[ALIGN=left] [/ALIGN][ALIGN=left]My friends have left. Far away, my darling is asleep.Outside, it's as dark as pitch.I'm saying words to myself, words that are white in the lamplight and when I'm half-asleep I begin to think about my mother. Autumnal recollection.Really, under the cover of winter, it's as if I know everything—even what my mother is doing now.[URL=http://www.discountmbt.com/]MBT[/URL] She's at home in the kitchen. She has a small child's stovetoward which the wooden rocking horse can trot,she has a small child's stove, the sort nobody uses today, but she basks in its heat. Mother. My diminutive mom.She sits quiedy, hands folded, and thinks about my father, who died years ago.[/ALIGN][ALIGN=left]And then she [URL=http://www.discountmbt.com/]MBT Shoes[/URL] is skinning fruit for me. 1 amin the room. Sitting right next to her. You've got to see us,God, you bully, who took so much. Howdark it is outside! What was I going to say?[/ALIGN][ALIGN=left]Oh, yes, now I remember. Because of all those hours I slept soundly, dirough calm nights, because of all those loved ones who are deep in dreams—Now, when everything's running short, I can't stand being here by myself. The lamplight's too strong. I am sowing grain [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/]MBT[/URL]on the headland. I will not live long.[/ALIGN][ALIGN=left]"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry," W. B. Yeats asserts in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1917), and Orten's poem seems to inscribe that self-challenging notion of the lyric. From the beginning, "A Small Elegy" dramatically establishes that the speaker—a [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/]MBT Shoes[/URL] stand-in for the poet—is by himself talking to himself. He was with other people, but now he is completely alone, his friends gone, his beloved sleeping elsewhere, unconscious, far away. The speaker is the sole operating consciousness mourning in a world where everyone else is asleep. Against the pitch-black darkness he starts saying [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/vibram-five-fingers-c-13.html?zenid=ea9711d15b496cd92fa8cb21e4b3c1e9]vibram fivefingers[/URL] things to himself, using "white" words, which I take to mean words that have a kind of unself-conscious purity about them. He daydreams about his mother—an "autumnal recollection"—and that in turn moves him back toward his childhood home where his mother seems still to preside, although much diminished, over an outmoded world. She is smaller, more vulnerable, someone to be protected. "Matku," he says tenderly in [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/vibram-five-fingers-c-13.html?zenid=ea9711d15b496cd92fa8cb21e4b3c1e9]vibram five fingers[/URL] Czech, "Mou maminku," "my little mommy," which the translator has rendered as "my diminutive mom." He imagines that after all these years she's still sitting there, quietly uncomplaining, thinking about his father who died so long ago.[/ALIGN]