Dr. Weevil » Poetry     @import url( http://web.archive.org./web/20210225163339cs_/http://www.drweevil.org/wp-content/themes/hybrid/style.css );                                                                                                               Dr. Weevil Pedantry, Poetry, Politics, and Pie           Contact me: E-mail: (turn it backwards)gro.liveewrd@liveewrdAny e-mail sent to this site is fair game for quotation in full or in part, with or without refutation, abuse, and cruel mockery of the spelling, style, and syntax, unless the writer specifically asks not to be quoted. Even in that case, if the e-mail is slanderous or offensive, I may and will feel free to print it and hold it up to ridicule. You know who you are, and you have been warned.

  Testimonials: Anonymous student evaluation in Latin 102:“God-like and unimprovable . . . can destroy small-minded creatures with a single thought” The Safety Valve:“the Abominable Dr. Weevil” James Lileks:“adamantine nuggets of erudition” Bjørn Stærk:“first up against the wall” (one of only 22 on his Stalinist hit-list) Pejman Yousefzadeh:“I find the bug drawings . . . creepy and worrisome” Robin Goodfellow:“kinda newsy / kinda thinky” Pseudo-Hesiod:“petty, small-minded, pinched, and boorish” Silflay Hraka:“pitch, turpentine and rosewater” Max Sawicky:“rude, unedifying, and unamusing” Protein Wisdom:“urbane and erudite” Noam Chomsky:“Stalinist methods of argument”    February 2021   M T W T F S S     « Aug        1234567   891011121314   15161718192021   22232425262728      Search:        Category Archives:  Ancient Joke of the Day  Ancient Text of the Week  Anecdota  Blackfriars Playhouse  Classics  Economics  General  Literature  Metablogular Musings  Music  Orbilius  Poetry  Politics  Science  Theater Reviews  What I've Been Listening To  What I've Been Reading  What I've Been Watching    Monthly Archives:  August 2013 March 2013 October 2012 August 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005   Old MT Archives: January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2002 November 2001     Powered by WordPress

     Sunday: February 5, 2012  More Significant Than ’42′? Filed under:  Classics Literature Orbilius Poetry — site admin @ 11:00 PM UTC   On his fifty-sixth birthday, Terry Teachout laments that “56 is a thoroughly uninteresting number”. Au contraire: it is quite significant as a birthday, perhaps the most significant birthday of all.

 Solon was the first (or one of the first) to write on the ‘Ages of Man’ theme, best known to English-speakers from Jacques’ “All the world’s a stage” monologue in As You Like It, II.7. Where Shakespeare distinguished seven ages with no specific lengths in years, Solon had divided the life of man into ten ‘hebdomads’ or periods of seven years each. I quoted the whole passage (Fragment 27, in M. L. West’s English translation) without comment on my fifty-sixth birthday. The most important part for Terry is lines 13-18:

 With seven hebdomads and eight – fourteen more years -     wisdom and eloquence are at their peak, while in the ninth, though he’s still capable, his tongue     and expertise have lost some of their force.

  For the mathematically-impaired, that means that one’s mental peak (or perhaps plateau, given its extent) is from the 42nd to the 56th birthday, and after that it’s all downhill. Welcome to the downhill slope, Terry.

   Comments (0)    Monday: November 9, 2009  An Unfortunate Coincidence of Names Filed under:  Literature Poetry — site admin @ 11:37 PM UTC   Prufrock Press is “the nation’s leading resource for gifted and talented children and gifted education programs”. I hope the name is not a literary allusion. Gifted and talented children have enough trouble with accusations of nerdliness and worse: they really don’t need to be associated with J. Alfred Prufrock, who couldn’t decide whether he dared to eat a peach or whether he should “wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach”.

   Comments (0)    Wednesday: May 13, 2009  Quotation of the Day Filed under:  Poetry What I've Been Reading — site admin @ 11:13 PM UTC   Emily Dickinson at her coldest and clearest:

  The heart asks pleasure first, And then, excuse from pain; And then, those little anodynes That deaden suffering;

 And then, to go to sleep; And then, if it should be The will of its Inquisitor, The liberty to die.

