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2 total messages Started by Slartibartfast Fri, 03 Oct 1986 00:15
night of the iguana - excerpt
#1100
Author: Slartibartfast
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1986 00:15
48 lines
2224 bytes
I was up at about 4am last week and saw "NIGHT OF THE IGUANA"
(or most of it) with Richard Burton.  It was great, and at the end
there was a fantastic poem ("fantastic" is a pun, 
if you know the play).


	Anyway, I looked it up, and here it is.  Since this is an
(albeit late) review of the play, no copyright infringement is
intended:


        How calmly does the orange branch
        Observe the sky begin to blanch
        Without a cry, without a prayer,
        With no betrayal of despair.

        Sometime while night obscures the tree
        The zenith of its life will be
        Gone past forever, and from thence
        A second history will commence.

        A chronicle no longer gold,
        A bargaining with mist and mould,
        And finally the broken stem
        The plummeting to earth; and then

        An intercourse not well designed
        For beings of a golden kind
        Whose native green must arch above
        The earth's obscene, corrupting love.

        And still the ripe fruit and the branch
        Observe the sky begin to blanch
        Without a cry, without a prayer,
        With no betrayal of despair.

        O Courage, could you not as well
        Select a second place to dwell,
        Not only in that golden tree
        But in the frightened heart of me?

                        From The Night of the Iguana, Act III
                             Tennesee Williams (1961)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark A. Johnson - Purdue University Department of Electrical Engineering
		(Department of Redundancy Department) 
UUCP:..allegra!purdue!pur-ee!mj USPS:Box 260, EE Building, Lafayette IN 47907
Re: night of the iguana - excerpt
#1102
Author: Theodore Hope
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1986 20:43
30 lines
1451 bytes
In article <4764@pur-ee.UUCP> mj@pur-ee.UUCP (Slartibartfast) writes:
>

>	Anyway, I looked it up, and here it is.

>
>        How calmly does the orange branch
>        Observe the sky begin to blanch
>        Without a cry, without a prayer,
>        With no betrayal of despair.

>Mark A. Johnson - Purdue University Department of Electrical Engineering
>


Strange... I could have sworn that the old man says:


	How calmly does the olive branch	(olive, not orange)
	....
	....

It could be that the old man's accent and the fact that the TV / VCR which I saw it on
was less-than hi-fi made me hear 'olive.'  Has anyone out there also heard it this way?

-- 
Theodore Hope
School of Information & Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
CSNet:	Hope @ gatech		ARPA:	Hope@ics.GATECH.EDU
uucp:	...!{akgua,decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!hope
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