“Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?”

— W.B. Yeats

Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems http://worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/WorldeBookLibrary.com/ytpafu.htm (1935). Supernatural Songs http://worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/WorldeBookLibrary.com/ytpafu.htm#1_0_7

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W.B. Yeats 255

Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 118

“We watched her breathing through the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.”

Thomas Hood The Death-Bed

The Death-Bed; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

“She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Source: The Crack-Up

“Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

“Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Repetition 202-203
1840s, Repetition (1843)
Context: Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me? After all, what I have done is praised in others.-Or is becoming a poet my compensation? I reject all compensation, I demand my rights-that is, my honor. I did not ask to become one, I will not buy it at this price. – Or if I am guilty, then I certainly should be able to repent of my guilt and make it good again. Tell me how. On top of that, must I perhaps repent that the world plays with me as a child plays with a beetle?-Or is it perhaps best to forget the whole thing? Forget-indeed, I shall have ceased to be if I forget it. Or what kind of life would it be if along with my beloved I have lost honor and pride and lost them in such a way that no one knows how it happened, for which reason I can never retrieve them again? Shall I allow myself to be shoved out in this manner? Why, then, was I shoved in?