A River, In Other Words

If you click on this little link, it will take you through to a map of America. On it every place name that refers to a watercourse is marked (apart from river and creek because they're too common). However, the bayous are marked in green, the rios are marked in white, the brooks in pale blue, and so on and so forth. It's therefore a map of regional dialects and old languages.

It's rather wonderful, and I didn't even know that a kill was a kind of stream (it's evidence of Dutch settlers).

Also, if you click on the image, it ought to enlarge.

This, incidentally, is what T.S. Eliot had to say about rivers:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.





This song has always interested me. The central idea of it is that a river is something that you can skate off on, like a road. This works if you're Canadian, but to an Englishman it's like saying 'I wish I had a fish to do my gardening for me.' Some thoughts, like some wines, don't travel. The same thing goes for rain and shade in the Bible.

And a merry Easter to you, Mr Eliot.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

- East Coker

An oddity of this little fragment is that it contains a double eye-rhyme: food, blood and good - ude, udd and... I don't know the phonetic alphabet well enough, but you see what I mean: good rhymes with hood, blood rhymes with mud and food rhymes with nude.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough
And blow it in one fiery cough
To kingdom come! More bombs! Although
One nuke's enough.

Other such non-rhymes in the comments, please.

Nervous Nations

This is from the preface to Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1721:

Some have remark'd that there is a constant Resemblance between the Genius of each People and the Language which they speak, and thence


The French who are a People of great Vivacity have a Language that runs extreme Lively and Brisk, and the Italians who succeeded the Romans have quite lost the Augustness and Nervousness of the Latin and sunk into Softness and Effeminacy, as well in their Language as their Manners.


The Spaniards, whose distinguishing Character is a haughty Air, have a Language resembling their Qualities, yet not without Delicacy and Sweetness.


The Romans who seem'd to be a People design'd for Command, us'd a Language that was noble, august and nervous.


The Greeks who were a polite but voluptuous People, us'd a Language exactly adapted thereto.


The English who are naturally Blunt, thoughtful and of few Words, use a Language that is very short, concise and sententious.

Quite aside from the truth of all this, it's strange to see how the word nervous has changed in meaning. Nerves were once identified with the sinews. So nervous was a synonym for sinewy, and meant tough.

Similarly, sententious was once a word of praise. A sentence used to be an opinion or judgement (which sort of survives, in that a trial ends up with a judge giving a sentence). From that you got the idea that a single opinion could be expressed in a sentence, hence a grammatical sentence. So, if your speech is not vapid and meaningless, if it contains a thought, it is sententious.

T.S. Eliot used the old sense of sentence in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It should therefore be stressed on the second syllable.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Inky Fool.

It is vital for good English that you keep your sentences short and simple.

Fact-Checking Poetry

I never knew that the New Yorker magazine fact-checks the poetry it publishes. There's a lovely article about it here. This seems to me a splendid notion. Had Shakespeare been fact-checked, Prospero wouldn't have been smuggled, under cover of darkness, down to the docks in Milan; Perdita wouldn't have been abandoned on the coasts of land-locked Bohemia; and Cleopatra wouldn't have talked of being hanged from the pyramids.

Moreover, had a proper proof-reader been set the task of going over The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the first line might have been the grammatically correct:

Let us go then, you and me,

Not strictly accurate

Vicars

A week, I fear, of priests and prelates, beginning with the lowly vicar.

A vicarious pleasure is one that is experienced at second hand, it is the smiling elder brother of compassion (suffering with) and sympathy (suffering with). I once heard that back in the days of rationing, when you couldn't buy a good cigar, fellows used to go and watch Citizen Kane, just to see Orson Welles smoke.

Anyway, a vicar is a vicarious substitute for God. God isn't there in the flesh (being uncarnate) so he sends along his substitute.

The novel The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith includes this merry little rhyme:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?


The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom, is -- to die.

Which I would love to see reprinted as a response in an agony aunt column. T.S. Eliot had fun with it in The Waste Land. His version is, alas, more accurate.

