Citations:undelight

English citations of undelight

Noun: "the condition or feeling of lacking delight; unhappiness or displeasure"

					1874 1900	1907 1940 1998	2008
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1874 — James Thomson, City of Dreadful Night:

  And since he cannot spend and use aright

  The little time here given him in trust,

  But wasteth it in weary undelight

  Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,

• 1900 — Thomas Anderton, A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham, Cornish Brothers (1900), Chapter XIV:

  I have also heard the dulcet chimings of many village church bells in various parts of the land, and I have listened with undelight to the unmusical tones of Big Ben of Westminster, but so far as mellow tone is concerned, I rarely hear any ordinary church bells that are more dulcet and harmonious than the bells of St. Martin's, Birmingham.

• 1907 — Virgil, The Æneid (trans. E. Fairfax Taylor), J. M. Dent & Sons (1910):

  Loud rise the sounds of sorrow, day and night,

  Where friends, clasped close in lingering undelight,

  Weep at the thought of parting. Matrons, ay,

• 1940 — Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Lotus Press (2000), →ISBN, page 107:

  Shall we say that Sachchidananda is not the beginning and end of things, but the beginning and end is Nihil, an impartial void, itself nothing but containing all potentialities of existence or non-existence, consciousness or non-consciousness, delight or undelight?

• 1998 — Bill Roorbach, Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature, Story Press (1998), →ISBN, page 135:

  […] we know a lot about how to read the gesture, and we understand our hero's undelight.

• 2008 — Harmon Leon, The American Dream: Walking in the Shoes of Carnies, Arms Dealers, Immigrant Dreamers, Pot Farmers, and Christian Believers, Nation Books (2008), →ISBN, page 121:

  In reality, though, if an actual real tank missile hit a person in the chest, their body would explode like a human piñata, spraying internal organs and body parts rather than candy (much to the undelight of children).

Noun: "something unpleasant or displeasing"

					1840	1931	2008
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1840 — Emanuel Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Providence, Otis Clapp (1840), page 321:

  Since, as was said above, the affectations of heaven and the concupiscences of hell are diametrically opposite to each other, it is manifest that the delight of heaven is such an undelight in hell, that they do not bear it; […]

• 1931 — Esther Frayne Hayes, At Home in China, W. Neale (1931), page 82:

  Along with the jollity of the trip from Tsing Hua into Peking are many undelights.

• 2008 — "The British Soldier Then and Now: An Interview with Richard Holmes", in Recent Themes in Military History: Historians in Conversation (ed. Donald A. Yerxa), University of South Carolina (2008), →ISBN, page 94:

  One of the delights of working at Sandhurst — it had numerous "undelights" as well — was being able to chat with Christopher over coffee each morning and to pick that massive brain of his.