Go, silly worm, drudge, trudge, and travel,
Despising pain,
So thou may’st gain
Some honour, or some golden gravel:
But Death the while (to fill his number)
With sudden call
Takes thee from all,
To prove thy days but dream and slumber.
“The sentence, if it is doing every one of its jobs, does not want you to desert it for another. It wants you to peer into each of its words, into the characters that form it, and the sentence wants you to consider the relations, acoustical and otherwise, between one word and another. The sentence wants to slow you down so that you might witness everything the writer has caused to happen inside it. Chance and randomness and accident should have little or no part in what goes on inside the sentence.”
Garielle Lutz