When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

Bitch

N.B. The vicariousness of vicars was pointed out to me by an erudite correspondent.

The Two Words From The Four Quartets

I've managed to read The Four Quartets at least a thousand times without ever having bothered to look up hebetude and appetency. I don't know why. It's not that I'm averse to dictionaries.

First, hebetude means lethargy, as in:

The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
   - East Coker

Appetency means desire or appetite and comes from the section in which Eliot describes travelling on the London Underground. It remains the greatest description of the Tube ever written. You should also note that eructation is belching.

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.


Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.
   - Burnt Norton

The video below is meant for foul-mouthed Londoners only.

A Peal Of Sullen Bells

I've been idly reading the Wordsworth book of Gothic Short Stories. It's a collection of dark and gloomy tales form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and it's amazing how formulaic they all are. Moreover, the formula always seems to involve bells.

The very first story, Sir Bertrand, starts with a noble knight riding on a lonely "heath" at sunset and hearing "the sullen toll of a distant bell". The second story, Captive of the Banditti, opens with the words "The sullen tolling of the curfew was heard over the heath", and who should hove into view but a noble knight.

And so on and bloody so forth. Nothing can happen in Gothic literature unless "the clock from the dungeon tower was heard to strike with unusual solemnity." It's rather like the distant barking of a dog in modern literature.

Three points occurred to me:

1) How can a chime be sullen? I mean, I know I'm being a trifle difficult here, but when you start to think about all these sullen bells, you do start to wonder.

2) "The castle bells rang out a merry [!] peal at the approach of a winter twilight" [The Spectral Bride] Again, I'm being a smidgen pedantic, but I know a bellringing fellow who absolutely insists that a peal of bells lasts for several hours. He has rung one peal of bells in his life and this is, apparently, a great achievement.

A bell tower contains a bunch of bells that can be rung in different orders. Each of these orders is called a change, hence ringing the changes (which has nothing to do with spot-the-difference puzzles). There are several thousand possible permutations and a peal of bells contains a minimum of five thousand changes. So a peal is a very long thing indeed. I don't know why anybody would want to ring five thousand changes, but bellringers' minds are funny places that probably shouldn't be investigated too thoroughly.

Originally, a peal was just any stroke on a bell. But by 1796 The Times was able to write that "The peal was divided into ten parts, or courses, of 504 each". So the anonymous author of The Spectral Bride was on the wrong side of pedantry. A peal, like a peck or a swathe, is one of those measurements that should be used with fear and trembling.

3) Bells are not always clichés. Literature contains some beautiful tintinnabulations. Here, in no particular order, are my favourite literary chimes. Obviously, there's the curfew tolling the knell of parting day in Gray's Elegy, but I prefer the The Waste Land, which has:

...each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

And there's John Donne's amazing feat of starting and ending a paragraph with phrases that entered the language whilst nobody can remember the middle:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

There's Falstaff's beautiful "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow," which Orson Welles used as the title for his film. But the best bell I know is Baudelaire's La Cloche Fêlée, which is incurably French but translates loosely as:

The Broken Bell

Sweet sadness on a winter night to hear,
While on the grate still burns one crackling log
And strange and distant memories appear,
The sound of church-bells singing through the fog.

So sweet a sound, so happy and so sure.
Old age cannot defeat that steadfast bell:
Its firm and faithful call so good, so pure:
The guardian of truth! God’s sentinel!

My soul is broken. Though I sometimes try
To chime triumphant through the freezing night,
Its feeble noises, if they sound at all,
Resemble more the crippled soldier’s sigh
Who, trapped beneath the corpses of the fight,
Must die because he is too weak to crawl.

There are several much better translations (and the original) here. I must go now: Time and the bell has buried the post.

The Inky Fool's new alarm clock

P.S. Does anyone remember Mr Clapper?

Little Tommy Turdman and the Waste Land

I've just discovered that in the early Eighteenth Century the servant whose job it was to empty the chamber pots was called a Tom Turdman.

