| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: he notably succeeded. For wherever we might expect a poet to
be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in his poetry.
And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors whom
a modern may still read and read over again with pleasure, he
has perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear
testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming, which
distinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the
man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises and the
rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with
something in nature or society, with which they become
pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an idea, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: night.
The scents of red roses and sandalwood flutter
and die in the maze of their gem-tangled
hair,
And smiles are entwining like magical ser-
pents the poppies of lips that are opiate-
sweet;
Their glittering garments of purple are burn-
ing like tremulous dawns in the quiver-
ing air,
And exquisite, subtle and slow are the tinkle
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: I have frequently observed that when persons scratch some point which
itches intolerably, they forcibly close their eyelids; but they do not,
as I believe, first draw a deep breath and then expel it with force;
and I have never noticed that the eyes then become filled with tears;
but I am not prepared to assert that this does not occur.
The forcible closure of the eyelids is, perhaps, merely a part of that
general action by which almost all the muscles of the body are at
the same time rendered rigid. It is quite different from the gentle
closure of the eyes which often accompanies, as Gratiolet remarks,[19]
the smelling a delicious odour, or the tasting a delicious morsel,
and which probably originates in the desire to shut out any disturbing
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
