Cleaving

The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky.

My head blazed with pain. The speed, the cleaving wind, the flailing beams of light from traffic tormented me. And there was the sickly smell too that no night air could clear.

The fight was brutal and intense but soon it became painfully obvious that the fairy could not keep this pace up for much longer. She was beginning to tire. No longer able to attack with each turn and dive, she had to use all of her remaining speed and energy just to dodge pincers. She was on the defensive, and the monster was nowhere near letting up. Her graceful turns and leaps became more and more frantic and less graceful, and the last cleaving strike sent her rolling. She leaped immediately to her feet only to be struck solidly with a sweeping blow from the flat side of the bonecracker’s other crablike claw. Swatted sideways, she flew face-first into a wooden cask at the edge of the well. She crumpled to the floor, her swords sliding from her hands and falling at her side.

That’s worth all the fuss and all the effort, all the sweat and the cleaving wind, the grind of wheels on paviors and the shrill of exaltation that you hold behind your teeth because really, let’s be cool, okay?

In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of time, and had but little understanding of its flight. But there were days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the rays of lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat, I thought: plashing the slippery walls and houses with the cleavings of the tide, as my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.

Many of Spenser's readers today find the cleavings and reunifications of Redcrosse and Una presenting a psychodrama of mental fragmentation […]

On all of them they renew their cleavings to God with love and delight.