Word: goldfinch
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...light of the Governor's destructive environmental plans for the beautiful state of Washington, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to picture her not as a goldfinch perched near an unspoiled shore but rather as a vulture poised menacingly in a dark wood, or as an oil-coated mallard struggling in a polluted ocean...
...second English generation of her class face death (on Dday, "two Mannerses"), and for a time, in "dung-covered boots," fed swill to pigs on a Sussex farm. Her bits on the horrors of life under British austerity are done with sharp irony. Lady Dufferin's goldfinch was "frozen to death in her bedroom. A remarkable thing to happen to a British bird." Then there were the disgruntled mothers from Britain's bombed slums quartered in the Stately Homes of England. Said one: "I can stand anything but the trees. The trees get me down...
...fascinated by the image of birds. The owl has been interpreted as the symbol of wisdom on the one hand and of evil on the other, the raven as a sign of death and of victory. To the Egyptians the hawk represented the sun god; to early Christians the goldfinch depicted the crucifixion. Seldom has this multiform fascination been better illustrated than in the 160 paintings, bronzes, jugs, vases and primitive musical instruments on show last week at the Seattle Art Museum, a display ranging from a bird-shaped Chinese ritual vessel done around 1100 B.C. to the hopping...
Pius XII, now 77, works an 18-hour day, seven days a week. He rises at 6:15 every morning, opens his windows, prays, and takes a cold shower. He shaves with an electric razor. While he shaves, a goldfinch named Gretel-one of five small pet birds he keeps-perches on his arm as it moves with the razor.* Until he goes to sleep in his simple brass bed between 12 and 2 a.m., Gretel is his only entertainment. He rarely listens any more to the records from his fine collection (favorites: Bach, Brahms, Wagner), and he has given...
...Horse in the Moon" silhouets a bridegroom, apoplectic with lust, and the head of a dying horse against a copper moon. The bride, seeing these two dying animals, and hearing the cries of anticipant ravens in the empty heavens, runs for home and father. Theme of "The Cat, a Goldfinch and the Stars" is that every individualized consciousness is circumvallated by whatever body it may inhabit. The stars knew not that the cat killed the goldfinch; the cat knew nothing about that particular finch; the bird did not know that it was life's only joy to the old couple...