You'd think that the job was bad enough without your employers rubbing it in (as it were). But I'm so delighted with the name that I care not a whit, jot or iota for poor Tommy Turdman's feelings.

Incidentally, I am not alone in my infantile delight at the word turd. T.S. Eliot, in his notes on The Waste Land, needlessly annotated these lines thus:

But sound of water over rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees*

*This is the Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) 'is is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats. ... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.' Its 'water-dripping song' is justly celebrated.

The notes to The Waste Land were utterly unintentional. It was decided that the poem was too short to publish on its own, so T.S. Eliot composed them to fatten  up the volume, and to mention the word Turdus.

Or, as the host says in the Canterbury Tales,

...pleynly, at a word
Thy drasty rhyming is nat worth a toord.

A constipated hermit thrush

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

I mentioned a few weeks ago the Rule of the Bellman: What I tell you three times is true. Here we can see a single rhetorical trope through the ages and discern the effects of Progress and Providence in bringing it from ramshackle beginnings to poetic grandeur in our own day.

 

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

   - Shakespeare Hamlet II, ii (c. 1600)

Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!

  - Tennyson Break, break, break (1834)

 

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,  
   - T.S. Eliot East Coker (1940)


LOCATION LOCATION 'LOCATION The 3 things to look for...
   - Valley News 11/22/1956*


Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, and education.
   - Anthony Blair 1997


Ask me my three priorities here and now - April 2010 - and I tell you: jobs, jobs, jobs.
   - Gordon Brown


There are armies of technical names for repetition: ploce, conduplicatio, iteratio: but it took the genius of Puttenham to come up with this:


The Greeks call him Epizeuxis, the Latines Subiunctio, we may call him the underlay, me thinks if we regard his manner of iteration, & would depart from the originall, we might very properly, in our vulgar and for pleasure call him the cuckowspell, for right as the cuckow repeats his lay, which is but one manner of note, and doth not insert any other tune betwixt, and sometimes for hast stammers out two or three of them one immediatly after another, as cuck, cuck, cuckow, so doth the figure Epizeuxis in the former verses.

 
*There may or may not be earlier citations follow links here and here 

Join The Majority

There are innumerable euphemisms for death. Some - pushing up daisies, sleeping with fishes, achieving room temperature - are comical and unused. Others are simply prissy circumlocutions: passed away, in a better place, gathered up to God, gone over etc etc.

The essential problem with any euphemism is not the verbiage or circumlocution; it's that they avoid a truth. Even assuming the existence of God and realised eschatology, how do you know that dear old Aunty Ethel is in a better place? She may be in Hell. In fact, I'm certain that she is.

The great exception to this rule is a solemn and beautiful phrase that has almost passed out of currency: Joined the majority. It came to English from the Latin of Petronius: Abiit ad plures is found in The Satyricon. Whole ages of death are contained in the phrase.

Join the majority avoids die (if that was your aim) whilst meditating on the eternal gluttony of the grave. It takes a miserable fact and clothes it in a greater and more miserable truth.

It is true. There is an utterly erroneous notion that the majority of all humans who have ever existed are alive today. In fact, about six percent are. The majority is 94%. Facts and figures can be found by following this link. The score currently stands at 6 billion living: 100 billion dead; or as Dante/Eliot said in the Inferno/Waste Land,

So many
I had not thought death had undone so many.

si lunga tratta    [so long a line]
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto    [of people, that I'd never have believed]
che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.     [that death had undone so many]

The only euphemism for death I like (if it is a euphemism) is Shakespeare's "precious friends hid in death's dateless night". Dateless night is wonderful enough (reminds me of Catullus' nox est perpetua, una dormienda) but the enigmatic idea of their having been hidden is what makes the line. As though death were squirreling people away in the dark. Perhaps it has something to do with Cleopatra's running "into the secret house of death."

I once got a Shakespeare concordance and went through every single reference to Death. I discovered that in Shakespeare personified Death is a rotting corpse who tends to eat men and seduce women, which is a trifle freaky.

