi man's. The eyes, Derisive and avuncular at once, Swivelling, fixed me. They'd seen Too many wakes, too many cathouse nights. The bony, idle fingers on the valves Of his knee-cradled horn could tear Through 'Georgia on My Mind' or 'Jesus Saves' With the same fury of indifference, If what propelled such frenzy was despair. Now, as the eyes sealed in the ashen flesh, And Eddie, like a deacon at his prayer, Rose, tilting the bright horn, I saw a flash Of gulls and pigeons from the dunes of coal Near my grandmother's barracks near the wharves, I saw the sallow faces of those men Who sighed as if they spoke into their graves About the Negro in America. That was when The Sunday comics sprawled out on her floor, Sent from the States, had a particular odour, A smell of money mingled with man's sweat. And yet, if Eddie's features held our fate, Secure in childhood I did not know then A jesus-ragtime or gut-bucket blues To the bowed heads of the lean, compliant men Back from the states in their funereal serge, Black, rusty Homburgs and limp waiters' ties With honey accents and lard-coloured eyes Was Joshua's ram's horn wailing for the Jews Of patient bitterness or patient siege. Now it was that as Eddie turned his back On our young crowd out feteing, swilling liquor, And blew, eyes closed, one foot up, out to sea, His horned aimed at those cities of the Gulf, Mobile and Galveston and sweetly meted The horn of plenty through a bitter cup, 66 In lonely exaltation blaming me For all whom race and exile have defeated, For my own uncle in America, That living there I could never look up. ~ Derek Walcott

254:Luz studied the mountains ahead, watched the sunset coloring them as the things gone from them: lilac, plum, lavender, orchid, mulberry, violet. Pomegranate, one of the last to go. John Muir had written how when we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Above those spoilt purple mountains materialized a glowing wedge of light, whiter than the sun, thin, blurred, and radiant. Snow, Luz thought, unable to stop herself. She’d seen snow only once, from a train skirting the Italian Alps, but she had never touched it and already she was zigging up there, ramming her fingers into the cool blue bank until they stung, crunching the puffs of sparkling crystals in her teeth, falling backward to make angels in the airy drifts. But there was nothing cool or blue or airy about this calcium-colored crust capping the range. It throbbed with heat, glowed radioactive with light. Luz said, “What is that?” just as the answer came to her. Ray said it. “The dune sea. The Amargosa.” “It’s that close?” They were barely beyond the city. Ray shook his head. “It’s that big.” This knocked Luz off balance: The dune was not atop the empurpled range before them but beyond it, beyond it by miles and miles. The white was not a rind of ice, not a snowcap, but sand piling up inland where the Mojave had been. They watched this sandsnow mirage, hypnotized by fertilizer dust and saline particulate and the pulverized bones of ancient sea creatures, though they did not know it. Did not know but felt this magnetic incandescence working the way the moon did, tugging at the iron in their blood. Knew only that it left them not breathless but with their breaths exactly synchronized. Ray reached for Luz, took her hand as though he’d never before touched her. They went on, silently transfixed by the immaculate flaxen range looming before them. ~ Claire Vaye Watkins

255:How To Accompany The Moon Without Walking Harsh, harsh, the maram grass on the salt dune, seen by the cricket’s eye against the harbor moon, anchor-frost and seaward, the lighthouse moon— the bellbuoy-beating moon, the tiderip bronze ringing above deep channels and old bones, the hawsehole moon, where blood and money runs— foremast and mainmast moon, up harbor still, island and smokestack moon, and the wind-spill falling from the sail-throat for the moon to fill— up harbor, the old wharf moon, the capstan moon, and round it the capstan bars, the heeling tune, India Wharf, we'll bring you to Rio soon— the shipyard moon, the grain-elevator moon, derrick and gantry, and the turbine croon sweet under seafoam as a bird in June— red-warehouse moon, yacht-basin moon, where spars tangle and telegraph with stays and stars— hi ho, the queen of accordions and guitars— ship-chandler moon, sea-boots and Wharf Street shine, the ropewalk moon that spins in turpentine, sail-loft invaded with a pour of silver twine— and high! up spinning! skyscraper tipped on purple! skyscraper moon, and high! for the stare of people— skysign and belltower moon, moon for the steeple— bells breaking bronze, gold, down, the scattered tinkle, silver-bell moon, cornice and rooftop twinkle, Christmas and graveyard moon, the tinsel sprinkle— and dead, the stockyard moon, where blood drips down, dead longhorn and mute snout; the barrelhouse moon, moonmusic doubling, rigadoon, jigadoon— 54 so down, and down, who will be darkened soon, red and green lights, the pallid airport moon— ah! on the flying field, the captive balloon! and cold; for the rim of night, the earth’s black arc, swings up, blots out the stars, to the last spark; while, underworld, the moon drowns dead and dark. ~ Conrad Potter Aiken

256:escape from a First Order spacecraft, and they had done that. Not that it would matter if he was found here, wandering alive among the dunes. Of one thing he was certain: His former colleagues would not understand, no matter how hard he tried to explain. No one fled the First Order and lived. The sand sucked at his feet as he stumbled toward the rising smoke. “Poe! Say something if you can hear me! Poe!” He did not expect a response, but he hoped for one. Flame had joined smoke in enveloping the wreck of the TIE fighter. Built more robustly than the typical ship of its class, the Special Forces craft had survived the crash landing, although hardly intact. Debris from the impact was scattered over a wide area. Careful not to cut himself on twisted shards of metal and still-hot composite, he pushed through the heat and haze until he reached the cockpit. It lay crushed and open to the desert air. Trying to shield his eyes against the smoke, Finn moved in closer. Something—there was something sticking out of the wreckage. An arm. Ignoring the heat and the licking flames, Finn reached in until he could get a grip on it. First one hand, then both, then pull—and it came free in his hands. No arm, no body: just Poe’s jacket. Frustrated, he threw it aside and tried to enter the ruined cockpit. Increasing smoke and heat made it impossible for him to even see, much less work his way inside. “Poe!” He felt his legs start to go out from under him. But they hadn’t buckled; the ground had. Looking down, he saw sand beginning to slide beneath him. His feet were already half covered. He was sinking. In front of him, the ruins of the ship began to slide into the hollow in which it had come to rest. Sand was crawling up the wings and reaching for the open cockpit. If he didn’t get away from the quicksand, it was clear he was going to join the TIE fighter in premature internment. He began backpedaling frantically, yelling at the disappearing vessel. “POE!” Going. Down, down into the sand, to a depth that could not be ~ Alan Dean Foster

257:A few years ago, Ed and I were exploring the dunes on Cumberland Island, one of the barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and the mainland of south Georgia. He was looking for the fossilized teeth of long-dead sharks. I was looking for sand spurs so that I did not step on one. This meant that neither of us was looking very far past our own feet, so the huge loggerhead turtle took us both by surprise. She was still alive but just barely, her shell hot to the touch from the noonday sun. We both knew what had happened. She had come ashore during the night to lay her eggs, and when she had finished, she had looked around for the brightest horizon to lead her back to the sea. Mistaking the distant lights on the mainland for the sky reflected on the ocean, she went the wrong way. Judging by her tracks, she had dragged herself through the sand until her flippers were buried and she could go no farther. We found her where she had given up, half cooked by the sun but still able to turn one eye up to look at us when we bent over her. I buried her in cool sand while Ed ran to the ranger station. An hour later she was on her back with tire chains around her front legs, being dragged behind a park service Jeep back toward the ocean. The dunes were so deep that her mouth filled with sand as she went. Her head bent so far underneath her that I feared her neck would break. Finally the Jeep stopped at the edge of the water. Ed and I helped the ranger unchain her and flip her back over. Then all three of us watched as she lay motionless in the surf. Every wave brought her life back to her, washing the sand from her eyes and making her shell shine again. When a particularly large one broke over her, she lifted her head and tried her back legs. The next wave made her light enough to find a foothold, and she pushed off, back into the water that was her home. Watching her swim slowly away after her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

258:It was a damned near-run thing, I must admit,' said Jack, modestly; then after a pause he laughed and said, 'I remember your using those very words in the old Bellerophon, before we had our battle.' 'So I did,' cried Dundas. 'So I did. Lord, that was a great while ago.' 'I still bear the scar,' said Jack. He pushed up his sleeve, and there on his brown forearm was a long white line. 'How it comes back,' said Dundas; and between them, drinking port, they retold the tale, with minute details coming fresh to their minds. As youngsters, under the charge of the gunner of the Bellerophon, 74, in the West Indies, they had played the same game. Jack, with his infernal luck, had won on that occasion too: Dundas claimed his revenge, and lost again, again on a throw of double six. Harsh words, such as cheat, liar, sodomite, booby and God-damned lubber flew about; and since fighting over a chest, the usual way of settling such disagreements in many ships, was strictly forbidden in the Bellemphon, it was agreed that as gentlemen could not possibly tolerate such language they should fight a duel. During the afternoon watch the first lieutenant, who dearly loved a white-scoured deck, found that the ship was almost out of the best kind of sand, and he sent Mr Aubrey away in the blue cutter to fetch some from an island at the convergence of two currents where the finest and most even grain was found. Mr Dundas accompanied him, carrying two newly sharpened cutlasses in a sailcloth parcel, and when the hands had been set to work with shovels the two little boys retired behind a dune, unwrapped the parcel, saluted gravely, and set about each other. Half a dozen passes, the blades clashing, and when Jack cried out 'Oh Hen, what have you done?' Dundas gazed for a moment at the spurting blood, burst into tears, whipped off his shirt and bound up the wound as best he could. When they crept aboard a most unfortunately idle, becalmed and staring Bellerophon, their explanations, widely different and in both cases so weak that they could not be attempted to be believed, were brushed aside, and their captain flogged them severely on the bare breech. 'How we howled,' said Dundas. 'You were shriller than I was,' said Jack. 'Very like a hyena. ~ Patrick O Brian

259:Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark. You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call 'le bapteme de solitude.' It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears...A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintergration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came. ...Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price. ~ Paul Bowles

260:Galen doesn’t get truly nervous until he senses the size of the Syrena mass coming toward them. Up until this point, he’d been worried about Emma. What she thought about all this. Her mother’s reunion with Grom. What she planned to do while they were gone. Whether or not she was going to keep her promise and stay out of the water. And…his thoughts keep wandering back to their kiss between the sand dunes. It was an exquisite torture, the way she tasted like a mixture of salt water and herself. A combination of two things he’s come to cherish. Water and land. Syrena world and human world. Love for his kind and love for Emma. Only now, as the party of Syrena approaches, its presence seems to encroach on Galen’s options. For some reason, it feels like a choice between water or land, Syrena world or human world, love for his kind or love for Emma. According to the law, there never was a choice. But that was before Emma. And Galen has the feeling that the time for truly deciding between the two is closing in on him. But haven’t I already made that decision? He steals a glance at Toraf, who’s been wearing the same grim expression since they left Emma’s house. Toraf is never grim. Since they were fingerlings, he’s always had a special talent for finding the positive in a situation, and if not the positive, then he can certainly find mischief in a situation. But not now. Now he’s keeping to himself. Toraf never keeps to himself. Even Grom, the usual sealed-up clam, has become boisterous and enlivened while he and Nalia chatter to each other, laughing and whispering and holding hands, all the while speculating over the events that separated them so long ago. But Toraf seems oblivious to the chatter and to Galen’s internal war of emotions and to the swarm of jellyfish he just narrowly avoided. Galen had thought Toraf might have been anxious about leaving Rayna behind. Usually, though, he comforts himself by talking about her until Galen wishes he’d had a twin brother instead of a twin sister. No, what’s troubling Toraf has nothing to do with leaving Rayna behind. He even persuaded her to stay. Which means he thinks it’s safer for her on land right now. Toraf’s motives are always simple: do what’s best for Rayna, in spite of Rayna. ~ Anna Banks

261:I DON'T WANT to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately-that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there-some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers-well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out-maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out-such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party. ~ Joy Williams

262:The Wanderer To see the clouds his spirit yearned toward so Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves, Back of old-storied spires and architraves To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut, And roused by street-cries in strange tongues when day Flooded with gold some domed metropolis, Between new towers to waken and new bliss Spread on his pillow in a wondrous way: These were his joys. Oft under bulging crates, Coming to market with his morning load, The peasant found him early on his road To greet the sunrise at the city-gates,--There where the meadows waken in its rays, Golden with mist, and the great roads commence, And backward, where the chimney-tops are dense, Cathedral-arches glimmer through the haze. White dunes that breaking show a strip of sea, A plowman and his team against the blue Swiss pastures musical with cowbells, too, And poplar-lined canals in Picardie, And coast-towns where the vultures back and forth Sail in the clear depths of the tropic sky, And swallows in the sunset where they fly Over gray Gothic cities in the north, And the wine-cellar and the chorus there, The dance-hall and a face among the crowd,--Were all delights that made him sing aloud For joy to sojourn in a world so fair. Back of his footsteps as he journeyed fell Range after range; ahead blue hills emerged. Before him tireless to applaud it surged The sweet interminable spectacle. 120 And like the west behind a sundown sea Shone the past joys his memory retraced, And bright as the blue east he always faced Beckoned the loves and joys that were to be. From every branch a blossom for his brow He gathered, singing down Life's flower-lined road, And youth impelled his spirit as he strode Like winged Victory on the galley's prow. That Loveliness whose being sun and star, Green Earth and dawn and amber evening robe, That lamp whereof the opalescent globe The season's emulative splendors are, That veiled divinity whose beams transpire From every pore of universal space, As the fair soul illumes the lovely face--That was his guest, his passion, his desire. His heart the love of Beauty held as hides One gem most pure a casket of pure gold. It was too rich a lesser thing to bold; It was not large enough for aught besides. ~ Alan Seeger

263:As soon as she releases me, Galen grabs my hand and I don’t even have time to gasp before he snatches me to the surface and pulls me toward shore, only pausing to dislodge his pair of swimming trunks from under his favorite rock, where he had just moments before taken the time to hide them. I know the routine and turn away so he can change, but it seems like no time before he hauls me onto the beach and drags me to the sand dunes in front of my house. “What are we doing?” I ask. His legs are longer than mine so for every two of his strides I have to take three, which feels a lot like running. He stops us in between the dunes. “I’m doing something that is none of anyone else’s business.” Then he jerks me up against him and crushes his mouth on mine. And I see why he didn’t want an audience for this kiss. I wouldn’t want an audience for this kiss, either, especially if the audience included my mother. This is our first kiss after he announced that he wanted me for his mate. This kiss holds promises of things to come. When he pulls away I feel drunk and excited and nervous and filled with a craving that I’m not sure can ever be satisfied. And Galen looks startled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “That makes it about fifty times harder to leave, I think.” He tucks my head under his chin and I wrap my arms around him until both our breathing returns to normal. I take the time to soak in his scent, his warmth, the hard contours of his-well, his everything. It’s really not fair that he has to leave when he’s only just gotten back. We didn’t have much time to talk on the way back home. We haven’t had much time for anything. “Emma,” he murmurs. “The water isn’t safe for you right now. Please don’t get in it. Please.” “I won’t.” I really won’t. He said please, after all. He lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. His eyes hold all the gentleness and love in the world, with a pinch of mischief. “And take good notes in calculus, or I’ll be forced to cheat off you and for some weird reason that makes me feel guilty.” I wonder what Grom the Triton king would think of that. That Galen basically just stated his intention to keep doing human things. Galen pushes his lips against my forehead, then disentangles himself from me and leads me back toward the water. My body feels ten degrees cooler when his arms fall, and it’s got nothing to do with the temperature outside. We reach the others just in time to see Rayna all but throw herself at Toraf. I can’t help but smile as they kiss. It’s like watching Beauty and the Beast. And Toraf’s not the Beast. ~ Anna Banks

264:Egypt, Tobago There is a shattered palm on this fierce shore, its plumes the rusting helmet of a dead warrior. Numb Antony, in the torpor stretching her inert sex near him like a sleeping cat, knows his heart is the real desert. Over the dunes of her heaving, to his heart's drumming fades the mirage of the legions, across love-tousled sheets, the triremes fading. Ar the carved door of her temple a fly wrings its message. He brushes a damp hair away from an ear as perfect as a sleeping child's. He stares, inert, the fallen column. He lies like a copper palm tree at three in the afternoon by a hot sea and a river, in Egypt, Tobago Her salt marsh dries in the heat where he foundered without armor. He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat, the uproar of arenas, the changing surf of senators, for this silent ceiling over silent sand - 16 this grizzled bear, whose fur, moulting, is silvered for this quick fox with her sweet stench. By sleep dismembered, his head is in Egypt, his feet in Rome, his groin a desert trench with its dead soldier. He drifts a finger through her stiff hair crisp as a mare's fountaining tail. Shadows creep up the palace tile. He is too tired to move; a groan would waken trumpets, one more gesture war. His glare, a shield reflecting fires, a brass brow that cannot frown at carnage, sweats the sun's force. It is not the turmoil of autumnal lust, its treacheries, that drove him, fired and grimed with dust, this far, not even love, but a great rage without clamor, that grew great because its depth is quiet; it hears the river of her young brown blood, it feels the whole sky quiver with her blue eyelid. She sleeps with the soft engine of a child, 17 that sleep which scythes the stalks of lances, fells the harvest of legions with nothing for its knives, that makes Caesars, sputtering at flies, slapping their foreheads with the laurel's imprint, drunkards, comedians. All-humbling sleep, whose peace is sweet as death, whose silence has all the sea's weight and volubility, who swings this globe by a hair's trembling breath. Shattered and wild and palm-crowned Antony, rusting in Egypt, ready to lose the world, to Actium and sand, everything else is vanity, but this tenderness for a woman not his mistress but his sleeping child. The sky is cloudless. The afternoon is mild. ~ Derek Walcott

265:The Blue One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It's years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile. • If his daughter spooled out the fabric she's chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land's scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan's Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean, a mile or so off, anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling: "This is it. Here! This is it!" his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive. • In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith's Blue ~ Camille T Dungy

