From peter-green-1@uiowa.edu Sat Mar 11 11:58:55 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA31076 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 11:58:54 -0800 Received: from ns-mx.uiowa.edu (ns-mx.uiowa.edu [128.255.56.78]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA27647 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 11:58:54 -0800 Received: from DialupEudora (IDENT:CLImodem358-722828WedDec3118000119690telnet_cmd21848@portal-1.weeg.uiowa.edu [128.255.56.101]) by ns-mx.uiowa.edu (8.9.3/8.9.1/ns-mx-1.7) with ESMTP id NAA56160 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 13:58:50 -0600 X-Sender: pegreen@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <005201bf8aab$078a2d40$46140dd0@t9q0o0> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 14:02:37 -0600 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: Peter Green Subject: Re: JLPB's "So wert thou loved" (Was No Subject) Just as a matter of curiosity, does anyone else find this sample of Tuckerman's verse, the topic of several earlier communications, as stupefyingly and mind-numbingly awful as I do? > > >So wert thou loved in that old graceful time > When Greece was fair, >While god and hero hearkened to thy chime; > Softly astir >Where the long grasses fringed Ca=FFster's lip; >Long-drawn, with glimmering sails of swan and ship, > And ship and swan; > Or where > Reedy Eurotas ran. >Did that low warble teach thy tender flute > Xenaphyle? >Its breathings mild? say! did the grasshopper >Sit golden in thy purple hair > O Psammathe? > Or wert thou mute, >Grieving for Pan amid the alders there? >And by the water and along the hill >That thirsty tinkle in the herbage still, >Though the lost forest wailed to horns of Arcady? Oh for a new Graves to dissect this stuff as he once dissected, e.g., Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree" and Masefield's "Cargoes" in "The Perfect Modern Lyric"! Quite apart from the pseudo-archaisms, well described by RLS as "tushery" and by Henley as "Wardour Street English", there are more improbabilities in the text cited than fleas in a barn puppy. "Thou" presumably is the cricket (pace earlier commentators,NOT a cicada, which is what T. really means). Anyway, cricket or cicada, it doesn't chime, not being a grandfather clock. Quite apart from the fact that the Ca=FFster isn't fringed with grasses, long or otherwise, just what is its lip (apart from a fortuitous rhyme)? Its bank? Then what's the relation of lip to mouth? Here's a river, it would seem, with the biggest (? widest) mouth ever, a real S.E.G. I suppose--the syntax is at best associative--it's the cricket's song that must be "softly astir" and "long-drawn", the latter presumably to match that mouth. But what's its connection with those glimmering sails? Just what are a swan's sails anyway? Its wings? And what's the mystic distinction of precedence between swan and ship, ship and swan? Eurotas is more rocky than reedy, and even if we concede that the cicada's sound can be described as "a low warble" (sounds more like a contralto with a cold), what help would that be to anyone learning the flute (which incidentally wasn't what the aulos was)? And who, flautist or not, may Xenaphyle have been? My reference works know nothing of her. Psam(m)athe, Nereus's daughter, turned herself into a seal to avoid the attentions of Aeacus; why this should have entitled her (like an oldfashioned Athenian nobleman) to fix up her hair with a golden grasshopper, or why (for the matter of that) her hair should have been purple, or what a Nere=EFd was doing grieving for Pan, and why in that case she was mute among alders, are matters to which I can find no good answer, and I doubt whether anyone else can either. By now, too, the syntax of what was never a clear sentence has trickled away altogether, verbless and meaningless, with a "thirsty tinkle" (presumably we've now switched by association from cicadas to water, ending with that impenetrable final concessive: the horns of Arcady should have stopped the tinkle?). We're left with a final clutch of baffling questions. Why was the tinkle thirsty? Who or what lost the forest? Why did the forest wail? (In agony at the excruciating sound of the horns?) And why should the horns be those of Arcadia when the Eurotas runs through Sparta south to the sea? The truth, I suspect, is that Tuckerman simply wanted to juxtapose a series of vaguely romantic images, without any concern for meaning at all, and so ended up sounding like a poor man's--no, make that an absolutely destitute man's-- John Addington Symonds. Actually, what this stuff needs isn't Graves on the Perfect Modern Lyric: it's Macaulay on the poems of Mr Robert Montgomery, whose readers, you'll recall, had, Macaulay commented, to take what sense they could find, and be thankful. "The Cricket" should be returned forthwith to that merciful oblivion from which Yvor Winters should never have rescued it. PMG .