I have been a course, I have been an eagle. I have been a coracle in the seas: I have been compliant in the banquet. I have been a drop in a shower; I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand I have been a shield in battle. I have been a string in a harp, Disguised for nine years, in water, in foam. I have been sponge in the fire, I have been wood in the covert

I have been in a multitude of shapes, Before I assumed a consistent form. I have been a sword, narrow, variegated, I will believe when it is apparent. I have been a tear in the air, I have been the dullest of stars. I have been a word among letters, I have been a book in the origin. I have been the light of lanterns, A year and a half. I have been a continuing bridge, Over three score river mouths.

I have been a sow, I have been a buck, I have been a sage, I have been a snout, I have been a horn, I have been a wild sow, I have been a shout in battle. I have been a torrent on the slope, I have been a wave on the extended shore. I have been the light sprinkling of a deluge, I have been a cat with a speckled head on three trees. I have been a circumference, I have been a head. A goat on an elder-tree. I have been a crane well filled, a sight to behold. Very ardent the animals of Morial, They kept a good stock. Of what is below the air, say the hateful men, Too many do not live, of those that know me.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die.

You can be one thing or two or three; you can be the beauty and the beast.

I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me.

My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and. . . . For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.

I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation of full growth.

To get the feeling of what it is like to be a creature of the sea requires the active exercise of the imagination and the temporary abandonment of many human concepts and human yardsticks. For example, time measured by the clock or the calendar means nothing if you are a shore bird or a fish, but the succession of light and darkness and the ebb and the flow of the tides mean the difference between the time to eat and the time to fast, between the time an enemy can find you easily and the time you are relatively safe. We cannot get the full flavor of marine life — cannot project ourselves vicariously into it — unless we make these adjustments in our thinking.