For when it’s your birthday, you get to choose a favorite moment of poetic prose and call it, not “purple prose,” but poetry, from The Sound and the Fury.

from The Sound and the Fury: April Eighth 1928 / by William Faulkner

She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for awhile with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish, then she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of her gown.