266:Haze KEEP a red heart of memories Under the great gray rain sheds of the sky, Under the open sun and the yellow gloaming embers. Remember all paydays of lilacs and songbirds; All starlights of cool memories on storm paths. Out of this prairie rise the faces of dead men. They speak to me. I can not tell you what they say. Other faces rise on the prairie. They are the unborn. The future. Yesterday and to-morrow cross and mix on the skyline The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets. One waits. In the yellow dust of sunsets, in the meadows of vermilion eight o'clock June nights ... the dead men and the unborn children speak to me ... I can not tell you what they say ... you listen and you know. I don't care who you are, man: I know a woman is looking for you and her soul is a corn-tassel kissing a south-west wind. (The farm-boy whose face is the color of brick-dust, is calling the cows; he will form the letter X with crossed streams of milk from the teats; he will beat a tattoo on the bottom of a tin pail with X's of milk.) I don't care who you are, man: I know sons and daughters looking for you And they are gray dust working toward star paths And you see them from a garret window when you laugh At your luck and murmur, 'I don't care.' I don't care who you are, woman: I know a man is looking for you And his soul is a south-west wind kissing a corn-tassel. (The kitchen girl on the farm is throwing oats to the chickens and the buff of their feathers says hello to the sunset's late maroon.) 179 I don't care who you are, woman: I know sons and daughters looking for you And they are next year's wheat or the year after hidden in the dark and loam. My love is a yellow hammer spinning circles in Ohio, Indiana. My love is a redbird shooting flights in straight lines in Kentucky and Tennessee. My love is an early robin flaming an ember of copper on her shoulders in March and April. My love is a graybird living in the eaves of a Michigan house all winter. Why is my love always a crying thing of wings? On the Indiana dunes, in the Mississippi marshes, I have asked: Is it only a fishbone on the beach? Is it only a dog's jaw or a horse's skull whitening in the sun? Is the red heart of man only ashes? Is the flame of it all a white light switched off and the power house wires cut? Why do the prairie roses answer every summer? Why do the changing repeating rains come back out of the salt sea wind-blown? Why do the stars keep their tracks? Why do the cradles of the sky rock new babies? ~ Carl Sandburg

267:The Four Queens (Maoriland) Wellington. HERE, where the surges of a world of sea Break on our bastioned walls with league-long sweep, Four fair young queens their lonely splendour keep, Each in a city throned. The first is she Whose face is arrogant with empery; Her throne from out the wounded hill-side steep Is rudely fashioned, and beneath her creep The narrow streets; and, stretching broad and free, Like a green-waving meadow, lies the bay, With blossom-sails and flower-wavelots flecked. Elate she stands; her brown and windblown hair Haloes a face with virgin freshness fair, As she receives, exuberant, erect, The stubborn homage that her sisters pay. Dunedin. And one is fair and winsome, and her face Is strung with winter's kisses, and is yet With winter's tears of parting sorrow wet; And all her figure speaks of bonny grace. High on the circling hills her seat has place, Within a bower of the green bush set; And 'neath her feet the city slopes—a net Of broad-büilt streets and green-girt garden space. Above her high the suburbs climb to crown Her city's battlements; and in her thrall Lie sleeping fiords, and forests call her queen. About her waist she winds a belt of green, And on her gleaming city looking down, She hears the Siren South for ever call. Christchurch. And one within a level city lies; To whose tree-shaded streets and squares succeed; A vista of white roads and bordering meads, Until each suburb in the great plain dies. 86 The clustering spires to crown her fair head rise, And for a girdle round her form she leads The Avon, green with waving river-weeds And swept with swaying willows. And her eyes Are quiet with a student's reverie; And in the hair that clouds her dreaming face There lurks the fragrance of some older place, And memories awake to die again, As, confident and careless, glad and sorrow-free She waits, queen of the margeless golden plain. Auckland. Set all about with walls, the last fair queen Over a tropic city holds her sway; Her throne on sleeping Eden, whence through grey And red-strewn roads and gleaming gardens green The city wanders on, and seems to lean To bathe her beauty in the cool, clear bay, That out past isle and islet winds its way To the wide ocean. In her hair a sheen Of sunlight lives; her face is sweetly pale— A queen who seems too young and maidenly, Her beauty all too delicate and frail, To hold a sway imperious. But forth From deep, dark eyes, that dreaming seem to be, There shine the strength and passion of the North. ~ Arthur Henry Adams

268:The Braes O'Yarrow Late at e'en, drinking the wine, And ere they paid the lawing, They set a combat them between, To fight it in the dawing. 'What though ye be my sister's lord We'll cross our swords to-morrow.' 'What though my wife your sister be, I'll meet ye then on Yarrow.' 'O stay at hame, my ain gude lord! O stay, my ain dear marrow! My cruel brither will you betray On the dowie banks of Yarrow.' 'O fare ye weel, my lady dear! And put aside your sorrow; For if I gae, I'll sune return Frae the bonny banks o' Yarrow.' She kiss'd his cheek, she kaimed his hair, As oft she'd done before, O; She belted him with his gude brand, And he's awa' to Yarrow. When he gaed up the Tennies bank, As he gaed mony a morrow, Nine armed men lay in a den On the dowie braes o' Yarrow. 'O come ye here to hunt or hawk The bonny Forest thorough? Or come ye here to wield your brand Upon the banks o' Yarrow?' 'I come not here to hunt or hawk As oft I've dune before, O, But I come here to wield my brand Upon the banks o' Yarrow. 257 'If ye attack me nine to ane, That God may send ye sorrow!-Yet will I fight while stand I may, On the bonny banks o' Yarrow.' Two has he hurt, and three has slain, On the bloody braes o' Yarrow; But the stubborn knight crept in behind, And pierced his body thorough. 'Gae hame, gae hame, you brither John, And tell your sister sorrow,-To come and lift her leafu' lord On the dowie banks o' Yarrow.' Her brither John gaed ower the hill, As oft he'd dune before, O; There he met his sister dear, Cam' rinnin' fast to Yarrow. 'I dreamt a dream last night,' she says, 'I wish it binna sorrow; I dreamt I pu'd the heather green Wi' my true love on Yarrow.' 'I'll read your dream, sister,' he says, 'I'll read it into sorrow; Ye're bidden go take up your love, He's sleeping sound on Yarrow.' She's torn the ribbons frae her head That were baith braid and narrow; She's kilted up her lang claithing, And she's awa' to Yarrow. She's ta'en him in her arms twa, And gi'en him kisses thorough; She sought to bind his many wounds, But he lay dead on Yarrow. 'O haud your tongue,' her father says, 258 'And let be a' your sorrow; I'll wed you to a better lord Than him you lost on Yarrow.' 'O haud your tongue, father,' she says, 'Far warse ye make my sorrow; A better lord could never be Than him that lies on Yarrow.' She kiss'd his lips, she kaimed his hair, As aft she'd dune before, O; And there with grief her heart did break Upon the banks o' Yarrow. ~ Anonymous

269:The Braes O' Yarrow Late at e'en, drinking the wine, And ere they paid the lawing, They set a combat them between, To fight it in the dawing. 'What though ye be my sister's lord We'll cross our swords to-morrow.' 'What though my wife your sister be, I'll meet ye then on Yarrow.' 'O stay at hame, my ain gude lord! O stay, my ain dear marrow! My cruel brither will you betray On the dowie banks of Yarrow.' 'O fare ye weel, my lady dear! And put aside your sorrow; For if I gae, I'll sune return Frae the bonny banks o' Yarrow.' She kiss'd his cheek, she kaimed his hair, As oft she'd done before, O; She belted him with his gude brand, And he's awa' to Yarrow. When he gaed up the Tennies bank, As he gaed mony a morrow, Nine armed men lay in a den On the dowie braes o' Yarrow. 'O come ye here to hunt or hawk The bonny Forest thorough? Or come ye here to wield your brand Upon the banks o' Yarrow?' 'I come not here to hunt or hawk As oft I've dune before, O, But I come here to wield my brand Upon the banks o' Yarrow. 'If ye attack me nine to ane, 303 That God may send ye sorrow!-Yet will I fight while stand I may, On the bonny banks o' Yarrow.' Two has he hurt, and three has slain, On the bloody braes o' Yarrow; But the stubborn knight crept in behind, And pierced his body thorough. 'Gae hame, gae hame, you brither John, And tell your sister sorrow,-To come and lift her leafu' lord On the dowie banks o' Yarrow.' Her brither John gaed ower the hill, As oft he'd dune before, O; There he met his sister dear, Cam' rinnin' fast to Yarrow. 'I dreamt a dream last night,' she says, 'I wish it binna sorrow; I dreamt I pu'd the heather green Wi' my true love on Yarrow.' 'I'll read your dream, sister,' he says, 'I'll read it into sorrow; Ye're bidden go take up your love, He's sleeping sound on Yarrow.' She's torn the ribbons frae her head That were baith braid and narrow; She's kilted up her lang claithing, And she's awa' to Yarrow. She's ta'en him in her arms twa, And gi'en him kisses thorough; She sought to bind his many wounds, But he lay dead on Yarrow. 'O haud your tongue,' her father says, 'And let be a' your sorrow; I'll wed you to a better lord 304 Than him you lost on Yarrow.' 'O haud your tongue, father,' she says, 'Far warse ye make my sorrow; A better lord could never be Than him that lies on Yarrow.' She kiss'd his lips, she kaimed his hair, As aft she'd dune before, O; And there with grief her heart did break Upon the banks o' Yarrow. ~ Anonymous Americas

270:The Braes O' Yarrow Late at e'en, drinking the wine, And ere they paid the lawing, They set a combat them between, To fight it in the dawing. 'What though ye be my sister's lord We'll cross our swords to-morrow.' 'What though my wife your sister be, I'll meet ye then on Yarrow.' 'O stay at hame, my ain gude lord! O stay, my ain dear marrow! My cruel brither will you betray On the dowie banks of Yarrow.' 'O fare ye weel, my lady dear! And put aside your sorrow; For if I gae, I'll sune return Frae the bonny banks o' Yarrow.' She kiss'd his cheek, she kaimed his hair, As oft she'd done before, O; She belted him with his gude brand, And he's awa' to Yarrow. When he gaed up the Tennies bank, As he gaed mony a morrow, Nine armed men lay in a den On the dowie braes o' Yarrow. 'O come ye here to hunt or hawk The bonny Forest thorough? Or come ye here to wield your brand Upon the banks o' Yarrow?' 'I come not here to hunt or hawk As oft I've dune before, O, But I come here to wield my brand Upon the banks o' Yarrow. 'If ye attack me nine to ane, 737 That God may send ye sorrow!Yet will I fight while stand I may, On the bonny banks o' Yarrow.' Two has he hurt, and three has slain, On the bloody braes o' Yarrow; But the stubborn knight crept in behind, And pierced his body thorough. 'Gae hame, gae hame, you brither John, And tell your sister sorrow,To come and lift her leafu' lord On the dowie banks o' Yarrow.' Her brither John gaed ower the hill, As oft he'd dune before, O; There he met his sister dear, Cam' rinnin' fast to Yarrow. 'I dreamt a dream last night,' she says, 'I wish it binna sorrow; I dreamt I pu'd the heather green Wi' my true love on Yarrow.' 'I'll read your dream, sister,' he says, 'I'll read it into sorrow; Ye're bidden go take up your love, He's sleeping sound on Yarrow.' She's torn the ribbons frae her head That were baith braid and narrow; She's kilted up her lang claithing, And she's awa' to Yarrow. She's ta'en him in her arms twa, And gi'en him kisses thorough; She sought to bind his many wounds, But he lay dead on Yarrow. 'O haud your tongue,' her father says, 'And let be a' your sorrow; I'll wed you to a better lord 738 Than him you lost on Yarrow.' 'O haud your tongue, father,' she says, 'Far warse ye make my sorrow; A better lord could never be Than him that lies on Yarrow.' She kiss'd his lips, she kaimed his hair, As aft she'd dune before, O; And there with grief her heart did break Upon the banks o' Yarrow. ~ Anonymous Olde English

271:The End Of March For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist. The sky was darker than the water --it was the color of mutton-fat jade. Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed a track of big dog-prints (so big they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string, looping up to the tide-line, down to the water, over and over. Finally, they did end: a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, rising on every wave, a sodden ghost, falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost... A kite string?--But no kite. I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of--are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.) I'd like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars, read boring books, 107 old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light. At night, a grog a l'américaine. I'd blaze it with a kitchen match and lovely diaphanous blue flame would waver, doubled in the window. There must be a stove; there is a chimney, askew, but braced with wires, and electricity, possibly --at least, at the back another wire limply leashes the whole affair to something off behind the dunes. A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible. And that day the wind was much too cold even to get that far, and of course the house was boarded up. On the way back our faces froze on the other side. The sun came out for just a minute. For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand, the drab, damp, scattered stones were multi-colored, and all those high enough threw out long shadows, individual shadows, then pulled them in again. They could have been teasing the lion sun, except that now he was behind them --a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide, making those big, majestic paw-prints, who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with. ~ Elizabeth Bishop

272:But these things that Rome had to give, are they not good things?” Marcus demanded. “Justice, and order, and good roads; worth having, surely?” “These be all good things,” Esca agreed. “But the price is too high.” “The price? Freedom?” “Yes—and other things than freedom.” “What other things? Tell me, Esca; I want to know. I want to understand.” Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. “Look at the pattern embossed here on your dagger-sheath,” he said at last. “See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.” Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. “Go on.” Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside at Cottia’s coming. “Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heaven and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to—if they ever had it.” He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. “You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.” “The sheath was made by a British craftsman,” Marcus said stubbornly. “I bought it at Anderida when I first landed.” “By a British craftsman, yes, making a Roman pattern. One who had lived so long under the wings of Rome—he and his fathers before him—that he had forgotten the ways and the spirit of his own people.” He laid the shield down again. “You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own.” For a while they were silent, watching Cub at his beetle-hunting. Then Marcus said, “When I came out from home, a year and a half ago, it all seemed so simple.” His gaze dropped again to the buckler on the bench beside him, seeing the strange, swelling curves of the boss with new eyes. Esca had chosen his symbol well, he thought: between the formal pattern on his dagger-sheath and the formless yet potent beauty of the shield-boss lay all the distance that could lie between two worlds. And yet between individual people, people like Esca, and Marcus, and Cottia, the distance narrowed so that you could reach across it, one to another, so that it ceased to matter. ~ Rosemary Sutcliff

273:The man was naked. He was all bones and ribs and snarling mouth. The front of him was caked in blood, a smear of charcoal black in the dim red glow of Palmer’s dive light. There was just a flash of this grisly image before the man crashed into Palmer, knocking him to the ground, desperate hands clenching around his throat. Palmer saw pops of bright light as his head hit the floor. He couldn’t breathe. He heard his own gurgles mix with the raspy hisses from the man on top of him. A madman. A thin, half-starved, and full-crazed madman. Palmer fought for a breath. His visor was knocked from his head. Letting go of the man’s wrists, he reached for his dive knife, but his leg was pinned, his boot too far away. He pawed behind himself and felt his visor, had some insane plan of getting it to his temples, getting his suit powered on, overloading the air around him, trying to shake the man off. But as his fingers closed on the hard plastic—and as the darkness squeezed in around his vision—he instead swung the visor at the snarling man’s face, a final act before the door to that king’s crypt sealed shut on him. A piercing shriek returned Palmer to his senses. Or it was the hands coming off his neck? The naked man howled and lunged again, but Palmer got a boot up, caught the man in the chest, kicked him. He scrambled backward while the man reeled. The other diver. Brock’s diver. Palmer turned and crawled on his hands and knees to get distance, got around a desk, moving as fast as he could, heart pounding. Two divers. There had been two divers. He waited for the man’s partner to jump onto his back, for the two men to beat him to death for his belly full of jangling coin— —when he bumped into the other diver. And saw by his dive light that he was no threat. And the bib of gore on the man chasing him was given sudden meaning. Palmer crawled away, sickened. He wondered how long the men had been down here, how long one had been eating the other. Hands fell onto his boots and yanked him, dragging him backward. A reedy voice yelled for him to be still. And then he felt a tug as his dive knife was pulled from its sheath, stolen. Palmer spun onto his back to defend himself. His own knife flashed above him traitorously, was brought down by those bone-thin arms, was meant to skewer him. There was a crunch against his belly. A painful blow. The air came out of Palmer. The blade was raised to strike him again, but there was no blood. His poor life had been saved by a fistful of coin. Palmer brought up his knee as the man struck again—and shin met forearm with a crack. A howl, and the knife was dropped. Palmer fumbled for it, his dive light throwing the world into pale reds and deep shadows. Hand on the hilt, his knife reclaimed, he slashed at the air, and the man fell back, hands up, shouting, “Please, please!” Palmer scooted away, keeping the knife in front of him. He was weak from fitful sleep and lack of food, but this poor creature before him seemed even weaker. Enraged and with the element of surprise, the man had nearly killed him, but it had been like fighting off a homeless dune-sleeper who had jumped him for some morsel of bread. Palmer dared to turn his dive light up so he could see the man better. “Sorry. I’m sorry,” the man said. “Thought you were a ghost.” The ~ Hugh Howey

274:Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in. ~ Michael Cunningham

275:I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it. ~ Tim Cahill

276:The House Of Dust: Part 04: 05: The Bitter Love-Song No, I shall not say why it is that I love you— Why do you ask me, save for vanity? Surely you would not have me, like a mirror, Say 'yes,—your hair curls darkly back from the temples, Your mouth has a humorous, tremulous, half-shy sweetness, Your eyes are April grey. . . .with jonquils in them?' No, if I tell at all, I shall tell in silence . . . I'll say—my childhood broke through chords of music Or were they chords of sun?—wherein fell shadows, Or silences; I rose through seas of sunlight; Or sometimes found a darkness stooped above me With wings of death, and a face of cold clear beauty. . I lay in the warm sweet grass on a blue May morning, My chin in a dandelion, my hands in clover, And drowsed there like a bee. . . .blue days behind me Stretched like a chain of deep blue pools of magic, Enchanted, silent, timeless. . . .days before me Murmured of blue-sea mornings, noons of gold, Green evenings streaked with lilac, bee-starred nights. Confused soft clouds of music fled above me. Sharp shafts of music dazzled my eyes and pierced me. I ran and turned and spun and danced in the sunlight, Shrank, sometimes, from the freezing silence of beauty, Or crept once more to the warm white cave of sleep. No, I shall not say 'this is why I praise you— Because you say such wise things, or such foolish. . .' You would not have me say what you know better? Let me instead be silent, only saying—: My childhood lives in me—or half-lives, rather— And, if I close my eyes cool chords of music Flow up to me . . . long chords of wind and sunlight. . . . Shadows of intricate vines on sunlit walls, Deep bells beating, with aeons of blue between them, Grass blades leagues apart with worlds between them, Walls rushing up to heaven with stars upon them. . . I lay in my bed and through the tall night window Saw the green lightning plunging among the clouds, 293 And heard the harsh rain storm at the panes and roof. . . . How should I know—how should I now remember— What half-dreamed great wings curved and sang above me? What wings like swords? What eyes with the dread night in them? This I shall say.—I lay by the hot white sand-dunes. . Small yellow flowers, sapless and squat and spiny, Stared at the sky. And silently there above us Day after day, beyond our dreams and knowledge, Presences swept, and over us streamed their shadows, Swift and blue, or dark. . . .What did they mean? What sinister threat of power? What hint of beauty? Prelude to what gigantic music, or subtle? Only I know these things leaned over me, Brooded upon me, paused, went flowing softly, Glided and passed. I loved, I desired, I hated, I struggled, I yielded and loved, was warmed to blossom . . . You, when your eyes have evening sunlight in them, Set these dunes before me, these salt bright flowers, These presences. . . .I drowse, they stream above me, I struggle, I yield and love, I am warmed to dream. You are the window (if I could tell I'd tell you) Through which I see a clear far world of sunlight. You are the silence (if you could hear you'd hear me) In which I remember a thin still whisper of singing. It is not you I laugh for, you I touch! My hands, that touch you, suddenly touch white cobwebs, Coldly silvered, heavily silvered with dewdrops; And clover, heavy with rain; and cold green grass. . . ~ Conrad Potter Aiken