For example:

He is too good and fair for Death and me:
Whom I myself embrace, to set him free.
   - Girl in All's Well That Ends Well

O proud Death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck.
   - Chap in Hamlet

Falstaff says "swifter than he that gibbets on the brewer's bucket", which doesn't appear to have anything to do with death at all. In fact it's pretty damned obscure to modern eyes because bucket is being used with the old sense of a cross-beam. Butcher's used to tie animals by their feet to a cross-beam and then kill them. The animals would writhe and kick and that's how we get the phrase kick the bucket.

Soldiers wittering on about how when the war's over they'll go back home, buy a little plot of land and raise cattle, is the origin of bought the farm. At last he's out of all this.

Anyway, given the 100 billion to six majority talked of earlier, it's worthwhile remembering G.K. Chesterton's line "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead." So join the unworking majority.
 
I have rambled too long. I was going to finish on a frightfully witty political joke, but I can't work it out. Something about a hanged parliament.

A postcard from Aunty Ethel

A Word Cloud of The Four Quartets

I wish they'd had word clouds back when I was at university sniffing dictionaries. For those of you innocent and ignorant of such things, the more times a word appears in the original text the bigger it is in the cloud. Here, for example, is Eliot's Four Quartets.

You can make your own at Wordle, although I should warn you that some are decidedly less interesting than others. The full text of Four Quartets can be found here. And a final oddness: there is on British television a programme that I have never watched called Wire In The Blood. I've no idea what it's about, but as the title is a quotation from Four Quartets -

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.

- I assume that the programme is mostly about TIME.

The actual rose garden at Burnt Norton, where you can apparently now get married.

Oh, and "Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality" is the 32nd most quoted line of poetry.

When Did You Stop Beating Your Choirboy?

Spot the connection between these two:

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

   - Eliot's Waste Land

POPE'S BROTHER: I HIT CHOIRBOYS

  - Today's Times

You can't work out the tense in either. The "read" in Eliot and the "hit" in The Times could both be past or present.

The English verb has three principle parts: I write, I wrote, I have written. Some verbs make do with two: I walk, I walked, I have walked. And some lazy, idle, good-for-nothing verbs make do with one: I hit, I hit, I have hit; burst, burst, burst; read, read, read.

There's a particular problem with read as, though the parts are all written identically, the first is pronounced as reed and the others as red. This awkwardness often pops up on the Letters Page:

Dear Sir,
I read this paper every day.

Dear Sir,
I read this paper every day until 1947 when your journalism went to the bloody dogs.

And the reader has to jump back to the beginning of the sentence and repronounce the word in his head. T.S. Eliot, I suspect, intended this ambiguity of sound and tense in The Waste Land. It is the last line of a section whose grammar and subject have become increasingly confusing until, with this line, it breaks up like a bad telephone connection. The advantage of being a Top Poet is that all your mistakes are assumed to be intentional.

Given that hitting children became illegal under German law in 1980, The Times' ambiguity is commendably reckless.

"Me again. How about a nice Emperor's Crown?"

The Thief Of Time

Today's Times has a three word front-page headline:

ON BORROWED TIME

It's to do with the economy or something. If you are, perhaps, suspicious of the notion that time can be borrowed you should consider tempo rubato. This is what happens when a musician slows down or speeds up for the sake of expression: literally tempo rubato is stolen time.

This sets up a difficult case for the High Court of Cliché. According to the Italians musicians are the thieves of time. But according to the utterly forgotten poet Edward Young Procrastination is the thief of time.  We've already seen that The Times, which ought to know, thinks that time has only been borrowed while TS Eliot insists that it hasn't gone missing at all and that "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future", which I suppose solves something.

Edward Young's poem Night Thought's from which the procastination quotation is taken is actually rather good. Here's from a few lines later:

At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

He also said: "By night an atheist half believes a God" and:

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote,
And think they grow immortal as they quote.

So I'll stop. Here's some rubato:

The Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

Here is the updated list of the fifty most quoted lines of poetry on the internet, including all the readers' suggestions. We started with a long list of over 400 lines taken from dictionaries of quotations, collections of favourite poems and our own knowledge. We put each one into google and google told us how many pages contained that exact line. The number of search results is shown on the right. It should be stated before you begin that google is, for a computer program, often strangely illogical and inconsistent. Click on the author's name for the full poem. Counting down from number fifty...

50. The mind is its own place, and in itself/[Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n] 403,000 Milton
49. Full fathom five thy father lies 438,000 Shakespeare
48. If you can keep your head what all about you 447,000 Kipling
47. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways 467,000 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
46. If music be the food of love, play on 507,000 Shakespeare
45. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers 521,000 Shakespeare
44. What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare 528,000 W.H. Davies
43. The moving finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on 571,000 Edward Fitzgerald
42. They also serve who only stand and wait 584,000 Milton
41. The quality of mercy is not strained 589,000 Shakespeare
40. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 594,000 Coleridge

You, You, You and Mrs Prufrock

There's a letter in this week's Economist on the meanings of the word we.

In English we have three: the regular we meaning you and I, as in "we had dinner together"; the royal we meaning I, as in "we are not amused"; and the marital we meaning you, as in "we need to take out the garbage."

This is all awfully true and reminded me of a theory of mine about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the word you.

You has two meanings in normal English. It can mean you, the person I'm talking to, or it can be synonym for one, as in "I know the route I have to take. You go up here and turn right", which is the same as "One goes up here and turns right."

In love poetry (and songs) you acquires more ambiguity. You can be the poet addressing the reader or the poet addressing the beloved. I just listened to "You're sixteen, you're beautiful and you're mine" even though I am none of the above. I understood that Johnny Burnette was singing to somebody else. Whereas when Paul McCartney sings "She was just seventeen/You know what I mean", the you is me, the listener.

The word you pops up ten times in Prufrock. Two of them are in inverted commas and don't count ("I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"). That leave eight. Two of them pretty much force an interpretation.

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

You and I are the same person here, which means that you must be one.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

You is part of a list of physically present objects and is clearly another person. That leaves us with eight other yous malingering in the poem. Two of them are in inverted commas and don't count. So that leaves six. How should you/one/I interpret them.

That leaves six uses that could be considered ambiguous, but I don't think they are. The reason for this is the title of the poem. I once wrote a poem called Letters to the Sultan. I showed it to a friend who said that he liked it but "They all seem to be letters, right?" "Right," I said. He paused and then asked, "Who are they to?"

Readers tend to discard titles and all the information given in them. Eliot did not have to call The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock a love song. He could have called it a song, or simply Prufrock (in fact he originally titled it Prufrock Among the Women, which suppports the point I'm about to make).

So the title of the poem is:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

And the first line is:

Let us go then, you and I,

So the you, is the beloved. Not to interpret it so is, at best, perverse. It is not the reader, it is not one (or there wouldn't be an I attached). Nor is there any suggestion that he is addressing his consciousness. It is pretty much the same as Come live with me and be my love: a love song addressing an imaginary beloved and enjoining her to get a move on. And things become more interesting if you carry this through.

The next you is here:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

We are only on line ten. There is no suggestion that the you has changed. You, the woman, is being led to the overwhelming question, not Prufrock. Prufrock is just walking. His woman is thinking about profound and overwhelming questions and he wants her to stop so that they can make their visit. Capish?

The next you is:
 
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
 
If we stick with the you as a woman the line makes extra sense. It's about make-up.
 
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Again you is getting a question dropped on her plate. It's therefore reasonable to assume that this must be the same you who was being led to the overwhelming question twenty lines before. You is not me. There is time for you and time for me, clearly separated and delineated. And here's the important point: the murder, creation and question that are for you, are contrasted with the time for me (Prufrock) which will be devoted to indecision, toast and tea.

