His art with nature’s workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed
– William Shakespeare, from Venus and Adonis
When I was studying Shakespeare in college we were reading Venus and Adonis aloud as a class together when my professor stopped the person reading his lines (the full poem is here if you are interested). He continued to explain that as our professor he was here to teach us about Shakespeare and expose us to his plays and characters and some of the history behind them and to make us think and write about them. But what he could not do as our professor was to teach us how beautiful a line of poetry was which the student had just read. I watched him as he smiled in a sort of rapture and joy with the literature, even while admitting his own inability to convey exactly why these lines were so special to him. Sitting at my desk, I looked back on the lines he was referencing (Lord help me if I could recall what lines they were now!), and as I re-read them again with new eyes in search of just the pure beauty in them I was instantly awakened (once again) to a deeper love of literature. I was discovering a new depth in reading and feeling the lines on the page.
As I write these words to you now, I am beginning to wonder if my teacher did in fact lie to me or was at least mistaken, because in hindsight I can clearly see that he was very much able to teach me just how beautiful those lines by Shakespeare really, truly were. He actually was able to convey to me that mysteries are indeed buried within words, and one way to reveal them is through pure feeling. In doing so, he helped me in that very moment to chart my course that much further with literature and to assist me in opening my heart even more to beauty, to truth, to language, and to literature.
In my own humble way, I’d like to explore this same vein with you all reading here – that is the language and beauty of literature! I read fairly extensively, and I listen regularly to podcasts and to professors speak on literature and history and culture, and although they all often cite stirring passages and lines in literary texts, it strikes me now that they don’t exactly discuss what makes those lines so beautiful, so rapturous. More often we discuss the meaning or significance behind the lines, how they relate or correspond to history or to cultural achievements, or we compare them to other pieces of literature through the ages. And all of that is good no question! Heck I live for and love all of that! But here today I’d like to try what my professor claimed he couldn’t do, and that is to somehow reveal the beauty in great literature.
I don’t plan to write very much in this post myself. Rather I plan to share with you great lines that I meditate upon regularly, that still ring in my ears even after reading them years ago. I don’t want to explain away the lines or dissect them very much at all. Instead I’d prefer for the lines to speak for themselves. Meaning in these lines is secondary to the beauty and rapture of the line. Let the music of the language carry you away. Let it hit your face like a breeze on a windy day. Just open up to it. Really this is the first love of literature in my estimation. The sheer pleasure of simply reading lines on a page. The sonorous and melodic tone of the language. Forget what is actually said for a moment and just hold on for the ride.
When I was studying poetry with the great Tony Hoagland he would often say that a poem is like a roller coaster – a poem is supposed to take you on a ride and thrill and excite you. As writers, readers, and critics of literature we are to be mindful of that ride and to insure that the tracks are well laid and sturdy and don’t throw the reader off that roller coaster. They are to have a smooth ride and adventure. I’ve always liked that analogy, and I think of it often when I write and read stories. Granted both Tony and I will be the first to say that this is not easy to do and is even harder to maintain for the entire piece. This is perhaps one of the most difficult things to accomplish as a writer, so when we find lines that are masterfully written, that carry us away, and resound in the core of our bodies, we are wise to embrace them, to devour them, and to imbibe them regularly and often. Really this is what this post is attempting to do. Of course the lines I will share with you today are not exhaustive – not even close. But they are lines which have thrilled me for years and still excite me and take me into a joy, an ecstasy, another world. We all have works of literature that elicit some transcendent experience, some body electric through us, and it is wonderful to relish them, to re-member them, and enjoy them. If perchance you don’t have many lines in literature that have made you awe-struck with wonder and excitement, then perhaps these lines I will share with you can help to inspire you and set you off on your own personal quest for more beauty, truth, wisdom, and love in your life. Truly I hope so for all of us! So enjoy reading – or shall I say imbibing – of literature!