277:Senlin: His Cloudy Destiny Senlin sat before us and we heard him. He smoked his pipe before us and we saw him. Was he small, with reddish hair, Did he light his pipe with a meditative stare And a twinkling flame reflected in blue eyes? 'I am alone': said Senlin; 'in a forest of leaves The single leaf that creeps and falls. The single blade of grass in a desert of grass That none foresaw and none recalls. The single shell that a green wave shatters In tiny specks of whiteness on brown sands . . . How shall you understand me with your hearts, Who cannot reach me with your hands? . . .' The city dissolves about us, and its walls Are the sands beside a sea. We plunge in a chaos of dunes, white waves before us Crash on kelp tumultuously, Gulls wheel over foam, the clouds blow tattered, The sun is swallowed . . . Has Senlin become a shore? Is Senlin a grain of sand beneath our footsteps, A speck of shell upon which waves will roar? . . . Senlin! we cry . . . Senlin! again . . . no answer, Only the crash of sea on a shell-white shore. Yet, we would say, this is no shore at all, But a small bright room with lamplight on the wall; And the familiar chair Where Senlin sat, with lamplight on his hair. Senlin, alone before us, played a music. Was it himself he played? . . . We sat and listened, Perplexed and pleased and tired. 'Listen!' he said, 'and you will learn a secret-Though it is not the secret you desired. 115 I have not found a meaning that will praise you! Out of the heart of silence comes this music, Quietly speaks and dies. Look! there is one white star above black houses! And a tiny man who climbs toward the skies! Where does he walk to? What does he leave behind him? What was his foolish name? What did he stop to say, before he left you As simply as he came? "Death?" did it sound like, "love and god, and laughter, Sunlight, and work, and pain . . .?" No--it appears to me that these were symbols Of simple truths he found no way to explain. He spoke, but found you could not understand him-You were alone, and he was alone. "He sought to touch you, and found he could not reach you,-He sought to understand you, and could not hear you. And so this music, which I play before you,-Does it mean only what it seems to mean? Or is it a dance of foolish waves in sunlight Above a desperate depth of things unseen? Listen! Do you not hear the singing voices Out of the darkness of this sea? But no: you cannot hear them; for if you heard them You would have heard and captured me. Yet I am here, talking of laughter. Laughter and love and work and god; As I shall talk of these same things hereafter In wave and sod. Walk on a hill and call me: "Senlin! . . . Senlin! . . ." Will I not answer you as clearly as now? Listen to rain, and you will hear me speaking. Look for my heart in the breaking of a bough . . .' Senlin stood before us in the sunlight, And laughed, and walked away. Did no one see him leaving the doors of the city, Looking behind him, as if he wished to stay? Has no one, in the forests of the evening, 116 Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown? For somewhere, in the worlds-in-worlds about us, He changes still, unfriended and alone. Is he the star on which we walk at daybreak, The light that blinds our eyes? 'Senlin!' we cry. 'Senlin!' again . . . no answer: Only the soulless brilliance of blue skies. Yet we would say, this was no man at all, But a dream we dreamed, and vividly recall; And we are mad to walk in wind and rain Hoping to find, somewhere, that dream again. ~ Conrad Potter Aiken

278:The Broomfield Hill There was a knight and lady bright Set trysts amo the broom, The one to come at morning eav, The other at afternoon. 'I'll wager a wager wi' you,' he said, 'An hundred marks and ten, That ye shall not go to Broomfield Hills, Return a maiden again.' 'I'll wager a wager wi' you,' she said, 'A hundred pounds and ten, That I will gang to Broomfield Hills, A maiden return again.' The lady stands in her bower door, And thus she made her mane: 'Oh, shall I gang to Broomfield Hills, Or shall I stay at hame? 'If I do gang to Broomfield Hills A maid I'll not return; But if I stay from Broomfield Hills, I'll be a maid mis-sworn.' Then out it speaks an auld witch wife, Sat in the bower aboon: 'O ye shall gang to Broomfield Hills, Ye shall not stay at hame. 'But when ye gang to Broomfield Hills, Walk nine times round and round; Down below a bonny burn bank, Ye'll find your love sleeping sound. 'Ye'll pu the bloom frae off the broom, Strew't at his head and feet, And aye the thicker that ye do strew, The sounder he will sleep. 207 'The broach that is on your napkin, Put it on his breast bane, To let him know, when he does wake, That's true love's come and gane. 'The rings that are on your fingers, Lay them down on a stane, To let him know, when he does wake, That's true love's come and gane. 'And when he hae your work all done, Ye'll gang to a bush o' broom, And then you'll hear what he will say, When he sees ye are gane.' When she came to Broomfield Hills, She walked it nine times round, And down below yon burn bank, She found him sleeping sound. She pu'd the bloom frae off the broom, Strew'd it at 's head and feet, And aye the thicker that she strewd, The sounder he did sleep. The broach that was on her napkin, She put it on his breast-bane, To let him know, when he did wake, His love was come and gane. The rings that were on her fingers, She laid upon a stane, To let him know, when he did wake, His love was come and gane. Now when she had her work all dune, She went to a bush o' broom, That she might hear what he did say, When he saw that she was gane. 'O where were ye my guid grey hound, 208 That I paid for sae dear, Ye didna waken me frae my sleep When my true love was sae near?' 'I scraped wi' my foot, master, Till a' my collars rang, But still the mair that I did scrape, Waken woud ye nane.' 'Where were ye, my bony brown steed, That I paid for sae dear, That ye woudna waken me out o' my sleep When my love was sae near?' 'I patted wi my foot, master, Till a' my bridles rang, But the mair that I did patt, Waken woud ye nane.' 'O where were ye, my gay goss-hawk That I paid for sae dear, That ye woudna waken me out o' my sleep When ye saw my love near?' 'I flapped wi my wings, master, Till a' my bells they rang, But still, the mair that I did flap, Waken woud ye nane.' 'O where were ye, my merry young men That I pay meat and fee, That ye woudna waken me out o' my sleep When my love ye did see?' 'Ye'll sleep mair on the night, master, And wake mair on the day; Gae sooner down to Broomfield Hills When ye've sic pranks to play. 'If I had seen any armed men Come riding over the hill-But I saw but a fair lady 209 Come quietly you until.' 'O wae mat worth yow, my young men, That I pay meat and fee, That ye woudna waken me frae sleep When ye my love did see? 'O had I waked when she was nigh, And o her got my will, I shoudna cared upon the morn The sma birds o her were fill.' When she went out, right bitter she wept, But singing came she hame; Says, 'I hae been at Broomfield Hills, And maid returned again.' ~ Andrew Lang

279:Marshal Neigh, V.C. He came from tumbled country past the humps of Buffalo Where the snow sits on the mountain 'n' the Summer aches below. He'd a silly name like Archie. Squattin' sullen on the ship, He knew nex' to holy nothin' through the gorforsaken trip. No thoughts he had of women, no refreshin' talk of beer; If he'd battled, loved, or suffered vital facts did not appear; But the parsons and the poets couldn't teach him to discourse When it come to pokin' guyver at a pore, deluded horse. If nags got sour 'n' kicked agin the rules of things at sea, Artie argued matters with 'em, 'n' he'd kid 'em up a tree. “Here's a pony got hystericks. Pipe the word for Privit Rowe,” The Sargint yapped, 'n' all the ship came cluckin' to the show. He'd chat him confidential, 'n' he'd pet 'n' paw the moke; He'd tickle him, 'n' flatter him, 'n' try him with a joke; 'N' presently that neddy sobers up, 'n' sez “Ive course, Since you puts it that way, cobber, I will be a better horse.” There was one pertickler whaler, known aboard ez Marshal Neigh, Whose monkey tricks with Privit Rowe was 66 better than a play. He'd done stunts in someone's circus, 'n' he loved a merry bout, Whirlin' in to bust his boiler, or to kick the bottom out. Rowe he sez: “Well, there's an idjit! Oh, yes, let her whiz, you beauty! Where's yer 'orse sense, little feller? Where's yer bloomin' sense iv duty? Well, you orter serve yer country!” Then there'd come a painful hush, 'N' that nag would drop his head-piece, 'n', so 'elp me cat, he'd blush. We was heaped ashore be Suez, rifle, horse, 'n' man, 'n' tent, Where the land is sand, the water, 'n' the gory firmament. We had intervals iv longin', we had sweaty spells of work In the ash-pit iv Gehenner, dumbly waitin' fer the Turk. We goes driftin' on the desert, nothin' doin', nothin' said, Till we get to think we're nowhere, 'n' arf fancy we are dead, 'N' the only 'uman interest on the red horizon's brim Is Marshal Neigh's queer faney fer the lad that straddles him. Plain-livin's nearly, bored us stiff. The Major calls on Rowe To devise an entertainment. What his charger doesn't know Isn't in the regulations. Him 'n' Rowe is brothers met, 'N' that horse's sense iv humor is the oddest fancy yet. 67 But the Turk arrives one mornin' on the outer edge iv space. From back iv things his guns is floppin' kegs about the place, 'N' Privit Artie Rowe along with others iv the force Goes pig-rootin' inter battle, holdin' converse with his horse. Little Abdul's quite a fighter, 'n' he mixes it with skill; But the Anzacs have him snouted,, 'n', oh, ma, he's feelin' ill. They wake the all-fired desert, 'n' the land for ever dead Is alive 'n' fairly creepin', and the skies are droppin' lead. When they've got the Ot'man goin', little gaudy hunts begin. It fer us to chiv His Trousers. 'n' to round the stragglers in. Cuttin' closest to the raw, 'n' swearin' lovin' all the way, Is Artie from Molinga on his neddy, Marshal Neigh. We're pursuin' sundry camels turkey-trottin' anyhow With the carriage iv an emu 'n' the action iv a cow, When a sand dune busts, 'n' belches arf a million iv the foe. They uncork a blanky batt'ry, 'n' it's, Allah, let her go! We're not stayin' dinner, thank you. Lie along yer horse 'n' yell, While the bullets pip yer britches 'n' you sniff the flue of Hell. Here it is that Artie takes it good 'n' solid in the crust, 68 He dives from out the saddle, 'n' is swallered in the dust. I got through 'n' saw them pointin' where the Marshal faced the band. He was goin' where we came from, sniffin' bodies in the sand. Till he found Rowe snugglin' under, took him where his pants was slack, 'N' be all the Asiatic gods, he brought his soldier back! With a bullet in his buttock, 'n' a drill hole in his ear, He dumped Artie down among us. Square 'n' all, how did we cheer! There's no medals struck fer neddies, but we rule there orter be, 'N' the pride iv all the Light Horse is old Marshal Neigh, V.C. ~ Edward George Dyson

280:Corsons Inlet I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea, then turned right along the surf rounded a naked headland and returned along the inlet shore: it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high, crisp in the running sand, some breakthroughs of sun but after a bit continuous overcast: the walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight: I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work: you can find in my sayings swerves of action like the inlet's cutting edge: there are dunes of motion, organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance in the overall wandering of mirroring mind: 12 but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting beyond the account: in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of primrose more or less dispersed; disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows of dunes, irregular swamps of reeds, though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ... predominantly reeds: I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines: as manifold events of sand change the dune's shape that will not be the same shape tomorrow, so I am willing to go along, to accept the becoming thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish no walls: by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek to undercreek: but there are no lines, though change in that transition is clear as any sharpness: but "sharpness" spread out, allowed to occur over a wider range than mental lines can keep: the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low: 13 black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk of air and, earlier, of sun, waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact, caught always in the event of change: a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals and ate to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab, picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits: risk is full: every living thing in siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears the shallows, darts to shore to stab—what? I couldn't see against the black mudflats—a frightened fiddler crab? the news to my left over the dunes and reeds and bayberry clumps was fall: thousands of tree swallows gathering for flight: an order held in constant change: a congregation rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable as one event, not chaos: preparations for flight from winter, cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps, beaks at the bayberries a perception full of wind, flight, curve, sound: the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness: the "field" of action with moving, incalculable center: in the smaller view, order tight with shape: 14 blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab: snail shell: pulsations of order in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed, broken down, transferred through membranes to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together and against, of millions of events: this, so that I make no form of formlessness: orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain the top of a dune, the swallows could take flight—some other fields of bayberry could enter fall berryless) and there is serenity: no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan, or thought: no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept: terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities of escape open: no route shut, except in the sudden loss of all routes: I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will not run to that easy victory: still around the looser, wider forces work: I will try to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening scope, but enjoying the freedom that Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk. 15 ~ Archie Randolph Ammons

281:Boadicea While about the shore of Mona those Neronian legionaries Burnt and broke the grove and altar of the Druid and Druidess, Far in the East Boadicea, standing loftily charioted, Mad and maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility, Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Camulodune, Yell'd and shriek'd between her daughters o'er a wild confederacy. `They that scorn the tribes and call us Britain's barbarous populaces, Did they hear me, would they listen, did they pity me supplicating? Shall I heed them in their anguish? shall I brook to be supplicated? Hear Icenian, Catieuchlanian, hear Coritanian, Trinobant! Must their ever-ravening eagle's beak and talon annihilate us? Tear the noble hear of Britain, leave it gorily quivering? Bark an answer, Britain's raven! bark and blacken innumerable, Blacken round the Roman carrion, make the carcase a skeleton, Kite and kestrel, wolf and wolfkin, from the wilderness, wallow in it, Till the face of Bel be brighten'd, Taranis be propitiated. Lo their colony half-defended! lo their colony, Camulodune! There the horde of Roman robbers mock at a barbarous adversary. There the hive of Roman liars worship a gluttonous emperor-idiot. Such is Rome, and this her deity: hear it, Spirit of Cassivelaun! `Hear it, Gods! the Gods have heard it, O Icenian, O Coritanian! Doubt not ye the Gods have answer'd, Catieuchlanian, Trinobant. These have told us all their anger in miraculous utterances, Thunder, a flying fire in heaven, a murmur heard aerially, Phantom sound of blows descending, moan of an enemy massacred, Phantom wail of women and children, multitudinous agonies. Bloodily flow'd the Tamesa rolling phantom bodies of horses and men; Then a phantom colony smoulder'd on the refluent estuary; Lastly yonder yester-even, suddenly giddily tottering-There was one who watch'd and told me--down their statue of Victory fell. Lo their precious Roman bantling, lo the colony Camulodune, Shall we teach it a Roman lesson? shall we care to be pitiful? Shall we deal with it as an infant? shall we dandle it amorously? `Hear Icenian, Catieuchlanian, hear Coritanian, Trinobant! While I roved about the forest, long and bitterly meditating, There I heard them in the darkness, at the mystical ceremony, 50 Loosely robed in flying raiment, sang the terrible prophetesses. "Fear not, isle of blowing woodland, isle of silvery parapets! Tho' the Roman eagle shadow thee, tho' the gathering enemy narrow thee, Thou shalt wax and he shall dwindle, thou shalt be the mighty one yet! Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated, Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable, Thine the lands of lasting summer, many-blossoming Paradises, Thine the North and thine the South and thine the battle-thunder of God." So they chanted: how shall Britain light upon auguries happier? So they chanted in the darkness, and there cometh a victory now. Hear Icenian, Catieuchlanian, hear Coritanian, Trinobant! Me the wife of rich Prasutagus, me the lover of liberty, Me they seized and me they tortured, me they lash'd and humiliated, Me the sport of ribald Veterans, mine of ruffian violators! See they sit, they hide their faces, miserable in ignominy! Wherefore in me burns an anger, not by blood to be satiated. Lo the palaces and the temple, lo the colony Camulodune! There they ruled, and thence they wasted all the flourishing territory, Thither at their will they haled the yellow-ringleted Britoness-Bloodily, bloodily fall the battle-axe, unexhausted, inexorable. Shout Icenian, Catieuchlanian, shout Coritanian, Trinobant, Till the victim hear within and yearn to hurry precipitously Like the leaf in a roaring whirlwind, like the smoke in a hurricane whirl'd. Lo the colony, there they rioted in the city of Cunobeline! There they drank in cups of emerald, there at tables of ebony lay, Rolling on their purple couches in their tender effeminacy. There they dwelt and there they rioted; there--there--they dwell no more. Burst the gates, and burn the palaces, break the works of the statuary, Take the hoary Roman head and shatter it, hold it abominable, Cut the Roman boy to pieces in his lust and voluptuousness, Lash the maiden into swooning, me they lash'd and humiliated, Chop the breasts from off the mother, dash the brains of the little one out, Up my Britons, on my chariot, on my chargers, trample them under us.' So the Queen Boadicea, standing loftily charioted, Brandishing in her hand a dart and rolling glances lioness-like, Yell'd and shriek'd between her daughters in her fierce volubility. Till her people all around the royal chariot agitated, Madly dash'd the darts together, writhing barbarous lineaments, Made the noise of frosty woodlands, when they shiver in January, Roar'd as when the rolling breakers boom and blanch on the precipices, 51 Yell'd as when the winds of winter tear an oak on a promontory. So the silent colony hearing her tumultuous adversaries Clash the darts and on the buckler beat with rapid unanimous hand, Thought on all her evil tyrannies, all her pitiless avarice, Till she felt the heart within her fall and flutter tremulously, Then her pulses at the clamoring of her enemy fainted away. Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds. Ran the land with Roman slaughter, multitudinous agonies. Perish'd many a maid and matron, many a valorous legionary. Fell the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Camulodune. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

