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These lines open the seventh stanza of John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, spoken by the poem's speaker at the point where his imagined flight to the bird reaches its furthest extent, immediately before the word "forlorn" tolls him back to himself.

Their function in the poem is to state the contrast the whole ode has been building towards. The speaker has spent six stanzas longing to escape a world in which "youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies", and here he finally names what the nightingale possesses and he does not: continuity. The bird is addressed directly as "immortal Bird", and the apostrophe matters - he is no longer describing the nightingale but appealing to it, which marks the highest point of his identification with it.

The claim is, strictly speaking, false: this individual bird will die. What is immortal is the song, passed unchanged from generation to generation, and the speaker's willingness to blur bird and song shows how far his imagination has carried him from fact. This is why the collapse of the next stanza is so abrupt; the vision has been pushed until it can no longer bear its own weight.

The phrase "hungry generations" compresses the poem's central idea into two words. It makes time itself predatory, something that consumes the living, and sets human beings in a devouring succession against the single continuous voice of the bird. The pairing of "emperor and clown" then flattens all human distinction: rank, wealth and power are irrelevant to the song, which has outlasted every listener equally.

The significance of the passage is therefore that it is both the ode's peak and the cause of its fall. In reaching for the bird's immortality the speaker has claimed something no living creature has, and the very completeness of the claim is what makes his return to "my sole self" inevitable.

This passage occurs in Phase the Second of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, when Tess, refused the help of the church, baptises her dying child Sorrow herself at night in the bedroom, watched by her younger brothers and sisters.

Its place in the novel is pivotal. The baptism is the last act of Tess's brief motherhood, and the child's death immediately afterwards closes the consequences of Alec's violation and releases her into the second half of the book. It also marks the point at which Tess stops appealing to institutions and begins to act on her own moral judgement, which is the movement the rest of the novel follows to its end.

The scene defines her character more sharply than any description could. She is shown as devout but not obedient: she performs the rite exactly, in the church's own words, while defying the church's refusal to grant it. That combination - reverence towards the meaning of the ritual, indifference towards the authority that owns it - is the essence of Hardy's Tess, and it is what makes her both sympathetic and doomed in the society he describes.

The passage carries the novel's central irony. The words of the baptism call the infant to fight "manfully" against "sin, the world, and the devil", yet this child is himself regarded by that world as the product of sin, and the woman speaking them has been condemned by the same standard. Hardy sets institutional morality and genuine moral feeling directly against each other, and the institution is the one found wanting - a judgement reinforced by the novel's subtitle, A Pure Woman.

The style does the work quietly. The formal liturgical phrasing, borrowed intact from the Prayer Book, sits against the domestic reality of a basin and a forefinger, and the gap between the grandeur of the language and the poverty of the means is where the pathos lies. The adverb "fervently" and the adjective "immense" are the only words that belong to Tess rather than to the ritual, and both measure the intensity she brings to it.

Youth is rarely presented in poetry as a simple stage of life; it is more often the point from which loss is measured. In Keats's Ode to a Nightingale youth is idealised as a condition of freedom from suffering, longed for and unreachable; in Yeats's Among School Children it is examined from old age with a mixture of nostalgia and philosophical doubt. Together the two poems show youth first as an object of desire and then as a problem of understanding.

Keats presents youth chiefly by presenting its destruction. The world he wishes to leave is one "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies", and the compression of that line - three stages of decline in six words - makes youth something that is happening to be lost rather than something possessed. What he longs for is not his own youth but a state outside time altogether, which is why the nightingale, "not born for death", becomes its emblem. Youth in this ode is defined negatively: it is whatever the "weariness, the fever, and the fret" is not.

Yeats begins from the opposite position. He is "a sixty-year-old smiling public man" walking through a schoolroom, and youth is in front of him, embodied in children he watches. The poem's movement is from observation to recollection: the children prompt him to imagine the woman he loved as a girl, and then to wonder "if she stood so at that age". Youth here is not longed for but reconstructed, and the reconstruction is admitted to be uncertain.

The difference sharpens when each poet considers what youth becomes. Keats stops at the fact of decay. Yeats presses further and asks whether a mother, shown her infant as he will be "with sixty or more winters on its head", would think the birth worth the cost - a question that refuses the consolation of nostalgia altogether. Where Keats mourns the loss of youth, Yeats doubts whether youth and age are even the same person.

This is why the two poems end so differently. Keats's vision collapses; the word "forlorn" returns him to "my sole self", and the ode closes on uncertainty about whether the escape was vision or dream. Yeats resolves his question instead by dissolving it. The chestnut tree that is neither "the leaf, the blossom or the bole" and the dancer who cannot be known from the dance propose that youth is not a separable stage at all, but one aspect of a whole that only exists entire.

Both poets therefore treat youth as inseparable from time, but they draw opposite conclusions from it. Keats's youth is precious because it ends, and his poem enacts the longing to stop it. Yeats's is unintelligible when taken by itself, and his poem works towards an acceptance in which nothing needs to be stopped. The first is an elegy for a condition; the second is an argument that the condition was never separate enough to mourn.

Iago is clever, and the play makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. But his cleverness is largely a matter of timing and restraint, and it would achieve nothing without the far more important fact the statement identifies: everyone he deceives has a reason of their own for believing him.

His technique is almost entirely negative. He rarely asserts; he withholds. "Ha! I like not that" and "Indeed?" are not accusations but invitations, and Othello supplies the accusation himself. His most quoted speech is a warning against jealousy, delivered while he is producing it. He is, in effect, letting his victims argue themselves into the conclusion he wants, which is why he can claim with some justice to have told no lies at all.

This works because Othello is already prepared to believe it. He is older than his wife, a foreigner in Venice, and has married in secret against her father's will. Brabantio's parting warning - that a daughter who deceived her father may deceive her husband - has been planted before Iago says anything whatever. Iago does not create Othello's insecurity; he locates it, and applies pressure to a fracture that was there before he arrived.

The same is true of everyone else in the play. Roderigo believes because he wants Desdemona and has no other route to her. Cassio confides because he is ashamed and needs a friend who will not judge him. Emilia hands over the handkerchief because she wants, for once, to please a husband who never notices her. In each case the belief serves a need the character already had, and Iago's contribution is simply to be present when it is felt. The pattern repeats too often to be accidental: Shakespeare is showing us a mechanism, not a series of tricks.

The play insists on this by making Iago's own motives incoherent. He offers the promotion, then suspicion of his wife, then a general hatred - explanations that do not add up and are not meant to. Coleridge's phrase about motiveless malignity points at something real: Shakespeare declines to give him a sufficient cause, because a sufficient cause would make him the origin of the tragedy rather than its occasion.

That is finally why the statement is right in substance if not quite in emphasis. Iago is a brilliant opportunist, but the tragedy is not caused by his brilliance. It is caused by a society whose assumptions about race, gender and reputation make his suggestions plausible to everyone who hears them. His last line - "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know" - refuses the explanation the survivors want, and leaves them holding a knowledge that was theirs from the beginning.