An editorial addition

In my Saturday Six from Patrick's Place, one of the questions was to include your favorite passage from a literary work.  Well, I could not recall it all from memory but I have now found it.  I love it so much I felt it deserved an entry all to itself.  It is from the funeral scene in "Out of Africa," starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. It can still bring tears to my eyes.  Sigh ...... Nobody does it better than Meryl in my book!

                                     

From A SHROPSHIRE LAD: XIX TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) (Poem written in honor of those slain in the Boer War.)
 

"The time you won your town the race /We chaired you through the market-place; /Man and boy stood cheering by, /And home we brought you shoulder-high...

Smart lad, to slip betimes away /From fields where glory does not stay /And early though the laurel grows /It withers quicker than the rose...

Now you will not swell the rout /Of lads that wore their honours out, /Runners whom renown outran /And the name died before the man...

And round that early-laurelled head /Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, /And find unwithered on its curls /The garland briefer than a girl's."

The (fictional)script written for the movie gives Meryl Streep the further comments:

"Now take back the soul of Denys George Finch Hatton, whom You have shared with us. He brought us joy...we loved him well.

He was not ours.

He was not mine."