Unit 9: Vocabulary from Readings 2

I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.

But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline—blackening dregs of the brightening gray—
Halved the sky ahead.

Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open

I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops.

The housemaster, Mr Wordsworth, sat behind his desk with an appearance of perplexity and apprehension.

An inexplicable convulsion took place in the nerves of Mr Wordsworth’s face; it really looked for a moment as though he were going to laugh.

This was not callousness on the part of Jerome, as it was interpreted by Mr Wordsworth to his colleagues (he even discussed with them whether, perhaps, Jerome was yet fitted to be a warden).

'A shocking accident,’ she would begin, and the stranger would compose his or her features into the correct shape for interest and commiseration.

Both reactions, of course, were false, but it was terrible for Jerome to see how suddenly, midway in her rambling discourse, the interest would become genuine.

Most of the biographies, of course, never appear—one wonders whether the whole thing may not be an obscure form of blackmail and whether many a potential writer of a biography or thesis finds the means in this way to finish his education at Kansas or Nottingham.

This was really a masterly attempt to make an intrinsically interesting subject boring.

The other method Jerome rehearsed had the virtue of brevity.
‘My father was killed by a pig.’

Jerome’s heart sang with joy. It was as though she had appeased his fear for ever.

And when I said, yes, he would grow very serious and say, “Now, which café shall we patronize?”

B. Wordsworth said, “I hope to distill the experiences of a whole month into that single line of poetry. So, in twenty-two years, I shall have written a poem that will sing to all humanity.”