#threetenths

They that have power to hurt and will do none   
That do not do the thing they most do show,   
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,   
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;   
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;   
They are the lords and owners of their faces,   
Others but stewards of their excellence.   
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,   
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,   
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:   
  For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;   
  Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.


Sonnet 94 - William Shakespeare(1609)

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is done, and the darkness 
Falls from the wings of Night, 
As a feather is wafted downward 
From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village 
Gleam through the rain and the mist, 
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me, 
That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing, 
That is not akin to pain, 
And resembles sorrow only 
As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem, 
Some simple and heartfelt lay, 
That shall soothe this restless feeling, 
And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters, 
Not from the bards sublime, 
Whose distant footsteps echo 
Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music, 
Their mighty thoughts suggest 
Life’s endless toil and endeavor; 
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet, 
Whose songs gushed from his heart, 
As showers from the clouds of summer, 
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor, 
And nights devoid of ease, 
Still heard in his soul the music 
Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet 
The restless pulse of care, 
And come like the benediction 
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume 
The poem of thy choice, 
And lend to the rhyme of the poet 
The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music 
And the cares that infest the day, 
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, 
And as silently steal away.


The Day is Done - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1844)
(submitted via claro-que-sea)

by Dylan Thomas

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking 
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further 
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.


A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London - Dylan Thomas(1945)

by Ben Greenman

1. Yes.

2. No.

3. Yes.

4. Yes.

5. No.

6. Well, it depends on how you look at it.

7. The mere fact that you’re asking that tells me more about you than I even cared to know. It reminds me of that time when we were out driving that summer after college and you said, “Let’s go down to the river,” and then we did, and I pulled the car up almost flush with the railing, and you took the book I was reading and pretended to ask me a question about it and then flung it into the water. I thought it would stay at the top of the river, bobbing—it’s paper and cardboard, right, maybe even with some trapped air—but it sank like a stone, and you said, “only hope floats,” and you grinned that evil grin, the one you had that time you were engaged to Jerry and I caught you out with another guy (and by the way you’re welcome for going along with your story that you were a grad student visiting from St. Louis), and then you opened up your backpack and showed me that you had a gun in there and that you could imagine a circumstance where you might have to one day use it.

8. Yes.

9. No.

10. Ireland.

11. Certainly not.

12. I don’t think so, not if you define love the way a sane person would define it, but if you defined it that way then there would be an decent chance that you were sane, and I think we both know that train sailed a long time ago. Who names their car? And even then, who names their car “Pitch Blue” and insists that the color is enough to cool it even though it’s manifestly about a hundred degrees in there? Not to mention that when I played you the Prisoners record, you told me you thought it sounded like the Strokes, which is an embarrassing thing to say, and not one of those embarrassing things that’s admirable because it is an illustration of honesty, but one of those embarrassing things that’s just plain cringe-worthy.

13. Seventeen.

14. Pineapple.

15. Oscar Wilde.

16. I really regret ever getting you pregnant.

- - -

NOTE: Questions available upon request.


Answers to All of Life’s Questions - Ben Greenman, as seen on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (2011)

by Virginia Woolf

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure–a ghostly couple.

“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here tool” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”

But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,’ one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. "What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps its upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling–what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room …” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?

A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burned behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us, coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. ‘The Treasure yours.“

The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.

"Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning–” “Silver between the trees–” “Upstairs–” 'In the garden–“ "When summer came–” 'In winter snowtime–“ "The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

Nearer they come, cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken, we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. "Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”

Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.

“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years–” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure–” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”


A Haunted House - Virginia Woolf 

by Robert Frost

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.


“Out, Out—” - Robert Frost(1916)