butterflies.
He had told me himself more than once that he never got up before twelve, and seldom earlier than one. Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when [...]
http://www.eudaemonist.com/images/168.jpg
A sleepless night, drowsing over Samson Agonistes. Dalila dandled forth, almost more specious than Helen among the Trojan Women, and the blind man missing his apotheosis, but not heroization. And then there are certain beautiful infelicities; I hesitate to say Milton loses his tone, but perhaps he clings rather too fiercely:
Chorus. But we had best [...]
At the end of March there was a puff piece about Anne Carson in the NY Times, occasioned by a staged reading of her translation of, I think, Euripides’ Hekabe.1 One short passage attracted my attention:
For all this, Ms. Carson said, she is not a poet. ‘Homer’s a poet,’ she said. ‘I would say I [...]
Mortality is fatal
Gentility is fine
Rascality, heroic
Insolvency, sublime
[…]
A coward will remain, Sir
Until the fight is done;
But an immortal hero
Will take his hat and run…
– Emily Dickinson
No. 21
This entry’s title is from the same poem; the stanza runs:
Put down the apple Adam
And come away with me
So shal’t thou have a pippin
From off my Father’s tree!
[↩]
cf.
She schools the flighty pupils of her eyes,
With levell’d lashes stilling their disquiet;
And puts in leash her pair’d lips lest surprise
Bare the condition of a realm at riot.
If he suspect that she has ought to sigh at
His injury she’ll avenge with raging shame.
She kept her love-thoughts on most lenten diet,
And learnt her not to startle [...]
‘As is’
he she we they you you you I her so pronouns begin the dance called washing whose name derives from an alchemical fact that after a small stillness there is a small stir after great stillness a great stir
– Anne Carson
Lately I’ve been thinking (very slowly) about the word choir and, in particular, its appearance in two familiar poems. The first is Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth‘, and the relevant passage (ll.5–8) runs as follows:
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs [...]
Among the Romanes a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or Prophet, as by his conjoyned words Vaticinium, and Vaticinari, is manifest, so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestowe uppon this hart-ravishing knowledge, and so farre were they carried into the admiration thereof, that they thought in [...]
For no good reason1 I’ve been reading The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (ed. W. Martin, CUP: 2002). It is somewhat refreshing to find books which do not concern Cicero. And it is interesting to step outside the charmed circle of academics and then to peer back in, as though through windows. For one can [...]
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ego hoc feci mm–mmviii
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