     Comments (0)    Saturday: January 3, 2009  Horace Kippled Filed under:  Poetry What I've Been Reading — site admin @ 11:54 PM UTC   D. A. West, in Horace Odes I: Carpe Diem, Oxford 1995, 6-7:

 In Horace the tone is often elusive. Perhaps the nearest thing in English is the parody [of Odes 1.1] by Kipling in ‘A Diversity of Creatures’:

 There are whose study is of smells,     Who to attentive schools rehearse How something mixed with something else     Makes something worse.

 Some cultivate in broths impure     The clients of our body; these, Increasing without Venus, cure     Or cause disease.

 Others the heated wheel extol,     And all its offspring, whose concern Is how to make it farthest roll     And fastest turn.

 Me, much incurious if the hour     Present, or to be paid for, brings Me to Brundisium by the power     Of wheels or wings,

 Me, in whose breast no flame has burned     Life long, save that by Pindar lit, Such lore leaves cold; nor have I turned     Aside for it,

 More than when, sunk in thought profound     of what the unaltered Gods require, My steward (friend but slave) brings round     Logs for my fire.

 

     Comments (0)    Tuesday: November 11, 2008  Announcement Filed under:  Classics Economics General Music Poetry Science What I've Been Watching — site admin @ 12:19 AM UTC   I’m not sure why my comments aren’t working, and why I can’t even use FTP. Until I can fix that, readers may contact me by e-mail at the following address, after carefully reversing it: gro.liveewrd@liveewrd.

   Comments (0)    Saturday: November 1, 2008  Milton on Reading Filed under:  Poetry — site admin @ 11:20 PM UTC                                 However many books Wise men have said are wearisom; who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep verst in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys, And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge; As Childern gathering pibles on the shore.

  (Paradise Regain’d, 4.322-30)

   Comments (0)    Sunday: May 25, 2008  Paradise Lost II Filed under:  Poetry What I've Been Reading — site admin @ 11:35 PM UTC   Notes from my reading of Book II:

 1. Again the passage that most struck me was a classicizing bit, a simile describing Satan’s journey through Chaos (943-50):

 As when a Gryfon through the Wilderness With winged course ore Hill or moarie Dale, Persues the Arimaspian, who by stelth Had from his wakeful custody purloind The guarded Gold: So eagerly the Fiend Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet persues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes:

  This has some resemblance rhetorically to 7.501-3, though the latter is more neatly laid out in threes:

                     Earth in her rich attire Consummat lovly smil’d; Aire, Water, Earth, By Fowl, Fish, Beast, was flown, was swum, was walkt Frequent;

  Milton does not mention that the Arimaspians were traditionally one-eyed: did he not think it important, or assume that his readers already knew? ‘Moarie’ is not in the Shorter O.E.D. or www.dictionary.com, and must be a form of ‘moory’, meaning ‘marshy, fenny’.

 2. The account of the origins of Sin and Death, featuring rape, incest, head-birth, and bestial transmogrification, manages to outdo Hesiod in gruesomeness.

 3. It’s interesting that the music of the fallen angels (546-51) is epic or panegyric, sung “With notes Angelical to many a harp” about themselves and their deeds. The effect is rather Homeric.

   Comments (1)    Saturday: May 24, 2008  Paradise Lost I Filed under:  General Poetry What I've Been Reading — site admin @ 11:24 PM UTC   I started a new job two months ago, and now teach part-time at two different high schools. Oddly, I seem to have more spare time for reading now, partly because I have to get to work at the new school at 7:00 to avoid rush-hour traffic, but don’t meet any of my students until 8:15. In the last month, I’ve read half a dozen novels and the first seven books of Paradise Lost, a work I had not read since college. (That would have been 1972 or 1973.) It seems appropriate to blog some desultory thoughts on the work, perhaps three per book. I’ll write about the novels tomorrow.

