A Pox on Poetry

From The Ultimate Christmas Cracker (2019), compiled by John Julius Norwich:

How beautiful, I have often thought, would be the names of many of our vilest diseases, were it not for their disagreeable associations. My old friend Jenny Fraser sent me this admirable illustration of the fact by J.C. Squire:

So forth then rode Sir Erysipelas
From good Lord Goitre’s castle, with the steed
Loose on the rein: and as he rode he mused
On Knights and Ladies dead: Sir Scrofula,
Sciatica, he of Glanders, and his friend,
Stout Sir Colitis out of Aquitaine,
And Impetigo, proudest of them all,
Who lived and died for blind Queen Cholera’s sake:
Anthrax, who dwelt in the enchanted wood
With those princesses three, tall, pale and dumb,
And beautiful, whose names were Music’s self,
Anaemia, Influenza, Eczema.
And then once more the incredible dream came back,
How long ago upon the fabulous Shores
Of far Lumbago, all of a summer’s Day,
He and the maid Neuralgia, they twain,
Lay in a flower-crowned mead, and garlands wove,
Of gout and yellow hydrocephaly,
Dim palsies, and pyrrhoea, and the sweet
Myopia, bluer than the summer Sky:
Agues, both white and red, pied common cold,
Cirrhosis and that wan, faint flower
The shep­herds call dyspepsia. — Gone, all gone:
There came a Knight: he cried ‘Neuralgia!’
And never a voice to answer. Only rang
O’er cliff and battlement and desolate mere
‘Neuralgia!’ in the echoes’ mockery.


Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

J.C. Squire at Wikipedia

Post-Performative Post-Scriptum

nosopoetic (obsolete rare) Producing or causing disease. ← noso- comb. form + ‑poetic comb. form, after Hellenistic Greek νοσοποιός causing illness; compare ancient Greek νοσοποιεῖν to cause illness. — Oxford English Dictionary

Pro’ with the Flow

• From Parallinear: 16 European Poets in Prose Translation (Symban Press 1977)

Jorisz Prokata, born Nembutå, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1901; died Paris, 1943 […]

’Ndra ven ožedigō tranvu
Istahe zesfusna vo kōb
G’va: svas moe’, oxoaz, hežbu
Vem mižurt qocrsiūjy aplouxōb
Veń ġucij doīv.

L’gefq tsiži, xveby, qa indreza:
Kipidi, aūcu mdvo, lkåd’vud
Utcuzu, veń gomfōj’t vgeza
Vqežefq keflozu ven užud
Odzub’za lkåtū sxoīv.


It’s raining and I walk by the river
Watching gulls on the opposite bank.
Then: two ducks, mergansers, I think,
And I take off my glasses to wipe them
And take a closer look.

It’s now I see what the rain has done:
The small drops, pearl-patterns, constellating
The lenses, and so beautiful beneath the dull sky
That I cannot touch them and walk on
My panes full of stars.


Translator’s notes

[…] The paronomasia in the final line rests on the ambiguity of the contracted odzub’za, which could mean either odzubaza, “my pains, my sufferings” or odzupeza, “my lookers, my specs” (otsupa, “look, observe”), with sandhi of p to b before z.

Translation © Caroline Dawkins 1956

The Will to Flower

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. — “The Old Fools” (1973) by Philip Larkin

Rhyme and Again

From John Julius Norwich’s More Christmas Crackers (1990):

Holorhymes are whole lines which have the same sound but different meanings. For some reason, they seem to go better in French. Louise de Vilmorin gave me two beautiful ones:

Étonnamment monotone et lasse
Est ton âme en mon automne, hélas!

And

Gall, amant de la reine, alla tour magnanime,
Gallament de l’arène à la Tour Magne, à Nîmes.

This second one is by Victor Hugo.

Froth of a Boy

“Portrait Of A Boy” by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)

After the whipping he crawled into bed,
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping.
How funny uncle’s hat had looked striped red!
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping
A black, frayed rag of tattered cloud before
In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed,
Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor
Fat motes danced. He sobbed, closed his eyes and dreamed.

Warm sand flowed round him. Blurts of crimson light
Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave’s mouth
Shone with a large, fierce splendor, wildly bright,
The crooked constellations of the South;
Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars,
The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars.
Within, great casks, like wattled aldermen,
Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold
Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again,
Beside webbed purples from some galleon’s hold,
A black chest bore the skull and bones in white
Above a scrawled “Gunpowder!” By the flames,
Decked out in crimson, gemmed with syenite,
Hailing their fellows with outrageous names,
The pirates sat and diced. Their eyes were moons.
“Doubloons!” they said. The words crashed gold. “Doubloons!”

Stephen Vincent Benét at Wikipedia


Post-Performative Post-Scriptum

The title of this post is a paronomasia on the Irish idiom “broth of a boy”, which means “a lively, energetic, or highly capable boy or young man”.

Snow No

XXXI

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
   His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
   And thick on Severn strew the leaves.

’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
   When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
   But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
   At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
   The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
   Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
   Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
   It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
   Are ashes under Uricon. — from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896)


Post-Performative Post-Scriptum

If you were already familiar with the poem, you may have noticed that I replaced “snow” with “strew” in line four. I don’t think the original “snow” works, because leaves don’t fall like snow or look anything like snow. Plus, leaves don’t melt like snowflakes when they land on water. Plus plus, the consonant-cluster of “strew” works well with the idea of leaves coating the water.

Less Is Cor

The splendor falls on castle walls
    And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
    And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,
    And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far from cliff and scar
    The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
    They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
    And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

• From Tennyson’s The Princess (1847)

Ghost Coast

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
       At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
       The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
       The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
               Now lie dead.

• “A Forsaken Garden” (1876), Swinburne