Epitaph
The following are lines from Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana, one of the poems which Selden Rodman wrote "say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read". (17 August 1957 Saturday Review) These lines stand for what Ellen Reiss has described as Siegel's "beautiful, faithful, passionate, critical, loving attention to the world and humanity".
- The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it!
- The past is in it;
- All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls,
- trees, stones, things of beauty, books, desires are in it;
- and all are to be known;
- Afternoons have to do with the whole world;
- And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!
Read more about this topic: Eli Siegel
Famous quotes containing the word epitaph:
“And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.