Did you ever meet, or was he before your day, that old gentleman — I forget his name — who used to enliven conversation, especially at breakfast when the post came in, by saying that the art of letter-writing is dead? The penny post, the old gentleman used to say, has killed the art of letter-writing. Nobody, he continued, examining an envelope through his eye-glasses, has the time even to cross their t’s. We rush, he went on, spreading his toast with marmalade, to the telephone. We commit our half-formed thoughts in ungrammatical phrases to the post card. Gray is dead, he continued; Horace Walpole is dead; Madame de Sévigné— she is dead too, I suppose he was about to add, but a fit of choking cut him short, and he had to leave the room before he had time to condemn1 all the arts, as his pleasure was, to the cemetery2. But when the post came in this morning and I opened your letter stuffed with little blue sheets written all over in a cramped3 but not illegible4 hand — I regret to say, however, that several t’s were uncrossed and the grammar of one sentence seems to me dubious5 — I replied after all these years to that elderly necrophilist — Nonsense. The art of letter-writing has only just come into existence. It is the child of the penny post. And there is some truth in that remark, I think. Naturally when a letter cost half a crown to send, it had to prove itself a document of some importance; it was read aloud; it was tied up with green silk; after a certain number of years it was published for the infinite delectation of posterity6. But your letter, on the contrary, will have to be burnt. It only cost three-halfpence to send. Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent, indiscreet in the extreme. What you tell me about poor dear C. and his adventure on the Channel boat is deadly private; your ribald jests at the expense of M. would certainly ruin your friendship if they got about; I doubt, too, that posterity, unless it is much quicker in the wit than I expect, could follow the line of your thought from the roof which leaks (“splash, splash, splash into the soap dish”) past Mrs. Gape7, the charwoman, whose retort to the greengrocer gives me the keenest pleasure, via Miss Curtis and her odd confidence on the steps of the omnibus; to Siamese cats (“Wrap their noses in an old stocking my Aunt says if they howl”); so to the value of criticism to a writer; so to Donne; so to Gerard Hopkins; so to tombstones; so to gold-fish; and so with a sudden alarming swoop9 to “Do write and tell me where poetry’s going, or if it’s dead?” No, your letter, because it is a true letter — one that can neither be read aloud now, nor printed in time to come — will have to be burnt. Posterity must live upon Walpole and Madame de Sévigné. The great age of letter-writing, which is, of course, the present, will leave no letters behind it. And in making my reply there is only one question that I can answer or attempt to answer in public; about poetry and its death.
But before I begin, I must own up to those defects, both natural and acquired, which, as you will find, distort and invalidate all that I have to say about poetry. The lack of a sound university training has always made it impossible for me to distinguish between an iambic and a dactyl, and if this were not enough to condemn one for ever, the practice of prose has bred in me, as in most prose writers, a foolish jealousy11, a righteous indignation — anyhow, an emotion which the critic should be without. For how, we despised prose writers ask when we get together, could one say what one meant and observe the rules of poetry? Conceive dragging in “blade” because one had mentioned “maid”; and pairing “sorrow” with “borrow”? Rhyme is not only childish, but dishonest, we prose writers say. Then we go on to say, And look at their rules! How easy to be a poet! How strait the path is for them, and how strict! This you must do; this you must not. I would rather be a child and walk in a crocodile down a suburban12 path than write poetry, I have heard prose writers say. It must be like taking the veil and entering a religious order — observing the rites13 and rigours of metre. That explains why they repeat the same thing over and over again. Whereas we prose writers (I am only telling you the sort of nonsense prose writers talk when they are alone) are masters of language, not its slaves; nobody can teach us; nobody can coerce14 us; we say what we mean; we have the whole of life for our province. We are the creators, we are the explorers. . . . So we run on — nonsensically enough, I must admit.
Now that I have made a clean breast of these deficiencies, let us proceed. From certain phrases in your letter I gather that you think that poetry is in a parlous15 way, and that your case as a poet in this particular autumn Of 1931 is a great deal harder than Shakespeare’s, Dryden’s, Pope’s, or Tennyson’s. In fact it is the hardest case that has ever been known. Here you give me an opening, which I am prompt to seize, for a little lecture. Never think yourself singular, never think your own case much harder than other people’s. I admit that the age we live in makes this difficult. For the first time in history there are readers — a large body of people, occupied in business, in sport, in nursing their grandfathers, in tying up parcels behind counters — they all read now; and they want to be told how to read and what to read; and their teachers — the reviewers, the lecturers, the broadcasters — must in all humanity make reading easy for them; assure them that literature is violent and exciting, full of heroes and villains16; of hostile forces perpetually in conflict; of fields strewn with bones; of solitary17 victors riding off on white horses wrapped in black cloaks to meet their death at the turn of the road. A pistol shot rings out. “The age of romance was over. The age of realism had begun”— you know the sort of thing. Now of course writers themselves know very well that there is not a word of truth in all this — there are no battles, and no murders and no defeats and no victories. But as it is of the utmost importance that readers should be amused, writers acquiesce19. They dress themselves up. They act their parts. One leads; the other follows. One is romantic, the other realist. One is advanced, the other out of date. There is no harm in it, so long as you take it as a joke, but once you believe in it, once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower20, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody. Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind, far more interesting — a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring. You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare; Dryden, Pope, Tennyson — to mention only the respectable among your ancestors — stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and think twice before you dress up as Guy Fawkes and spring out upon timid old ladies at street corners, threatening death and demanding twopence-halfpenny.
However, as you say that you are in a fix (“it has never been so hard to write poetry as it is to-day and that poetry may be, you think, at its last gasp21 in England the novelists are doing all the interesting things now”), let me while away the time before the post goes in imagining your state and in hazarding one or two guesses which, since this is a letter, need not be taken too seriously or pressed too far. Let me try to put myself in your place; let me try to imagine, with your letter to help me, what it feels like to be a young poet in the autumn of 1931. (And taking my own advice, I shall treat you not as one poet in particular, but as several poets in one.) On the floor of your mind, then — is it not this that makes you a poet?— rhythm keeps up its perpetual beat. Sometimes it seems to die down to nothing; it lets you eat, sleep, talk like other people. Then again it swells22 and rises and attempts to sweep all the contents of your mind into one dominant23 dance. To-night is such an occasion. Although you are alone, and have taken one boot off and are about to undo24 the other, you cannot go on with the process of undressing, but must instantly write at the bidding of the dance. You snatch pen and paper; you hardly trouble to hold the one or to straighten the other. And while you write, while the first stanzas25 of the dance are being fastened down, I will withdraw a little and look out of the window. A woman passes, then a man; a car glides26 to a stop and then — but there is no need to say what I see out of the window, nor indeed is there time, for I am suddenly recalled from my observations by a cry of rage or despair. Your page is crumpled27 in a ball; your pen sticks upright by the nib8 in the carpet. If there were a cat to swing or a wife to murder now would be the time. So at least I infer from the ferocity of your expression. You are rasped, jarred, thoroughly28 out of temper. And if I am to guess the reason, it is, I should say, that the rhythm which was opening and shutting with a force that sent shocks of excitement from your head to your heels has encountered some hard and hostile object upon which it has smashed itself to pieces. Something has worked in which cannot be made into poetry; some foreign body, angular, sharp-edged, gritty, has refused to join in the dance. Obviously, suspicion attaches to Mrs. Gape; she has asked you to make a poem of her; then to Miss Curtis and her confidences on the omnibus; then to C., who has infected you with a wish to tell his story — and a very amusing one it was — in verse. But for some reason you cannot do their bidding. Chaucer could; Shakespeare could; so could Crabbe, Byron, and perhaps Robert Browning. But it is October 1931, and for a long time now poetry has shirked contact with — what shall we call it?— Shall we shortly and no doubt inaccurately29 call it life? And will you come to my help by guessing what I mean? Well then, it has left all that to the novelist. Here you see how easy it would be for me to write two or three volumes in honour of prose and in mockery of verse; to say how wide and ample is the domain30 of the one, how starved and stunted31 the little grove32 of the other. But it would be simpler and perhaps fairer to check these theories by opening one of the thin books of modern verse that lie on your table. I open and I find myself instantly confused. Here are the common objects of daily prose — the bicycle and the omnibus. Obviously the poet is making his muse18 face facts. Listen:Which of you waking early and watching daybreakWill not hasten in heart, handsome, aware of wonderAt light unleashed33, advancing; a leader of movement,Breaking like surf on turf on road and roof,Or chasing shadow on downs like whippet racing,The stilled stone, halting at eyelash barrier,Enforcing in face a profile, marks of misuse,Beating impatient and importunate34 on boudoir shuttersWhere the old life is not up yet, with raysExploring through rotting floor a dismantled35 mill —The old life never to be born again?
Yes, but how will he get through with it? I read on and find:Whistling as he shuts
His door behind him, travelling to work by tubeOr walking to the park to it to ease the bowels,and read on and find again
As a boy lately come up from country to townReturns for the day to his village in EXPENSIVE SHOES—and so on again to:
Seeking a heaven on earth he chases his shadow,Loses his capital and his nerve in pursuingWhat yachtsmen, explorers, climbers and BUGGERS ARE AFTER.
These lines and the words I have emphasized are enough to confirm me in part of my guess at least. The poet is trying to include Mrs. Gape. He is honestly of opinion that she can be brought into poetry and will do very well there. Poetry, he feels, will be improved by the actual, the colloquial36. But though I honour him for the attempt, I doubt that it is wholly successful. I feel a jar. I feel a shock. I feel as if I had stubbed my toe on the corner of the wardrobe. Am I then, I go on to ask, shocked, prudishly and conventionally, by the words themselves? I think not. The shock is literally37 a shock. The poet as I guess has strained himself to include an emotion that is not domesticated38 and acclimatized to poetry; the effort has thrown him off his balance; he rights himself, as I am sure I shall find if I turn the page, by a violent recourse to the poetical39 — he invokes41 the moon or the nightingale. Anyhow, the transition is sharp. The poem is cracked in the middle. Look, it comes apart in my hands: here is reality on one side, here is beauty on the other; and instead of acquiring a whole object rounded and entire, I am left with broken parts in my hands which, since my reason has been roused and my imagination has not been allowed to take entire possession of me, I contemplate42 coldly, critically, and with distaste.
Such at least is the hasty analysis I make of my own sensations as a reader; but again I am interrupted. I see that you have overcome your difficulty, whatever it was; the pen is once more in action, and having torn up the first poem you are at work upon another. Now then if I want to understand your state of mind I must invent another explanation to account for this return of fluency43. You have dismissed, as I suppose, all sorts of things that would come naturally to your pen if you had been writing prose — the charwoman, the omnibus, the incident on the Channel boat. Your range is restricted — I judge from your expression — concentrated and intensified44. I hazard a guess that you are thinking now, not about things in general, but about yourself in particular. There is a fixity, a gloom, yet an inner glow that seem to hint that you are looking within and not without. But in order to consolidate45 these flimsy guesses about the meaning of an expression on a face, let me open another of the books on your table and check it by what I find there. Again I open at random46 and read this:To penetrate47 that room is my desire,The extreme attic48 of the mind, that liesJust beyond the last bend in the corridor.
Writing I do it. Phrases, poems are keys.
Loving’s another way (but not so sure).
A fire’s in there, I think, there’s truth at lastDeep in a lumber49 chest. Sometimes I’m near,But draughts50 puff51 out the matches, and I’m lost.
Sometimes I’m lucky, find a key to turn,Open an inch or two — but always thenA bell rings, someone calls, or cries of “fire”
Arrest my hand when nothing’s known or seen,And running down the stairs again I mourn.
and then this:
There is a dark room,
The locked and shuttered womb,Where negative’s made positive.
Another dark room,
The blind and bolted tomb,
Where positives change to negative.
We may not undo that or escape this, whoHave birth and death coiled in our bones,Nothing we can do
Will sweeten the real rue10,
That we begin, and end, with groans52.
And then this:
Never being, but always at the edge of BeingMy head, like Death mask, is brought into the Sun.
The shadow pointing finger across cheek,I move lips for tasting, I move hands for touching,But never am nearer than touching,Though the spirit leans outward for seeing.
Observing rose, gold, eyes, an admired landscape,My senses record the act of wishingWishing to be
Rose, gold, landscape or another —Claiming fulfilment in the act of loving.
Since these quotations53 are chosen at random and I have yet found three different poets writing about nothing, if not about the poet himself, I hold that the chances are that you too are engaged in the same occupation. I conclude that self offers no impediment; self joins in the dance; self lends itself to the rhythm; it is apparently56 easier to write a poem about oneself than about any other subject. But what does one mean by “oneself”? Not the self that Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley have described — not the self that loves a woman, or that hates a tyrant57, or that broods over the mystery of the world. No, the self that you are engaged in describing is shut out from all that. It is a self that sits alone in the room at night with the blinds drawn58. In other words the poet is much less interested in what we have in common than in what he has apart. Hence I suppose the extreme difficulty of these poems — and I have to confess that it would floor me completely to say from one reading or even from two or three what these poems mean. The poet is trying honestly and exactly to describe a world that has perhaps no existence except for one particular person at one particular moment. And the more sincere he is in keeping to the precise outline of the roses and cabbages of his private universe, the more he puzzles us who have agreed in a lazy spirit of compromise to see roses and cabbages as they are seen, more or less, by the twenty-six passengers on the outside of an omnibus. He strains to describe; we strain to see; he flickers59 his torch; we catch a flying gleam. It is exciting; it is stimulating60; but is that a tree, we ask, or is it perhaps an old woman tying up her shoe in the gutter61?
Well, then, if there is any truth in what I am saying — if that is you cannot write about the actual, the colloquial, Mrs. Gape or the Channel boat or Miss Curtis on the omnibus, without straining the machine of poetry, if, therefore, you are driven to contemplate landscapes and emotions within and must render visible to the world at large what you alone can see, then indeed yours is a hard case, and poetry, though still breathing — witness these little books — is drawing her breath in short, sharp gasps62. Still, consider the symptoms. They are not the symptoms of death in the least. Death in literature, and I need not tell you how often literature has died in this country or in that, comes gracefully63, smoothly64, quietly. Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves65. The old designs are copied so glibly66 that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness67. But here the very opposite is happening: here in my first quotation54 the poet breaks his machine because he will clog68 it with raw fact. In my second, he is unintelligible69 because of his desperate determination to tell the truth about himself. Thus I cannot help thinking that though you may be right in talking of the difficulty of the time, you are wrong to despair.
Is there not, alas70, good reason to hope? I say “alas” because then I must give my reasons, which are bound to be foolish and certain also to cause pain to the large and highly respectable society of necrophils — Mr. Peabody, and his like — who much prefer death to life and are even now intoning the sacred and comfortable words, Keats is dead, Shelley is dead, Byron is dead. But it is late: necrophily induces slumber71; the old gentlemen have fallen asleep over their classics, and if what I am about to say takes a sanguine72 tone — and for my part I do not believe in poets dying; Keats, Shelley, Byron are alive here in this room in you and you and you — I can take comfort from the thought that my hoping will not disturb their snoring. So to continue — why should not poetry, now that it has so honestly scraped itself free from certain falsities, the wreckage73 of the great Victorian age, now that it has so sincerely gone down into the mind of the poet and verified its outlines — a work of renovation74 that has to be done from time to time and was certainly needed, for bad poetry is almost always the result of forgetting oneself — all becomes distorted and impure75 if you lose sight of that central reality — now, I say, that poetry has done all this, why should it not once more open its eyes, look out of the window and write about other people? Two or three hundred years ago you were always writing about other people. Your pages were crammed76 with characters of the most opposite and various kinds — Hamlet, Cleopatra, Falstaff. Not only did we go to you for drama, and for the subtleties77 of human character, but we also went to you, incredible though this now seems, for laughter. You made us roar with laughter. Then later, not more than a hundred years ago, you were lashing78 our follies79, trouncing our hypocrisies80, and dashing off the most brilliant of satires81. You were Byron, remember; you wrote Don Juan. You were Crabbe also; you took the most sordid83 details of the lives of peasants for your theme. Clearly therefore you have it in you to deal with a vast variety of subjects; it is only a temporary necessity that has shut you up in one room, alone, by yourself.
But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess — to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside. It is a difficult problem. No living poet has, I think, altogether solved it. And there are a thousand voices prophesying84 despair. Science, they say, has made poetry impossible; there is no poetry in motor cars and wireless85. And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive87 of instincts, the instinct of rhythm. All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical88 sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments. I am talking nonsense, I know. What I mean is, summon all your courage, exert all your vigilance, invoke40 all the gifts that Nature has been induced to bestow89. Then let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses, sparrows — whatever come along the street — until it has strung them together in one harmonious90 whole. That perhaps is your task — to find the relation between things that seem incompatible91 yet have a mysterious affinity92, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate93 it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun94 out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesised in the poet’s way-that is what we look to you to do now. But as I do not know what I mean by rhythm nor what I mean by life, and as most certainly I cannot tell you which objects can properly be combined together in a poem — that is entirely95 your affair — and as I cannot tell a dactyl from an iambic, and am therefore unable to say how you must modify and expand the rites and ceremonies of your ancient and mysterious art — I will move on to safer ground and turn again to these little books themselves.
When, then, I return to them I am, as I have admitted, filled, not with forebodings of death, but with hopes for the future. But one does not always want to be thinking of the future, if, as sometimes happens, one is living in the present. When I read these poems, now, at the present moment, I find myself — reading, you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde96 of rebels who swarm97 out attacking one in twenty places at once — hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head — all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal98 than to open the door and get no response), and all I believe certain proof that this poet is alive and kicking. And yet mingling99 with these cries of delight, of jubilation100, I record also, as I read, the repetition in the bass101 of one word intoned over and over again by some malcontent102. At last then, silencing the others, I say to this malcontent, “Well, and what do YOU want?” Whereupon he bursts out, rather to my discomfort103, “Beauty.” Let me repeat, I take no responsibility for what my senses say when I read; I merely record the fact that there is a malcontent in me who complains that it seems to him odd, considering that English is a mixed language, a rich language; a language unmatched for its sound and colour, for its power of imagery and suggestion — it seems to him odd that these modern poets should write as if they had neither ears nor eyes, neither soles to their feet nor palms to their hands, but only honest enterprising book-fed brains, uni-sexual bodies and — but here I interrupted him. For when it comes to saying that a poet should be bisexual, and that I think is what he was about to say, even I, who have had no scientific training whatsoever104, draw the line and tell that voice to be silent.
But how far, if we discount these obvious absurdities105, do you think there is truth in this complaint? For my own part now that I have stopped reading, and can see the poems more or less as a whole, I think it is true that the eye and ear are starved of their rights. There is no sense of riches held in reserve behind the admirable exactitude of the lines I have quoted, as there is, for example, behind the exactitude of Mr. Yeats. The poet clings to his one word, his only word, as a drowning man to a spar. And if this is so, I am ready to hazard a reason for it all the more readily because I think it bears out what I have just been saying. The art of writing, and that is perhaps what my malcontent means by “beauty,” the art of having at one’s beck and call every word in the language, of knowing their weights, colours, sounds, associations, and thus making them, as is so necessary in English, suggest more than they can state, can be learnt of course to some extent by reading — it is impossible to read too much; but much more drastically and effectively by imagining that one is not oneself but somebody different. How can you learn to write if you write only about one single person? To take the obvious example. Can you doubt that the reason why Shakespeare knew every sound and syllable106 in the language and could do precisely107 what he liked with grammar and syntax, was that Hamlet, Falstaff and Cleopatra rushed him into this knowledge; that the lords, officers, dependants108, murderers and common soldiers of the plays insisted that he should say exactly what they felt in the words expressing their feelings? It was they who taught him to write, not the begetter109 of the Sonnets110. So that if you want to satisfy all those senses that rise in a swarm whenever we drop a poem among them — the reason, the imagination, the eyes, the ears, the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, not to mention a million more that the psychologists have yet to name, you will do well to embark111 upon a long poem in which people as unlike yourself as possible talk at the tops of their voices. And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.
That, I am sure, is of very great importance. Most of the faults in the poems I have been reading can be explained, I think, by the fact that they have been exposed to the fierce light of publicity112 while they were still too young to stand the strain. It has shrivelled them into a skeleton austerity, both emotional and verbal, which should not be characteristic of youth. The poet writes very well; he writes for the eye of a severe and intelligent public; but how much better he would have written if for ten years he had written for no eye but his own! After all, the years from twenty to thirty are years (let me refer to your letter again) of emotional excitement. The rain dripping, a wing flashing, someone passing — the commonest sounds and sights have power to fling one, as I seem to remember, from the heights of rapture113 to the depths of despair. And if the actual life is thus extreme, the visionary life should be free to follow. Write then, now that you are young, nonsense by the ream. Be silly, be sentimental114, imitate Shelley, imitate Samuel Smiles; give the rein115 to every impulse; commit every fault of style, grammar, taste, and syntax; pour out; tumble over; loose anger, love, satire82, in whatever words you can catch, coerce or create, in whatever metre, prose, poetry, or gibberish that comes to hand. Thus you will learn to write. But if you publish, your freedom will be checked; you will be thinking what people will say; you will write for others when you ought only to be writing for yourself. And what point can there be in curbing116 the wild torrent117 of spontaneous nonsense which is now, for a few years only, your divine gift in order to publish prim86 little books of experimental verses? To make money? That, we both know, is out of the question. To get criticism? But you friends will pepper your manuscripts with far more serious and searching criticism than any you will get from the reviewers. As for fame, look I implore118 you at famous people; see how the waters of dullness spread around them as they enter; observe their pomposity119, their prophetic airs; reflect that the greatest poets were anonymous120; think how Shakespeare cared nothing for fame; how Donne tossed his poems into the waste-paper basket; write an essay giving a single instance of any modern English writer who has survived the disciples121 and the admirers, the autograph hunters and the interviewers, the dinners and the luncheons122, the celebrations and the commemorations with which English society so effectively stops the mouths of its singers and silences their songs.
But enough. I, at any rate, refuse to be necrophilus. So long as you and you and you, venerable and ancient representatives of Sappho, Shakespeare, and Shelley are aged55 precisely twenty-three and propose — 0 enviable lot!— to spend the next fifty years of your lives in writing poetry, I refuse to think that the art is dead. And if ever the temptation to necrophilize comes over you, be warned by the fate of that old gentleman whose name I forget, but I think that it was Peabody. In the very act of consigning123 all the arts to the grave he choked over a large piece of hot buttered toast and the consolation124 then offered him that he was about to join the elder Pliny in the shades gave him, I am told, no sort of satisfaction whatsoever.
And now for the intimate, the indiscreet, and indeed, the only really interesting parts of this letter. . . .
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condemn
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| vt.谴责，指责；宣判(罪犯)，判刑 | |
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cemetery
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cramped
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illegible
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dubious
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posterity
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| n.后裔，子孙，后代 | |
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gape
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nib
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swoop
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rue
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jealousy
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suburban
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rites
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| 仪式，典礼( rite的名词复数 ) | |
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coerce
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parlous
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villains
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| n.恶棍( villain的名词复数 )；罪犯；（小说、戏剧等中的）反面人物；淘气鬼 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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18
muse
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| n.缪斯（希腊神话中的女神），创作灵感 | |
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19
acquiesce
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| vi.默许，顺从，同意 | |
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20
follower
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| n.跟随者；随员；门徒；信徒 | |
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21
gasp
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| n.喘息，气喘；v.喘息；气吁吁他说 | |
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22
swells
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| 增强( swell的第三人称单数 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情） | |
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23
dominant
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| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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24
undo
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| vt.解开，松开；取消，撤销 | |
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25
stanzas
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| 节，段( stanza的名词复数 ) | |
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26
glides
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| n.滑行( glide的名词复数 )；滑音；音渡；过渡音v.滑动( glide的第三人称单数 )；掠过；（鸟或飞机 ） 滑翔 | |
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27
crumpled
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| adj. 弯扭的, 变皱的 动词crumple的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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28
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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29
inaccurately
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| 不精密地，不准确地 | |
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30
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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31
stunted
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| adj.矮小的；发育迟缓的 | |
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32
grove
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| n.林子，小树林，园林 | |
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33
unleashed
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| v.把（感情、力量等）释放出来，发泄( unleash的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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34
importunate
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| adj.强求的；纠缠不休的 | |
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35
dismantled
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| 拆开( dismantle的过去式和过去分词 )； 拆卸； 废除； 取消 | |
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36
colloquial
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| adj.口语的，会话的 | |
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37
literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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38
domesticated
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| adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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39
poetical
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| adj.似诗人的；诗一般的；韵文的；富有诗意的 | |
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40
invoke
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| v.求助于(神、法律)；恳求，乞求 | |
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41
invokes
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| v.援引( invoke的第三人称单数 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求 | |
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42
contemplate
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| vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视 | |
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43
fluency
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| n.流畅，雄辩，善辩 | |
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44
intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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45
consolidate
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| v.使加固，使加强；(把...)联为一体，合并 | |
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46
random
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| adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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47
penetrate
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| v.透(渗)入；刺入，刺穿；洞察，了解 | |
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48
attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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49
lumber
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| n.木材，木料；v.以破旧东西堆满；伐木；笨重移动 | |
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50
draughts
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| n. <英>国际跳棋 | |
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51
puff
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| n.一口(气)；一阵(风)；v.喷气，喘气 | |
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52
groans
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| n.呻吟，叹息( groan的名词复数 )；呻吟般的声音v.呻吟( groan的第三人称单数 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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53
quotations
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| n.引用( quotation的名词复数 )；[商业]行情（报告）；（货物或股票的）市价；时价 | |
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54
quotation
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| n.引文，引语，语录；报价，牌价，行情 | |
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55
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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56
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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57
tyrant
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| n.暴君，专制的君主，残暴的人 | |
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58
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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59
flickers
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| 电影制片业； （通常指灯光）闪烁，摇曳( flicker的名词复数 ) | |
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60
stimulating
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| adj.有启发性的，能激发人思考的 | |
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61
gutter
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| n.沟，街沟，水槽，檐槽，贫民窟 | |
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62
gasps
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| v.喘气( gasp的第三人称单数 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
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63
gracefully
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| ad.大大方方地；优美地 | |
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64
smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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65
grooves
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| n.沟( groove的名词复数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏v.沟( groove的第三人称单数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏 | |
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66
glibly
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| adv.流利地，流畅地；满口 | |
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67
glibness
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| n.花言巧语；口若悬河 | |
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68
clog
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| vt.塞满，阻塞；n.[常pl.]木屐 | |
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69
unintelligible
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| adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的 | |
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70
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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71
slumber
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| n.睡眠，沉睡状态 | |
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72
sanguine
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| adj.充满希望的，乐观的，血红色的 | |
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73
wreckage
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| n.（失事飞机等的）残骸，破坏，毁坏 | |
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74
renovation
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| n.革新，整修 | |
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75
impure
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| adj.不纯净的，不洁的；不道德的，下流的 | |
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76
crammed
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| adj.塞满的，挤满的；大口地吃；快速贪婪地吃v.把…塞满；填入；临时抱佛脚( cram的过去式) | |
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77
subtleties
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| 细微( subtlety的名词复数 )； 精细； 巧妙； 细微的差别等 | |
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78
lashing
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| n.鞭打；痛斥；大量；许多v.鞭打( lash的现在分词 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥 | |
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79
follies
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| 罪恶，时事讽刺剧； 愚蠢，蠢笨，愚蠢的行为、思想或做法( folly的名词复数 ) | |
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80
hypocrisies
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| n.伪善，虚伪( hypocrisy的名词复数 ) | |
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81
satires
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| 讽刺，讥讽( satire的名词复数 )； 讽刺作品 | |
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82
satire
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| n.讽刺，讽刺文学，讽刺作品 | |
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83
sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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84
prophesying
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| v.预告，预言( prophesy的现在分词 ) | |
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85
wireless
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| adj.无线的；n.无线电 | |
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86
prim
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| adj.拘泥形式的，一本正经的；n.循规蹈矩，整洁；adv.循规蹈矩地，整洁地 | |
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87
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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88
rhythmical
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| adj.有节奏的，有韵律的 | |
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89
bestow
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| v.把…赠与，把…授予；花费 | |
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90
harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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91
incompatible
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| adj.不相容的，不协调的，不相配的 | |
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92
affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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93
saturate
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| vt.使湿透，浸透；使充满，使饱和 | |
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94
spun
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| v.纺，杜撰，急转身 | |
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95
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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96
horde
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| n.群众，一大群 | |
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97
swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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98
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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99
mingling
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| adj.混合的 | |
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100
jubilation
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| n.欢庆，喜悦 | |
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101
bass
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| n.男低音(歌手)；低音乐器；低音大提琴 | |
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102
malcontent
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| n.不满者，不平者；adj.抱不平的，不满的 | |
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103
discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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104
whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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105
absurdities
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| n.极端无理性( absurdity的名词复数 )；荒谬；谬论；荒谬的行为 | |
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106
syllable
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| n.音节；vt.分音节 | |
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107
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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108
dependants
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| 受赡养者，受扶养的家属( dependant的名词复数 ) | |
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109
begetter
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| n.生产者，父 | |
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110
sonnets
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| n.十四行诗( sonnet的名词复数 ) | |
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111
embark
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| vi.乘船，着手，从事，上飞机 | |
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112
publicity
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| n.众所周知，闻名；宣传，广告 | |
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113
rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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114
sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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115
rein
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| n.疆绳，统治，支配；vt.以僵绳控制，统治 | |
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116
curbing
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| n.边石，边石的材料v.限制，克制，抑制( curb的现在分词 ) | |
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117
torrent
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| n.激流，洪流；爆发，(话语等的)连发 | |
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118
implore
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| vt.乞求，恳求，哀求 | |
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119
pomposity
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| n.浮华；虚夸；炫耀；自负 | |
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120
anonymous
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| adj.无名的；匿名的；无特色的 | |
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121
disciples
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| n.信徒( disciple的名词复数 )；门徒；耶稣的信徒；（尤指）耶稣十二门徒之一 | |
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122
luncheons
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| n.午餐，午宴( luncheon的名词复数 ) | |
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123
consigning
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| v.把…置于（令人不快的境地）( consign的现在分词 )；把…托付给；把…托人代售；丟弃 | |
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124
consolation
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| n.安慰，慰问 | |
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