Unit 8: Vocabulary from Readings 2

That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London.

She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed.

It was a woman Edward FitzGerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night.

As it is the poet’s gift to give expression to the moments of insight or experience that come to him now and then, so in following him we have to sketch for ourselves a map of those submerged lands which lie between one pinnacle and the next.

His vision comes to him directly; he seems almost always, before he began to get his words into order, to have had one of those puzzling shocks of emotion which the world deals by such incongruous methods, to the poet often, to the rest of us too seldom for our souls’ good.

Naturally the critical senses rise in alarm to protect their owner from such insinuations.

What Mr Sassoon has felt to be the most sordid and horrible experiences in the world he makes us feel to be so in a measure which no other poet of the war has achieved.

As these jaunty matter-of-fact statements succeed each other such loathing, such hatred accumulates behind them that we say to ourselves, ‘Yes, this is going on; and we are sitting here watching it,’ with a new shock of surprise, with an uneasy desire to leave our place in the audience, which is a tribute to Mr Sassoon’s power as a realist.

His non-sense is not vacuity of sense: it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it.

The Fumblies is a poem of adventure, and of nostalgia for the romance of foreign voyage and exploration...

The Yongy-Bongy Bo and The Dong with a Luminous Nose are poems of unrequited passion—“blues” in fact.

Some poetry is meant to be sung; most poetry, in modern times, is meant to be spoken—and there are many other things to be spoken of besides the murmur of innumerable bees or the moan of doves in immemorial elms.

Dissonance, even cacophony, has its place: just as, in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole...

Dissonance, even cacophony, has its place: just as, in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole...

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted