"Homage to Wallace Stevens"
No Truce with the Furies (1995)
“Down through the years, I turned to the Bible and found in it all that I needed”
“I've read the last page of the Bible, it's all going to turn out all right.”
“I have suffered for my music. Now it's your turn.”
Rutland Weekend Television.
“I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.”
Source: The Angel's Game
“Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage;
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom.”
"Returning to the Fields"
Arthur Waley, Translations from the Chinese (1941), p. 90
Variant translation:
Young I was witless in the world's affairs,
My nature wildness and hills prefers;
By mishap fallen into mundane snares,
Once I had left I wasted thirty years.
Birds in the cage long for their wonted woods,
Fish in the pool for former rivers yearn.
I clear the wildness that stretches south,
Hiding my defects homeward I return.
Ten acres built with scattered house square,
Beside the thatched huts eight or nine in all;
The elms and willows shade the hindmost eaves,
While peach and pear-trees spread before the hall.
While smoke form nearby huts hangs in the breeze;
A dog is barking in the alley deep;
A cock crows from the chump of mulberry trees.
Within my courtyard all is clear of dust,
Where tranquil in my leisure I remain.
Long have I been imprisoned in the cage;
Now back to Nature I return again.
"Returning to my Farm Young" (translation by Andrew Boyd)
Context: When I was young, I was out of tune with the herd,
[[File:Chen Hongshou Portrait von Tao-Qian. JPG|thumb|Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage;
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom. ]] My only love was for the hills and mountains.
Unwitting I fell into the Web of World's dust,
And was not free until my thirtieth year.
The migrant bird longs for the old wood;
The fish in the tank thinks of its native pool.
I had rescued from wildness a patch of the Southern Moor
And, still rustic, I returned to field and garden.
My ground covers no more than ten acres;
My thatched cottage has eight or nine rooms.
Elms and willows cluster by the eaves;
Peach trees and plum trees grow before the Hall.
Hazy, hazy the distant hamlets of men;
Steady the smoke that hangs over cottage roofs.
A dog barks somewhere in the deep lanes,
A cock crows at the top of the mulberry tree.
At gate and courtyard—no murmur of the World's dust;
In the empty rooms—leisure and deep stillness.
Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage;
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom.
“I used to wonder what it was like to be rich. Now I am and it turns out to be mostly headaches.”
Source: Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), Chapter 20 (p. 224)
“Now it's the dark's turn to be afraid.”
Source: Curse of the Bane
Said to his wife in the Presidential Palace, shortly before his assassination, as quoted in Rodric Braithwaite (2010) Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89, page 67.
