Grade 12: Unit 4, Small-Group Learning

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And, while ye may, go marry;
For, having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

The Emperor of the Universe of Pain
jutted his upper chest above the ice;
and I am closer in size to the great mountain
the Titans make around the central pit,
than they to his arms.

With what a sense of awe I saw his head
towering above me! for it had three faces:
one was in front, and it was fiery red;
the other two, as weirdly wonderful,
merged with it from the middle of each shoulder
to the point where all converged at the top of the skull;
the right was something between white and bile;
the left was about the color one observes
on those who live along the banks of the Nile.

Down there, beginning at the further bound
of Beelzebub's dim tomb, there is a space
not known by sight, but only by the sound
of a little stream descending through the hollow
it has eroded from the massive stone
in its endlessly entwining lazy flow.

I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days.

I chafed against the work of school.

After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

In the glance of a mirror, I saw a timid shape
standing in the beveled bit,
the thin prismatic strip on the edge of the frame
and thought it was a ghost of you.

You wavered in the air, vanishing.
How I wanted to hold out my hand,
so that your sad ghost
could crawl into a friendly cradle.