| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: --
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.
Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us --
Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
And the long fall wind on the lake.
Octaves
I
To get at the eternal strength of things,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: full of wrinkles as a washerwoman's hands. She
had three jolly old teeth left in the front of her
mouth, and when she grinned she looked very
knowing, as if when you found out how to take
it, life wasn't half bad. While she and Alex-
andra patched and pieced and quilted, she
talked incessantly about stories she read in a
Swedish family paper, telling the plots in great
detail; or about her life on a dairy farm in
Gottland when she was a girl. Sometimes she
forgot which were the printed stories and which
O Pioneers! |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: collection I never saw, and I am sure that had it not been for
the train of thought I was pursuing when the director called
upon me, I should have returned the papers to him without troubling
my head with any attempt to unravel the man's story.
The evidence, however, that he had endeavored to hide his life, had
been revealed by my first superficial examination; and here, I
reflected, was a singular opportunity to test both his degree of
success and my own power of constructing a coherent history out of
the detached fragments. Unpromising as is the matter, said I, let
me see whether he can conceal his secret from even such unpractised
eyes as mine.
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