The Masters Of Their Craft
The following extract is the end of the story, 'The Dead' by James Joyce. Considered to be one of the most beautiful and poetic prose of all times, the three paragraphs leave a lasting effect on your senses, specially in retrospect. Just LOVE it for what it is.After this, is a poem by Emily Dickinson. It is one of my personal favourites, as again, it plays on the senses. The setting is ethereal, other worldly and there is a softness to the whole scene, that is essentially indescribable. Feel it for yourself.
My respects to the two of them.
JAMES JOYCE
"The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. "
EMILY DICKINSON
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!
posted by Swetank Gupta @ 3:39 pm
3 Comments:
I like Emily Dickinson. One poem of hers I esp remember:
"Hope is [blank, damn I thought I remembered]... with feathers
That perches on the soul
And sings the tune without the words..."
Okay Googled it.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
...
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Okay, I didn't know these :|
You guys are just too good at Literature. Anyways.. the lines by James Joyce are nice!
His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
NICE!
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