Song lyrics, Heaven's Open (1991)
“All those whom history calls great
Left only empty names for us to venerate.”
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Vast is the night. How you have grown, dear night,
walking your empty halls, how tall!”
Time will come, no doubt,
When the sun too shall die; the planets will freeze,
and the air on them; frozen gases, white flasks of air
Will be dust: which no wind ever will stir: this very
dust in dim starlight glistening
Is dead wind, the white corpse of wind.
Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way,
our universe, all the stars that have names are dead.
Vast is the night. How you have grown, dear night,
walking your empty halls, how tall!
The Double Axe and Other Poems, including eleven suppressed poems (1977) II.The Inhumanist XLV
Context: Come little ones,
You are worth no more than the foxes and yellow
wolfkins, yet I will give you wisdom.
O future children:
Trouble is coming; the world as of the present time
Sails on its rocks; but you will be born and live
Afterwards. Also a day will come when the earth
Will scratch herself and smile and rub off humanity:
But you will be born before that.
Source: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
"All of Me Wants All of You"
Lyrics, Carrie and Lowell (2015)
The House of Sixty Fathers (1956)
"In Railway Halls, on Pavements Near the Traffic"
Context: In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament
To make them birds upon my singing tree:
Time merely drives these lives which do not live
As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.
“639. Emptie vessels sound most.”
Jacula Prudentum (1651)
Variant: Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name. Nothing.
Source: The Tale of Despereaux (2004)
