Word: piteous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...best, this approach is explicit and visual. A bishop's red robes billow out on crinoline hoops, a cartoon of gluttony, indicating that the church would feed on men's lives to fatten its authority. The foot soldier who delivers the tenderly piteous speech that includes "I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle" is a Negro, suggesting that the king rules by exploitive oppression. When the list of the French dead is read, each dead man rises with a blood-splotched white mask to stand at the footlights in a solid phalanx...
This passage from the ringing first novel in T. H. White's Arthurian cycle, The Once and Future King, is a shade too piteous to be in character. The Sword in the Stone comes so near to being a perfect book that the momentary faltering in Merlyn's tone is worth examining. In her compassionate biography of White, Author Sylvia Townsend Warner suggests that it was White himself who missed his love, who lay at night listening to the roar of his veins, and who swallowed great draughts of learning as a painkiller...
...came when the Master of the House invited himself up to Tea one afternoon. Unfortunately, George did not remain quiet, and soon after the Master arrived she began to whine and growl in a most piteous way and to knock on the door to the living room behind which she was incarcertated. The Master, remarking on the peculiarity of the noises issuing from behind the door, opened...
...eruption of jealousy and murderous violence. Said the Financial Times's Alan Dent: "He is like a lion caught in a cruel trap." In the Daily Mail, the often appreciation-proof Bernard Levin said that "Sir Laurence's Othello is larger than life, bloodier than death, more piteous than pity...
...Miller-Monroe marriage takes up most of the play's second half. It is an ugly and piteous picture; many persons will doubtless find it embarrassing, disgusting, and tasteless. Yet it is unsparingly honest. Miller does absolve himself of direct responsibility for La Monroe's death, but he makes no attempt to deny that he shares some of the guilt for the union's collapse. Over and above their validity as components in a work of art, the Monroe episodes constitute a precious document in the history of psychology; they provide the explanation by one knowledgeable, sensitive, and articulate observer...