Here is the point. Prufock is unhappy, conscious of his own inadequacy etc etc etc (all the usual interpretations of him) because he is going out with such an profound woman. That is the conflict and the constrast of the first half of the poem. The point is the juxtaposition. The man's spiritual and intellectual inferiority among the women. She asks overwhelming questions. He worries about baldness. She wants to murder and create. He wants tea.
 
There is a simple delineation that every critical essay I've ever read manages to miss. She's profound and he's doesn't want her to be because it makes him feel shallow. He wants them to make their visit and not have some deep discussion on the way (I have been on similar dates).
 
There's even further evidence that a woman is physically there in lines 55-6:
 
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
 
So that's the first half of the poem. A carefully constructed juxtaposition of profound woman and man who doesn't dare to think about such things and disturb the universe. Then in line 69 he starts to try and say something. But he then realises that any attempted profundity on his part would not have been worth it after all if it wasn't the same profundity that the woman had meant.
 
And the beauty is that it is at this point that the yous disappear. She becomes a one, remote and considered. The poem now seems to become a soliloquy. (I imagine the dietary enquiries concerning peaches to be aporias). Until the woman with all her magical, other-worldly thoughts has become transformed into a magical other-worldly woman - a mermaid - and the women will not sing to each other, not to him.
 
Got that? Now go back and read the poem again. Don't pretend you have something better to do. You don't. Here's the link.
 
Of course you can go on reading it as an allegory of the Bermaniac relationship between image and consciousness of whatnot, so long as you remember that there's absolutely no reason to do so. Whereas my reading is clear and simple and takes account of the title.
 

Does Obama dare to eat a peach?

Crepitation

Crepitation, I was raised to believe, is the crackling sound made by a log fire: the little pops and snaps that emerge from arboreal combustion. More generally it can be any crackling noise: for example the sound made when you rub your hair together beside your ear. Go on, try it. Medically it is a "dry, crackling sound or sensation, such as that produced by the grating of the ends of a fractured bone", which I suppose must be similar.

This latter meaning - of which I was, until today, ignorant - reminded me of The Waste Land and

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.

Which caused me to discover a hypertext of The Waste Land, meaning an internet version of it with built in notes. This a Good Thing. I have a battered old copy in which I scrupulously and in a Lilliputian hand transcribed every note from the a companion volume. While the notes don't seem to be quite complete I can still recommend it. It is here.

There is a third meaning of crepitation: "the sudden expulsion of an acrid fluid by some beetles as a means of self-defence".

There is a post on crepitation over at wordnik. They cite almost infinite usages, most of which seem to be from a "Special Report on Diseases of the Horse". One though is from a book I had never heard of called The Cardinal's Snuff Box. It goes:

The tiled roof just above his head resounded with a continual loud crepitation, as if a multitude of iron-shod elves were dancing on it.

Crepitant

Winterlude

Snow here has covered everything that might ever have been a thing. I may post something etymological or journophobic later, but for the moment the best imaginable thing you can do with your allotted span on earth is to read the opening lines of Little Gidding and then contemplate a photograph I took this morning.

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

The Inky Fool's plush new offices

Andrew Motion and Shakespeare

There's a story in The Times today about how a chap called Ben Shephard has accused Andrew Motion of plagiarism. Motion's defence is that other people have done it and he cites Shakespeare.


Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra borrowed whole passages from Sir Thomas North’s Life of Mark Antony he said, including the description of her barge: “The poop was beaten gold; purple the sails . . .”


The Times doesn't actually make clear whether this is Motion speaking in free indirect discourse or the journalist's interpolation, but it gave me a nasty turn. I dashed for my edition of Antony & Cleopatra (luckily I keep a copy of North's Plutarch strapped to my ankle for just such emergencies as these) and I compared passages. Here is the full sentence from North:


She disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poope whereof was of gold, the sailes of purple, and the owers of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sounde of the musicke of flutes, howboyes, citherns, violls, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.


And here (if you need it) is Shakespeare:


The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.


Now correct me if I'm wrong (which I never am), but a few scattered words do not a "whole passage" make. It's not even a whole damned sentence. Moreover, those insidious dot dot dots suggest that there's more, whereas in fact Shakespeare now interpolates perfumes for the lovely alliteration of Ps.


