The three-part poem "Chanson d'Aventure", describing a journey by ambulance after suffering a stroke, invokes with gentle reverence John Keats, who wrote in a late poem of "This living hand, now warm and capable / of earnest grasping".
This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is I hold it towards you.
Underneath its deceptively quiet surface is a raw, angry, earnest attempt to grasp the moral consequences of the war in Iraq, and to stare without blinking into the chasm that divides those who are fighting it from their families, their fellow citizens and one another.
If we choose to work with Saturn in earnest, we can grasp the golden ring and achieve our greatest dreams, and I have no doubt that VICE will devise new ways to become even more relevant to its readers.
Something similar is at play in the work of Rex Orange County, a young British lounge-soul singer with a firm grasp on kitsch and devastatingly earnest lyrics.
Waking the Dead Keith Gordon's painfully earnest screen adaptation of Scott Spencer's novel grasps at a fusion of historicism and heartbreak we normally expect to find in Hollywood epics.
It's something worse: an exceedingly earnest mishmash of subplots with only the haziest grasp of narrative coherence.
But as he senses that his wife (Nora Gregor, above) may be slipping out of his grasp and into the arms of an earnest, lovestruck aviator (Roland Toutain), he betrays shadowy but potent emotions that can't be controlled with a good windup.
But with the exception of Mr. LaPaglia's Leo, the characters remain theoretical constructions grasping at a reality that no amount of earnest acting can supply.
She dragged me to her, grasped my jacket, spoke face to face in an earnest and serious voice.
