For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. . . [This] homicide ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself--slays an immortality rather than a life.

-John Milton, Areopagitica

I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf

The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup

Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sevres pleases,
Old ones crack.

I could not die with you,
For one must wait
To shut the other's gaze down,
You could not.

And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus'.
That new grace

Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.

They'd judge us - how?
For you served Heaven, you know
Or sought to;
I could not,

Because you saturated sight,
And I had no more eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise.

And were you lost, I would be,
Though my name
Rang loudest
On the heavenly fame.

And were you saved,
And I condemned to be
Where you were not,
That self were hell to me.

So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!

-Emily Dickinson

A few from Milton. I'm eventually going to go through and mark down all the sections I loved, but for now I'll only do a little (since I'm procrastinating a paper on this book as it is):

. . . From morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day, and with the setting sun
Dropped on the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos th'Aegean isle. Thus they relate,
Erring. (1.743-7)

. . . For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense and motion? (2.146-51)

. . . Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the muses haunt
Clear spring or shady grove or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song. But chief
Thee, Sion, and the flow'ry brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit nor sometimes forget
Those other two equaled with me in fate
(So were I equaled with them in renown)
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return but not to me returns
Say or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose
Or flocks or herds or human face divine
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank. (3.26-48)

These then though unbeheld in deep of night
Shine not in vain. Nor think, though men were none,
That Heav'n would want spectators, God want praise!
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen both when we wake and when we sleep.
All these with ceaseless praise His works behold
Both day and night. How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole or responsive each to other's note,
Singing . . . (4.674-83)

Dismounted on th'Aleian field I fall
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn. (7.19-20)

They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves as mountains to assault
Heav'n's heighth and with the center mix the pole. (7.211-5)

Just this:

Thou seyst, men may nat kepe a castel-wal;
It may so longe assailled been over-al.

-Chaucer

Oh wife of Bath, you are a silly and terrible lady.



We wommen han, if that I shal nat lye,
In this matere a quentye fantasye;
Wayte what thing we may nat lightly have,
Ther-after wol we crye al-day and crave.
Forbede us thing, and that desyren we;
Prees on us faste, and thanne wol we flee.


--


Allas! allas! that ever love was sinne!
I folwed ay myn inclinacioun
By vertu of my constellacioun;
That made me I coude nought withdrawe
My chambre of Venus from a good felawe.
Yet have I Martes mark up-on my face,
And also in another privee place.
For, god so wis be my savacioun,
I ne loved never by no discrecioun,
But ever folwede myn appetyt,
Al were he short or long, or black or whyt:
I took no kepe, so that he lkyed me,
How pore he was, ne eek of what degree.



-Chaucer

two favorites

Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink
by Edna St. Vincent Millay


Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.


--


The Equilibrists
by John Crowe Ransom


Full of her long white arms and milky skin
He had a thousand times remembered sin.
Alone in the press of people traveled he,
Minding her jacinth, and myrrh, and ivory.

Mouth he remembered: the quaint orifice
From which came heat that flamed upon the kiss,
Till cold words came down spiral from the head.
Gray doves from the officious tower ill sped.

Body: it was a white field ready for love.
On her body's field, with the gaunt tower above,
The lilies grew, beseeching him to take,
If he would pluck and wear them, bruise and break.

Eyes talking: Never mind the cruel words,
Embrace my flowers, but not embrace the swords.
But what they said, the doves came straightway flying
And unsaid: Honor, Honor, they came crying.

Importunate her doves. Too pure, too wise,
Clambering on his shoulder, saying, Arise,
Leave me now, and never let us meet,
Eternal distance now command thy feet.

Predicament indeed, which thus discovers
Honor among thieves, Honor between lovers.
O such a little word is Honor, they feel!
But the gray word is between them cold as steel.

At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.

And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But honor beat them back and kept them clear.

Ah, the strict lovers, they are ruined now!
I cried in anger. But with puddled brow
Devising for those gibbeted and brave
Came I descanting: Man, what would you have?

For spin your period out, and draw your breath,
A kinder saeculum begins with Death.
Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell?
Or take your bodies honorless to Hell?

In Heaven you have heard no marriage is,
No white flesh tinder to your lecheries,
Your male and female tissue sweetly shaped
Sublimed away, and furious blood escaped.

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

But still I watched them spinning, orbited nice.
Their flames were not more radiant than their ice.
I dug in the quiet earth and wrought their tomb
And made these lines to memorize their doom:—

Epitaph
Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light;
Close, but untouching in each other's sight;
Moldered the lips and ashy the tall skull.
Let them lie perilous and beautiful.

"Because love is not born and does not grow and reach perfection in a moment, but requires time and nourishment of thought, especially where there are opposing thoughts that impede it, it was necessary before this new love could become perfect that there be much strife between the thought that nourished it and the one that opposed it, which still held the citadel of my mind on behalf of that glorious Beatrice."
-Dante's Convivio: an interesting read, but kind of infuriating!

"The man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamored of a woman but also to be enamored of the sonnet."
-C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost

"Either he was incredibly religious or completely crazy; the distinction is mostly academic."
-Michael Pettinger

"You know me; I'm just like you. It's two in the morning and we don't know nobody."
-The Sting



Also, the other day I picked up the Complete Poems of Catullus translated by Ryan Gallagher.

Eliot's Middlemarch

"Many have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness."

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time."

"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.
'No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semi-colons and parentheses.'"

"Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him."

"Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."

"And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her and to whom she is grateful."

"Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."

"For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor is generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptible as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly."

"There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them."

"'I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.'"

"All these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology."

"In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole."

"But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired."

"'By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with the darkness narrower.'
'That is a beautiful mysticism--it is a--'
'Please not to call it by any name,' said Dorothea. 'It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it.'

"They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds."

"Foolish sayings were more objectionable to her than any unwise doings."

"Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self."

"She had once said that she would like him to stay, and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her."

"He looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises."

"'I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.'"

"He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held that the deptch of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness."

"But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's orbit and solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day."

"Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy."

"It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning."

"A man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repeated error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."

"It could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing."

"'I have never done you injustice. Please, remember me,' said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob.
'Why should you say that?' said Will, with irritation. 'As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else.'"

"'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall."
-Measure for Measure (cited)

"The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses."

"But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."

"And in the long valley of her life, which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers by the way."

"'Yes, dear, a great many things have happened,' said Dorothea, in her full tones.
'I wonder what,' said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning forward upon them.
'Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth.'"

"'Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.'"

"'I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting another who is tied to us. Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.'"

"'It is quite true that I might have been a wiser person,' said Dorothea, 'and that I might have done something better, if I had been better. But this is what I am going to do.'"

Eliot's Middlemarch (installment #1)

"It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes."

"'You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods,' said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals."

"Two people persistently flirting could by no means escape from 'the various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on."

"As the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes."

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

-Brautigan