Word: mournful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Serious critics, nevertheless, were entitled to mourn the descent of MacLeish's style from such elevation to the vague patriotic fretting and bad verse that affairs of state seemed to stimulate...
Many an onlooker at Kappler's trial (the first war crimes trial by an Italian court) had made the Ardeatine pilgrimage to mourn husband or son; the crowd stiffened with horror as Kappler dryly told how 30 SS men had rounded up the victims and taken them out to the cave. The officer who was to fire first got sick at the scene; Kappler explained to the court that he had had to fire the first shot to encourage the weakling...
Today, at 29, Héctor Poleo still paints as if he had taken lessons from some Renaissance master. But his subjects are a modern nightmare. His women, like modern Madonnas, mourn, eyes shut against the world. A disfigured war hero stares numbly out of his canvas, his blind eye patched with paper money, his chest covered with worthless medals of tin, cork, broken combs, and tiny crutches. Poleo's trees are dead, his earth pocked and parched, his cities mere ruins and rubble. In some paintings, there are no signs of life at all-only tiny ladders down...
...comfortable place. It neither welcomes pilgrims on arrival, nor says goodbye when they leave. It is seldom impressed with their triumphs and does not mourn if they choose to dive out a window. There is no lonelier sight in the world than a dead man lying on a Manhattan sidewalk, ringed by a throng of the half-curious...
This is how many Czechs explain Jan Masaryk's death. Maybe, we are not right. Nobody can assert it. We would prefer to mourn for him without speaking about his motives. But we cannot help feeling offended by those who comment upon his death by the words, "Too late, but still...