| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: "Old King Cole", "Another Dark Lady", and "The Unforgiven";
"Flammonde" and "The Poor Relation"; "The Clinging Vine";
"Eros Turannos" and "Bokardo"; "The Voice of Age"; "Cassandra";
"The Burning Book"; "Theophilus"; "Ben Jonson Entertains
a Man from Stratford".
Contents
Flammonde
The Gift of God
The Clinging Vine
Cassandra
John Gorham
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: 'If it belonged to me alone,' said the man, 'you should have it.'
'Yes, yes,' said the others: 'if he will sing again, he can have it.'
The bird came down, and all the twenty millers set to and lifted up
the stone with a beam; then the bird put his head through the hole and
took the stone round his neck like a collar, and flew back with it to
the tree and sang--
'My mother killed her little son;
My father grieved when I was gone;
My sister loved me best of all;
She laid her kerchief over me,
And took my bones that they might lie
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: silence of night enabled the young surgeons to hear vaguely the noise
their horses made in eating their provender, and the murmur of the
waters of the Rhine, together with those indefinable sounds which
always enliven an inn when filled with persons preparing to go to bed.
Doors and windows are opened and shut, voices murmur vague words, and
a few interpellations echo along the passages.
At this moment of silence and tumult the two Frenchmen and their
landlord, who was boasting of Andernach, his inn, his cookery, the
Rhine wines, the Republican army, and his wife, were all three
listening with a sort of interest to the hoarse cries of sailors in a
boat which appeared to be coming to the wharf. The innkeeper, familiar
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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 Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: and hairless like myself. I know now that he must have
been a white man."
D'Arnot looked long and earnestly at his companion.
"Tarzan," he said at length, "it is impossible that the ape,
Kala, was your mother. If such a thing can be, which I
doubt, you would have inherited some of the characteristics
of the ape, but you have not--you are pure man, and, I
should say, the offspring of highly bred and intelligent
parents. Have you not the slightest clue to your past?"
"Not the slightest," replied Tarzan.
"No writings in the cabin that might have told something
Tarzan of the Apes |
