Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Canterbury Tales
What that Aprill with shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in swich licour of which vertu engendred is the flour; whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth inspired hath in every holt and heeth the tendre croppes... and smale foweles maken melodye, that slepen al the nyght with open ye (so priketh hem nature in hir corages); thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
A Typing History
I learned to touch type in 1968 when I was in a three-week course during the summer between my junior and senior year in high school. Our classroom had manual typewriters with blank keys; we were supposed to look at a big chart at the front of the room as we did our exercises. I wasn't a very fast typist by the end of that course, but I didn't have to look at my fingers. Personal computers were far in the future then.
Typing Practice
When I was a child, my father told me to practice with this sentence: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." Another sentence that he recommended was, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
Ted Hughes
- The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Something else is alive beside the clock's loneliness and this blank page where my fingers move... Cold, delicately as the dark snow, a fox's nose touches twig, leaf; two eyes serve a movement, that now and again now, and now, and now set neat prints into the snow between trees... til with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox it enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, the page is printed.
Theodore Roethke
- The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow... This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.
Mark Strand
- Keeping Things Whole
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
Roger McGough
- Goodbat Nightman
God bless all policemen and fighters of crime. May thieves go to jail for a very long time. They've had a hard day helping clean up the town. Now they hang from the mantelpiece, both upside down. A glass of warm blood and then straight up the stairs, Batman and Robin are saying their prayers... They've filled their batwater-bottles, made their batbeds, with two springy battresses for sleep batheads. They're closing red eyes and their counting black sheep. Batman and Robin are falling asleep.
Wallace Stevens
- Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee, and round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground and tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, like nothing else in Tennessee.
Robert Frost
- Tree at my Window
Tree at my window, window tree, my sash is lowered when night comes on; but let there never be curtain drawn between you and me... But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed, and if you have seen me when I slept, you have seen me when I was taken and swept and all but lost. That day she put our heads together, fate had her imagination about her, your head is so much concerned with outer, mine with inner, weather.
A. E. Houseman
- Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough, and stands about the woodland ride wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, twenty will not come again, and take from seventy springs a score, it only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom fifty springs are little room, about the woodlands I will go to see the cherry hung with snow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The House of Seven Gables
Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon street; the house the old Pyncheon house; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon elm.
Thomas Jefferson
- Instructions to Captain Meriwhether Lewis, June 20, 1803
The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, and such principal streams of it, as by its course and communication with the waters of the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river, may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.
Charles Darwin
- The Brazilian Forest
I do not doubt every traveler must remember the glowing sense of happiness from the simple consciousness of breathing in a foreign clime where the civilized man has seldom or never trod.
Mark Twain
- Roughing It
Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be? - it is the same the angels breathe.
Theodore Roethke
- My Papa's Waltz
The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy; but I hung on like death: such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf; my mother's countenance could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle; at every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time in my head with a palm caked hard by dirt, then waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt.
Marianne Moore
- Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
- The Worst Journey in the World
Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year.
Robert Frost
- Birches
When I see birches bend to left and right across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy's been swinging them. But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay as ice storms do. Often you must have seen them loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain. They click upon themselves as the breeze rises, and turn many-colored as the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Robert Frost
- Departmental
An ant on the tablecloth ran into a dormant moth of many times his size. He showed not the least surprise. His business wasn't with such. He gave it scarcely a touch, and was off on his duty run. Yet if he encountered one of the hive's enquiry squad whose work is to find out God and the nature of time and space, he would put him on to the case. Ants are a curious race; one crossing with hurried tread the body of one of their dead isn't given a moment's arrest - seems not even impressed.
Robert Frost
- Neither Out Far Nor in Deep
The people along the sand all turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day. As long as it takes to pass a ship keeps raising its hull; the wetter ground like glass reflects a standing gull. The land may vary more; but wherever the truth may be - the water comes ashore, and the people look at the sea. They cannot look out far. They cannot look in deep. But when was that ever a bar to any watch they keep?
