Paper Assignment
Passage Choices

Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. (5.5.18-28)

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

Another man clung to a cypress tree on a tiny island. A tin roof of a building hung from the branches by electric wires and the wind swung it back and forth like a mighty ax. The man dared not move a step to his right lest this crushing blade split him open. He dared not step to the left for a large rattlesnake was stretched full length with his head in the wind. There was a strip of water between the island and the fill, and the man clung to the tree and cried for help. (164-5)

"Arms and the Boy," Wilfred Owen

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

"When I Heard the Learned Astronomer," Walt Whitman

When I sitting heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway

"I may not be going," said the young gentleman, "very probably not. I will leave word with the padrone at the hotel office." (103)

"A Considerable Speck," Robert Frost

I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.

"The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled a City," by Dylan Thomas

A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.