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TO DEFLATE THE EGO

(Ingredients for a Humble Pie)

I'M NOBODY!

BY EMILY DICKINSON

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us-don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

OZYMANDIAS OF EGYPT

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

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 those 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 besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

TO THE STONE CUTTERS

BY ROBINSON JEFFERS

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated

Challengers of oblivion,

Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,

The square-limbed Roman letters

Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly;

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the

brave sun

Die blind, his heart blackening:

Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found

The honey peace in old poems.

MY HOUSE

BY MAY WILLIAMS WARD

My house is small,
An irrelevant cube;

Absurdity

Sucked by gravity

Against immensity,
Walled by diversity,
Roofed by infinity.

THE BEASTS

BY WALT WHITMAN

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain❜d;

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;

Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

ONE IN THE INFINITE

BY GEORGE FRANCIS SAVAGE-ARMSTRONG

Roll on, and with thy rolling crust
That round thy poles thou twirlest,