night of the iguana - excerpt

[Slartibartfast]

I was up at about 4am last week and saw "NIGHT OF THE IGUANA"
(or most of it) with Richard Burton. It was great, and at the end
there was a fantastic poem ("fantastic" is a pun,
if you know the play).

Anyway, I looked it up, and here it is. Since this is an
(albeit late) review of the play, no copyright infringement is
intended:

How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.

A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene, corrupting love.

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?

From The Night of the Iguana, Act III
Tennesee Williams (1961)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark A. Johnson - Purdue University Department of Electrical Engineering
(Department of Redundancy Department)
UUCP:..allegra!purdue!pur-ee!mj USPS:Box 260, EE Building, Lafayette IN 47907

[Theodore Hope]

In article <47...@pur-ee.UUCP> m...@pur-ee.UUCP (Slartibartfast) writes:
>

> Anyway, I looked it up, and here it is.

>

> How calmly does the orange branch
> Observe the sky begin to blanch
> Without a cry, without a prayer,
> With no betrayal of despair.

>Mark A. Johnson - Purdue University Department of Electrical Engineering
>

Strange... I could have sworn that the old man says:

How calmly does the olive branch (olive, not orange)
....
....

It could be that the old man's accent and the fact that the TV / VCR which I saw it on
was less-than hi-fi made me hear 'olive.' Has anyone out there also heard it this way?

--
Theodore Hope
School of Information & Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
CSNet: Hope @ gatech ARPA: Ho...@ics.GATECH.EDU
uucp: ...!{akgua,decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!hope