The Courtier's Reply

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext94/ednam10.txt

On satoja paikkoja, joissa pelkään käydä
niin ne huokuvat sinun muistoasi.
Ja kun unohtaneena saavun johonkin hiljaiseen paikkaan
jonne hän ei koskaan astunut,
missä koskaan eivät hänen kasvonsa loistaneet.
Sanon: ”Täällä ei ole muistoa hänestä!”
Ja taas seison mielettömänä, taas hänet muistan.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Suom. Risto Ahti

Dirge without Music
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

"On yhtä kiusallista pitää palvelijaa kuin olla palvelija."

A Sane Revolution
D.H. Lawrence

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.

Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.

Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.

Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.

Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!