On lit class

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?" Henry David Thoreau "Walden, or Life in the Woods"

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide...These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Self-Reliance"

"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, to pass our long love's day,
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find, I by the tide
Of Humber would complain, I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow
A hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyed, and on thy fore head gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest,
An age at least should show your heart
For, lady you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song, then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy milling soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his snow-chapp'd power
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness up, into one ball,
And tear our pleasure with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run"
Andrew Marvell "To his Coy Mistress"

"A poem is a movie character
Sometimes adored
Sometimes despised
Spending its years being admired, criticized, examined
There is a basic role
And yet the portrayal has depth and life
With always a new feature to be realized"
Lindsey Carroll on assignment to write a poem about poetry...poetry and I have this love/hate relationship :)