mj@pur-ee.UUCP (Slartibartfast) (10/03/86)
I was up at about 4am last week and saw "NIGHT OF THE IGUANA"
(or most of it) with Richard Burton. It was great, and at the end
there was a fantastic poem ("fantastic" is a pun,
if you know the play).
Anyway, I looked it up, and here it is. Since this is an
(albeit late) review of the play, no copyright infringement is
intended:
How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.
A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then
An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene, corrupting love.
And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?
From The Night of the Iguana, Act III
Tennesee Williams (1961)
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Mark A. Johnson - Purdue University Department of Electrical Engineering
(Department of Redundancy Department)
UUCP:..allegra!purdue!pur-ee!mj USPS:Box 260, EE Building, Lafayette IN 47907hope@gatech.EDU (Theodore Hope) (10/03/86)
In article <4764@pur-ee.UUCP> mj@pur-ee.UUCP (Slartibartfast) writes: > > Anyway, I looked it up, and here it is. > > How calmly does the orange branch > Observe the sky begin to blanch > Without a cry, without a prayer, > With no betrayal of despair. >Mark A. Johnson - Purdue University Department of Electrical Engineering > Strange... I could have sworn that the old man says: How calmly does the olive branch (olive, not orange) .... .... It could be that the old man's accent and the fact that the TV / VCR which I saw it on was less-than hi-fi made me hear 'olive.' Has anyone out there also heard it this way? -- Theodore Hope School of Information & Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332 CSNet: Hope @ gatech ARPA: Hope@ics.GATECH.EDU uucp: ...!{akgua,decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!hope