"Through the dim hues of Time my vision sees / Thy lofty ______, and owns thy passion's flame"

[larryhammer]

The dedicatory "Address to Spencer" to John Walker Ord's England: A Historical Poem (published 1833-34, when the author was 22-23) is somewhat unfortunate, running into trouble before completing the second line:

Great Spirit, let me worship on my knees,
With reverent adoration, thy great —

At this point, the brain leaps ahead and supplies several possible nouns all more interesting, or at least more risque, than what the eyes actually see.* It does not help that it takes just a couple other replacements to make the entire stanza quite smutty indeed.

Or maybe this is just me.

(Not that the rest is any more fortunate: 1400-odd Spencerian stanzas of 19th-century English smugness masquerading as supra-Byronic histrionics masquerading as a history of Britain up to Shakespeare. Gods help us all, and blessed be the BACK button.)

I am, btw, startled by the spelling of the subtitle -- I had thought "an historical" standard for the time. Maybe being printed in Edinburgh** makes a difference?


* "name"

** Ord wrote this while in medical school -- or more precisely, while failing out of it because he spent too much time writing poetry.

---L.

Comments

[jjhunter]

Hee! Yes, you're not the only one who goes there re: the second line.

or more precisely, while failing out of it because he spent too much time writing poetry.

Oh dear, and for bad poetry too. Poetry does have a way of taking over.

Thanks for sharing - you certainly helped me start my day off on a laughing note!

[larryhammer]

According to one biography I found online, he blamed his failure for the examination committee being angry over his satirical verses, but friends claimed it really was that he didn't study enough.

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

He sure takes his time getting to the point--I skimmed a bit to find out which mode of Britain's past he uses. (Answer: not enough staying power to do it properly, instead hitting a few points he finds interesting and dropping the rest.) (If Milton had stuck to his earlier plan for writing a great epic, most would've forgotten his name, but I really want to know what he'd have done, given his prose History of Britain. He knew some stuff.)

ETA Also, terrible poetry or not, I wonder where Ord got his sense of Alfred's reign. It's very . . . single-minded. Starts p. 95.

[larryhammer]

It is, yes, very much a Good Parts version of history -- the most memorable of otherwise disconnected short stories, rather than an actual through-line history. I want to sit down and correlate which tales he picks with 1066 And All That.

I haven't gotten to his Alfred yet. Time to skim ahead --

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

One of his section epigraphs quotes Stowe, which makes sense, though I admit to being unfamiliar with the details of Stowe's Annales. But it pretty well had to be Stowe, Holinshed, or Camden, and Stowe would've been the most accessible in Ord's time (Holinshed too long, Camden too scholarly--Camden was the sort of "good" antiquary Ord was reproached for not being, in that blog entry you linked...).

[larryhammer]

Ah -- Stowe. That makes sense. I should have picked up on that. Was too distracted by other qualities of the work ...

---L.