282:The House Of Dust: Part 04: 06: Cinema As evening falls, The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving, Moving like music, secret and rich and warm. How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn? To what new light or darkness yearn? A thousand winding stairs lead down before us; And one by one in myriads we descend By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades, Through half-lit halls which reach no end. . . . Take my arm, then, you or you or you, And let us walk abroad on the solid air: Look how the organist's head, in silhouette, Leans to the lamplit music's orange square! . . . The dim-globed lamps illumine rows of faces, Rows of hands and arms and hungry eyes, They have hurried down from a myriad secret places, From windy chambers next to the skies. . . . The music comes upon us. . . .it shakes the darkness, It shakes the darkness in our minds. . . . And brilliant figures suddenly fill the darkness, Down the white shaft of light they run through darkness, And in our hearts a dazzling dream unwinds . . . Take my hand, then, walk with me By the slow soundless crashings of a sea Down miles on miles of glistening mirrorlike sand,— Take my hand And walk with me once more by crumbling walls; Up mouldering stairs where grey-stemmed ivy clings, To hear forgotten bells, as evening falls, Rippling above us invisibly their slowly widening rings. . . . Did you once love me? Did you bear a name? Did you once stand before me without shame? . . . Take my hand: your face is one I know, I loved you, long ago: You are like music, long forgotten, suddenly come to mind; You are like spring returned through snow. 295 Once, I know, I walked with you in starlight, And many nights I slept and dreamed of you; Come, let us climb once more these stairs of starlight, This midnight stream of cloud-flung blue! . . . Music murmurs beneath us like a sea, And faints to a ghostly whisper . . . Come with me. Are you still doubtful of me—hesitant still, Fearful, perhaps, that I may yet remember What you would gladly, if you could, forget? You were unfaithful once, you met your lover; Still in your heart you bear that red-eyed ember; And I was silent,—you remember my silence yet . . . You knew, as well as I, I could not kill him, Nor touch him with hot hands, nor yet with hate. No, and it was not you I saw with anger. Instead, I rose and beat at steel-walled fate, Cried till I lay exhausted, sick, unfriended, That life, so seeming sure, and love, so certain, Should loose such tricks, be so abruptly ended, Ring down so suddenly an unlooked-for curtain. How could I find it in my heart to hurt you, You, whom this love could hurt much more than I? No, you were pitiful, and I gave you pity; And only hated you when I saw you cry. We were two dupes; if I could give forgiveness,— Had I the right,—I should forgive you now . . . We were two dupes . . . Come, let us walk in starlight, And feed our griefs: we do not break, but bow. Take my hand, then, come with me By the white shadowy crashings of a sea . . . Look how the long volutes of foam unfold To spread their mottled shimmer along the sand! . . . Take my hand, Do not remember how these depths are cold, Nor how, when you are dead, Green leagues of sea will glimmer above your head. You lean your face upon your hands and cry, The blown sand whispers about your feet, Terrible seems it now to die,— 296 Terrible now, with life so incomplete, To turn away from the balconies and the music, The sunlit afternoons, To hear behind you there a far-off laughter Lost in a stirring of sand among dry dunes . . . Die not sadly, you whom life has beaten! Lift your face up, laughing, die like a queen! Take cold flowers of foam in your warm white fingers! Death's but a change of sky from blue to green . . . As evening falls, The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls Tremble and glow . . . the music breathes upon us, The rayed white shaft plays over our heads like magic, And to and fro we move and lean and change . . . You, in a world grown strange, Laugh at a darkness, clench your hands despairing, Smash your glass on a floor, no longer caring, Sink suddenly down and cry . . . You hear the applause that greets your latest rival, You are forgotten: your rival—who knows?—is I . . . I laugh in the warm bright light of answering laughter, I am inspired and young . . . and though I see You sitting alone there, dark, with shut eyes crying, I bask in the light, and in your hate of me . . . Failure . . . well, the time comes soon or later . . . The night must come . . . and I'll be one who clings, Desperately, to hold the applause, one instant,— To keep some youngster waiting in the wings. The music changes tone . . . a room is darkened, Someone is moving . . . the crack of white light widens, And all is dark again; till suddenly falls A wandering disk of light on floor and walls, Winks out, returns again, climbs and descends, Gleams on a clock, a glass, shrinks back to darkness; And then at last, in the chaos of that place, Dazzles like frozen fire on your clear face. Well, I have found you. We have met at last. Now you shall not escape me: in your eyes I see the horrible huddlings of your past,— All you remember blackens, utters cries, 297 Reaches far hands and faint. I hold the light Close to your cheek, watch the pained pupils shrink,— Watch the vile ghosts of all you vilely think . . . Now all the hatreds of my life have met To hold high carnival . . . we do not speak, My fingers find the well-loved throat they seek, And press, and fling you down . . . and then forget. Who plays for me? What sudden drums keep time To the ecstatic rhythm of my crime? What flute shrills out as moonlight strikes the floor? . . What violin so faintly cries Seeing how strangely in the moon he lies? . . . The room grows dark once more, The crack of white light narrows around the door, And all is silent, except a slow complaining Of flutes and violins, like music waning. Take my hand, then, walk with me By the slow soundless crashings of a sea . . . Look, how white these shells are, on this sand! Take my hand, And watch the waves run inward from the sky Line upon foaming line to plunge and die. The music that bound our lives is lost behind us, Paltry it seems . . . here in this wind-swung place Motionless under the sky's vast vault of azure We stand in a terror of beauty, face to face. The dry grass creaks in the wind, the blown sand whispers, The soft sand seethes on the dunes, the clear grains glisten, Once they were rock . . . a chaos of golden boulders . . . Now they are blown by the wind . . . we stand and listen To the sliding of grain upon timeless grain And feel our lives go past like a whisper of pain. Have I not seen you, have we not met before Here on this sun-and-sea-wrecked shore? You shade your sea-gray eyes with a sunlit hand And peer at me . . . far sea-gulls, in your eyes, Flash in the sun, go down . . . I hear slow sand, And shrink to nothing beneath blue brilliant skies . . . 298 * The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry To go our devious secret ways, forgetting Those many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed, We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves. The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled. Whose body have I found beside dark waters, The cold white body, garlanded with sea-weed? Staring with wide eyes at the sky? I bent my head above it, and cried in silence. Only the things I dreamed of heard my cry. Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened. Again I loved, and love itself was darkened. Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days. The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent. The doors of night are closed. We go our ways. ~ Conrad Potter Aiken

283:Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait The bows glided down, and the coast Blackened with birds took a last look At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye; The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck. Then good-bye to the fishermanned Boat with its anchor free and fast As a bird hooking over the sea, High and dry by the top of the mast, Whispered the affectionate sand And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay. For my sake sail, and never look back, Said the looking land. Sails drank the wind, and white as milk He sped into the drinking dark; The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl And the moon swam out of its hulk. Funnels and masts went by in a whirl. Good-bye to the man on the sea-legged deck To the gold gut that sings on his reel To the bait that stalked out of the sack, For we saw him throw to the swift flood A girl alive with his hooks through her lips; All the fishes were rayed in blood, Said the dwindling ships. Good-bye to chimneys and funnels, Old wives that spin in the smoke, He was blind to the eyes of candles In the praying windows of waves But heard his bait buck in the wake And tussle in a shoal of loves. Now cast down your rod, for the whole Of the sea is hilly with whales, 39 She longs among horses and angels, The rainbow-fish bend in her joys, Floated the lost cathedral Chimes of the rocked buoys. Where the anchor rode like a gull Miles over the moonstruck boat A squall of birds bellowed and fell, A cloud blew the rain from its throat; He saw the storm smoke out to kill With fuming bows and ram of ice, Fire on starlight, rake Jesu's stream; And nothing shone on the water's face But the oil and bubble of the moon, Plunging and piercing in his course The lured fish under the foam Witnessed with a kiss. Whales in the wake like capes and Alps Quaked the sick sea and snouted deep, Deep the great bushed bait with raining lips Slipped the fins of those humpbacked tons And fled their love in a weaving dip. Oh, Jericho was falling in their lungs! She nipped and dived in the nick of love, Spun on a spout like a long-legged ball Till every Till every Till every Rose and beast blared down in a swerve turtle crushed from his shell bone in the rushing grave crowed and fell! Good luck to the hand on the rod, There is thunder under its thumbs; Gold gut is a lightning thread, His fiery reel sings off its flames, The whirled boat in the burn of his blood 40 Is crying from nets to knives, Oh the shearwater birds and their boatsized brood Oh the bulls of Biscay and their calves Are making under the green, laid veil The long-legged beautiful bait their wives. Break the black news and paint on a sail Huge weddings in the waves, Over the wakeward-flashing spray Over the gardens of the floor Clash out the mounting dolphin's day, My mast is a bell-spire, Strike and smoothe, for my decks are drums, Sing through the water-spoken prow The octopus walking into her limbs The polar eagle with his tread of snow. From salt-lipped beak to the kick of the stern Sing how the seal has kissed her dead! The long, laid minute's bride drifts on Old in her cruel bed. Over the graveyard in the water Mountains and galleries beneath Nightingale and hyena Rejoicing for that drifting death Sing and howl through sand and anemone Valley and sahara in a shell, Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl Is old as water and plain as an eel; Always good-bye to the long-legged bread Scattered in the paths of his heels For the salty birds fluttered and fed And the tall grains foamed in their bills; Always good-bye to the fires of the face, 41 For the crab-backed dead on the sea-bed rose And scuttled over her eyes, The blind, clawed stare is cold as sleet. The tempter under the eyelid Who shows to the selves asleep Mast-high moon-white women naked Walking in wishes and lovely for shame Is dumb and gone with his flame of brides. Susannah's drowned in the bearded stream And no-one stirs at Sheba's side But the hungry kings of the tides; Sin who had a woman's shape Sleeps till Silence blows on a cloud And all the lifted waters walk and leap. Lucifer that bird's dropping Out of the sides of the north Has melted away and is lost Is always lost in her vaulted breath, Venus lies star-struck in her wound And the sensual ruins make Seasons over the liquid world, White springs in the dark. Always good-bye, cried the voices through the shell, Good-bye always, for the flesh is cast And the fisherman winds his reel With no more desire than a ghost. Always good luck, praised the finned in the feather Bird after dark and the laughing fish As the sails drank up the hail of thunder And the long-tailed lightning lit his catch. The boat swims into the six-year weather, A wind throws a shadow and it freezes fast. See what the gold gut drags from under Mountains and galleries to the crest! 42 See what clings to hair and skull As the boat skims on with drinking wings! The statues of great rain stand still, And the flakes fall like hills. Sing and strike his heavy haul Toppling up the boatside in a snow of light! His decks are drenched with miracles. Oh miracle of fishes! The long dead bite! Out of the urn a size of a man Out of the room the weight of his trouble Out of the house that holds a town In the continent of a fossil One by one in dust and shawl, Dry as echoes and insect-faced, His fathers cling to the hand of the girl And the dead hand leads the past, Leads them as children and as air On to the blindly tossing tops; The centuries throw back their hair And the old men sing from newborn lips: Time is bearing another son. Kill Time! She turns in her pain! The oak is felled in the acorn And the hawk in the egg kills the wren. He who blew the great fire in And died on a hiss of flames Or walked the earth in the evening Counting the denials of the grains Clings to her drifting hair, and climbs; And he who taught their lips to sing Weeps like the risen sun among The liquid choirs of his tribes. The rod bends low, divining land, 43 And through the sundered water crawls A garden holding to her hand With birds and animals With men and women and waterfalls Trees cool and dry in the whirlpool of ships And stunned and still on the green, laid veil Sand with legends in its virgin laps And prophets loud on the burned dunes; Insects and valleys hold her thighs hard, Times and places grip her breast bone, She is breaking with seasons and clouds; Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves, with moving fish and rounded stones Up and down the greater waves A separate river breathes and runs; Strike and sing his catch of fields For the surge is sown with barley, The cattle graze on the covered foam, The hills have footed the waves away, With wild sea fillies and soaking bridles With salty colts and gales in their limbs All the horses of his haul of miracles Gallop through the arched, green farms, Trot and gallop with gulls upon them And thunderbolts in their manes. O Rome and Sodom To-morrow and London The country tide is cobbled with towns And steeples pierce the cloud on her shoulder And the streets that the fisherman combed When his long-legged flesh was a wind on fire And his loin was a hunting flame Coil from the thoroughfares of her hair And terribly lead him home alive Lead her prodigal home to his terror, 44 The furious ox-killing house of love. Down, down, down, under the ground, Under the floating villages, Turns the moon-chained and water-wound Metropolis of fishes, There is nothing left of the sea but its sound, Under the earth the loud sea walks, In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down And the bait is drowned among hayricks, Land, land, land, nothing remains Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech, And into its talkative seven tombs The anchor dives through the floors of a church. Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon, To the fisherman lost on the land. He stands alone in the door of his home, With his long-legged heart in his hand. ~ Dylan Thomas

284:Above The Gaspereau To H. E. C. THERE are sunflowers too in my garden on top of the hill, Where now in the early September the sun has his will— The slow autumn sun that goes leisurely, taking his fill Of life in the orchards and fir-woods so moveless and still; As if, should they stir, they might break some illusion and spill The germ of their long summer musing on top of the hill. The crowds of black spruces in tiers from the valley below, Ranged round their sky-roofed coliseum, mount row after row. How often there, rank above rank, they have watched for the slow Silver-lanterned processions of twilight—the moon's come and go! How often, as if they expected some bugle to blow, Announcing a bringer of news they were breathless to know, They have hushed every leaf,—to hear only the murmurous flow Of the small mountain river sent up from the valley below! How still through the sweet summer sun, through the soft summer rain, They have stood there awaiting the summons should bid them attain The freedom of knowledge, the last touch of truth to explain The great golden gist of their brooding, the marvellous train Of thought they have followed so far, been so strong to sustain,— The white gospel of sun and the long revelations of rain! Then the orchards that dot, all in order, the green valley floor, Every tree with its boughs weighed to earth, like a tent from whose door Not a lodger looks forth,—yet the signs are there gay and galore, The great ropes of red fruitage and russet, crisp snow to the core. Can the dark-eyed Romany here have deserted of yore Their camp at the coming of frost? Will they seek it no more? Who dwells in St. Eulalie's village? Who knows the fine lore Of the tribes of the apple-trees there on the green valley floor? Who, indeed? From the blue mountain gorge to the dikes by the sea, Goes that stilly wanderer, small Gaspereau; who but he Should give the last hint of perfection, the touch that sets free From the taut string of silence the whisper of beauties to be! The very sun seems to have tarried, turned back a degree, To lengthen out noon for the apple folk here by the sea. 34 What is it? Who comes? What's abroad on the blue mountain side? A hush has been laid on the leaves and will not be defied. Is the great Scarlet Hunter at last setting out on his ride From the North with deliverance now? Were the lights we descried Last night in the heavens his camp-fire seen far and wide, The white signal of peace for whose coming the ages have cried? 'Expectancy lingers; fulfilment postponed,' I replied, When soul said uneasily,'Who is it haunts your hillside?' All the while not a word from my sunflowers here on the hill. And to-night when the stars over Blomidon flower and fill The blue Northern garden of heaven, so pale and so still, From the lordly king-aster Aldebaran there by the sill Of the East, where the moonlight will enter, not one will fulfil A lordlier lot than my sunflowers here on the hill. So much for mere fact, mere impression. So much I portray Of the atmosphere, colour, illusion of one autumn day In the little Acadian valley above the Grand Pré; Just the quiet of orchards and firs, where the sun had full sway, And the river went trolling his soft wander-song to the bay, While roseberry, aster, and sagaban tangled his way. Be you their interpreter, reasoner; tell what they say, These children of silence whose patient regard I portray. You Londoner, walking in Bishopsgate, strolling the Strand, Some morning in autumn afford, at a fruit-dealer's stand, The leisure to look at his apples there ruddy and tanned. Then ask, when he's smiling to serve you, if choice can command A Gravenstein grown oversea on Canadian land. (And just for the whim's sake, for once, you'll have no other brand!) How teach you to tell them? Pick one, and with that in your hand, Bethink you a while as you turn again into the Strand. 'What if,' you will say,—so smooth in your hand it will lie, So round and so firm, of so rich a red to the eye, Like a dash of Fortuny, a tinge of some Indian dye, While you turn it and toss, mark the bloom, ere you taste it and try— 'Now what if this grew where the same bright pavilion of sky Is stretched o'er the valley and hillside he bids me descry, The windless valley of peace, where the seasons go by, 35 And the river goes down through the orchards where long shadows lie!' There's the fruit in your hand, in your ears is the roar of the street, The pulse of an empire keeping its volume and beat, Its sure come and go day and night, while we sleep or we eat. Taste the apple, bite in to the juice—how abundant and sweet! As sound as your own English heart, and wholesome as wheat,— There grow no such apples as that in your Bishopsgate Street. Or perhaps in St. Helen's Place, when your business is done And the ledgers put by, you will think of the hundred and one Commissions and errands to do; but what under the sun Was that, so important? Ah, yes! the new books overrun The old shelves. It is high time to order a new set begun. Then off to the joiner's. You enter, to see his plane run With a long high shriek through the lumber he's working upon. Then he turns from his shavings to query what you would have done. But homeward 'tis you who make question. That song of the blade! And the sharp sweet cry of the wood, what an answer it made! What stories the joiner must hear, as he plies his clean trade, Of all the wild life of the forest where long shadows wade The untrodden moss, and the firs send a journeying shade So slow through the valley so far from the song of his blade. Come back to my orchards a moment. They're waiting for you. How still are the little gray leaves where the pippins peep through! The boughs where the ribstons hang red are half breaking in two. Above them September in magical soft Northern blue Has woven the spell of her silence, like frost or like dew, Yet warm as a poppy's red dream. When All Saints shall renew The beauty of summer a while, will their dreaming come true? Ah, not of my Grand Pré they dream, nor your London and you! Their life is their own, and the surge of it. All through the spring They pushed forth their buds, and the rainbirds at twilight would sing. They put forth their bloom, and the world was as fairy a thing As a Japanese garden. Then midsummer came with the zing And the clack of the locust; then fruit time and coolness, to bring This aftermath deep underfoot with its velvety spring. And they all the while with the fatherly, motherly care, 36 Taking sap from the strength of the ground, taking sun from the air, Taking chance of the frost and the worm, taking courage to dare, Have given their life that the life might be goodly and fair In their kind for the seasons to come, with good witness to bear How the sturdy old race of the apples could give and not spare. To-morrow the harvest begins. We shall rifle them there Of the beautiful fruit of their bodies, the crown of their care. How lovingly then shall the picker set hand to the bough!— Bid it yield, ere the seed come to earth or the graft to the plough, Not only sweet life for its kind, as the instincts allow, That savour and shape may survive generations from now, But life to its kin who can say, 'I am stronger than thou,'— Fulfilling a lordlier law than the law of the bough. I heard before dawn, with planets beginning to quail,— 'Whoso hath life, let him give, that my purpose prevail; Whoso hath none, let him take, that his strength may be hale. Behold, I have reckoned the tally, I keep the full tale. Whoso hath love, let him give, lest his spirit grow stale; Whoso hath none, let him die; he shall wither and fail. Behold, I will plenish the loss at the turn of the scale. He hath law to himself, who hath love; ye shall hope and not quail.' Then the sun arose, and my sunflowers here on the hill, Like good little Catholics, turned to the East to fulfil Their daily observance, receiving his peace and his will,— The lord of their light who alone bids the darkness be nil, The lord of their love who alone bids the life in them thrill; Undismayed and serene, they awaited him here on the hill. Ah, the patience of earth! Look down at the dark pointed firs; They are carved out of blackness; one pattern recurs and recurs. They crowd all the gullies and hillsides, the gashes and spurs, As silent as death. What an image! How nature avers The goodness of calm with that taciturn beauty of hers! As silent as sleep. Yet the life in them climbs and stirs. They too have received the great law, know that haste but defers The perfection of time,—the initiate gospeller firs. So year after year, slow ring upon ring, they have grown, Putting infinite long-loving care into leafage and cone, 37 By the old ancient craft of the earth they have pondered and known In the dead of the hot summer noons, as still as a stone. Not for them the gay fruit of the thorn, nor the high scarlet roan, Nor the plots of the deep orchard land where the apples are grown. In winter the wind, all huddled and shuddering, came To warm his old bones by the fires of sunset aflame Behind the black house of the firs. When the moose-birds grew tame In the lumberers' camps in the woods, what marvellous fame His talk and the ice of his touch would spread and proclaim, Of the berg and the floe and the lands without nation or name, Where the earth and the sky, night and noon, north and south are the same, The white and awful Nirvana of cold whence he came! Then April, some twilight picked out with a great yellow star, Returning, like Hylas long lost and come back with his jar Of sweet living water at last, having wandered so far, Leads the heart out of doors, and the eye to the point of a spar, At whose base in the half-melted snow the first Mayflowers are,— And there the first robin is pealing below the great star. So soon, over-soon, the full summer. Within those dark boughs, Deliberate and far, a faltering reed-note will rouse The shy transports of earth, till the wood-creatures hear where they house, And grow bold as the tremble-eared rabbits that nibble and mouse. While up through the pasture-lot, startling the sheep as they browse, Where kingbirds and warblers are piercing the heat's golden drowse, Some girl, whom the sun has made tawny, the wind had to blowse, Will come there to gentle her lover beneath those dark boughs. Then out of the hush, when the grasses are frosty and old, Will the chickadee's tiny alarm against winter be rolled; And soon, when the ledges and ponds are bitten with cold, The honk of the geese, that wander-cry stirring and bold, Will sound through the night, where those hardy mariners hold The uncharted course through the dark, as it was from of old. Ah, the life of the woods, how they share and partake of it all, These evergreens, silent as Indians, solemn and tall! From the goldenwing's first far-heard awakening call, The serene flute of the thrush in his high beech hall, And the pipe of the frog, to the bannered approach of the fall, 38 And the sullen wind, when snow arrives on a squall, Trooping in all night from the North with news would appal Any outposts but these; with a zest they partake of it all. Lo, out of the hush they seem to mount and aspire! From basement to tip they have builded, with heed to go higher, One circlet of branches a year with their lift of green spire. Nay, rather they seem to repose, having done with desire, Awaiting the frost, with the fruit scarlet-bright on the brier, Each purpose fulfilled, each ardour that bade them aspire. Then hate be afar from the bite of the axe that shall fell These keepers of solitude, makers of quiet, who dwell On the Slopes of the North. And clean be the hand that shall quel The tread of the sap that was wont to go mounting so well, Round on round with the sun in a spiral, slow cell after cell, As a bellringer climbs in a turret. That resinous smell From the eighth angel's hand might have risen with the incense to swell His offering in heaven, when the half-hour's silence befell. Behold, as the prayers of the saints that went up to God's knees In John's Revelation, the silence and patience of these Our brothers of orchard and hill, the unhurrying trees, To better the burden of earth till the dark suns freeze, Shall go out to the stars with the sound of Acadian seas, And the scent of the wood-flowers blowing about their great knees. To-night when Altair and Alshain are ruling the West, Whence Boötes is driving his dogs to long hunting addressed; With Alioth sheer over Blomidon standing at rest; When Algol is leading the Pleiades over the crest Of the magical East, and the South puts Alpherat to test With Menkar just risen; will come, like a sigh from Earth's breast, The first sob of the tide turning home,—one distraught in his quest For ever, and calling for ever the wind in the west. And to-night there will answer the ghost of a sigh on the hill, So small you would say, Is it wind, or the frost with a will Walking down through the woods, and to-morrow shall show us his skill In yellows and reds? So noiseless, it hardly will thrill The timorous aspens, which tremble when all else is still; Yet the orchards will know, and the firs be aware on the hill. 39 'O Night, I am old, I endure. Since my being began, When out of the dark thy aurora spread up like a fan, I have founded the lands and the islands; the hills are my plan. I have covered the pits of the earth with my bridge of one span. From the Horn to Dunedin unbroken my long rollers ran, From Pentland and Fastnet and Foyle to Bras d'Or and Manan, To dredge and upbuild for the creatures of tribe and of clan. Lo, now who shall end the contriving my fingers began?' Then the little wind that blows from the great star-drift Will answer: 'Thou tide in the least of the planets I lift, Consider the journeys of light. Are thy journeyings swift? Thy sands are as smoke to the star-banks I huddle and shift. Peace! I have seeds of the grasses to scatter and sift. I have freighting to do for the weed and the frail thistle drift. 'O ye apples and firs, great and small are as one in the end. Because ye had life to the full, and spared not to spend; Because ye had love of your kind, to cherish and fend; Held hard the good instinct to thrive, cleaving close to life's trend; Nor questioned where impulse had origin,—purpose might tend; Now, beauty is yours, and the freedom whose promptings transcend Attainment for ever, in death with new being to blend. O ye orchards and woods, death is naught, love is all in the end.' Ah, friend of mine over the sea, shall we not discern, In the life of our brother the beech and our sister the fern, As St. Francis would call them (his Minorites, too, would we learn!) In death but a door to new being no creature may spurn, But must enter for beauty's completion,—pass up in his turn To the last round of joy, yours and mine, whence to think and discern? Who shall say 'the last round'? Have I passed by the exit of soul? From behind the tall door that swings outward, replies no patrol To our restless Qui vive? when is paid each implacable toll. Not a fin of the tribes shall return, having cleared the great shoal; Not a wing of the migrants come back from below the dark knoll; Yet the zest of the flight and the swimming who fails to extol? Saith the Riddle, 'The parts are all plain; ye may guess at the whole.' I guess, 'Immortality, knowledge, survival of Soul.' 40 To-night, with the orchards below and the firs on the hill Asleep in the long solemn moonlight and taking no ill, A hand will open the sluice of the great sea-mill,— Start the gear and the belts of the tide. Then a murmur will fill The hollows of midnight with sound, when all else is still, And stray through the dream of the sunflowers here on the hill. ~ Bliss William Carman

