| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Prufrock/Other Observations by T. S. Eliot: In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
Prufrock/Other Observations |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: CHAPTER 2
EARNESTLY as Maria endeavoured to soothe, by reading, the anguish
of her wounded mind, her thoughts would often wander from the
subject she was led to discuss, and tears of maternal tenderness
obscured the reasoning page. She descanted on "the ills which
flesh is heir to," with bitterness, when the recollection of her
babe was revived by a tale of fictitious woe, that bore any
resemblance to her own; and her imagination was continually employed,
to conjure up and embody the various phantoms of misery, which
folly and vice had let loose on the world. The loss of her babe
was the tender string; against other cruel remembrances she laboured
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: Our dances broke and buzzed in knots of talk;
Nothing but this; my very ears were hot
To hear them: knowledge, so my daughter held,
Was all in all: they had but been, she thought,
As children; they must lose the child, assume
The woman: then, Sir, awful odes she wrote,
Too awful, sure, for what they treated of,
But all she is and does is awful; odes
About this losing of the child; and rhymes
And dismal lyrics, prophesying change
Beyond all reason: these the women sang;
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Caesar's Commentaries in Latin by Julius Caesar: Arvernos. Hi cum tantopere de potentatu inter se multos annos
contenderent, factum esse uti ab Arvernis Sequanisque Germani mercede
arcesserentur. Horum primo circiter milia XV Rhenum transisse; postea
quam agros et cultum et copias Gallorum homines feri ac barbari
adamassent, traductos plures; nunc esse in Gallia ad C et XX milium
numerum. Cum his Haeduos eorumque clientes semel atque iterum armis
contendisse; magnam calamitatem pulsos accepisse, omnem nobilitatem, omnem
senatum, omnem equitatum amisisse. Quibus proeliis calamitatibusque
fractos, qui et sua virtute et populi Romani hospitio atque amicitia
plurimum ante in Gallia potuissent, coactos esse Sequanis obsides dare
nobilissimos civitatis et iure iurando civitatem obstringere sese neque
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