 1. The passage in Book I that most struck me as particularly worth quoting was the description of Mammon, principal architect in Heaven and now in Hell (738-51):

 Nor was his name unheard or unador’d In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land Men calld him Mulciber; and how he fell From Heav’n, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove Sheer ore the Crystal Battlements: from Morn To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve, A Summers day; and with the setting Sun Dropd from the Zenith like a falling Starr, On Lemnos th’ Aegaean Ile: thus they relate, Erring; for hee with this rebellious rout Fell long before; nor aught availd him now To have built in Heav’n high Towrs; nor did he scape By all his Engins, but was headlong sent With his industrious crew to build in Hell.

  2. The only non-famous line that was particularly familiar after all these years was 307:

 Busiris and his Memphian Chivalrie

  3. Right from the start, I’ve found the poem entertaining, sometimes even hypnotic, but also insubstantial: far more words than matter. So far from being a peer of Homer, Vergil, and Dante, Milton seems a poet in roughly the same class as Statius or Claudian. Is this unfair? He seems to do a mediocre job of justifying the ways of God to men.

   Comments (0)    Thursday: March 1, 2007  An Epitaph by Lope de Vega Filed under:  Poetry — site admin @ 11:32 PM UTC   Enseñé, no me escucharon; escribí, no me leyeron; curé mal, no me entendieron; maté, no me castigaron;

 Ya con morir satisfice; oh muerte, quiero quejarme, bien pudieras perdonarme por servicios que te hice.

 I lectured, they did not listen to me; I wrote, they did not read me; I ministered badly, they did not understand; I killed, they did not punish me;

 Now, by dying, I have paid in full. Death, I wish to lodge a complaint: you might well have pardoned me for my services to you.

    Comments Off    Sunday: July 16, 2006  Prediction Filed under:  Music Poetry — site admin @ 9:13 PM UTC   Just as some of the minor poetasters of the 17th century would be utterly forgotten today if they had not been fortunate enough to be mocked in Pope’s Dunciad, some of the bands of the late 20th century, including many that were and are admired by critics or the general public or both, will only be remembered in a century or two because they were fortunate enough to be mocked by Beavis and Butt-Head.

   Comments (2)    Monday: May 29, 2006  Memorial Day Texts Filed under:  Poetry — site admin @ 7:58 AM UTC   (This is a rewrite of a previous Memorial Day post.)

 1. Simonides’ epitaph on the 300 Spartans who died at Thermopylae:

 o xeîn’, aggéllein Lakedaimoníois hóti têide     keímetha toîs keínon peithómenoi nomímois.

 Stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here, obedient to their laws/customs.

  (I’ve underlined the etas and omegas to distinguish them from epsilon and omicron.) The epitaph appeals to the passerby to deliver the message because these men died and were buried far from Sparta: with no post offices or telephones in the ancient world, epitaphs for those who died away from home were often in the form “If you are ever in the town of X, tell Y the son of Z that his son is buried here, far from home”. The only way to send the message was to have it ‘hitchhike’ with someone who happened to be headed in the right direction. In this case, specific names are unnecessary.

 Simonides was one of the greatest Greek poets, though little of his work survives — just enough to show us what we’re missing. He was particularly known for his elegies, epitaphs, and threnodies — all the gloomier genres — which were simple and moving. His epitaphs were written for the actual monuments, not as literary exercises. This is Simonides XXIIb in the Oxford Classical Text of Epigrammata Graeca and (with commentary) Further Greek Epigrams, both edited by D. L. Page. The meter is elegiac couplet. Other sources give the last two words as rhémasi peithómenoi, “obedient to their words”. However, whether he said that the Spartans were “obedient to the words” (= commands) of their kings or “obedient to the customs” of their country, it means that they were willing to follow orders without question even when there was no chance of survival. The word I have translated “obedient to” also means “persuaded by” — a nice example of small-d democracy in the very structure of the Greek language. The movie Go Tell The Spartans takes its title from Simonides’ epitaph, either directly or (perhaps through Cicero) indirectly.

