Jerusalem

Here's a challenge: try reciting the poem Jerusalem without making it sound like the hymn.

Those of you of a foreign persuasion may not know that William Blake's poem was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry during the First World War to boost morale and stiffen upper lips. In fact, you may not know the poem at all, but I'm sure you've heard of Chariots of Fire.

Anyway, the hymn is so famous on these shores that reciting it as a poem has become astonishingly difficult. You start out declaiming like Laurence Olivier, but the rhythms and cadences of the music keep creeping in.

For example, lines 2 and 4 should end with an upward inflection because they're questions; but the music makes you want to end them as statements. The "did" in the first line should be stressed as it's part of the tetrameter; but in the hymn the first stress falls on "feet".

Indeed, the first thing to do is say de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM a few times as firmly as you can. Then launch in. And DID those FEET in ANCient TIME. It's a completely different poem, postively mooreeffocish.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land

And as a fillip to foreigners here is the hymn accompanied by a series of preposterously patriotic English images that make me tear up and want to jolly well go and shoot a german.



P.S. I was reminded of all this because I went to see the play Jerusalem last night, which is terribly good and goodly terrible.

P.P.S. Anybody who thinks fit to complain about the split infinitive in the last sentence will be fed to the weasels.

Too Much Is Bad For You

WHY TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING IS BAD FOR YOU

I was about to write a long and fascinating post on Myles Coverdale and his psalter. It was going to be great: no journalese, just a learnèd exposition of the metonymic meaning of the Hebrew word nefesh. Then I toddled down to lunch and found my place at table usurped by an opened copy of the Sunday Times. Here is the offender, bluetoothed from paper to your screen:

I could hardly have missed it, could I? It's a quarter of a broadsheet page.

Palaces of wisdom aside, how could too much be good for you? Too much is too much. By definition it is bad: that's what too means. Any negative judgement on too much is pleonastic.

It's astonishing how often people employ this tautology making useless statements like don't eat too much, walk too fast, go too far, try too hard, try too little. It's very trying.

A similar paradox oppresses the question "Do you believe in the supernatural?"

Well of course not. I believe in ghosts, telepathy, the power of crystals, dream-catchers and leprechauns which means I believe all of them to be natural. It would be impossible to believe in the supernatural.

Without wishing to allow mission creep to tiptoe into this blog I think I can...

After that aposiopesis I shall limit myself to the following: Sesquipedalianism is the use of overly long words. Sesquipedalianism is therefore autological: it is a word that is an example of itself. Word is also autological because word is a word. A trochee (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one) is a trochee. Polysyllabic is polysyllabic.

Monosyllabic, on the other hand, is heterological because the word monosyllabic is not monosyllabic, it's polysyllabic. Got that? Hyphenated, iamb and unpronounceable are all heterological.

So, here's your question for Sunday: is the word heterological heterological?

If it is then it isn't, so it is, so it isn't, so....

This is called the Grelling-Nelson Paradox and there's more on it here.

This illustration is for the reference above to "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom", which is from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell along with "The cut worm forgives the plough [or plow]." A friend of mine once sent me an e-mail with the subject line "The cut worm forgives the plough." The body of the e-mail read simply "Like fuck it does."