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:
“Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them
be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze
Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume
Floats moveless on the storm, and in the blaze
Of sunrise gleams when Earth is wrapped in gloom;
An epitaph of glory for the tomb
Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,
Great People! as the sands shalt thou become;
Thy growth is swift as morn, when night must fade;
The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“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)