My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav'd of light. My mother taught me underneath a tree And sitting down before the heat of day, She...
There is not the slightest doubt that things in the Colony don't go as one would wish, and though we move forward, anyway, perhaps, as not a few think, the time has come for us to bring in a Political Reformer. Yet the obstacle and difficulty is that they make a...
Phernazis the poet is at work on the crucial part of his epic: how Dareios, son of Hystaspis, took over the Persian kingdom. (It’s from him, Dareios, that our glorious king, Mithridatis, Dionysos and Evpator, descends.) But this calls for serious thought; Phernazis has to analyze the feelings Dareios must have had: arrogance,...
He who becomes the slave of habit, who follows the same routes every day, who never changes pace, who does not risk and change the color of his clothes, who does not speak and does not experience, dies slowly. He or she who shuns passion, who prefers black on white, dotting ones "it’s"...
XLII A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on; And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly. That’s human action on the outside world. We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget; And the sun is always punctual...
Without reflection, without mercy, without shame, they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about. And now I sit here and consider and despair. My brain is worn with meditating on my fate: I had outside so many things to terminate. Oh! why when they were building did I...
My happiness is me, not you. Not only because you may be temporary, But also because you want me to be what I am not. I cannot be happy when I change Merley to satisfy your selfishness. Nor can I feel content when you critize me for not thinking your thoughts, Or...
At the noisy end of the café, head bent over the table, an old man sits alone, a newspaper in front of him. And in the miserable banality of old age he thinks how little he enjoyed the years when he had strength, eloquence, and looks. He knows he’s aged a...
(Imitation - “A Dream within a Dream, 1827) TAKE this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow — You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In...
Strange, to wander in the fog. Each bush and stone stands alone, No tree sees the next one, Each is alone. My world was full of friends When my life was filled with light, Now as the fog descends None is still to be seen. Truly there is no wise man Who does not...