285:Mother And Daughter- Sonnet Sequence Young laughters, and my music! Aye till now The voice can reach no blending minors near; 'Tis the bird's trill because the spring is here And spring means trilling on a blossomy bough; 'Tis the spring joy that has no why or how, But sees the sun and hopes not nor can fear-Spring is so sweet and spring seems all the year. Dear voice, the first-come birds but trill as thou. Oh music of my heart, be thus for long: Too soon the spring bird learns the later song; Too soon a sadder sweetness slays content Too soon! There comes new light on onward day, There comes new perfume o'er a rosier way: Comes not again the young spring joy that went. ROME, November 1881. II That she is beautiful is not delight, As some think mothers joy, by pride of her, To witness questing eyes caught prisoner And hear her praised the livelong dancing night; But the glad impulse that makes painters sight Bids me note her and grow the happier; And love that finds me as her worshipper Reveals me each best loveliness aright. Oh goddess head! Oh innocent brave eyes! Oh curved and parted lips where smiles are rare And sweetness ever! Oh smooth shadowy hair Gathered around the silence of her brow! Child, I'd needs love thy beauty stranger-wise: And oh the beauty of it, being thou! III I watch the sweet grave face in timorous thought Lest I should see it dawn to some unrest And read that in her heart is youth's ill guest, 117 The querulous young sadness, born of nought, That wearies of the strife it has not fought, And finds the life it has not had unblest, And asks it knows not what that should be best, And till Love come has never what it sought. But she is still. A full and crystal lake So gives it skies their passage to its deeps In an unruffled morn where no winds wake, And, strong and fretless, 'stirs not, nor yet sleeps. My darling smiles and 'tis for gladness' sake; She hears a woe, 'tis simple tears she weeps. IV 'Tis but a child. The quiet Juno gaze Breaks at a trifle into mirth and glow, Changed as a folded bud bursts into blow, And she springs, buoyant, on some busy craze, Or, in the rhythm of her girlish plays, Like light upon swift waves floats to and fro, And, whatsoe'er's her mirth, needs me to know, And keeps me young by her young innocent ways. Just now she and her kitten raced and sprang To catch the daisy ball she tossed about; Then they grew grave, and found a shady tree, And kitty tried to see the notes she sang: Now she flies hitherward--'Mother! Quick! Come see! Two hyacinths in my garden almost out!' Last night the broad blue lightnings flamed the sky; We watched, our breaths caught as each burst its way, And through its fire out-leaped the sharp white ray, And sudden dark re-closed when it went by: But she, that where we are will needs be nigh, Had tired with hunting orchids half the day. Her father thought she called us; he and I, Half anxious, reached the bedroom where she lay. Oh lily face upon the whiteness blent! 118 How calm she lay in her unconscious grace! A peal crashed on the silence ere we went; She stirred in sleep, a little changed her place, 'Mother,' she breathed, a smile grew on her face: 'Mother,' my darling breathed, and slept content. VI Sometimes, as young things will, she vexes me, Wayward, or too unheeding, or too blind. Like aimless birds that, flying on a wind, Strike slant against their own familiar tree; Like venturous children pacing with the sea, That turn but when the breaker spurts behind Outreaching them with spray: she in such kind Is borne against some fault, or does not flee. And so, may be, I blame her for her wrong, And she will frown and lightly plead her part, And then I bid her go. But 'tis not long: Then comes she lip to ear and heart to heart. And thus forgiven her love seems newly strong, And, oh my penitent, how dear thou art! VII Her father lessons me I at times am hard, Chiding a moment's fault as too grave ill, And let some little blot my vision fill, Scanning her with a narrow near regard. True. Love's unresting gaze is self-debarred From all sweet ignorance, and learns a skill, Not painless, of such signs as hurt love's will, That would not have its prize one tittle marred. Alas! Who rears and loves a dawning rose Starts at a speck upon one petal's rim: Who sees a dusk creep in the shrined pearl's glows, Is ruined at once: 'My jewel growing dim!' I watch one bud that on my bosom blows, I watch one treasured pearl for me and him. VIII A little child she, half defiant came 119 Reasoning her case--'twas not so long ago-'I cannot mind your scolding, for I know However bad I were you'd love the same.' And I, what countering answer could I frame? 'Twas true, and true, and God's self told her so. One does but ask one's child to smile and grow, And each rebuke has love for its right name. And yet, methinks, sad mothers who for years, Watching the child pass forth that was their boast, Have counted all the footsteps by new fears Till even lost fears seem hopes whereof they're reft And of all mother's good love sole is left-Is their Love, Love, or some remembered ghost? IX Oh weary hearts! Poor mothers that look back! So outcasts from the vale where they were born Turn on their road and, with a joy forlorn, See the far roofs below their arid track: So in chill buffets while the sea grows black And windy skies, once blue, are tost and torn, We are not yet forgetful of the morn, And praise anew the sunshine that we lack. Oh, sadder than pale sufferers by a tomb That say 'My dead is happier, and is more' Are they who dare no 'is' but tell what's o'er-Thus the frank childhood, those the lovable ways-Stirring the ashes of remembered days For yet some sparks to warm the livelong gloom. Love's Counterfeit. Not Love, not Love, that worn and footsore thrall Who, crowned with withered buds and leaves gone dry, Plods in his chains to follow one passed by, Guerdoned with only tears himself lets fall. Love is asleep and smiling in his pall, 120 And this that wears his shape and will not die Was once his comrade shadow, Memory-His shadow that now stands for him in all. And there are those who, hurrying on past reach, See the dim follower and laugh, content, 'Lo, Love pursues me, go where'er I will!' Yet, longer gazing, some may half beseech, 'This must be Love that wears his features still: Or else when was the moment that Love went?' XI Love's Mourner. 'Tis men who say that through all hurt and pain The woman's love, wife's, mother's, still will hold, And breathes the sweeter and will more unfold For winds that tear it, and the sorrowful rain. So in a thousand voices has the strain Of this dear patient madness been retold, That men call woman's love. Ah! they are bold, Naming for love that grief which does remain. Love faints that looks on baseness face to face: Love pardons all; but by the pardonings dies, With a fresh wound of each pierced through the breast. And there stand pityingly in Love's void place Kindness of household wont familiar-wise, And faith to Love--faith to our dead at rest. XII She has made me wayside posies: here they stand, Bringing fresh memories of where they grew. As new-come travellers from a world we knew Wake every while some image of their land, So these whose buds our woodland breezes fanned Bring to my room the meadow where they blew, The brook-side cliff, the elms where wood-doves coo-And every flower is dearer for her hand. 121 Oh blossoms of the paths she loves to tread, Some grace of her is in all thoughts you bear: For in my memories of your homes that were The old sweet loneliness they kept is fled, And would I think it back I find instead A presence of my darling mingling there. XIII My darling scarce thinks music sweet save mine: 'Tis that she does but love me more than hear. She'll not believe my voice to stranger ear Is merely measure to the note and line; 'Not so,' she says; 'Thou hast a secret thine: The others' singing's only rich, or clear, But something in thy tones brings music near; As though thy song could search me and divine.' Oh voice of mine that in some day not far Time, the strong creditor, will call his debt, Will dull--and even to her--will rasp and mar, Sing Time asleep because of her regret, Be twice thy life the thing her fancies are, Thou echo to the self she knows not yet. CASERTA, April, 1882. XIV To love her as to-day is so great bliss I needs must think of morrows almost loth, Morrows wherein the flower's unclosing growth Shall make my darling other than she is. The breathing rose excels the bud I wis, Yet bud that will be rose is sweet for both; And by-and-by seems like some later troth Named in the moment of a lover's kiss. Yes, I am jealous, as of one now strange That shall instead of her possess my thought, Of her own self made new by any change, Of her to be by ripening morrows brought. My rose of women under later skies! Yet, ah! my child with the child's trustful eyes! 122 XV That some day Death who has us all for jest Shall hide me in the dark and voiceless mould, And him whose living hand has mine in hold, Where loving comes not nor the looks that rest, Shall make us nought where we are known the best, Forgotten things that leave their track untold As in the August night the sky's dropped gold-This seems no strangeness, but Death's natural hest. But looking on the dawn that is her face To know she too is Death's seems mis-belief; She should not find decay, but, as the sun Moves mightier from the veil that hides his place, Keep ceaseless radiance. Life is Death begun: But Death and her! That's strangeness passing grief. XVI She will not have it that my day wanes low, Poor of the fire its drooping sun denies, That on my brow the thin lines write good-byes Which soon may be read plain for all to know, Telling that I have done with youth's brave show; Alas! and done with youth in heart and eyes, With wonder and with far expectancies, Save but to say 'I knew such long ago.' She will not have it. Loverlike to me, She with her happy gaze finds all that's best, She sees this fair and that unfretted still, And her own sunshine over all the rest: So she half keeps me as she'd have me be, And I forget to age, through her sweet will. XVII And how could I grow old while she's so young? Methinks her heart sets tune for mine to beat, We are so near; her new thoughts, incomplete, Find their shaped wording happen on my tongue; Like bloom on last year's winterings newly sprung My youth upflowers with hers, and must repeat 123 Old joyaunces in me nigh obsolete. Could I grow older while my child's so young? And there are tales how youthful blood instilled Thawing frore Age's veins gave life new course, And quavering limbs and eyes made indolent Grew freshly eager with beginning force: She so breathes impulse. Were my years twice spent, Not burdening Age, with her, could make me chilled. XVIII 'Tis hard that the full summer of our round Is but the turn where winter's sign-post's writ; That to have reached the best is leaving it; That final loss bears date from having found. So some proud vessel in a narrow sound Sails at high water with the fair wind fit, And lo! the ebb along the sandy spit, Lower and lower till she jars, aground. 'Tis hard. We are young still but more content; 'Tis our ripe flush, the heyday of our prime; We learn full breath, how rich of the air we are! But suddenly we note a touch of time, A little fleck that scarcely seems to mar; And we know then that some time since youth went. XIX Life on the wane: yes, sudden that news breaks. And yet I would 'twere suddenly and less soon; Since no forewarning makes loss opportune. And now I watch that slow advance Time makes: Watch as, while silent flow spreads broad the lakes Mid the land levels of a smooth lagoon, One waiting, pitiful, on a tidal dune, Aware too long before it overtakes. Ah! there's so quick a joy in hues and sun, And will my eyes see dim? Will vacant sense Forget the lark, the surges on the beach? Shall I step wearily and wish 'twere done? Well, if it be love will not too go hence, 124 Love will have new glad secrets yet to teach. XX There's one I miss. A little questioning maid That held my finger, trotting by my side, And smiled out of her pleased eyes open wide, Wondering and wiser at each word I said. And I must help her frolics if she played, And I must feel her trouble if she cried; My lap was hers past right to be denied; She did my bidding, but I more obeyed. Dearer she is to-day, dearer and more; Closer to me, since sister womanhoods meet; Yet, like poor mothers some long while bereft, I dwell on toward ways, quaint memories left, I miss the approaching sound of pit-pat feet, The eager baby voice outside my door. XXI Hardly in any common tender wise, With petting talk, light lips on her dear cheek, The love I mean my child will bear to speak, Loth of its own less image for disguise; But liefer will it floutingly devise, Using a favourite jester's mimic pique, Prompt, idle, by-names with their sense to seek, And takes for language laughing ironies. But she, as when some foreign tongue is heard, Familiar on our lips and closely known, We feel the every purport of each word When ignorant ears reach empty sound alone, So knows the core within each merry gird, So gives back such a meaning in her own. XXII The brook leaps riotous with its life just found, That freshets from the mountain rains have fed, Beats at the boulders in its hindered bed, And fills the valley with its triumphing sound. The strong unthirsty tarn sunk in deep ground 125 Has never a sigh wherewith its wealth is said, Has no more ripples than the May-flies tread: Silence of waters is where they abound. And love, whatever love, sure, makes small boast: 'Tis the new lovers tell, in wonder yet. Oh happy need! Enriched stream's jubilant gush! But who being spouses well have learned love's most, Being child and mother learned not nor forget, These in their joyfulness feel the tarn's strong hush. XXIII Birds sing 'I love you, love' the whole day through, And not another song can they sing right; But, singing done with, loving's done with quite, The autumn sunders every twittering two. And I'd not have love make too much ado With sweet parades of fondness and delight, Lest iterant wont should make caresses trite, Love-names mere cuckoo ousters of the true. Oh heart can hear heart's sense in senseless nought, And heart that's sure of heart has little speech. What shall it tell? The other knows its thought. What shall one doubt or question or beseech Who is assured and knows and, unbesought, Possesses the dear trust that each gives each. XXIV 'You scarcely are a mother, at that rate. Only one child!' The blithe soul pitied loud. And doubtless she, amid her household crowd, When one brings care in another's fortunate; When one fares forth another's at her gate. Yea, were her first-born folded in his shroud, Not with a whole despair would she be bowed, She has more sons to make her heart elate. Many to love her singly, mother theirs, To give her the dear love of being their need, To storm her lap by turns and claim their kiss, To kneel around her at their bed-time prayers; 126 Many to grow her comrades! Some have this. Yet I, I do not envy them indeed. RAMSGATE, 1886. XXV You think that you love each as much as one, Mothers with many nestlings 'neath your wings. Nay, but you know not. Love's most priceless things Have unity that cannot be undone. You give the rays, I the englobed full sun; I give the river, you the separate springs: My motherhood's all my child's with all it brings-None takes the strong entireness from her: none. You know not. You love yours with various stress; This with a graver trust, this with more pride; This maybe with more needed tenderness: I by each uttermost passion of my soul Am turned to mine; she is one, she has the whole: How should you know who appraise love and divide? XXVI Of my one pearl so much more joy I gain As he that to his sole desire is sworn, Indifferent what women more were born, And if she loved him not all love were vain, Gains more, because of her--yea, through all pain, All love and sorrows, were they two forlorn-Than whoso happiest in the lands of morn Mingles his heart amid a wifely train. Oh! Child and mother, darling! Mother and child! And who but we? We, darling, paired alone? Thou hast all thy mother; thou art all my own. That passion of maternity which sweeps Tideless 'neath where the heaven of thee hath smiled Has but one channel, therefore infinite deeps. XXVII Since first my little one lay on my breast I never needed such a second good, Nor felt a void left in my motherhood 127 She filled not always to the utterest. The summer linnet, by glad yearnings pressed, Builds room enough to house a callow brood: I prayed not for another child--nor could; My solitary bird had my heart's nest. But she is cause that any baby thing If it but smile, is one of mine in truth, And every child becomes my natural joy: And, if my heart gives all youth fostering, Her sister, brother, seems the girl or boy: My darling makes me mother to their youth. ~ Augusta Davies Webster