My New Cambridge Shakespeare (I can't find my Arden) says that "the verbal parallels are remarkably close", but nothing of whole passages copied word for word.


Motion might just as well have cited Prospero's speech in The Tempest:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves

As against Golding's Metamorphoses (which flicks out from my left wrist like that gun in Taxi Driver):

Ye elves of hills, of brooks, of woods
Of standing lakes,


But neither of these comes close to T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp

When compared to Lancelot Andrewes Christmas Day sermon of 1622:

A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp


This is a trifle more important because not only is it a whole quatrain taken pretty much word for word, but "A cold coming we had of it" is one of Eliot's most famous lines. Not the most famous, perhaps, but it's a contender alongside lines like:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

Which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with Jules Laforgue's
 
Dans la piece les femmes vont et viennent
En parlant des maîtres de Sienne.
 
[In the room the women come and go
Talking of the Siennese masters]

Going through the Motions

What the Dickens?

The only reason T.S. Eliot insisted on his middle initial was that he was morbidly aware of what his name would have spelled backwards without it. Auden (whose H was idiopathic) wrote a palindrome on the subject:

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot-toilet.

S was a real name, though, it stood (appropriately) for Stearns, a name by which he briefly tried to be known as a student: i.e. T. Stearns Eliot. This is, incidentally, the reason that it's the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The debilitating fear of the cloacal also produced, through inversion, the completely superfluous reference to the Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, in the author's notes on The Waste Land.


Meanwhile the phrase What the Dickens has nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Dickens (unless Shakespeare was blessed with the gift of prognostication). It pops up in The Merry Wives of Windsor and is derived (like almost every other renaissance expletive) from Devil.

Just a little follow-up to my post on the grammar of Dickens and Eliot.

The original Dickens

The T.S. Eliot Defence

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

Is without doubt one of the finest couplets in English poetry (by "without doubt" I mean that if you doubt it I will track you down and punch you on the jaw); the only problem with it is that the grammar is wrong - irrefutably and indubitably wrong.

"You and I" is apposite to "us", so it should be "you and me". Put another way: "let you and I go" is as wrong as "let I go". It should be "me".

Me, me, me, me, me.

Let us go then, you and me,
When the evening is a tumpty-tee...

No.

This is a problem for a pedant. What, really, is the point of all this grammatical, syntactical, linguistic brou-ha-ha if you can ignore it all and still write some of the finest lines in English?

What, indeed, about Our Mutual Friend? When two things are mutual each stands in the same relation to the other. There can be mutual love and mutual hate but there can be no third party in a mutual relationship. It should, were the rules obeyed, be called Our Shared Friend.

A Dickens-loving pedant would probably proffer the excuse that the line is attributed in the book to Silas Wegg and that the whole joke is that Wegg is illiterate yet pretentious. They would then return to altering the punctuation in Shakespeare, muttering that dear old Charles do the police in different voices.

Such defenders of Dickens would, I am afraid, be no more convincing than Mr Curdle. Dickens got it wrong. Eliot got it wrong. I do not even believe that he sacrificed "me" for the rhyme.

Yet their wrongness did not detract from their genius because the beauty of the lines and the clearness of thought were not impaired. I would not alter a jot or even a tittle of Eliot's lines any more than I would point out to Botticelli how wrong the anatomy is in the Birth of Venus. Beauty cannot be wrong, nor can the deliberate be mistaken.

So, it's probably worth saying something about the subject of this blog. I am not here to assert by force of arms the hegemony of grammar over sense or by dint of pandiculation the rule of dictionary definitions over perfectly good new uses. Oblivious may be defined in the dictionary as forgetting, but everybody now uses it to mean never having noticed and that is, quite simply, that.

It is only the lazy uses, the meaningless swathes, the casual use of casual, ubiquitous axes and vacuous vibrancies to which we take (odd phrase when you think about it) exception.

Note her left shoulder and arm