Shared Country

Famous quotes containing the words shared and/or country:

    Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of “communication”; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

    O if we but knew what we do
    When we delve or hew—
    Hack and rack the growing green!
    Since country is so tender
    To touch, her being so slender,
    That, like this sleek and seeing ball
    But a prick will make no eye at all,
    Where we, even where we mean
    To mend her we end her,
    When we hew or delve:
    After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
    Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)