The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro

If you are looking for the story by Alice Munro assigned for your oral exam please go to the following site:


http://www.condenet.com/mags/newyorker/asme/categories/artwork/pdf/12_27_Munro_Fiction.pdf

William Carlos Williams - To A Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

*********

Walt Whitman
O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths--for you the shores accrowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

********

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Who Said this?

1) The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

2) But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

3) Courage is grace under pressure.

4) I hate phonies.

5) The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

6) The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

7) Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

8) Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

9) I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.

10) I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.

11) Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

12) There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

13) I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

14) I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

15) Eighty percent of success is showing up.

16) His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

17) Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner

18) Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

19) I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

20) It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them.

21) Live all you can - it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?

22) Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

23) A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

24) A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

25) And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

26) Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

27) College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

28) Dying is a wild night and a new road.

Literature: a Sine qua non

I feel we had a very good year together. I would like to congratulate you on your hard work and your interest. Literature (to borrow from what Matthew Arnold said about culture) invites us "to know the best that has been said and thought in the world." It is not a matter of luxury but a necessity. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) who declared that "men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there" in poetry, was stressing this essential need. The best of American literature like the best literature of any other nation makes its appeal to mankind everywhere and forever. It is universal and immortal.

In our course we studied American literature from its inception to the present time. The aim of this course was not so much to impart information, but to come to grips with the imaginative wisdom and artistic vision of a nation fighting for its moral and existential survival. It was an attempt to reach out and greet the literary experience of a country that has made a tremendous impact in the modern era.

We covered authors such as Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Henry James (1843-1916), Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) Robert Frost (1874–1963), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), Jerome David Salinger, (1919-), Toni Morrison (1931-), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), William Faulkner (1897 –1962), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Woody Allen (1935-), Groucho Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977), Hart Crane (1899-1932), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), Alice Walker (February 9, 1944-), Kate Chopin (1851-1904), Henry James (1843-1916), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), Bret Easton Ellis (1964-), Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), William "Bill" McGuire Bryson (1951-), Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005), Truman Capote (1924-1984).

We started the year with a poem by William Carlos Williams. It will be apt to also end with another poem by Williams in praise of poetic imagination:

Through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.
It is imagination
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole we escape...


Only the imagination is real!
I have declared it
time without end.
If a man die
it is because death
has first
possessed his imagination...

The Brain is wider than the sky

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)



The Brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She grew up at a time when people in New England were beginning to struggle with religion. Many had fallen away from the traditional Puritan faith, and so a religious revival movement was sweeping the area, bringing people back to the church. Dickinson remained agnostic, even after her father and sister experienced a conversion at a revival meeting in 1850, when Dickinson was 20 years old. She wrote in a letter, "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling [sister] believes she loves, and trusts [Jesus], and I am standing alone in rebellion."

Dickinson spent one year in seminary school at Mount Holyoke, and then she moved back in with her parents to take care of the family household while her mother recovered from a nervous breakdown. She was not happy about the arrangement. She enjoyed gardening, but she hated to clean and absolutely refused to dust. What she disliked most of all about her father's house was the many visitors. Her father was one of the most prominent men in town, and people stopped by every day to talk politics, to get legal advice, and just to pay tribute. Dickinson thought the visits extremely tedious.

As Dickinson took care of her family household, she watched as her friends got married and moved away. She grew increasingly isolated from her community, in no small part because she didn't attend church. Many biographers have tried to find some reason why Dickinson withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there has never been any definite evidence for that theory.

What we do know is that she spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. When an editor named Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her what she looked like, she wrote back, "I ... am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself.

Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great American lyric poet, and one of the greatest American poets ever.

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Two poems by Robert Frost (1874–1963)

The Wood-pile


Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.


Away

Now I out walking
The world desert,
And my shoe and my stocking
Do me no hurt.

I leave behind
Good friends in town.
Let them get well-wined
And go lie down.

Don't think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Put out of the Park.

Forget the myth.
There is no one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.

Unless I'm wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I'm—bound—away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.



Poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor