Recitation
1. "Hope" is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson, 1861
"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—
I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.
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Recitation
2. The Kite Runner (excerpt)
Khaled Hosseini, 2004
We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The
shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened
us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were
foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears
would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.
Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of
us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life. If not quite yet,
then at least it was the beginning of the end. The end, the official end, would
come first in April 1978 with the communist coup d'état, and then in
December 1979, when Russian tanks would roll into the very same streets
where Hassan and I played, bringing the death of the Afghanistan I knew and
marking the start of a still ongoing era of bloodletting.
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Recitation
3. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost, 1923
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
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Recitation
4. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne, 2006
In his imagination he had thought that all the huts were full of happy families,
some of whom sat outside on rocking chairs in the evening and told stories
about how things were so much better when they were children and they'd had
respect for their elders, not like the children nowadays. He thought that all the
boys and girls who lived here would be in different groups, playing tennis or
football, skipping and drawing out squares for hopscotch on the ground. He
had thought that there would be a shop in the centre, and maybe a small café
like the ones he had known in Berlin; he had wondered whether there would
be a fruit and vegetable stalls. As it turned out, all the things that he thought
might be there - weren't.
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Recitation
5. Psalm 137 (excerpt)
1.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion.
2. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they
that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of
Zion.
4. How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?
5. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if
I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
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Recitation
6. The Great Gatsby (excerpt)
F·Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling
voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each
speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face
was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate
mouth--but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for
her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a
promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that
there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
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Recitation
7. A Dream Within A Dream
Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avowYou are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sandHow few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
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Recitation
8. The Reader (excerpt)
Bernhard Schlink, 1995
When I think today about those years, I realize how little direct observation
there actually was, how few photographs that made life and murder in the
camps real. We knew the gate of Auschwitz with its inscription, the stacked
wooden bunks, the piles of hair and spectacles and suitcases; we knew the
building that formed the entrance to Birkenau with tower, the two wings, and
the entryway for the trains, and from Bergen-Belsen the mountains of corpses
found and photographed by the allies at the liberation. We were familiar with
some of the testimony of prisoners, but many of them were published soon
after the war and not reissued until the 1980s, and in the intervening years
they disappeared from publishers` lists.
Today there are so many books and films that the world of the camps is part of
our collective imagination and completes our ordinary everyday one. Our
imagination knows its way around in it, and since the television series
Holocaust and movies like Sophie`s Choice and especially Schindler`s List,
actually moves in it, not just registering, but supplementing and embellishing
it. Back then, the imagination was almost static: the shattering fact of the
world of the camps seemed properly beyond its operations. The few images
derived from Allied photographs and the testimony of survivors flashed on the
mind again and again, until they froze into clichés.
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Recitation
9. Sunset
Rainer Maria Rilke
Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.
leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs--
leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
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Recitation
10. The Little Prince (excerpt)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1942
All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For
some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more
than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems…
But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has
them… In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing.
And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at
night.
You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is
comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known
me… You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you
will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… It will be as if, in
place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how
to laugh.
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Recitation
11. Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
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Recitation
12. The Sinews of Peace (excerpt)
Winston Churchill, 1946
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the
ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna,
Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the
populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are
subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high
and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
...
I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of
war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we
have to consider here to-day while time remains, is the permanent prevention
of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as
rapidly as possible in all countries. Our difficulties and dangers will not be
removed by closing our eyes to them. They will not be removed by mere
waiting to see what happens; nor will they be removed by a policy of
appeasement. What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed,
the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become.
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Recitation
13. She Walks in Beauty
George Gordon Byron, 1814
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.
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Recitation
14. Scaffolding
Seamus Heaney - 1939-2013
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
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