fluctuant

Playing the film’s most unintentionally destructive force, Mulligan is as fluctuant as a flame, as Jeanette attempts to sew together the young beauty queen she had to stop being when she impulsively got hitched and the world-weary cynic who teaches her son that feeling sorry for the unfortunate is fundamentally pointless.

The Eve of Revolution, for instance, with which the Songs Before Sunrise open, rings with the stirring noise of trumpets: I hear the midnight on the mountains cry With many tongues of thunders, and I hear Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer, And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly, Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear.

He uses one verse, for example, which with its combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly irritating: Hills and valleys where April rallies his radiant squadron of flowers and birds, Steep strange beaches and lustrous reaches of fluctuant sea that the land engirds, Fields and downs that the sunrise crowns with life diviner than lives in words,— a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.

How is it, O moon, that melting, Unstintedly, prodigally, On the peaks' hard majesty, Till they seem diaphanous And fluctuant as a veil, And pouring thy rapturous light Through pine, and oak, and laurel, Till the summer-sharpened green, Softening and tremulous, Is a lustrous miracle— How is it that I find, When I turn again to thee, That thy lost and wasted light Is regained in one magic breath?

Is it that now a year has passed In vain pursuit of glittering things, In fruitless searching, shouting, running, And greedy lies and candour cunning, Here as I stand the year above Sudden the heats and the strivings fail And fall away, a fluctuant veil, And the fixed familiar stones restore The old appearance-buried core, The unmoving and essential me, The eternal personality Alone enduring first and last?