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John Milton: From Lycidas

YET once more, O ye laurels, and once more,  Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,  I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,  And with forced fingers rude  Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.  Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear  Compels me to disturb your season due;  For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,  Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.  Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew  Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.  He must not float upon his watery bier  Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,  Without the meed of some melodious tear.  Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well  That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;  Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.  Hence with denial vain and coy excuse:  So may some gentle Muse  With lucky words favour my destined urn,  And as he passes turn,  And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud!  For we were nursed upon the self-same hill,  Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill; ...

John Milton: From Paradise Lost

What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men.

Happy Halloween: Thick-billed Kingbird in Ontario CA

 

Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution

The various poetic experiments and student exercises that Milton chose to preserve from his time at school and at Cambridge exhibit such an accelerated pursuit of the humanist ideal of the complete orator–poet. Milton’s character and career, as a writer of both poetry and prose, were profoundly influenced by the educational and cultural ideals of humanitas, in which he was intensively trained by private tutors and then at grammar school and university. Milton exemplifies the success of a humanist programme that sought to instil in students an ‘emotional commitment to antiquity and its repository of useful knowledge, which illuminated the human condition and guided behaviour’.29 The following chapters will show how the pursuit of humanist erudition was a key concern of his life up to the point in 1639 when, aged thirty, he returned from a fourteen-month tour of Italy to an England sliding into civil war. His dedication to the cause of liberty after 1640 was motivated less by ‘benevolenc

Baudelaire: Paris Spleen

We had spent a long day together, and it had seemed to me short. We had promised one another that we would think the same thoughts and that our two souls should become one soul; a dream which is not original, after all, except that, dreamed by all men, it has been realised by none.

Baudelaire: Paris Spleen

"The great misfortune of not being able to be alone," La Bruyere says somewhere, as though to shame those who rush to forget themselves in the crowd, fearing, doubtless, that they will be unable to endure themselves. "Almost all our ills come to us from inability to remain in our room," said another sage, Pascal, I believe, recalling thus in the cell of meditation the frantic ones who seek happiness in animation, and in a prostitution which I could call fraternary, if I wished to use the fine language of my century.

Baudelaire: Paris Spleen

From The Plaything of the Poor: I should like to give you an idea for an innocent diversion. There are so few amusements that are not guilty ones! When you go out in the morning for a stroll along the highways, fill your pockets with little penny contrivances—such as the straight merryandrew moved by a single thread, the blacksmiths who strike the anvil, the rider and his horse, with a whistle for a tail—and, along the taverns, at the foot of the trees, make presents of them to the unknown poor children whom you meet. You will see their eyes grow beyond all measure. At first, they will not dare to take; they will doubt their good fortune. Then their hands will eagerly seize the gift, and they will flee as do the cats who go far off to eat the bit you have given them, having learned to distrust man.