Category Archives: English Literature

The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats [w/ Audio]

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
   The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
   Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
   Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
   When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
 Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
   A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
   Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
 Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
   The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
   Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
   Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron [w/ Audio]

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She walks in beauty, like the night
   Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
 And all that's best of dark and bright
   Meets in her aspect and her eyes,
 Thus mellow'd to that tender light
   Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less
   Had half impair'd the nameless grace
 Which waves in every raven tress
   Or softly lightens o'er her face,
 Where thoughts serenely sweet express
   How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o'er that brow
   So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
 The smiles that win, the tints that glow
   But tell of days in goodness spent,--
 A mind at peace with all below,
   A heart whose love is innocent.

BOOKS: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

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The Importance of Being EarnestThe Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This play is an amusing cautionary tale on the dangers of “Bunburying” and / or leading a double life. “Bunburying,” a term coined by Wilde in this play, is the act of concocting meetings with a fictitious friend to get out of tedious familial (and other social) obligations. Don’t want to go to Aunt Bessie’s potluck? Tell her that your friend with a plausibly absurd name (e.g. Bunbury) has ruptured a disc in his back and desperately needs your assistance. Bunburying is the specialty of one of the two bachelor characters this story is built around, a man named Algernon. The other, Jack, goes by the name Ernest when he is in London, and has to invent the story that he has a brother when his town and country dichotomy of personalities starts to be seen through by those other than Algernon.

This humorous tale revolves around both Algernon and Jack finding desirable fiancés while being tangled in the web of their own duplicity. Much of the humor comes from the interactions of Algernon and Jack, two men who are quite alike, though Jack thinks himself more respectable. Algernon is more at ease with his own scamp-like nature and plays a role similar to that played by Lord Henry in Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. That is, Algernon offers many a quotable line that at least has the appearance of wisdom — if, often, a kind of nihilistic wisdom.

This play is definitely worth reading.

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Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley [w/ Audio]

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I met a traveller from an antique land
   Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
 Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
   Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
   Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
 Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
   The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
 And on the pedestal these words appear:
   "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
   Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
   The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare [w/ Audio]

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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
   Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
 Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
   And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
 Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
   And often is his gold complexion dimm'd:
 And every fair from fair sometime declines,
   By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
 But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
   Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
 Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
   When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;

   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

BOOKS: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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The Picture of Dorian GrayThe Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

This is a book about what happens when you hollow out a person of all the complexity of the human condition and idealize them. At the beginning of the story, Dorian Gray is young, attractive, and preternaturally likable in a naïvely innocent kind of way. Almost to the novel’s end, through the magic of a wish made upon a portrait, Gray is still young and beautiful, though that naive innocence cracks under the strain of the impossible bifurcation of man and his soul. The artist, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry (a man who will become a mutual friend of Gray and Hallward) cannot see Gray as a fully formed human being, but rather see him as an emblem of youth and beauty. But this unnatural ideal cannot hold, and a string of tragic deaths will be left in its wake.

The book is full of clever witticisms, albeit often of a nihilistic nature. These are almost all spoken by Lord Henry, who is the Polonius of the story – but a hipper kind of Polonius than Hamlet‘s. That said, it’s telling that toward the end of the book Gray does some of this epigrammatic philosophizing. (e.g. Such as when Gray tells Hallward, “Each of us has heaven and hell in him…”) One might dismiss this as Gray parroting Lord Henry, but I think that life has defrocked him of his naïveté, and he begins to think in ways that were impossible in his [true] youth.

This is a must-read. It’s interesting, thought-provoking, and well worth the time.

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