| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: Which never yet saw navigate its waters
Any that afterward had known return.
There he begirt me as the other pleased;
O marvellous! for even as he culled
The humble plant, such it sprang up again
Suddenly there where he uprooted it.
Purgatorio: Canto II
Already had the sun the horizon reached
Whose circle of meridian covers o'er
Jerusalem with its most lofty point,
And night that opposite to him revolves
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare: And thou, treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: his brow against the wet metal, and listening to the tremulous
silence of the trees. 'Murder! murder!' he kept repeating, as
though iteration could dim the horror of the word. The sound of
his own voice made him shudder, yet he almost hoped that Echo might
hear him, and wake the slumbering city from its dreams. He felt a
mad desire to stop the casual passer-by, and tell him everything.
Then he wandered across Oxford Street into narrow, shameful alleys.
Two women with painted faces mocked at him as he went by. From a
dark courtyard came a sound of oaths and blows, followed by shrill
screams, and, huddled upon a damp door-step, he saw the crook-
backed forms of poverty and eld. A strange pity came over him.
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