286:The Last Tournament Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his mood Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round, At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods, Danced like a withered leaf before the hall. And toward him from the hall, with harp in hand, And from the crown thereof a carcanet Of ruby swaying to and fro, the prize Of Tristram in the jousts of yesterday, Came Tristram, saying, `Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?' For Arthur and Sir Lancelot riding once Far down beneath a winding wall of rock Heard a child wail. A stump of oak half-dead, From roots like some black coil of carven snakes, Clutched at the crag, and started through mid air Bearing an eagle's nest: and through the tree Rushed ever a rainy wind, and through the wind Pierced ever a child's cry: and crag and tree Scaling, Sir Lancelot from the perilous nest, This ruby necklace thrice around her neck, And all unscarred from beak or talon, brought A maiden babe; which Arthur pitying took, Then gave it to his Queen to rear: the Queen But coldly acquiescing, in her white arms Received, and after loved it tenderly, And named it Nestling; so forgot herself A moment, and her cares; till that young life Being smitten in mid heaven with mortal cold Past from her; and in time the carcanet Vext her with plaintive memories of the child: So she, delivering it to Arthur, said, `Take thou the jewels of this dead innocence, And make them, an thou wilt, a tourney-prize.' To whom the King, `Peace to thine eagle-borne Dead nestling, and this honour after death, Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn, 631 And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear.' `Would rather you had let them fall,' she cried, `Plunge and be lost-ill-fated as they were, A bitterness to me!-ye look amazed, Not knowing they were lost as soon as givenSlid from my hands, when I was leaning out Above the river-that unhappy child Past in her barge: but rosier luck will go With these rich jewels, seeing that they came Not from the skeleton of a brother-slayer, But the sweet body of a maiden babe. Perchance-who knows?-the purest of thy knights May win them for the purest of my maids.' She ended, and the cry of a great jousts With trumpet-blowings ran on all the ways From Camelot in among the faded fields To furthest towers; and everywhere the knights Armed for a day of glory before the King. But on the hither side of that loud morn Into the hall staggered, his visage ribbed From ear to ear with dogwhip-weals, his nose Bridge-broken, one eye out, and one hand off, And one with shattered fingers dangling lame, A churl, to whom indignantly the King, `My churl, for whom Christ died, what evil beast Hath drawn his claws athwart thy face? or fiend? Man was it who marred heaven's image in thee thus?' Then, sputtering through the hedge of splintered teeth, Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump Pitch-blackened sawing the air, said the maimed churl, `He took them and he drave them to his towerSome hold he was a table-knight of thineA hundred goodly ones-the Red Knight, heLord, I was tending swine, and the Red Knight Brake in upon me and drave them to his tower; And when I called upon thy name as one 632 That doest right by gentle and by churl, Maimed me and mauled, and would outright have slain, Save that he sware me to a message, saying, 'Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I Have founded my Round Table in the North, And whatsoever his own knights have sworn My knights have sworn the counter to it-and say My tower is full of harlots, like his court, But mine are worthier, seeing they profess To be none other than themselves-and say My knights are all adulterers like his own, But mine are truer, seeing they profess To be none other; and say his hour is come, The heathen are upon him, his long lance Broken, and his Excalibur a straw.'' Then Arthur turned to Kay the seneschal, `Take thou my churl, and tend him curiously Like a king's heir, till all his hurts be whole. The heathen-but that ever-climbing wave, Hurled back again so often in empty foam, Hath lain for years at rest-and renegades, Thieves, bandits, leavings of confusion, whom The wholesome realm is purged of otherwhere, Friends, through your manhood and your fealty,-now Make their last head like Satan in the North. My younger knights, new-made, in whom your flower Waits to be solid fruit of golden deeds, Move with me toward their quelling, which achieved, The loneliest ways are safe from shore to shore. But thou, Sir Lancelot, sitting in my place Enchaired tomorrow, arbitrate the field; For wherefore shouldst thou care to mingle with it, Only to yield my Queen her own again? Speak, Lancelot, thou art silent: is it well?' Thereto Sir Lancelot answered, `It is well: Yet better if the King abide, and leave The leading of his younger knights to me. Else, for the King has willed it, it is well.' Then Arthur rose and Lancelot followed him, 633 And while they stood without the doors, the King Turned to him saying, `Is it then so well? Or mine the blame that oft I seem as he Of whom was written, 'A sound is in his ears'? The foot that loiters, bidden go,-the glance That only seems half-loyal to command,A manner somewhat fallen from reverenceOr have I dreamed the bearing of our knights Tells of a manhood ever less and lower? Or whence the fear lest this my realm, upreared, By noble deeds at one with noble vows, From flat confusion and brute violences, Reel back into the beast, and be no more?' He spoke, and taking all his younger knights, Down the slope city rode, and sharply turned North by the gate. In her high bower the Queen, Working a tapestry, lifted up her head, Watched her lord pass, and knew not that she sighed. Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme Of bygone Merlin, `Where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes.' But when the morning of a tournament, By these in earnest those in mockery called The Tournament of the Dead Innocence, Brake with a wet wind blowing, Lancelot, Round whose sick head all night, like birds of prey, The words of Arthur flying shrieked, arose, And down a streetway hung with folds of pure White samite, and by fountains running wine, Where children sat in white with cups of gold, Moved to the lists, and there, with slow sad steps Ascending, filled his double-dragoned chair. He glanced and saw the stately galleries, Dame, damsel, each through worship of their Queen White-robed in honour of the stainless child, And some with scattered jewels, like a bank Of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire. He looked but once, and vailed his eyes again. 634 The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began: And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, When all the goodlier guests are past away, Sat their great umpire, looking o'er the lists. He saw the laws that ruled the tournament Broken, but spake not; once, a knight cast down Before his throne of arbitration cursed The dead babe and the follies of the King; And once the laces of a helmet cracked, And showed him, like a vermin in its hole, Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard The voice that billowed round the barriers roar An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight, But newly-entered, taller than the rest, And armoured all in forest green, whereon There tript a hundred tiny silver deer, And wearing but a holly-spray for crest, With ever-scattering berries, and on shield A spear, a harp, a bugle-Tristram-late From overseas in Brittany returned, And marriage with a princess of that realm, Isolt the White-Sir Tristram of the WoodsWhom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain His own against him, and now yearned to shake The burthen off his heart in one full shock With Tristram even to death: his strong hands gript And dinted the gilt dragons right and left, Until he groaned for wrath-so many of those, That ware their ladies' colours on the casque, Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds, And there with gibes and flickering mockeries Stood, while he muttered, `Craven crests! O shame! What faith have these in whom they sware to love? The glory of our Round Table is no more.' So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems, Not speaking other word than `Hast thou won? 635 Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand Wherewith thou takest this, is red!' to whom Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot's languorous mood, Made answer, `Ay, but wherefore toss me this Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound? Lest be thy fair Queen's fantasy. Strength of heart And might of limb, but mainly use and skill, Are winners in this pastime of our King. My hand-belike the lance hath dript upon itNo blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight, Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield, Great brother, thou nor I have made the world; Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine.' And Tristram round the gallery made his horse Caracole; then bowed his homage, bluntly saying, `Fair damsels, each to him who worships each Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold This day my Queen of Beauty is not here.' And most of these were mute, some angered, one Murmuring, `All courtesy is dead,' and one, `The glory of our Round Table is no more.' Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung, And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day Went glooming down in wet and weariness: But under her black brows a swarthy one Laughed shrilly, crying, `Praise the patient saints, Our one white day of Innocence hath past, Though somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it. The snowdrop only, flowering through the year, Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide. Come-let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen's And Lancelot's, at this night's solemnity With all the kindlier colours of the field.' So dame and damsel glittered at the feast Variously gay: for he that tells the tale Likened them, saying, as when an hour of cold Falls on the mountain in midsummer snows, And all the purple slopes of mountain flowers Pass under white, till the warm hour returns 636 With veer of wind, and all are flowers again; So dame and damsel cast the simple white, And glowing in all colours, the live grass, Rose-campion, bluebell, kingcup, poppy, glanced About the revels, and with mirth so loud Beyond all use, that, half-amazed, the Queen, And wroth at Tristram and the lawless jousts, Brake up their sports, then slowly to her bower Parted, and in her bosom pain was lord. And little Dagonet on the morrow morn, High over all the yellowing Autumn-tide, Danced like a withered leaf before the hall. Then Tristram saying, `Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?' Wheeled round on either heel, Dagonet replied, `Belike for lack of wiser company; Or being fool, and seeing too much wit Makes the world rotten, why, belike I skip To know myself the wisest knight of all.' `Ay, fool,' said Tristram, `but 'tis eating dry To dance without a catch, a roundelay To dance to.' Then he twangled on his harp, And while he twangled little Dagonet stood Quiet as any water-sodden log Stayed in the wandering warble of a brook; But when the twangling ended, skipt again; And being asked, `Why skipt ye not, Sir Fool?' Made answer, `I had liefer twenty years Skip to the broken music of my brains Than any broken music thou canst make.' Then Tristram, waiting for the quip to come, `Good now, what music have I broken, fool?' And little Dagonet, skipping, `Arthur, the King's; For when thou playest that air with Queen Isolt, Thou makest broken music with thy bride, Her daintier namesake down in BrittanyAnd so thou breakest Arthur's music too.' `Save for that broken music in thy brains, Sir Fool,' said Tristram, `I would break thy head. Fool, I came too late, the heathen wars were o'er, The life had flown, we sware but by the shellI am but a fool to reason with a fool- 637 Come, thou art crabbed and sour: but lean me down, Sir Dagonet, one of thy long asses' ears, And harken if my music be not true. `'Free love-free field-we love but while we may: The woods are hushed, their music is no more: The leaf is dead, the yearning past away: New leaf, new life-the days of frost are o'er: New life, new love, to suit the newer day: New loves are sweet as those that went before: Free love-free field-we love but while we may.' `Ye might have moved slow-measure to my tune, Not stood stockstill. I made it in the woods, And heard it ring as true as tested gold.' But Dagonet with one foot poised in his hand, `Friend, did ye mark that fountain yesterday Made to run wine?-but this had run itself All out like a long life to a sour endAnd them that round it sat with golden cups To hand the wine to whosoever cameThe twelve small damosels white as Innocence, In honour of poor Innocence the babe, Who left the gems which Innocence the Queen Lent to the King, and Innocence the King Gave for a prize-and one of those white slips Handed her cup and piped, the pretty one, 'Drink, drink, Sir Fool,' and thereupon I drank, Spat-pish-the cup was gold, the draught was mud.' And Tristram, `Was it muddier than thy gibes? Is all the laughter gone dead out of thee?Not marking how the knighthood mock thee, fool'Fear God: honour the King-his one true knightSole follower of the vows'-for here be they Who knew thee swine enow before I came, Smuttier than blasted grain: but when the King Had made thee fool, thy vanity so shot up It frighted all free fool from out thy heart; Which left thee less than fool, and less than swine, A naked aught-yet swine I hold thee still, 638 For I have flung thee pearls and find thee swine.' And little Dagonet mincing with his feet, `Knight, an ye fling those rubies round my neck In lieu of hers, I'll hold thou hast some touch Of music, since I care not for thy pearls. Swine? I have wallowed, I have washed-the world Is flesh and shadow-I have had my day. The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind Hath fouled me-an I wallowed, then I washedI have had my day and my philosophiesAnd thank the Lord I am King Arthur's fool. Swine, say ye? swine, goats, asses, rams and geese Trooped round a Paynim harper once, who thrummed On such a wire as musically as thou Some such fine song-but never a king's fool.' And Tristram, `Then were swine, goats, asses, geese The wiser fools, seeing thy Paynim bard Had such a mastery of his mystery That he could harp his wife up out of hell.' Then Dagonet, turning on the ball of his foot, `And whither harp'st thou thine? down! and thyself Down! and two more: a helpful harper thou, That harpest downward! Dost thou know the star We call the harp of Arthur up in heaven?' And Tristram, `Ay, Sir Fool, for when our King Was victor wellnigh day by day, the knights, Glorying in each new glory, set his name High on all hills, and in the signs of heaven.' And Dagonet answered, `Ay, and when the land Was freed, and the Queen false, ye set yourself To babble about him, all to show your witAnd whether he were King by courtesy, Or King by right-and so went harping down The black king's highway, got so far, and grew So witty that ye played at ducks and drakes With Arthur's vows on the great lake of fire. Tuwhoo! do ye see it? do ye see the star?' 639 `Nay, fool,' said Tristram, `not in open day.' And Dagonet, `Nay, nor will: I see it and hear. It makes a silent music up in heaven, And I, and Arthur and the angels hear, And then we skip.' `Lo, fool,' he said, `ye talk Fool's treason: is the King thy brother fool?' Then little Dagonet clapt his hands and shrilled, `Ay, ay, my brother fool, the king of fools! Conceits himself as God that he can make Figs out of thistles, silk from bristles, milk From burning spurge, honey from hornet-combs, And men from beasts-Long live the king of fools!' And down the city Dagonet danced away; But through the slowly-mellowing avenues And solitary passes of the wood Rode Tristram toward Lyonnesse and the west. Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt With ruby-circled neck, but evermore Past, as a rustle or twitter in the wood Made dull his inner, keen his outer eye For all that walked, or crept, or perched, or flew. Anon the face, as, when a gust hath blown, Unruffling waters re-collect the shape Of one that in them sees himself, returned; But at the slot or fewmets of a deer, Or even a fallen feather, vanished again. So on for all that day from lawn to lawn Through many a league-long bower he rode. At length A lodge of intertwisted beechen-boughs Furze-crammed, and bracken-rooft, the which himself Built for a summer day with Queen Isolt Against a shower, dark in the golden grove Appearing, sent his fancy back to where She lived a moon in that low lodge with him: Till Mark her lord had past, the Cornish King, With six or seven, when Tristram was away, And snatched her thence; yet dreading worse than shame Her warrior Tristram, spake not any word, But bode his hour, devising wretchedness. 640 And now that desert lodge to Tristram lookt So sweet, that halting, in he past, and sank Down on a drift of foliage random-blown; But could not rest for musing how to smoothe And sleek his marriage over to the Queen. Perchance in lone Tintagil far from all The tonguesters of the court she had not heard. But then what folly had sent him overseas After she left him lonely here? a name? Was it the name of one in Brittany, Isolt, the daughter of the King? `Isolt Of the white hands' they called her: the sweet name Allured him first, and then the maid herself, Who served him well with those white hands of hers, And loved him well, until himself had thought He loved her also, wedded easily, But left her all as easily, and returned. The black-blue Irish hair and Irish eyes Had drawn him home-what marvel? then he laid His brows upon the drifted leaf and dreamed. He seemed to pace the strand of Brittany Between Isolt of Britain and his bride, And showed them both the ruby-chain, and both Began to struggle for it, till his Queen Graspt it so hard, that all her hand was red. Then cried the Breton, `Look, her hand is red! These be no rubies, this is frozen blood, And melts within her hand-her hand is hot With ill desires, but this I gave thee, look, Is all as cool and white as any flower.' Followed a rush of eagle's wings, and then A whimpering of the spirit of the child, Because the twain had spoiled her carcanet. He dreamed; but Arthur with a hundred spears Rode far, till o'er the illimitable reed, And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle, The wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh Glared on a huge machicolated tower That stood with open doors, whereout was rolled 641 A roar of riot, as from men secure Amid their marshes, ruffians at their ease Among their harlot-brides, an evil song. `Lo there,' said one of Arthur's youth, for there, High on a grim dead tree before the tower, A goodly brother of the Table Round Swung by the neck: and on the boughs a shield Showing a shower of blood in a field noir, And therebeside a horn, inflamed the knights At that dishonour done the gilded spur, Till each would clash the shield, and blow the horn. But Arthur waved them back. Alone he rode. Then at the dry harsh roar of the great horn, That sent the face of all the marsh aloft An ever upward-rushing storm and cloud Of shriek and plume, the Red Knight heard, and all, Even to tipmost lance and topmost helm, In blood-red armour sallying, howled to the King, `The teeth of Hell flay bare and gnash thee flat!Lo! art thou not that eunuch-hearted King Who fain had clipt free manhood from the worldThe woman-worshipper? Yea, God's curse, and I! Slain was the brother of my paramour By a knight of thine, and I that heard her whine And snivel, being eunuch-hearted too, Sware by the scorpion-worm that twists in hell, And stings itself to everlasting death, To hang whatever knight of thine I fought And tumbled. Art thou King? -Look to thy life!' He ended: Arthur knew the voice; the face Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind. And Arthur deigned not use of word or sword, But let the drunkard, as he stretched from horse To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-shore, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, 642 Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing; thus he fell Head-heavy; then the knights, who watched him, roared And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen; There trampled out his face from being known, And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves: Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang Through open doors, and swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurled The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement streamed with massacre: Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, Which half that autumn night, like the live North, Red-pulsing up through Alioth and Alcor, Made all above it, and a hundred meres About it, as the water Moab saw Came round by the East, and out beyond them flushed The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea. So all the ways were safe from shore to shore, But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord. Then, out of Tristram waking, the red dream Fled with a shout, and that low lodge returned, Mid-forest, and the wind among the boughs. He whistled his good warhorse left to graze Among the forest greens, vaulted upon him, And rode beneath an ever-showering leaf, Till one lone woman, weeping near a cross, Stayed him. `Why weep ye?' `Lord,' she said, `my man Hath left me or is dead;' whereon he thought`What, if she hate me now? I would not this. What, if she love me still? I would not that. I know not what I would'-but said to her, `Yet weep not thou, lest, if thy mate return, He find thy favour changed and love thee not'Then pressing day by day through Lyonnesse Last in a roky hollow, belling, heard The hounds of Mark, and felt the goodly hounds Yelp at his heart, but turning, past and gained Tintagil, half in sea, and high on land, 643 A crown of towers. Down in a casement sat, A low sea-sunset glorying round her hair And glossy-throated grace, Isolt the Queen. And when she heard the feet of Tristram grind The spiring stone that scaled about her tower, Flushed, started, met him at the doors, and there Belted his body with her white embrace, Crying aloud, `Not Mark-not Mark, my soul! The footstep fluttered me at first: not he: Catlike through his own castle steals my Mark, But warrior-wise thou stridest through his halls Who hates thee, as I him-even to the death. My soul, I felt my hatred for my Mark Quicken within me, and knew that thou wert nigh.' To whom Sir Tristram smiling, `I am here. Let be thy Mark, seeing he is not thine.' And drawing somewhat backward she replied, `Can he be wronged who is not even his own, But save for dread of thee had beaten me, Scratched, bitten, blinded, marred me somehow-Mark? What rights are his that dare not strike for them? Not lift a hand-not, though he found me thus! But harken! have ye met him? hence he went Today for three days' hunting-as he saidAnd so returns belike within an hour. Mark's way, my soul!-but eat not thou with Mark, Because he hates thee even more than fears; Nor drink: and when thou passest any wood Close vizor, lest an arrow from the bush Should leave me all alone with Mark and hell. My God, the measure of my hate for Mark Is as the measure of my love for thee.' So, plucked one way by hate and one by love, Drained of her force, again she sat, and spake To Tristram, as he knelt before her, saying, `O hunter, and O blower of the horn, Harper, and thou hast been a rover too, For, ere I mated with my shambling king, 644 Ye twain had fallen out about the bride Of one-his name is out of me-the prize, If prize she were-(what marvel-she could see)Thine, friend; and ever since my craven seeks To wreck thee villainously: but, O Sir Knight, What dame or damsel have ye kneeled to last?' And Tristram, `Last to my Queen Paramount, Here now to my Queen Paramount of love And loveliness-ay, lovelier than when first Her light feet fell on our rough Lyonnesse, Sailing from Ireland.' Softly laughed Isolt; `Flatter me not, for hath not our great Queen My dole of beauty trebled?' and he said, `Her beauty is her beauty, and thine thine, And thine is more to me-soft, gracious, kindSave when thy Mark is kindled on thy lips Most gracious; but she, haughty, even to him, Lancelot; for I have seen him wan enow To make one doubt if ever the great Queen Have yielded him her love.' To whom Isolt, `Ah then, false hunter and false harper, thou Who brakest through the scruple of my bond, Calling me thy white hind, and saying to me That Guinevere had sinned against the highest, And I-misyoked with such a want of manThat I could hardly sin against the lowest.' He answered, `O my soul, be comforted! If this be sweet, to sin in leading-strings, If here be comfort, and if ours be sin, Crowned warrant had we for the crowning sin That made us happy: but how ye greet me-fear And fault and doubt-no word of that fond taleThy deep heart-yearnings, thy sweet memories Of Tristram in that year he was away.' And, saddening on the sudden, spake Isolt, 645 `I had forgotten all in my strong joy To see thee-yearnings?-ay! for, hour by hour, Here in the never-ended afternoon, O sweeter than all memories of thee, Deeper than any yearnings after thee Seemed those far-rolling, westward-smiling seas, Watched from this tower. Isolt of Britain dashed Before Isolt of Brittany on the strand, Would that have chilled her bride-kiss? Wedded her? Fought in her father's battles? wounded there? The King was all fulfilled with gratefulness, And she, my namesake of the hands, that healed Thy hurt and heart with unguent and caressWell-can I wish her any huger wrong Than having known thee? her too hast thou left To pine and waste in those sweet memories. O were I not my Mark's, by whom all men Are noble, I should hate thee more than love.' And Tristram, fondling her light hands, replied, `Grace, Queen, for being loved: she loved me well. Did I love her? the name at least I loved. Isolt?-I fought his battles, for Isolt! The night was dark; the true star set. Isolt! The name was ruler of the dark-Isolt? Care not for her! patient, and prayerful, meek, Pale-blooded, she will yield herself to God.' And Isolt answered, `Yea, and why not I? Mine is the larger need, who am not meek, Pale-blooded, prayerful. Let me tell thee now. Here one black, mute midsummer night I sat, Lonely, but musing on thee, wondering where, Murmuring a light song I had heard thee sing, And once or twice I spake thy name aloud. Then flashed a levin-brand; and near me stood, In fuming sulphur blue and green, a fiendMark's way to steal behind one in the darkFor there was Mark: 'He has wedded her,' he said, Not said, but hissed it: then this crown of towers So shook to such a roar of all the sky, That here in utter dark I swooned away, 646 And woke again in utter dark, and cried, 'I will flee hence and give myself to God'And thou wert lying in thy new leman's arms.' Then Tristram, ever dallying with her hand, `May God be with thee, sweet, when old and gray, And past desire!' a saying that angered her. `'May God be with thee, sweet, when thou art old, And sweet no more to me!' I need Him now. For when had Lancelot uttered aught so gross Even to the swineherd's malkin in the mast? The greater man, the greater courtesy. Far other was the Tristram, Arthur's knight! But thou, through ever harrying thy wild beastsSave that to touch a harp, tilt with a lance Becomes thee well-art grown wild beast thyself. How darest thou, if lover, push me even In fancy from thy side, and set me far In the gray distance, half a life away, Her to be loved no more? Unsay it, unswear! Flatter me rather, seeing me so weak, Broken with Mark and hate and solitude, Thy marriage and mine own, that I should suck Lies like sweet wines: lie to me: I believe. Will ye not lie? not swear, as there ye kneel, And solemnly as when ye sware to him, The man of men, our King-My God, the power Was once in vows when men believed the King! They lied not then, who sware, and through their vows The King prevailing made his realm:-I say, Swear to me thou wilt love me even when old, Gray-haired, and past desire, and in despair.' Then Tristram, pacing moodily up and down, `Vows! did you keep the vow you made to Mark More than I mine? Lied, say ye? Nay, but learnt, The vow that binds too strictly snaps itselfMy knighthood taught me this-ay, being snaptWe run more counter to the soul thereof Than had we never sworn. I swear no more. I swore to the great King, and am forsworn. For once-even to the height-I honoured him. 647 'Man, is he man at all?' methought, when first I rode from our rough Lyonnesse, and beheld That victor of the Pagan throned in hallHis hair, a sun that rayed from off a brow Like hillsnow high in heaven, the steel-blue eyes, The golden beard that clothed his lips with lightMoreover, that weird legend of his birth, With Merlin's mystic babble about his end Amazed me; then, his foot was on a stool Shaped as a dragon; he seemed to me no man, But Micha l trampling Satan; so I sware, Being amazed: but this went by- The vows! O ay-the wholesome madness of an hourThey served their use, their time; for every knight Believed himself a greater than himself, And every follower eyed him as a God; Till he, being lifted up beyond himself, Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done, And so the realm was made; but then their vowsFirst mainly through that sullying of our QueenBegan to gall the knighthood, asking whence Had Arthur right to bind them to himself? Dropt down from heaven? washed up from out the deep? They failed to trace him through the flesh and blood Of our old kings: whence then? a doubtful lord To bind them by inviolable vows, Which flesh and blood perforce would violate: For feel this arm of mine-the tide within Red with free chase and heather-scented air, Pulsing full man; can Arthur make me pure As any maiden child? lock up my tongue From uttering freely what I freely hear? Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it. And worldling of the world am I, and know The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour Woos his own end; we are not angels here Nor shall be: vows-I am woodman of the woods, And hear the garnet-headed yaffingale Mock them: my soul, we love but while we may; And therefore is my love so large for thee, Seeing it is not bounded save by love.' 648 Here ending, he moved toward her, and she said, `Good: an I turned away my love for thee To some one thrice as courteous as thyselfFor courtesy wins woman all as well As valour may, but he that closes both Is perfect, he is Lancelot-taller indeed, Rosier and comelier, thou-but say I loved This knightliest of all knights, and cast thee back Thine own small saw, 'We love but while we may,' Well then, what answer?' He that while she spake, Mindful of what he brought to adorn her with, The jewels, had let one finger lightly touch The warm white apple of her throat, replied, `Press this a little closer, sweet, untilCome, I am hungered and half-angered-meat, Wine, wine-and I will love thee to the death, And out beyond into the dream to come.' So then, when both were brought to full accord, She rose, and set before him all he willed; And after these had comforted the blood With meats and wines, and satiated their heartsNow talking of their woodland paradise, The deer, the dews, the fern, the founts, the lawns; Now mocking at the much ungainliness, And craven shifts, and long crane legs of MarkThen Tristram laughing caught the harp, and sang: `Ay, ay, O ay-the winds that bend the brier! A star in heaven, a star within the mere! Ay, ay, O ay-a star was my desire, And one was far apart, and one was near: Ay, ay, O ay-the winds that bow the grass! And one was water and one star was fire, And one will ever shine and one will pass. Ay, ay, O ay-the winds that move the mere.' Then in the light's last glimmer Tristram showed And swung the ruby carcanet. She cried, `The collar of some Order, which our King 649 Hath newly founded, all for thee, my soul, For thee, to yield thee grace beyond thy peers.' `Not so, my Queen,' he said, `but the red fruit Grown on a magic oak-tree in mid-heaven, And won by Tristram as a tourney-prize, And hither brought by Tristram for his last Love-offering and peace-offering unto thee.' He spoke, he turned, then, flinging round her neck, Claspt it, and cried, `Thine Order, O my Queen!' But, while he bowed to kiss the jewelled throat, Out of the dark, just as the lips had touched, Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek`Mark's way,' said Mark, and clove him through the brain. That night came Arthur home, and while he climbed, All in a death-dumb autumn-dripping gloom, The stairway to the hall, and looked and saw The great Queen's bower was dark,-about his feet A voice clung sobbing till he questioned it, `What art thou?' and the voice about his feet Sent up an answer, sobbing, `I am thy fool, And I shall never make thee smile again.' ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

