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Literary notes about abysm (AI summary)

Writers often invoke "abysm" to evoke an image of a profound, sometimes ominous void that may be physical, temporal, or psychological in nature. In some works, the term depicts an approaching edge of despair or death, suggesting an inescapable plunge into darkness [1, 2]. In others, it expands into a metaphor for the unfathomable depths of time and space—illustrated by phrases like "the dark backward and abysm of time" [3, 4, 5]—or the mysterious, sometimes chaotic realms of human experience and existence [6, 7]. This versatile word thus becomes a powerful literary tool, capable of conveying both existential dread and the magnificent vastness of the unknown.
  1. Closer and closer my steps Come to the dread abysm; Closer Death to my lips Presses the awful chrism.
    — from Poems You Ought to Know by Elia Wilkinson Peattie
  2. Closer and closer my steps Come to the dread abysm: Closer Death to my lips Presses the awful chrism.
    — from Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 4 by Charles Herbert Sylvester
  3. page 16 Prospero : ' What seest thou else In the dark backward abysm of time? '
    — from Shakespeare's Comedy of The Tempest by William Shakespeare
  4. He asks Miranda what she can remember of her early life, and reaches magical words: “What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?”
    — from The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story by Frank Harris
  5. He felt that he had been peeping indecently close into the dark backward and abysm of time.
    — from Limbo by Aldous Huxley
  6. His whole existence passed before him, swaying above his head as before, and the earth itself seemed like a dark speck in the abysm of space.
    — from Pelle the Conqueror — Volume 02 by Martin Andersen Nexø
  7. A strong propensity exists in every investigating, reflecting mind, to explore the labyrinthian abysm of the past.
    — from A Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, and of Washington and Patrick Henry With an appendix, containing the Constitution of the United States, and other documents by L. Carroll (Levi Carroll) Judson

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