I’m currently grading annotated bibliographies that my students had to complete in order to give a speech on Thoreau and modern day civil disobedience. The third author for one student’s third source is “Durden, Tyler.”  I guess I need to reteach how to evaluate a source’s credibility.  Alas…

“…some vigor of wild virtue” Ralph Waldo Emerson “Self-Reliance”

William, Blake. Albion Rose also called Glad Day or The Dance of Albion. 1796. The British Museum, London. JPEG file. 

“…and as her tear’s fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

Dorothea Lange. Mrs. Sam Cates, wife of Cow Hollow Farmer. Malheur County, Oregon. October 1938

“With a shudder of disgust/Apollo cleans his instrument…this is already beyond the endurance/of the god with nerves of artificial fibers.” -from “Apollo and Marsyas” by Zbigniew Herbert

Apollo, source of light, Greek god of music, capable of the most awful cruelty.  In my mind, Apollo looks like David Bowie’s Thin White Duke—cold, distant, detached—but nonetheless creator of something beautiful.  

“Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.”

from “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke