Fun_People Archive
23 Jan
LIT BITS V3 #24

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 100 18:31:46 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #24

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #24

Today is Monday, 24 January 2000; on this day,

268 years ago (1732),

	Pierre-Augustin-Caron de Beaumarchais is born in Paris. He will
     become a watchmaker, pamphleteer, and secret agent, as well as a
     successful dramatist: _The Marriage of Figaro_; _The Barber of
     Seville_.

138 years ago (1862),

	Edith Wharton (_The House of Mirth_) is born to a distinguished
     New York family.

87 years ago (1913),

	Franz Kafka stops work on _Amerika_, which will never be completed.

56 years ago (1944),

	Edith Sitwell writes to classical scholar Maurice Bowra:
     "Sometimes, when I begin a poem, it is almost like automatic writing.
     Then I use my mind on it afterwards."

Today's poem:

                       Heart and Mind

 SAID the Lion to the Lioness--'When you are amber dust,--
 No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun
 (No liking but all lust)--
 Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,
 The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,
 Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws
 Though the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.'

 Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time--
 'The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
 Is greater than all gold, more powerful
 Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
 Like all that grows or leaps...so is the heart

 More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules
 Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:
 But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
 Is but a foolish wind.'

 Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone,
 And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,
 Remember only this of our hopeless love
 That never till Time is done
 Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.

                                               Edith Sitwell
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