Development: A NovelA loosely fictionalized autobiographical novel which takes Nancy--Bryher's fictional self--from her earliest conscious memories at the age of three or so to her first visit to the Scilly Isles around the age of 17. |
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Common terms and phrases
actual adventure Agathokles AGE OF DISCOVERY almond antiquity Arab artist basset hound beauty blue Bouvard et Pécuchet breathed Carthage Carthaginian CHAPTER child childhood colour Crete dark date palms desire desolate Doreen Downwood dream dull eager echoed verse Egypt Elizabethans epic expression eyes feel felt flower freedom French gold Hannibal head girl heart heavy hills hope Iliad imagination immortality islands knew Knossos knowledge land light lived loveliness Luxor temple mind Miss Sampson mistress morning Nancy looked Nancy stared Nancy turned Nancy's never night paint passed petals picture poem poet poetry realised reality rhythm richness ride rose rough ruins sailor sand scarlet seemed ships Sicily silence sleep South spirit strange Swiss Family Robinson Sylvia thought touch truth uncon Verhaeren vers libre verse vivid walked wasted watch waves wild wind window wonderful words
Popular passages
Page 53 - Give me my robe, put on my crown ; I have Immortal longings in me : now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip : Yare, yare, good Iras ; quick.
Page 54 - The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life.
Page 108 - Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights, Wherein you spend your folly : There's nought in this life sweet If man were wise to see't, But only melancholy, O sweetest Melancholy...
Page 109 - How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes She took eternal fire that never dies ; How she...
Page 99 - Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing Worthy your noble thoughts ! 'tis not a life, 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.
Page 169 - Shall I hurl myself from here, shall I leap and be nearer you? Shall I drop, beloved, beloved, ankle against ankle? Would you pity me, O white breast? If I woke, would you pity me, would our eyes meet? Have you heard, do you know how I climbed this rock? My breath caught, I lurched forward — I stumbled in the ground-myrtle.
Page 59 - She would labour to make it perfect, to make it beautiful, till it became the very epic of the South, till all could read in one volume the knowledge she was seeking in books, in fragments, in pictures, in stones, in the whole of the land itself. At this time a historian usurped, to her, the place that excavators and Egyptologists formerly had held. It seemed a way to keep, to touch the immortality of a greatness...
Page 5 - Wreck." Lip to lip against the masterful wind scattered the alarm. Already the lifeboat waited to be launched ; crowds filled the desolation of the beach. The blue asphalt of the front was flooded with puddles, but for once all were too excited to blame Nancy if she splashed in them. The sea was a wide mass of luminous metal, faint silver here and there where a flickering light caught it, or a grey hollow revealing the tumult underneath ; and beyond the clamorous horizon, sailors, actual sailors,...
Page 138 - Rhyme had already begun to grate harshly on an ear that daily grew more sensitive to curve of rhythm or subtlety of phrase. Words were, of themselves, loveliness ; of themselves, colour. But it was the modernity of many of these writers, their fondness of experiment, that made them not alone a technical revelation but brought a new and vital element of wideness into her vision. Swept away by the vividness...
Page 169 - I am glad the tide swept you out, 0 beloved, you of all this ghastly host alone untouched, your white flesh covered with salt as with myrrh and burnt iris. We were hemmed in this place, so few of us, so few of us to fight their sure lances, the straight thrust — effortless with slight life of muscle and shoulder. So straight — only we were left, the four of us — somehow shut off.