Such Different Kinds

“Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and …

Fairy Land

“At length, in a nook of the river, gloomy with the weight of overhanging foliage, and still and deep as a soul in which the torrent eddies of pain have hollowed a great gulf, and then, subsiding in violence, have left it full of a motionless, fathomless sorrow—I saw a little boat lying. So still …

The Echo of a Tune

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it …

What You Do

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.” ― Alexandre Dumas

False Parallels

“We must beware of false parallels… Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all. The critique of a chain of reasoning is itself a chain of reasoning: the critique of a tragedy is not itself a tragedy. To say that only the rational man can judge reasonings is, therefore, to make the …

Classical Diction

But in a much deeper sense, Shakespeare was classical, because he was civilized. Voltaire criticized him as a barbarian. But he was not a barbarian. The Germans have even admired him as a German; but by some strange accident of birth, he was not even a German. The point here, however, is that the classical …

Sonnet 76

Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my …

LOVE’S AS WARM AS TEARS

Love’s as warm as tears,Love is tears:Pressure within the brain,Tension at the throat,Deluge, weeks of rain,Haystacks afloat,Featureless seas betweenHedges, where once was greenLove’s as fierce as fire, Love is fire:All sorts–Infernal heatClinkered with greed and pride, Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,Laughing, even when denied, And that empyreal flame Whence all loves came. Love’s as fresh as spring,Love …

To His Wife

A Poem written to his wife in her illness.I do not bring you health, or cold Coarse pity as the Gentiles do: Though swathed in sickness sevenfold, The world shall come for health to you. The hair on your unconquered head Shall freshen wanderers like a field The very healers round your bed Shall touch …

GKC: On Reading

THE highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as …