February 2011
27 posts
Ode on a Grecian Urn
By John Keats, 1820
Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What...
“We ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
– Franz Kafka
Chemise
by Kay Ryan, 1945.
What would the self disrobed look like, the form undraped? There is a flimsy cloth we can’t take off— some last chemise we can’t escape— a hope more intimate than paint to please.
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
By William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course...
