"Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost."
Games, boys. Games.
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Here's a little tidbit from my Qualifying Exam reading (thanks to Sir Thomas Browne):
"I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man committs in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed. I speak not in prejudice, nor am I averse from that sweet sex, but naturally amorous of all that is beautiful: I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of an horse."
You have to love those pretentious seventeenth-century equiphiles. Now, I don't have anything against trees and horses per se, but...
Lord Byron:
"But, spirit! if
It be, as thou has said (and I within
Feel the prophetic torture of its truth),
Here let me die: for to give birth to those
Who can but suffer many years, and die,
Methinks is merely propagating death,
And multiplying murder.
from Hanif Kureishi:
"What do you know, woman? Except how to contradict me, which after long years of practice you're an expert at? I can't say anything in this house without being in the wrong. Is there anyone in England more in the wrong than me?
Man, do you ever read anything that could actually encourage a smitten man?
Sorry, Strauss. Here you go-- from Bram Stoker:
"I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood."
OK, so it's not technically part of my Qualifying Exam, but I've been listening to Nashville Skyline a lot this week, and here's a great line from "Lay, Lady, Lay"-- straight from Dylan to Strauss (and all the other smitten men out there):
"Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile
Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can have your cake and eat it too
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he's standing in front of you"
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