"Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, / Trip the light fantastic toe"

[larryhammer]

I've been using the very bad poetry tag a lot lately. I should also post about something good with line breaks. Or at least something fluffy -- and present it in a suitably fluffy manner.

[Poll #1827205]
---L.

Comments

[alpha-strike.livejournal.com]

What actually interests me is "how the drudging goblin sweat to earn his cream-bowl duly set", but neither poem bothers to enlighten us.

And he's pretty demanding, isn't he? What if mirth can only deliver two thirds of what he's asking? Will he then see what sorrow offers? (Perhaps this is the point of Il Penseroso?) "If mother won't give us a cookie, perhaps father will" is hardly a mature position to take.

It's small wonder that in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Colonel Brandon refers to Milton as majestic, yet calls Shakespeare a demi-god. Colonel Brandon clearly believes Milton to be a greedy little popinjay, hence his lesser place in the hierarchy of great poets.

[larryhammer]

Doesn't Brandon also shows signs of Tory sympathy, thus suggesting political reasons for disliking Milton? Not that I disagree with him.

I think the goblin is a brownie.

---L.

[alpha-strike.livejournal.com]

The bowl of cream certainly suggests brownies. The reference to work sent me scampering to my Annotated Brothers Grimm to check the notes on The Elves. I thought perhaps the Cobbler's Tale (omitted, sadly, by Chaucer's publisher) would shed some light. Interestingly, the elves in the story are never referred to as elves other than in the title; they're simply "tiny little naked men". The notes suggest that the cobbler's piety is stressed again and again to indicate his protection against the pagan spirits who help him by discharging his chores, but that doesn't help identify the little men other than to assure us that they aren't, say, angels.

Brownies it is. I'm still more interested in them than in Milton's demands of Mirth.