Robert Service
To buy for school a copy-book
I asked my Dad for two-pence;
He gave it with a gentle look,
Although he had but few pence.
It was then I proved myself a crook
And came a moral cropper,
I bought a penny copy-book
And blued the other copper.
I spent it on a sausage roll
Gulped down with guilt suggestion,
To the damnation of my soul
And awful indigestion.
Poor Dad! His job was hard to hold;
His mouths to feed were many;
Were he alive a million fold
I’d pay him for his penny.
Now nigh the grave I think with grief,
Though other sins are many,
I am a liar and a thief
’Cause once I stole a penny:
Yet be he pious as a friar
It is my firm believing,
That every man has been a liar
And most of us done thieving.
1.Discuss within groups your understandings of the origins and symptoms of the universal sense of guilt and sins.
2.Try to translate the last stanza of the poem into Chinese.Pay special attention to the metrical form and rhyme scheme of the poem.
Proper Names
Congo 刚果
Poland 波兰
Ukraine 乌克兰
Notes
1. Lord of the Flies:It is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, with disastrous results.Its stances on the already-controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common goodearned it position 68 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-1999.
2. Modernism:It is modern thought, character, or practice.More specifically, the term describes themodernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associatedcultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes toWestern societyin the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
3. Romanticism:It is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to theIndustrial Revolution.In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of theAge of Enlightenmentand a reaction against the scientificrationalizationof nature.It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, educationand natural history.
4. William Golding:Sir William Gerald Golding(19 September 1911-19 June 1993) was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literaturelaureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies .He was also awarded theBooker Prizefor literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage , the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth .
For Fun
Works to Read
1. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom(2006):It is a psychologybook byJonathan Haidtwritten for a general audience.In it, Haidt poses several “Great Ideas”on happiness espoused by thinkers of the past—Plato,Buddha,Jesusand others.
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):It is sometimes published as 1984.Is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949.The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as “thoughtcrimes”.
Movies to See
1. Apocalypse Now(1979): It is an Americanepicwar filmset during theVietnam War, directed and produced byFrancis Ford Coppola.The central character isU.S. Armyspecial operationsofficerCaptainBenjamin L.Willard, ofMACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insaneSpecial ForcesColonelWalter E.Kurtz(Marlon Brando).
2. Lord of the Flies (1990):It is an American thriller film adapted from the classic novel Lord of the Flies written by William Golding.It is the second film adaptation of the book, the first being the 1963 film Lord of the Flies .The film was a moderate box office success and critics gave it average reviews.