"I need Moses / to cross this sea of loneliness / and part this red river of pain"

[larryhammer]

In a note to Juvenal's Satire VI, Peter Green comments in passing on Livy's account of the Sabine women's peacemaking: "The whole passage makes me wonder whether scholars do not seriously underestimate Livy's deadpan sense of humor." I should admit I didn't notice any deadpan humor myself, but I was in grad school when I read Livy.

If an editor names Auden and MacNiece as the "guiding spirits" of his anthology, this will indeed make me pay more attention. The anthology being Scanning the Century, which tries to be a documentary history of the 20th century through poetry. I see his point: after Auden and McNeice disappear from the scene, it gets less interesting -- possibly because he was collecting too closely.

Wordsworth on the uses of fantasy:

A gracious spirit o'er this earth presides,
And o'er the heart of man; invisibly
It comes, to works of unreproved delight,
And tendency benign, directing those
Who care not, know not, think not, what they do.
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby, romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised
By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,
Out of the bowels of those very schemes
In which his youth did first extravagate;
These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
...
To endure this state of meagre vassalage,
Unwilling to forego, confess, submit,
Uneasy and unsettled, yoke-fellows
To custom, mettlesome, and not yet tamed
And humbled down--oh! then we feel, we feel,
We know where we have friends. Ye dreamers, then,
Forgers of daring tales! we bless you then,
Impostors, drivellers, dotards, as the ape
Philosophy will call you: then we feel
With what, and how great might ye are in league,
Who make our wish, our power, our thought a deed,
An empire, a possession,--ye whom time
And seasons serve; all Faculties to whom
Earth crouches, the elements are potter's clay,
Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,
Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.

—from The Prelude (1850), book five

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I just love Prelude.

[larryhammer]

I'm finding the 1805 version really is a lot better. I'm doing a slow reading, on breaks at work.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Interesting observations. I don't know enough about poetry to feel certain why this or that is better than something else, short of cutting outright cliche, but the first version reads out loud better, to my ear, even the address to the wind.

[larryhammer]

If something reads better, even if you cannot quantify why, it almost always is better.

---L.