To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
The jacmanna was bright violent; the wall staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since Mr. Paunceforte’s visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent. Then beneath the colour there […]
Filed under: 1927, 20th-century, Britain, Virginia Woolf, fiction on July 16th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Hallucinating Foucault
by Patricia Duncker
selections
the narrator is discussing his studies at Cambridge University:
The tine, white stone city on the edge of the Fens had seemed intensely romantic when I first came up as an undergarduate. It was like Gawain’s castle, a shimmering mass of pinnacles, an intimate world of friendships on staircases. I loved […]
Filed under: 20th-century, Britain, fiction on December 27th, 2006 | No Comments »
Voyage Out
by Virginia Woolf
selections
Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfying, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed?
He shouted out a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled […]
Filed under: 20th-century, Britain, fiction on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »
A Room of One’s Own
by Virginia Woolf
selections
[…] when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish […] has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
When people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and […]
Filed under: 20th-century, Britain, criticism on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »
Sonnet 130
by William Shakespeare
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes […]
Filed under: 16th-century, Britain, poetry on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »
Sonnet 116
by William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s […]
Filed under: 16th-century, Britain, poetry on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »
Sonnet 29
by William Shakespeare
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I […]
Filed under: 16th-century, Britain, poetry on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »
Sonnet 18
by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s […]
Filed under: 16th-century, Britain, poetry on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the […]
Filed under: 20th-century, Britain, poetry on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
PART THE FIRST.
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
“The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st hear the merry din.”
He holds him with […]
Filed under: 19th-century, Britain, poetry on December 20th, 2006 | No Comments »