Unit 5: Selection Vocabulary 2

On some evenings, seated at his desk in the corner of the big empty shed, the postmaster too would call up memories of his own home, of his mother and his sister, of those for whom in his exile his heart was sad...

The postmaster, of his own accord, went on to tell her that his application for a transfer had been rejected, so he had resigned his post and was going home.

These words were kindly meant, no doubt: but inscrutable are the ways of a woman's heart!

The postmaster was dumbfounded. He had never seen Ratan like this before.

He brought out from his pocket the whole of his month's salary, retaining only a trifle for his travelling expenses.

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

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.

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.

This set of budding writers, artists, critics, and thinkers formed the core of the original Bloomsbury Group.

The sisters’ dinners and the beginning of the Bloomsbury Group coincided with the beginning of the Modernist movement, of which early works included, among others, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), abstract paintings by Kandinsky, and atonal music by Schoenberg.

In addition to more obscure works, Hogarth also published significant works of the Modernist period...

More recent critics argue that the group’s progressive thinking has been overly romanticized, and despite bucking some trends of Victorian propriety, members have been criticized for everything from anti-Semitism (reflected in Virginia Woolf’s personal letters about her feelings on marrying Leonard, a Jewish man, and in the stereotypes sometimes seen in her characters) to participation in colonization (Leonard was in the Colonial Civil Service in Ceylon).

Still others point out that the majority of the group were highly privileged and critique the group as elitist bourgeoisie playing at being bohemians.