Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 15:13:39 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Easter, 1916


On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Marwan Dalal wrote:

> Easter, 1916
> By W. B. Yeats
> 
>  I HAVE met them at close of day
>  Coming with vivid faces
>  From counter or desk among grey
>  Eighteenth-century houses.
>  I have passed with a nod of the head
>  Or polite meaningless words,
>  Or have lingered awhile and said
>  Polite meaningless words,
>  And thought before I had done
>  Of a mocking tale or a gibe
>  To please a companion
>  Around the fire at the club,
>  Being certain that they and I
>  But lived where motley is worn:
>  All changed, changed utterly:
>  A terrible beauty is born.
....

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (chapter 89):

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a loose-fish, in which Columbus struck the
Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?
What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to
England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?
What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of
religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious
smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is
the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a
Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?


Lech b'shalom,


Joe Lockard

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JOE LOCKARD

English Department
322 Wheeler Hall
University of California - Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720

E-mail:     lockard-AT-socrates.berkeley.edu
Workpage:   http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~lockard/Workpages.html

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