Central Intermediate School - Memories Yearbook (Ottawa, IL)

Page 255 text:

121362 5 PCJLYSCCIDFTE 3 :Q-193.62 f237j RAIN By DORAN THARP Drop, Drop, Rain, On the tin-roof of my house. Make soft, strumpy music, Like old Grecian harps. Now Hood, rain, In a steady pour Rear like high wind in the elm tops, Slide in cool, slithering torrents Off the roof of my house. Drop, Drop, Rain, On the hot, tin-roof of my soul. Strum sweet, peaceful music To my soul. Wash it cool and clean again, Rain, With your flooding' sheets of silver.

Page 254 text:

P519-Q6-3 Z PDLYSCQPPE 2 :fr-192.62 52361 disregarded them and they punished him through the simple verse which a boy had written on the palace door: I saw a purple bird. Go up against the sky, And it went up and up, And round did fly. I saw it die. How many of us are purple birds flying round and round in measureless time-only to die. This symbolism is due to the Oriental influence of par- allelism, for in many instances Dunsany uses the Bible as a model. Simple things are created in a magic world. Dunsany's plays contain a religious mystery or moral passion in the avenging gods. There is a sense of great forces beyond mortals. The sub- ject is the struggle of man through the ages to escape this something that he does not understand. There is an idea of moral responsibility. In the Glittering Gate two burglars jimmy the gates of heaven and think they have been cheated when the swinging gates reveal infinite stars. Man's reaction to an unknown power marks the zenith of Dunsany's achievements. He sees life in terms of the spiritual 3 man is a tiny mote in fathomless, pur- poseless will, a fleck in measureless eternity. Dunsany's tales are nature myths dealing with the immensity of time and space and personifying the elements, as Time, Death, Love, Fame, and Notoriety. They are to dream over and gloat upon at midnight hours. There is ironic j uxtaposition, a king longs for the desert and an Arab longs for the throne, a slave overthrows a king and then hungers for bones like a slave. The Tents of the Arabs contains exquisite love lyrics and descriptions of the desert. A king, who loves the desert and longs for it, welcomes an imposter to his throne and wanders back with his gypsy love. Terror is dominant suggesting Assyria, Babylonia, and Ancient Egypt. The shorter tales are a world of simplicity in elemental things. Dunsany uses simple narrative to illustrate his philosophy. Dunsany has transported us to a weird land of gods and mortals play- ing a game in the web of fate, the threads of which are held by the gods. A priest of open spaces, Dunsany's creed, though pessemistic, has a sense of infinite and is a worship of years to come. A soul that hath the walls of piled centuries for guard.

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qiyngafzi- 5 PDLYSCQWPE 5 2-iaszsg gzssj AWISI-I By DORAN THARP Oh God, When you Were making the great scheme of things, And fitting each Into his proper little nicheg And when you came to me, God, Sometimes I Wish That you had just made me The figure on that Grecian Urn of Keats' Who cannot ever know The sad satiety of love.