Daily Literature Page Content Archive

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1. "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses": Proust dips a madeleine in his tea and a whole town comes back2026-10-02
2. "The Lord stuck His finger in the net of my nerves": Knut Hamsun's starving man argues with God in the Bible's own words2026-10-03
3. "A child said What is the grass?": Walt Whitman's Song of Myself guesses four times, then finds the dead2026-10-04
4. "Hearken to the reed-flute": Rumi opens the Masnavi with a reed that complains and a poem that knows how it will be read2026-10-05
5. "O rash and bold lampe": Psyche looks at Cupid, and Apuleius puts the lamp on trial2026-10-06
6. "Fair is the Lithe": Gunnar turns back for a mown hay-field, and Njál's Saga lets his brother name the price2026-10-07
7. "Then was not non-existent nor existent": the Rigveda's creation hymn opens on darkness and water, and closes with "or perhaps he knows not"2026-10-08
8. "He was that same falcon": the Nibelungenlied tells Kriemhild how her story ends before it has begun2026-10-09
9. "I am smitten with the love of wisdom": the Queen of Sheba sets out for Solomon in Ethiopia's national epic2026-10-10
10. "Suppose that I ask the brilliant humming-bird": a sixteenth-century Nahuatl song from Mexico sends a poet hunting flowers2026-10-11
11. "Even the mighty ocean would reek with corruption": the Kural's case for rain, in an English modelled on the King James Bible2026-10-12
12. "He will not weaken Georgian": the Georgian national epic's rules for a poet2026-10-13
13. "They never woke more": Herodotus's Solon answers a king's question about happiness with two Argive brothers2026-10-14
14. "A woman's wealth was all thou hadst": the Táin Bó Cúailnge begins in a marriage bed2026-10-15
15. "Far, far above him he thrusts up the sky": Tāne-mahuta prises heaven from earth in the Māori creation story2026-10-16
16. "He hopes for the coming of cold weather": Bai Juyi follows a wagon of charcoal into Chang'an2026-10-17
17. "What is life? 'Tis but a madness": Calderón's prince spends forty lines learning how to behave in a dream2026-10-18
18. "A god whose name I dared not utter": Phaedra confesses to her nurse, and Racine makes the nurse say the name2026-10-19
19. "I'm getting crushed": Aristophanes bans one joke at the start of The Frogs, and his slave tells it anyway2026-10-20
20. "I saw nothing but the waters wappe": Malory's Bedivere lies twice about throwing Excalibur away2026-10-21
21. "He abused me, he beat me": the Dhammapada's opening verses come in pairs, and one word decides each2026-10-22
22. "Swords, and knives, and shields": the Book of Enoch lists everything the angels taught, and the list cannot separate a weapon from an eyeliner2026-10-23
23. "Where is the proof that thou art Rustam's son?": in the Shahnameh, a father kills his son and then asks for evidence2026-10-24
24. "Before you speak, pray take this handkerchief": in Tartuffe, the sin changes hands with a piece of linen2026-10-25
25. "One does not look for such music from men of your condition": a Nō ghost answers a monk's compliment with a list of flutes2026-10-26
26. "I am thy brother": in Gogol's The Overcoat, a clerk says eight words and a newcomer hears a second sentence inside them2026-10-27
27. "Save only Madness": Ariosto's moon keeps everything we lose, sorted and labelled2026-10-28
28. "I humbly solicit my readers' incredulity": Lucian's True History asks to be disbelieved before the voyage starts2026-10-29
29. "We have discovered happiness," say the last men, and blink: Nietzsche's Zarathustra describes the people who want nothing more2026-10-30
30. "Not a tree of any other kind in sight": Tao Yuanming's fisherman finds a village nearly six hundred years out of touch2026-10-31
31. "Where are the horses? Where are the heroes?": an Old English exile asks what became of everyone he knew, and the poem answers with a wall2026-11-01
32. "God, what a noble vassal, an he had a worthy lord": the Poem of the Cid opens with an emptied house and a town that shuts its doors2026-11-02
33. "A mark of the most common sort of men": Marcus Aurelius talks himself out of a country house and into his own soul2026-11-03
34. "We have no other ayme of truth and reason": Montaigne measures the cannibals with the only measure he has2026-11-04
35. "I turn the wheel that spins": Boethius gives Fortune the floor, and she answers his complaint as a lawsuit about who owns what2026-11-05

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