The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
regumque turres. — Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Carmina, I, 4
Pale Death knocks with the same bony fist
At the door of paupers’ huts and kingly towers. — Horace, Odes, I, 4
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.
“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”.
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.
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)
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
Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna
inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver
et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos,
quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent
fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores.
• Cupido Cruciatur, Decimius Magnus Ausonius (c.310-c.395)
They wander in deep woods, in mournful light,
Amid long reeds and drowsy headed poppies,
and lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailed names of kings.
• translated by Helen Waddell in her Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929)
Il était un gendarme à Nanteuil,
Qui n’avait qu’une dent et qu’un oeil;
Mais cet oeil solitaire
Était plein de mystère;
Cette dent, d’importance et d’orgueil. — George du Maurier (1834-96)
Elsewhere other-accessible
• Vers Nonsensiques — more by du Maurier
A.E. Housman drawn in charcoal by Francis Dodd, 1926 (National Portrait Gallery)
On entre, on crie,
Et c’est la vie.
On baîlle, on sort,
Et c’est la mort. — Ausone de Chancel (1808-78)
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 