 2. Cicero’s paraphrase, from Tusculan Disputations 1.101:

 Dic, hospes, Spartae, nos te hic vidisse iacentes     dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur.

 Stranger, tell Sparta that you saw us lying here, as we obey the sacred laws of our fatherland.

  3. A. E. Housman, More Poems XXXVI:

 Here dead we lie because we did not choose     To live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;     But young men think it is, and we were young.

  The first two lines are a paraphrase of Simonides, generalized for all nations. The last two are Housman’s own addition, though the thought is very pagan and very Greek. Housman’s little poem achieves an impressive degree of Simonidean simplicity. Every word but two is monosyllabic, and even the exceptions hardly count, since ‘nothing’ was originally ‘no thing’ and ‘because’ originally (I think) ‘by cause’. It’s odd that a professional Latinist should write such a thoroughly unLatin poem: just about every word is pure Anglo-Saxon.

   Comments (2)    Wednesday: March 1, 2006  Supreme Erudition Filed under:  Poetry — site admin @ 11:21 PM UTC   Terry Teachout quotes some words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., on his 90th birthday:

 And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago:

 “Death plucks my ear and says, Live—I am coming.”

  I thought it was odd that Holmes did not name the Latin poet, but it turns out that he is anonymous, or at least pseudonymous. The quoted words are a very close translation of the last line of Pseudo-Vergil’s Copa (“The Barmaid”), on-line here:

 Mors aurem vellens «vivite» ait, «venio».

  Holmes obviously knows that this is Pseudo-Vergil, since the original Vergil had been dead for 1950 years when he spoke. Of course, his 1500 years is just a very rough guess, and von Albrecht’s History of Roman Literature (to look no further) puts the Copa in the Augustan age.

   Comments Off    Monday: November 7, 2005  My Favorite Poem Filed under:  Classics Poetry — site admin @ 10:59 PM UTC   As promised in the preceding post, here is a very literal prose translation of my favorite poem, Propertius 2.29 (Latin text here and — with vocabulary and translation notes — here). I don’t know how much will come through in translation:

 Very late at night, my light, while I was wandering drunk, and no band [1] of slaves was leading me, I don’t know how many boys [2], a tiny crowd, crossed my path (fear forbade me to number them); some of whom seemed to be holding torchlets, some arrows, and part even seemed to be readying chains for me. But [3] they were naked. One more impudent [or ‘lewder’] than the rest said: “Arrest this man: you already know him well. [4] This was he, this one the angry woman instructed us to deal with.” He spoke, and already the knot was on my neck. Next another bids them push me into their midst, and another, “Let him go in the middle, [5] who does not think us gods! This one is waiting for undeserving you to all hours [of the night]: but you, fool, are seeking I don’t know what doors. When that one has loosened the nocturnal bonds of her Sidonian nightcap and stirred her heavy eyes, odors will waft upon you not from the Arabs’ herb, but those which Love himself has made with his own hands. Spare him now, brothers, now he pledges true love; and look, now we have reached the house to which we were ordered to come.” And when my clothes had been thrown back on, they said: “Go now and learn to stay home nights!” It was dawn, and I decided to visit, if she was resting alone, but Cynthia was alone in her bed. I was stunned: that one had never seemed more beautiful to me, not even when she was in her purple tunic and was on her way to tell her dreams to chaste Vesta, so that they would not harm either herself or me in any way. Thus she seemed to me, released by recent sleep. Oh how strong is the power of beauty in itself! “What?” she said, “you are an early morning girlfriend inspector [6]. Do you think I am like your habits? [7] I am not so easy: one man known to me will be enough, either you or if someone [else] can be truer. No marks can be seen pressed into the bed, nor any indication that two have lain rolling to and fro. Look how no breath [8] rises up from my whole body, familiar when adultery has been committed.” She has spoken, and driving away my kisses with opposed right hand, leaps forth, resting her foot on a loose slipper. Thus am I mocked as the guardian of so chaste a love: since then I have had no happy night.

