Summary:

Keats describes his reaction to a Grecian urn painted with images of maidens, pipers and other Greeks. While the melody of modern day pipes may be sweet, Keats finds the painted pipes sweeter. They are not mere sensual pleasure, but guide one to a higher sense of ideal beauty. The other images have a similar effect, as they are frozen forever at the moment of highest perfection.

One part of the urn shows a youth about to kiss a maid. Keats envies the lover, for though he will never actually kiss his love, she will ever remain fair and they will forever be in love. The painted trees will also forever be perfect, never losing their leaves. When Keats' world passes away, this beautiful object will still remain and tell man that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

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Keats urges his reader not to respond to melancholy by committing suicide. He says to avoid poisons like Wolf's-bane, nightshade, and yew berries. Instead, when most depressed, "glut thy sorrow" on the beauty of a rose or the rainbow of salt and sea. Likewise, if your mistress is angry with you, look into her eyes and feast on their ephemeral beauty.

Contrast is the key to pleasure. Melancholy is not the moment for death, but an opportunity for a fine experience. It is the fine balance between pain and pleasure that is ideal. The final stanza rephrases this idea. Beauty is always ephemeral; joy is always about to leave, but these are man's highest moments.

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A man walks through the countryside after a night of rain. The creatures around him are lively and refreshed. At first, he shares their joy, but his mood soon turns as he reflects that care and pain are the inevitable balance to the care-free life he has lead so far: "We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

He comes upon an old man staring into a muddy pond. The man seems weighed down with care; he is so still he seems dead. He greets the man and asks what he is doing. The old man is a leech-gatherer, leeches being needed by eighteenth-century doctors. He wanders the moors, sleeping outside, and thus makes a steady living. The wanderer resolves not to give in to misery, but to think instead of the courage and firm mind of the leech gatherer.

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Wordsworth describes his respect for an elderly female friend. Her wrinkles, grey hair, white cheeks, and bent head bring to mind a snowdrop. Like her, the delicate flower that blossoms on snow-covered mountains is a child of winter that prompts thoughts of gentle demise. Aging and death are compared to the moon growing brighter as night grows darker. Old age refines people into something more pure and exquisite.

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A doctor is called to the home of a poor, immigrant family. A beautiful little girl is quite ill. As diphtheria has been going around, the doctor attempts to examine her throat. The girl, however, won't open her mouth. She fights him off and all attempts to cajole her into compliance fail. Yet, the doctor is resolved to see that throat. He forces the girl's father to hold her down, while he manages to wrest open her mouth after a long battle. She does, in fact, have diphtheria.

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Albert Gans' father is in the hospital dying of something the doctors cannot identify. Depressed, Albert is entering the subway when a retarded woman hands him a card reading "Heal the Sick. Save the Dying. Make a Silver Crown." It gives a rabbi's name and address. Albert had just been speaking to a friend who encouraged him to try a faith healer saying, "Different people know different things; nobody knows everything. You can't tell about the human body."

So, Albert goes to the Rabbi's house. The aging man tells him that he will make Albert's father a crown made of pure silver, covered with blessings and his son's love that will heal him completely. For $401 he can have a medium crown, for $986 a large one that will work more quickly. Albert is skeptical and asks rational questions that the Rabbi answers with a combination of mysticism and salesmanship. Finally, Albert agrees and gives the Rabbi his money. Immediately afterwards, he feels duped and threatens the Rabbi, calling him a thief.

The Rabbi tries to soothe him, asking him not to spoil the miracle and to think of the father who loves him. Albert bursts out, "He hates me, the son of a bitch, I hope he croaks." He then rushes out. An hour later, Albert's father dies.

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Charles Bovary is a country physician who, after an unhappy first marriage, marries the daughter of a patient. Emma is eager to leave her father's dirty farm but finds marriage to be less romantic and satisfying than she expected. Charles is not a prince, but a bumbling, aging man. Even when at work he performs more like a veterinarian than a skilled surgeon. Indeed, when he and the local chemist attempt a new procedure on a clubfoot, the patient gets gangrene and loses his leg.

Disgusted, Emma develops a relationship with Leon Dupuis, a young lawyer. She refuses to sleep with him but regrets it after he leaves town. She then meets Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy landowner who seduces Emma to pass the time. They have a brief if passionate affair.

When Boulanger abandons her, Emma returns to Leon, this time giving in to their mutual passion. Her affair has an air of desperation. She soon exhausts her limited funds on trips to visit her lover and love gifts. Knowing that her husband will discover her affair when their financial situation is revealed, Emma overdoses on arsenic and dies miserably.

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This novel tells the story of Jess Goldberg, a transgendered "butch" growing up in Buffalo, New York. Jess first learns to admit and negotiate her attraction to women and her butch identity. Immediately, she is faced with violence. The police raid the lesbian bars, arrest any woman wearing fewer than three articles of women’s clothing and routinely beat, strip, or rape them. Jess and her friends also face the violence of bashers who attack without cause on dark or well-lighted streets.

Nevertheless, Jess refuses to compromise. From a doctor, she gets a prescription for testosterone, goes to a gym and transforms herself into a bearded, muscular man. Having saved two thousand dollars, she has a mastectomy done. The doctor falsifies a biopsy, performs the surgery and makes her leave. By the end of the novel, Jess is secure in her identity and determines to fight to make the world safe for others like her.

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This is the narrative of an old doctor. Once greatly admired, he is now ridiculed by young doctors who find his techniques outdated and his lectures boring. His specialty is microbiology; his lab works on AIDS. His daughter asks him to support a group demanding that researchers release without so much delay the preventive drugs they are developing for AIDS patients. The doctor refuses on the grounds that the drugs need more testing. Later he finds out that his son is dying of AIDS.

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Summary:

Rossetti writes about Lilith, Adam's evil first wife according to Hebraic oral tradition. She is described as a beautiful temptress. Her beauty hides a deep evil that nearly snares Adam and dooms mankind.

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