polyanthea

[polyanthea]

He thought he saw an Elephant, That practiced on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. "At length I realize," he said, "The bitterness of Life!"

-Lewis Carroll, "The Mad Gardener's Song"

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That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!

-Robert Browning, "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad"

[polyanthea]

Dead Ringers (Cronenberg, 1988)

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L'Atalante (1934)

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As into the garden Elizabeth ran Pursued by the just indignation of Ann, She trod on an object that lay in her road, She trod on an object that looked like a toad.

It looked like a toad, and it looked so because A toad was the actual object it was; And after supporting Elizabeth's tread It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.

-A. E. Housman

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Bahia Shehab, A Thousand Times No

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Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing—that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality"

[polyanthea]

I picked up a leaf today from the sidewalk. This seems childish. Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity! You are too relaxed to answer me. I am too frightened to insist. Leaf! don’t be neurotic like the small chameleon.

-Frank O'Hara

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Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

-Philip Larkin (unfinished poem)

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Reminded of the hour And that his chair is hard, A deathless verse half done, One interrupted bard Postpones his dying with a dish Of several suffocated fish.

-W. H. Auden

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La dolce vita

[polyanthea]

Taxi Driver, dir. Martin Scorsese (1976)

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Rhyme’s what’s drawn to what’s gone.

-Graham Foust, "Genre Poem"

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My Man Godfrey (1936)

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Some that turn over all books, and are equally searching in all papers; that write out of what they presently find or meet, without choice. By which means it happens that what they have discredited and impugned in one week, they have before or after extolled the same in another. Such are all the essayists, even their master Montaigne. These, in all they write, confess still what books they have read last, and therein their own folly so much, that they bring it to the stake raw and undigested; not that the place did need it neither, but that they thought themselves furnished and would vent it.

-Ben Jonson

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New Year’s morning— everything is in blossom!       I feel about average.

   A huge frog and I    staring at each other,       neither of us moves.

-Robert Hass, "After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa"

[polyanthea]

People are vivid and small and don’t live very long—

-Molly Brodak