287:Idylls Of The King: The Last Tournament (Excerpt) Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his mood Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round, At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods, Danced like a wither'd leaf before the hall. And toward him from the hall, with harp in hand, And from the crown thereof a carcanet Of ruby swaying to and fro, the prize Of Tristram in the jousts of yesterday, Came Tristram, saying, "Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?" For Arthur and Sir Lancelot riding once Far down beneath a winding wall of rock Heard a child wail. A stump of oak half-dead. From roots like some black coil of carven snakes, Clutch'd at the crag, and started thro' mid air Bearing an eagle's nest: and thro' the tree Rush'd ever a rainy wind, and thro' the wind Pierced ever a child's cry: and crag and tree Scaling, Sir Lancelot from the perilous nest, This ruby necklace thrice around her neck, And all unscarr'd from beak or talon, brought A maiden babe; which Arthur pitying took, Then gave it to his Queen to rear: the Queen But coldly acquiescing, in her white arms Received, and after loved it tenderly, And named it Nestling; so forgot herself A moment, and her cares; till that young life Being smitten in mid heaven with mortal cold Past from her; and in time the carcanet Vext her with plaintive memories of the child: So she, delivering it to Arthur, said, "Take thou the jewels of this dead innocence, And make them, an thou wilt, a tourney-prize." To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne Dead nestling, and this honour after death, Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn, 197 And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear." "Would rather you had let them fall," she cried, "Plunge and be lost--ill-fated as they were, A bitterness to me!--ye look amazed, Not knowing they were lost as soon as given-Slid from my hands, when I was leaning out Above the river--that unhappy child Past in her barge: but rosier luck will go With these rich jewels, seeing that they came Not from the skeleton of a brother-slayer, But the sweet body of a maiden babe. Perchance--who knows?--the purest of thy knights May win them for the purest of my maids." She ended, and the cry of a great jousts With trumpet-blowings ran on all the ways From Camelot in among the faded fields To furthest towers; and everywhere the knights Arm'd for a day of glory before the King. But on the hither side of that loud morn Into the hall stagger'd, his visage ribb'd From ear to ear with dogwhip-weals, his nose Bridge-broken, one eye out, and one hand off, And one with shatter'd fingers dangling lame, A churl, to whom indignantly the King, "My churl, for whom Christ died, what evil beast Hath drawn his claws athwart thy face? or fiend? Man was it who marr'd heaven's image in thee thus?" Then, sputtering thro' the hedge of splinter'd teeth, Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump Pitch-blacken'd sawing the air, said the maim'd churl, "He took them and he drave them to his tower-Some hold he was a table-knight of thine-A hundred goodly ones--the Red Knight, he-Lord, I was tending swine, and the Red Knight Brake in upon me and drave them to his tower; And when I cal'd upon thy name as one 198 That doest right by gentle and by churl, Maim'd me and maul'd, and would outright have slain, Save that he aware me to a message, saying, 'Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I Have founded my Round Table in the North, And whatsoever his own knights have sworn My knights have sworn the counter to it--and say My tower is full of harlots, like his court, But mine are worthier, seeing they profess To be none other than themselves--and say My knights are all adulterers like his own, But mine are truer, seeing they profess To be none other; and say his hour is come, The heathen are upon him, his long lance Broken, and his Excalibur a straw.' " Then Arthur turn'd to Kay the seneschal, "Take thou my churl, and tend him curiously Like a king's heir, till all his hurts be whole. The heathen--but that ever-climbing wave, Hurl'd back again so often in empty foam, Hath lain for years at rest--and renegades, Thieves, bandits, leavings of confusion, whom The wholesome realm is purged of otherwhere, Friends, thro' your manhood and your fealty,--now Make their last head like Satan in the North. My younger knights, new-made, in whom your flower Waits to be solid fruit of golden deeds, Move with me toward their quelling, which achieved, The loneliest ways are safe from shore to shore. But thou, Sir Lancelot, sitting in my place Enchair'd to-morrow, arbitrate the field; For wherefore shouldst thou care to mingle with it Only to yield my Queen her own again? Speak, Lancelot, thou art silent: is it well?" Thereto Sir Lancelot answer'd, "It is well: Yet better if the King abide, and leave The leading of his younger knights to me. Else, for the King has will'd it, it is well." 199 Then Arthur rose and Lancelot follow'd him, And while they stood without the doors, the King Turn'd to him saying, "Is it then so well? Or mine the blame that oft I seem as he Of whom was written, 'A sound is in his ears'? The foot that loiters, bidden go,--the glance That only seems half-loyal to command,-A manner somewhat fall'n from reverence-Or have I dream'd the bearing of our knights Tells of a manhood ever less and lower? Or whence the fear lest this my realm, uprear'd, By noble deeds at one with noble vows, From flat confusion and brute violence,s Reel back into the beast, and be no more?" He spoke, and taking all his younger knights, Down the slope city rode, and sharply turn'd North by the gate. In her high bower the Queen, Working a tapestry, lifted up her head, Watch'd her lord pass, and knew not that she sigh'd. Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme Of bygone Merlin, "Where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes." But when the morning of a tournament, By these in earnest those in mockery call'd The Tournament of the Dead Innocence, Brake with a wet wind blowing, Lancelot, Round whose sick head all night, like birds of prey, The words of Arthur flying shriek'd, arose, And down a streetway hung with folds of pure White samite, and by fountains running wine, Where children sat in white with cups of gold, Moved to the lists, and there, with slow sad steps Ascending, fill'd his double-dragon'd chair. He glanced and saw the stately galleries, Dame, damsel, each thro' worship of their Queen 200 White-robed in honour of the stainless child, And some with scatter'd jewels, like a bank Of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire. He look'd but once, and vail'd his eyes again. The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began: And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, When all the goodlier guests are past away, Sat their great umpire, looking o'er the lists. He saw the laws that ruled the tournament Broken, but spake not; once, a knight cast down Before his throne of arbitration cursed The dead babe and the follies of the King; And once the laces of a helmet crack'd, And show'd him, like a vermin in its hole, Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard The voice that billow'd round the barriers roar An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight, But newly-enter'd, taller than the rest, And armour'd all in forest green, whereon There tript a hundred tiny silver deer, And wearing but a holly-spray for crest, With ever-scattering berries, and on shield A spear, a harp, a bugle--Tristram--late From overseas in Brittany return'd, And marriage with a princess of that realm, Isolt the White--Sir Tristram of the Woods-Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain His own against him, and now yearn'd to shake The burthen off his heart in one full shock With Tristram ev'n to death: his strong hands gript And dinted the gilt dragons right and left, Until he groan'd for wrath--so many of those, That ware their ladies' colours on the casque, Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds, And there with gibes and flickering mockeries 201 Stood, while he mutter'd, "Craven crests! O shame! What faith have these in whom they sware to love? The glory of our Round Table is no more." So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems, Not speaking other word than "Hast thou won? Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand Wherewith thou takest this, is red!" to whom Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot's languorous mood, Made answer, "Ay, but wherefore toss me this Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound? Let be thy fair Queen's fantasy. Strength of heart And might of limb, but mainly use and skill, Are winners in this pastime of our King. My hand--belike the lance hath dript upon it-No blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight, Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield, Great brother, thou nor I have made the world; Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine." And Tristram round the gallery made his horse Caracole; then bow'd his homage, bluntly saying, "Fair damsels, each to him who worships each Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold This day my Queen of Beauty is not here." And most of these were mute, some anger'd, one Murmuring, "All courtesy is dead," and one "The glory of our Round Table is no more." Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung, And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day Went glooming down in wet and weariness: But under her black brows a swarthy one Laugh'd shrilly, crying, "Praise the patient saints, Our one white day of Innocence hath past, Tho' somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it. The snowdrop only, flowering thro' the year, Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide. Come--let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen's 202 And Lancelot's, at this night's solemnity With all the kindlier colours of the field." So dame and damsel glitter'd at the feast Variously gay: for he that tells the tale Liken'd them, saying, as when an hour of cold Falls on the mountain in midsummer snows, And all the purple slopes of mountain flowers Pass under white, till the warm hour returns With veer of wind, and all are flowers again; So dame and damsel cast the simple white, And glowing in all colours, the live grass, Rose-campion, bluebell, kingcup, poppy, glanced About the revels, and with mirth so loud Beyond all use, that, half-amazed, the Queen, And wroth at Tristram and the lawless jousts, Brake up their sports, then slowly to her bower Parted, and in her bosom pain was lord. And little Dagonet on the morrow morn, High over all the yellowing Autumn-tide, Danced like a wither'd leaf before the hall. Then Tristram saying, "Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?" Wheel'd round on either heel, Dagonet replied, "Belike for lack of wiser company; Or being fool, and seeing too much wit Makes the world rotten, why, belike I skip To know myself the wisest knight of all." "Ay, fool," said Tristram, "but 'tis eating dry To dance without a catch, a roundelay To dance to." Then he twangled on his harp, And while he twangled little Dagonet stood Quiet as any water-sodden log Stay'd in the wandering warble of a brook; But when the twangling ended, skipt again; And being ask'd, "Why skipt ye not, Sir Fool?" Made answer, "I had liefer twenty years Skip to the broken music of my brains Than any broken music thou canst make." Then Tristram, waiting for the quip to come, 203 "Good now, what music have I broken, fool?" And little Dagonet, skipping, "Arthur, the King's; For when thou playest that air with Queen Isolt, Thou makest broken music with thy bride, Her daintier namesake down in Brittany-And so thou breakest Arthur's music, too." "Save for that broken music in thy brains, Sir Fool," said Tristram, "I would break thy head. Fool, I came late, the heathen wars were o'er, The life had flown, we sware but by the shell-I am but a fool to reason with a fool-Come, thou art crabb'd and sour: but lean me down, Sir Dagonet, one of thy long asses' ears, And harken if my music be not true. "`Free love--free field--we love but while we may: The woods are hush'd, their music is no more: The leaf is dead, the yearning past away: New leaf, new life--the days of frost are o'er: New life, new love, to suit the newer day: New loves are sweet as those that went before: Free love--free field--we love but while we may.' "Ye might have moved slow-measure to my tune, Not stood stockstill. I made it in the woods, And heard it ring as true as tested gold." But Dagonet with one foot poised in his hand, "Friend, did ye mark that fountain yesterday Made to run wine?--but this had run itself All out like a long life to a sour end-And them that round it sat with golden cups To hand the wine to whosoever came-The twelve small damosels white as Innocence, In honour of poor Innocence the babe, Who left the gems which Innocence the Queen Lent to the King, and Innocence the King Gave for a prize--and one of those white slips Handed her cup and piped, the pretty one, 204 'Drink, drink, Sir Fool,' and thereupon I drank, Spat--pish--the cup was gold, the draught was mud." And Tristram, "Was it muddier than thy gibes? Is all the laughter gone dead out of thee?-Not marking how the knighthood mock thee, fool-'Fear God: honour the King--his one true knight-Sole follower of the vows'--for here be they Who knew thee swine enow before I came, Smuttier than blasted grain: but when the King Had made thee fool, thy vanity so shot up It frighted all free fool from out thy heart; Which left thee less than fool, and less than swine, A naked aught--yet swine I hold thee still, For I have flung thee pearls and find thee swine." And little Dagonet mincing with his feet, "Knight, an ye fling those rubies round my neck In lieu of hers, I'll hold thou hast some touch Of music, since I care not for thy pearls. Swine? I have wallow'd, I have wash'd--the world Is flesh and shadow--I have had my day. The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind Hath foul'd me--an I wallow'd, then I wash'd-I have had my day and my philosophies-And thank the Lord I am King Arthur's fool. Swine, say ye? swine, goats, asses, rams and geese Troop'd round a Paynim harper once, who thrumm'd On such a wire as musically as thou Some such fine song--but never a king's fool." And Tristram, "Then were swine, goats, asses, geese The wiser fools, seeing thy Paynim bard Had such a mastery of his mystery That he could harp his wife up out of hell." Then Dagonet, turning on the ball of his foot, "And whither harp'st thou thine? down! and thyself 205 Down! and two more: a helpful harper thou, That harpest downward! dost thou know the star We call the harp of Arthur up in heaven?" And Tristram, "Ay, Sir Fool, for when our King Was victor wellnigh day by day, the knights, Glorying in each new glory, set his name High on all hills, and in the signs of heaven." And Dagonet answer'd, "Ay, and when the land Was freed, and the Queen false, ye set yourself To babble about him, all to show your wit-And whether he were King by courtesy, Or King by right--and so went harping down The black king's highway, got so far, and grew So witty that we play'd at ducks and drakes With Arthur's vows on the great lake of fire. Tuwhoo! do ye see it? do ye see the star?" "Nay, fool," said Tristram, "not in open day." And Dagonet, "Nay, nor will: I see it and hear. It makes a silent music up in heaven, And I, and Arthur and the angels hear, And then we skip." "Lo, fool," he said, "ye talk Fool's treason: is the King thy brother fool?" Then little Dagonet clapt his hands and shrill'd, "Ay, ay, my brother fool, the king of fools! Conceits himself as God that he can make Figs out of thistles, silk from bristles, milk From burning spurge, honey from hornet-combs And men from beasts--Long live the king of fools!" And down the city Dagonet danced away; But thro' the slowly-mellowing avenues And solitary passes of the wood Rode Tristram toward Lyonnesse and the west. Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt With ruby-circled neck, but evermore 206 Past, as a rustle or twitter in the wood Made dull his inner, keen his outer eye For all that walk'd, or crept, or perch'd, or flew. Anon the face, as, when a gust hath blown, Unruffling waters re-collect the shape Of one that in them sees himself, return'd; But at the slot or fewmets of a deer, Or ev'n a fall'n feather, vanish'd again. So on for all that day from lawn to lawn Thro' many a league-long bower he rode. At length A lodge of intertwisted beechen-boughs Furze-cramm'd, and bracken-rooft, the which himself Built for a summer day with Queen Isolt Against a shower, dark in the golden grove Appearing, sent his fancy back to where She lived a moon in that low lodge with him: Till Mark her lord had past, the Cornish King, With six or seven, when Tristram was away, And snatch'd her thence; yet dreading worse than shame Her warrior Tristram, spake not any word, But bode his hour, devising wretchedness. And now that desert lodge to Tristram lookt So sweet, that halting, in he past, and sank Down on a drift of foliage random-blown; But could not rest for musing how to smoothe And sleek his marriage over to the Queen. Perchance in lone Tintagil far from all The tonguesters of the court she had not heard. But then what folly had sent him overseas After she left him lonely here? a name? Was it the name of one in Brittany, Isolt, the daughter of the King? "Isolt Of the white hands" they call'd her: the sweet name Allured him first, and then the maid herself, Who served him well with those white hands of hers, And loved him well, until himself had thought He loved her also, wedded easily, But left her all as easily, and return'd. 207 The black-blue Irish hair and Irish eyes Had drawn him home--what marvel? then he laid His brows upon the drifted leaf and dream'd. He seem'd to pace the strand of Brittany Between Isolt of Britain and his bride, And show'd them both the ruby-chain, and both Began to struggle for it, till his Queen Graspt it so hard, that all her hand was red. Then cried the Breton, "Look, her hand is red! These be no rubies, this is frozen blood, And melts within her hand--her hand is hot With ill desires, but this I gave thee, look, Is all as cool and white as any flower." Follow'd a rush of eagle's wings, and then A whimpering of the spirit of the child, Because the twain had spoil'd her carcanet. He dream'd; but Arthur with a hundred spears Rode far, till o'er the illimitable reed, And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle, The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh Glared on a huge machicolated tower That stood with open doors, where out was roll'd A roar of riot, as from men secure Amid their marshes, ruffians at their ease Among their harlot-brides, an evil song. "Lo there," said one of Arthur's youth, for there, High on a grim dead tree before the tower, A goodly brother of the Table Round Swung by the neck: and on the boughs a shield Showing a shower of blood in a field noir, And therebeside a horn, inflamed the knights At that dishonour done the gilded spur, Till each would clash the shield, and blow the horn. But Arthur waved them back. Alone he rode. Then at the dry harsh roar of the great horn, That sent the face of all the marsh aloft An ever upward-rushing storm and cloud Of shriek and plume, the Red Knight heard, and all, 208 Even to tipmost lance and topmost helm In blood-red armour sallying, howl'd to the King, "The teeth of Hell flay bare and gnash thee flat! Lo! art thou not that eunuch-hearted King Who fain had clipt free manhood from the world-The woman-worshipper? Yea, God's curse, and I! Slain was the brother of my paramour By a knight of thine, and I that heard her whine And snivel, being eunuch-hearted too, Sware by the scorpion-worm that twists in hell, And stings itself to everlasting death, To hang whatever knight of thine I fought And tumbled. Art thou King?--Look to thy life!" He ended: Arthur knew the voice; the face Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind. And Arthur deign'd not use of word or sword, But let the drunkard, as he stretch'd from horse To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-shore, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing; thus he fell Head-heavy; then the knights, who watch'd him, roar'd And shouted and leapt down upon the fall'n; There trampled out his face from being known, And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves: Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang Thro' open doors, and swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl'd The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement stream'd with massacre: Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, Which half that autumn night, like the live North, 209 Red-pulsing up thro' Alioth and Alcor, Made all above it, and a hundred meres About it, as the water Moab saw Come round by the East, and out beyond them flush'd The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea. So all the ways were safe from shore to shore, But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord. Then, out of Tristram waking, the red dream Fled with a shout, and that low lodge return'd, Mid-forest, and the wind among the boughs. He whistled his good warhorse left to graze Among the forest greens, vaulted upon him, And rode beneath an ever-showering leaf, Till one lone woman, weeping near a cross, Stay'd him. "Why weep ye?" "Lord," she said, "my man Hath left me or is dead"; whereon he thought-"What, if she hate me now? I would not this. What, if she love me still? I would not that. I know not what I would"--but said to her, "Yet weep not thou, lest, if thy mate return, He find thy favour changed and love thee not"-Then pressing day by day thro' Lyonnesse Last in a roky hollow, belling, heard The hounds of Mark, and felt the goodly hounds Yelp at his heart, but turning, past and gain'd Tintagil, half in sea, and high on land, A crown of towers. Down in a casement sat, A low sea-sunset glorying round her hair And glossy-throated grace, Isolt the Queen. And when she heard the feet of Tristram grind The spiring stone that scaled about her tower, Flush'd, started, met him at the doors, and there Belted his body with her white embrace, Crying aloud, "Not Mark--not Mark, my soul! The footstep flutter'd me at first: not he: Catlike thro' his own castle steals my Mark, But warrior-wise thou stridest thro' his halls Who hates thee, as I him--ev'n to the death. 210 My soul, I felt my hatred for my Mark Quicken within me, and knew that thou wert nigh." To whom Sir Tristram smiling, "I am here. Let be thy Mark, seeing he is not thine." And drawing somewhat backward she replied, "Can he be wrong'd who is not ev'n his own, But save for dread of thee had beaten me, Scratch'd, bitten, blinded, marr'd me somehow--Mark? What rights are his that dare not strike for them? Not lift a hand--not, tho' he found me thus! But harken! have ye met him? hence he went To-day for three days' hunting--as he said-And so returns belike within an hour. Mark's way, my soul!--but eat not thou with Mark, Because he hates thee even more than fears; Nor drink: and when thou passest any wood Close vizor, lest an arrow from the bush Should leave me all alone with Mark and hell. My God, the measure of my hate for Mark Is as the measure of my love for thee.'' So, pluck'd one way by hate and one by love, Drain'd of her force, again she sat, and spake To Tristram, as he knelt before her, saying, "O hunter, and O blower of the horn, Harper, and thou hast been a rover too, For, ere I mated with my shambling king, Ye twain had fallen out about the bride Of one--his name is out of me--the prize, If prize she were--(what marvel--she could see) Thine, friend; and ever since my craven seeks To wreck thee villainously: but, O Sir Knight, What dame or damsel have ye kneel'd to last?" And Tristram, "Last to my Queen Paramount, Here now to my Queen Paramount of love And loveliness--ay, lovelier than when first Her light feet fell on our rough Lyonnesse, 211 Sailing from Ireland." Softly laugh'd Isolt; "Flatter me not, for hath not our great Queen My dole of beauty trebled?" and he said, "Her beauty is her beauty, and thine thine, And thine is more to me--soft, gracious, kind-Save when thy Mark is kindled on thy lips Most gracious; but she, haughty ev'n to him, Lancelot; for I have seen him wan enow To make one doubt if ever the great Queen Have yielded him her love." To whom Isolt, "Ah then, false hunter and false harper, thou Who brakest thro' the scruple of my bond, Calling me thy white hind, and saying to me That Guinevere had sinn'd against the highest, And I--misyoked with such a want of man-That I could hardly sin against the lowest." He answer'd, "O my soul, be comforted! If this be sweet, to sin in leading-strings, If here be comfort, and if ours be sin, Crown'd warrant had we for the crowning sin That made us happy: but how ye greet me--fear And fault and doubt--no word of that fond tale-Thy deep heart-yearnings, thy sweet memories Of Tristram in that year he was away." And, saddening on the sudden, spake Isolt, "I had forgotten all in my strong joy To see thee--yearnings?--ay! for, hour by hour, Here in the never-ended afternoon, O sweeter than all memories of thee, Deeper than any yearnings after thee Seem'd those far-rolling, westward-smiling seas, Watch'd from this tower. Isolt of Britain dash'd Before Isolt of Brittany on the strand, Would that have chill'd her bride-kiss? Wedded her? Fought in her father's battles? wounded there? 212 The King was all fulfill'd with gratefulness, And she, my namesake of the hands, that heal'd Thy hurt and heart with unguent and caress-Well--can I wish her any huger wrong Than having known thee? her too hast thou left To pine and waste in those sweet memories. O were I not my Mark's, by whom all men Are noble, I should hate thee more than love." And Tristram, fondling her light hands, replied, "Grace, Queen, for being loved: she loved me well. Did I love her? the name at least I loved. Isolt?--I fought his battles, for Isolt! The night was dark; the true star set. Isolt! The name was ruler of the dark--Isolt? Care not for her! patient, and prayerful, meek, Pale-blooded, she will yield herself to God." And Isolt answer'd, "Yea, and why not I? Mine is the larger need, who am not meek, Pale-blooded, prayerful. Let me tell thee now. Here one black, mute midsummer night I sat, Lonely, but musing on thee, wondering where, Murmuring a light song I had heard thee sing, And once or twice I spake thy name aloud. Then flash'd a levin-brand; and near me stood, In fuming sulphur blue and green, a fiend-Mark's way to steal behind one in the dark-For there was Mark: 'He has wedded her,' he said, Not said, but hiss'd it: then this crown of towers So shook to such a roar of all the sky, That here in utter dark I swoon'd away, And woke again in utter dark, and cried, 'I will flee hence and give myself to God'-And thou wert lying in thy new leman's arms." Then Tristram, ever dallying with her hand, "May God be with thee, sweet, when old and gray, And past desire!" a saying that anger'd her.' 213 "`May God be with thee, sweet, when thou art old, And sweet no more to me!' I need Him now. For when had Lancelot utter'd aught so gross Ev'n to the swineherd's malkin in the mast? The greater man, the greater courtesy. Far other was the Tristram, Arthur's knight! But thou, thro' ever harrying thy wild beasts-Save that to touch a harp, tilt with a lance Becomes thee well--art grown wild beast thyself. How darest thou, if lover, push me even In fancy from thy side, and set me far In the gray distance, half a life away, Her to be loved no more? Unsay it, unswear! Flatter me rather, seeing me so weak, Broken with Mark and hate and solitude, Thy marriage and mine own, that I should suck Lies like sweet wines: lie to me: I believe. Will ye not lie? not swear, as there ye kneel, And solemnly as when ye sware to him The man of men, our King--My God, the power Was once in vows when men believed the King! They lied not then, who sware, and thro' their vows The King prevailing made his realm:--I say, Swear to me thou wilt love me ev'n when old, Gray-hair'd, and past desire, and in despair." Then Tristram, pacing moodily up and down, "Vows! did you keep the vow you made to Mark More than I mine? Lied, say ye? Nay, but learnt, The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself-My knighthood taught me this--ay, being snapt-We run more counter to the soul thereof Than had we never sworn. I swear no more. I swore to the great King, and am forsworn. For once--ev'n to the height--I honour'd him. 'Man, is he man at all?' methought, when first I rode from our rough Lyonnesse, and beheld That victor of the Pagan throned in hall-His hair, a sun that ray'd from off a brow Like hillsnow high in heaven, the steel-blue eyes, The golden beard that clothed his lips with light-- 214 Moreover, that weird legend of his birth, With Merlin's mystic babble about his end Amazed me; then his foot was on a stool Shaped as a dragon; he seem'd to me no man, But Michaël trampling Satan; so I sware, Being amazed: but this went by--The vows! O ay--the wholesome madness of an hour-They served their use, their time; for every knight Believed himself a greater than himself, And every follower eyed him as a God; Till he, being lifted up beyond himself, Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done, And so the realm was made; but then their vows-First mainly thro' that sullying of our Queen-Began to gall the knighthood, asking whence Had Arthur right to bind them to himself? Dropt down from heaven? wash'd up from out the deep? They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood Of our old kings: whence then? a doubtful lord To bind them by inviolable vows, Which flesh and blood perforce would violate: For feel this arm of mine--the tide within Red with free chase and heather-scented air, Pulsing full man; can Arthur make me pure As any maiden child? lock up my tongue From uttering freely what I freely hear? Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it. And worldling of the world am I, and know The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour Woos his own end; we are not angels here Nor shall be: vows--I am woodman of the woods, And hear the garnet-headed yaffingale Mock them: my soul, we love but while we may; And therefore is my love so large for thee, Seeing it is not bounded save by love." Here ending, he moved toward her, and she said, "Good: an I turn'd away my love for thee To some one thrice as courteous as thyself-For courtesy wins woman all as well As valour may, but he that closes both 215 Is perfect, he is Lancelot--taller indeed, Rosier and comelier, thou--but say I loved This knightliest of all knights, and cast thee back Thine own small saw, 'We love but while we may,' Well then, what answer?" He that while she spake, Mindful of what he brought to adorn her with, The jewels, had let one finger lightly touch The warm white apple of her throat, replied, "Press this a little closer, sweet, until-Come, I am hunger'd and half-anger'd--meat, Wine, wine--and I will love thee to the death, And out beyond into the dream to come." So then, when both were brought to full accord, She rose, and set before him all he will'd; And after these had comforted the blood With meats and wines, and satiated their hearts-Now talking of their woodland paradise, The deer, the dews, the fern, the founts, the lawns; Now mocking at the much ungainliness, And craven shifts, and long crane legs of Mark-Then Tristram laughing caught the harp, and sang: "Ay, ay, O ay--the winds that bend the brier! A star in heaven, a star within the mere! Ay, ay, O ay--a star was my desire, And one was far apart, and one was near: Ay, ay, O ay--the winds that bow the grass! And one was water and one star was fire, And one will ever shine and one will pass. Ay, ay, O ay--the winds that move the mere." Then in the light's last glimmer Tristram show'd And swung the ruby carcanet. She cried, "The collar of some Order, which our King Hath newly founded, all for thee, my soul, For thee, to yield thee grace beyond thy peers." 216 "Not so, my Queen," he said, "but the red fruit Grown on a magic oak-tree in mid-heaven, And won by Tristram as a tourney-prize, And hither brought by Tristram for his last Love-offering and peace-offering unto thee." He spoke, he turn'd, then, flinging round her neck, Claspt it, and cried "Thine Order, O my Queen!" But, while he bow'd to kiss the jewell'd throat, Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch'd, Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek-"Mark's way," said Mark, and clove him thro' the brain. That night came Arthur home, and while he climb'd, All in a death-dumb autumn-dripping gloom, The stairway to the hall, and look'd and saw The great Queen's bower was dark,--about his feet A voice clung sobbing till he question'd it, "What art thou?" and the voice about his feet Sent up an answer, sobbing, "I am thy fool, And I shall never make thee smile again." ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

--- IN CHAPTERS (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

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   6 Integral Yoga
   3 Fiction
   2 Psychology
   1 Mythology


   6 The Mother
   4 Satprem
   3 H P Lovecraft