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the mind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature’s watchmen- links which connect the days of animated life. – Henry David Thoreau, from Walden Pond, Chapter “Solitude”
There is one point on which we would wish to say a word before closing this preface. Hawkeye calls the Lac du Saint Sacrement, the “Horican.” As we believe this to be an appropriation of the name that has its origin with ourselves, the time has arrived, perhaps, when the fact should be frankly admitted. While writing this book, fully a quarter of a century since, it occurred to us that the French name of this lake was too complicated, the American too commonplace, and the Indian too unpronounceable, for either to be used familiarly in a work of fiction. Looking over an ancient map, it was ascertained that a tribe of Indians, called “Les Horicans” by the French, existed in the neighborhood of this beautiful sheet of water. As every word uttered by Natty Bumppo was not to be received as rigid truth, we took the liberty of putting the “Horican” into his mouth, as the substitute for “Lake George.” The name has appeared to find favor, and all things considered, it may possibly be quite as well to let it stand, instead of going back to the House of Hanover for the appellation of our finest sheet of water. We relieve our conscience by the confession, at all events leaving it to exercise its authority as it may see fit. – James Fenimore Cooper, from Last of the Mohicans, “Introduction”
And then when Beowulf needed him most Wiglaf showed his courage, his strength And skill, and the boldness he was born with. Ignoring The dragon’s head, he helped his lord By striking lower down. The sword Sank in; his hand was burned, but the shining Blade had done its work, the dragon’s Belching flames began to flicker And die away. And Beowulf drew His battle-sharp dagger: the blood-stained old king Still knew what he was doing. Quickly, he cut The beast in half, slit it apart. It fell, their courage had killed it, two noble Cousins had joined in the dragon’s death. Yet what they did all men must do When the time comes! But the triumph was the last Beowulf would ever earn, the end Of greatness and life together. The wound In his neck began to swell and grow; He could feel something stirring, burning In his veins, a stinging venom, and knew The beast’s fangs had left it. He fumbled Along the wall, found a slab Of stone, and dropped down; above him he saw Huge stone arches and heavy posts, Holding up the roof of that giant hall. Then Wiglaf’s gentle hands bathed The blood-stained prince, his glorious lord, Weary of war, and loosened his helmet. – from Beowulf, translated by Burton Raffel
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. – Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms
The young man who came to the door – he was about thirty, perhaps, with a handsome, smiling face – didn’t seem to find my lateness offensive, and led me into a large room. On one side of the room sat half a dozen women, all in white; they were much occupied with a beautiful baby, who seemed to belong to the youngest of the women. On the other side of the room sat seven or eight men, young, dressed in dark suits, very much at ease, and very imposing. The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remember from rooms in one’s early childhood – a sunlight encountered later only in one’s dreams. I remember being astounded by the quietness, the ease, the peace, the taste. I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect – and the respect increased my fright, for it meant that they expected something of me that I knew in my heart, for their sakes, I could not give – and we sat down. – James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time
They are dark caves. Even when they open towards the sun, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the circular chamber. There is little use to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit; the walls of the circular chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaid with lovely colours divides the lovers, delicate stars of pink and grey interpose, exquisite nebulae, shadings fainter than the tail of a comet or the midday moon, all the evanescent life of the granite, only here visible. Fists and fingers thrust above the advancing soil – here at last is their skin, finer than any covering acquired by the animals, smoother than windless water, more voluptuous than love. The radiance increases, the flames touch one another, kiss, expire. The cave is dark again, like all the caves. – E.M. Forster, from A Passage to India
The wind was practicing with small gusts of hot air that fluttered the leaves on the elm tree in the yard. The wind was warming up for the afternoon, and within a few hours the sky over the valley would be dense with red dust, and along the ground the wind would catch waves of reddish sand and make them race cross the dry red clay flats. The sky was hazy blue and it looked far away and uncertain, but he could remember times when he and Rocky had climbed Bone Mesa, high above the valley southwest of Mesita, and he had felt that the sky was near and that he could have touched it. He believed then that touching the sky had to do with where you were standing and how the clouds were that day. He had believed that on certain nights, when the moon rose full and wide as as corner of the sky, a person standing on the high sandstone cliff of that mesa could reach the moon. Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. .They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the direction – exactly which way to go and what to do to get there; it depended on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind “nonsense.” But they had been wrong. Joisah had been there, in the jungle; he had come. Tayo had watched him die, and he had done nothing to save him. – Leslie Marmon Silko, from Ceremony
