La Marseillaise

by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle

Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie,
L'étendard sanglant est levé
L'étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils et vos compagnes !

Aux armes, citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
marchons, marchons
qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.

Que veut cette horde d'esclaves,
De traîtres, de rois conjurés ?
Pour qui ces ignobles entraves,
Ces fers dès longtemps préparés ?
Ces fers dès longtemps préparés ?
Français, pour nous, ah ! quel outrage
Quels transports il doit exciter !
C'est nous qu'on ose méditer
De rendre à l'antique esclavage !

Quoi ! des cohortes étrangères
Feraient la loi dans nos foyers !
Quoi ! ces phalanges mercenaires
Terrasseraient nos fiers guerriers !
Terrasseraient nos fiers guerriers !
Grand Dieu ! par des mains enchaînées
Nos fronts sous le joug se ploieraient
De vils despotes deviendraient
Les maîtres de nos destinées !

Tremblez, tyrans et vous perfides
L'opprobre de tous les partis,
Tremblez ! vos projets parricides
Vont enfin recevoir leurs prix !
Vont enfin recevoir leurs prix !
Tout est soldat pour vous combattre,
S'ils tombent, nos jeunes héros,
La terre en produit de nouveaux,
Contre vous tout prêts à se battre !

Français, en guerriers magnanimes,
Portez ou retenez vos coups !
Épargnez ces tristes victimes,
A regret s'armant contre nous.
A regret s'armant contre nous.
Mais ces despotes sanguinaires,
Mais ces complices de Bouillé,
Tous ces tigres qui, sans pitié,
Déchirent le sein de leur mère !

Amour sacré de la Patrie,
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs
Liberté, Liberté chérie,
Combats avec tes défenseurs !
Combats avec tes défenseurs !
Sous nos drapeaux que la victoire
Accoure à tes mâles accents,
Que tes ennemis expirants
Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire !

Nous entrerons dans la carrière
Quand nos aînés n'y seront plus,
Nous y trouverons leur poussière
Et la trace de leurs vertus
Et la trace de leurs vertus
Bien moins jaloux de leur survivre
Que de partager leur cercueil,
Nous aurons le sublime orgueil
De les venger ou de les suivre

As I Walked Out One Evening

by W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
     Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
     Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
     I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
     'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
     Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
     And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
     Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
     Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
     For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
     And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
     Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
     You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
     Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
     And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
     Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
     To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
     Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
     And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
     Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
     And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
     The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
     A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
     And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
     And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror?
     O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
     Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
     As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
     With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
     The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
     And the deep river ran on.

Red & White & Blue & Gold

by Aoife O'Donovan

Red and white and blue and gold
I want to wait for the water to touch my toes
On the beach the Fourth of July
I want to wait for the fire to burn my eyes

Come on, sit next to me
Bury my feet
Bury my feet in the sand
There's a hole
That is twelve miles deep
I dug it with my hands

Come on, lie next to me
I'll sing you to sleep
I'll sing you to sleep
There's a band on the boardwalk
You're tapping your feet
But I'm too drunk to dance

Black and blue all along my face
I want to follow you home
I want to see your place
Want to take you in my arms
And float down a river with you
I want to buy the farm

Come on, let's run away
Baby, let's go
Let's go
There's a southbound train
Pulling out at nine
Leave this jukebox joint behind

Come on, let's have one more
I don't want to go
I'm not ready to go
I'm scared of the way
That my heart gets sore
Wondering if you're mine

Come on, let's jump in
The water's cold
It's going to be cold
But the feeling I get
When you touch my skin
It makes me bold

Come on, let's kiss
In the July sun
'Neath the July sky
The feeling I get
When you pass me by

Red and white and blue and gold
I want to wait for the water to touch my toes
On the beach it's the Fourth of July
I want to wait for the fire to burn my eyes

How sad our state by nature is!

by Isaac Watts

How sad our state by nature is!
Our sin, how deep it stains!
And Satan binds our captive souls
Fast in his slavish chains.

But hark! a voice of sovereign grace
Sounds from the sacred Word;
'Ho, ye despairing sinners, come,
And trust upon the Lord!'

My soul obeys the Almighty's call,
And runs to this relief;
I would believe Thy promise, Lord;
O help my unbelief!

To the blest fountain of Thy blood,
Incarnate God, I fly;
Here let me wash my spotted soul
From sins of deepest dye.

Stretch out Thine arm, victorious King,
My reigning sins subdue,
Drive the old Dragon from his seat,
With all his hellish crew.

A guilty, weak, and helpless worm,
Into Thy hands I fall;
Be Thou my strength and righteousness,
My Savior, and my all.

from Manhattan

by Woody Allen

Chapter one. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion.

Uh, no. Make that: He romanticized it all out of proportion. Better.

To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.

Uh... no. Let me start this over.

Chapter one. He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle-bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles.

Ah no, corny. Too corny for a man of my taste. Let me try and make it more profound.

Chapter one. He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams...

No, it's gonna be too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here.

Chapter one. He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...

Too angry. I don't wanna be angry.

Chapter one. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.

I love this.

New York was his town and it always would be.

Lay My Burden Down

by Aoife O'Donovan

Going to lay my burden down
Lay my body in the ground
Cold clay against my skin
I don't care at all

Can't seem to find my piece of mind
So with the earth I'll lay entwined
Six feet underground
My feet are warm and dry

When I get to the other side
I'll put your picture way up high
But I'm not coming back to you
It's just too far
It's just too far

If I was cast out on the sea
Would you come and look for me
Or would you just let me sink
Beneath the waves so blue

What if I had learned to fly
I'd fly all night till day drew nigh
I'd perch down upon a branch
And scan the crowd for you

When I touch my feet on the land
I'll kiss your face and take your hands
But you know I'm not here to stay
It's just too far

Can't you hear me cry?
My bones are broke, my tongue is tied
The moon is swaying back and forth
Against the navy sky
It's all that I can see
My body's trembling on my knees
Have a little mercy on me
Run away and hide

When I sleep the angels sing
But I cannot hear a thing
Eyes closed
Dreaming of the better days gone by

When I wake the trumpets play
And I'm standing at the gates
Fall down in joy
I know my race has just been run

When I was young my mom would say
Life is hard, but that's okay
If you can make it through the day
It's not that far
No, it's not that far

from Ulysses

by James Joyce

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigree: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of alloted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constallated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?

Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that, the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000 pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers.