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27. I WILL SHOW YOU: See Jeremiah* 33:2-3,10,11:
“Thus saith the Lord the maker thereof, the Lord that formed it, to establish it; ...Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not. ...Again there shall be heard in this place, ...even in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, that are desolate, without man, and without inhabitant, and without beast, The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness ...For I will cause to return the captivity of the land, as at the first...”
28. SHADOWS: See Eliot, The Death of Narcissus (1915):
“Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or
Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock...”
See also Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster 3.2 (1620):
“Preach to birds and beasts
What woman is, and help to save them from you;
How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions,
Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven
With thousand changes in one subtle web,
And worn so by you;
...How all the good you have is but a shadow,
I' the morning with you, and at night behind you
Past and forgotten.”
See also The Allegory of the Cave, in Plato, Republic (360 B.C.E., tr. Benjamin Jowett, ca. 1893):
“[Socrates:] And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
...[Glaucon:] You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
[Socrates:] Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another ...To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. “
30. A HANDFUL OF DUST: See John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: 4. The Physician Is Sent For (1638):
“What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust; what’s become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave?”
GRAVES AND BURIAL SCENES recur at lines 71-75, 193, 246 and 388; see also notes 0.3, 2, 7, 30, 71, 74, 186, 214, 246, 298 and 378.
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* see note 0.1
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