The roar of the sea had long announced their approach to the cliff, on the summit of which, like the nest of some sea-eagle, the founder of the fortalice had perched his eyry. The pale moon, which had hitherto been contending with flitting clouds, now shone out, and gave them a view of the solitary and naked tower, situated on a projecting cliff that beetled over the German ocean. On three sides the rock was precipitous; on the fourth which was that towards the land, it had been originally fenced by an artificial ditch and drawbridge, but the latter was broken down and ruinous, and the former had been in part filled up, so as to allow passage for a horseman into the narrow court-yard, encircled on two sides with low offices and stables, partly ruinous, and closed on the landward front by a low embattled wall, while the remaining side of the quadrangle was occupied by the tower itself, which, tall and narrow, and built of a greyish stone, stood glimmering in the moonlight, like the sheeted spectre of some huge giant. A wilder, or a more disconsolate dwelling, it was perhaps difficult to conceive. The sombrous and heavy sound of the billows, successively dashing against the rocky beach at a profound distance beneath, was to the ear what the landscape was to the eye – a symbol of unvaried and monotonous melancholy, not unmingled with horror. – Sir Walter Scott, from The Bride of Lammermoor
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. – William Shakespeare, from Macbeth, Act V Scene V
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
– John Keats, from Ode to a Nightingale
With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it — a third time. And so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed ( she felt it looming out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers — this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention. She was half unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away? Why not left in peace, to talk to Mr. Carmichael on the lawn? It was an exacting form of intercourse anyhow. Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted. Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt. Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn’t paint, saying she couldn’t create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them. – Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse
The owners of the land came onto the land, or more often a spokesman for the owners came. They came in closed cars, and they felt the dry earth with their fingers, and sometimes they drove big earth augers into the ground for soil tests. The tenants, from their sun-beaten dooryards, watched uneasily when the closed cars drove along the fields. And at last the owner men drove into the dooryards and sat in their cars to talk out of the windows. The tenant men stood beside the cars for a while, and then squatted on their hams and found sticks with which to mark the dust. In the open doors the women stood looking out, and behind them the children—corn-headed children, with wide eyes, one bare foot on top of the other bare foot, and the toes working. The women and the children watched their men talking to the owner men. They were silent. Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. – John Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath
But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines. It is possible that there was this golden legend under the utilitarian one: “I will help to my last effort the woman I have loved so dearly.”
He went back to the barn to endeavour to obtain assistance for covering the ricks that very night. All was silent within, and he would have passed on in the belief that the party had broken up, had not a dim light, yellow as saffron by contrast with the greenish whiteness outside, streamed through a knot-hole in the folding doors.
Gabriel looked in. An unusual picture met his eye.
The candles suspended among the evergreens had burnt down to their sockets, and in some cases the leaves tied about them were scorched. Many of the lights had quite gone out, others smoked and stank, grease dropping from them upon the floor. Here, under the table, and leaning against forms and chairs in every conceivable attitude except the perpendicular, were the wretched persons of all the work-folk, the hair of their heads at such low levels being suggestive of mops and brooms. In the midst of these shone red and distinct the figure of Sergeant Troy, leaning back in a chair. Coggan was on his back, with his mouth open, huzzing forth snores, as were several others; the united breathings of the horizonal assemblage forming a subdued roar like London from a distance. Joseph Poorgrass was curled round in the fashion of a hedge-hog, apparently in attempts to present the least possible portion of his surface to the air; and behind him was dimly visible an unimportant remnant of William Smallbury. The glasses and cups still stood upon the table, a water-jug being overturned, from which a small rill, after tracing its course with marvellous precision down the centre of the long table, fell into the neck of the unconscious Mark Clark, in a steady, monotonous drip, like the dripping of a stalactite in a cave. – Thomas Hardy, from Far From the Madding Crowd