Word: tantalus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...best of my recollection, abetted by contemporary research, it was Sisyphus who was the Greeks' most futile lapidist, not Tantalus...
Perhaps weary Henry Agard Wallace "toiling like Tantalus in Hades" is merely logrolling; or maybe the pork suspended above him and the slush about him disappear as he is about to grasp them...
...Presidential boomlets, that of patient Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace has probably laid the biggest egg. Weary Mr. Wallace, toiling like Tantalus in Hades, has pushed the farm problem up the hill countless times, only to have it roll back and crush him anew each & every time. Trapped in a six-year mesh of cumbrous grabbag legislation, alternately burned by droughts* and swamped by bounteous Nature's overproduction, still he comes up with a dogged smile, pushes his greying cowlick out of his eyes, and tackles the irresistible forces with new enthusiasm. But still U. S. farmers rate...
...tantalizing outfit this year, with its bright spots brighter than bright, and the duller moments inexcusably dull. It has clicked, and it has failed to click, but the impression has always been left that it is almost ready to go. The club has been dangling the apple before Tantalus too long, and a break is about...
...curse of Tantalus haunted their Romantic love. As Amy Lowell explains, "She kept Keats in a burning agitation of desire which, under the circumstances, she was powerless to gratify." Yet she waited out the long days of his illness, lonely in her cold virginity, never regarding the torment of delirious notes in which he accused her of unfaithfulness. She kept faith to the dying poet long after he coughed out his last feeble breath, holding her oval white carnelian in his hand. She had understood his request that her last letter be laid in his coffin. He died. "All that...