  A few necessary notes:

  manus is a pun, since it means both “hand” and “band, squad”. The boys are at the same time fugitivarii (fugitive slave-catchers), cupids, and pueri minuti (impudent children kept for the amusement of adults, like pets). sed, “but”, because nudity is appropriate only to cupids. Fugitivarii were often hired among acquaintances of the runaway. Since Propertius was a love-poet, the boys also know him well in their role as cupids. intereat is another pun, since it means both “let him go in the middle” and “let him die”. A speculator is actually a “scout”, a military reconnaissance-man, but I couldn’t use that word, since it makes the narrator sound like a Boy Scout. The “you” implied by “your habits” is plural, so she must mean “the habits of you men”. Though vague, this seems to refer to an odor, not heavy breathing.    Comments Off    Thursday: October 20, 2005  Never Send A Machine To Do A Man’s Job Filed under:  Classics Poetry — site admin @ 11:50 PM UTC   Lileks finds some coded Latin, but concludes that it must be gibberish, since the online Latin translator couldn’t handle it. That just shows how stupid machines are. It is not quite classical Latin, but close enough to have a meaning. Lileks’ text is missing the first letter — easy enough when it’s written in Morse code and the letter is an I. It should read:

 IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI.

  Classical Latin would spell the second word GYRUM and the last one IGNE, but this is good Mediaeval (aka Vulgar) Latin. It means “At night we go into a gyre [= whirl/circle/ring] and are consumed by fire”. That’s not a very clear or satisfying meaning, but better than average for palindromes. With one more syllable at the beginning, it would be an epic (dactylic hexameter) line: again, that’s probably the best meter we can expect from a palindrome. The version with ECCE (“look!”) inserted after NOCTE fulfills (barely) the minimum requirements for a hexameter, but the meaning is even clunkier.

 This site has some interesting, but not entirely accurate, information on the words (click on Palindromes – it’s the first one on the right). I don’t see anything macaronic about the line, and suspect that a moth would be at least as likely as a mayfly to fly in circles and be consumed by fire. I wonder if this gyre has anything to do with the one Yeats asked someone or other to perne in in “Sailing to Byzantium”.

   Comments (2)    Wednesday: July 6, 2005  Petronius On Kisses Filed under:  Classics Poetry — site admin @ 8:04 PM UTC   Since today is International Kissing Day, here’s a little poem attributed to Petronius (Fragment 54 in the collections, though it doesn’t look particularly fragmentary):

 Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas et taedet Veneris statim peractae. non ergo ut pecudes libidinosae caeci protinus irruamus illuc (nam languescit amor peritque flamma); sed sic sic sine fine feriati et tecum iaceamus osculantes. hic nullus labor est ruborque nullus: hoc iuvit, iuvat et diu iuvabit; hoc non deficit incipitque semper.

  And here is Ben Jonson’s translation (Underwood 88):

 Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport: Let us not rush blindly on unto it, Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it: For lust will languish, and that heat decay, But thus, thus, keeping endless Holy-day, Let us together closely lie, and kiss, There is no labour, nor no shame in this; This hath pleased, doth please and long will please; never Can this decay, but is beginning ever.

  Line 6 (“thus, thus”) seems to depict or enact the kiss itself, and is even more effectively alliterative in the Latin (sed sic sic sine fine). Jonson’s “Holy-day” is what we would call a holiday. I doubt that our author is particularly sincere in impugning “doing” (coitus) in favor of kissing.

   Comments (1)    Friday: July 1, 2005  Thought For The Day Filed under:  Literature Poetry Politics — site admin @ 9:48 PM UTC   Critical Mass and Our Girl in Chicago both link to an amusing attack on writers’ workshops. I couldn’t help thinking of one of Kingsley Amis’ apophthegms:

 If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop.

  In searching the web for the exact phrasing, I found that I had forgotten the sequel:

 After Youth, that is.

  Of course there’s nothing wrong with the sort of workshop that contains power tools or more primitive equivalents.

   Comments Off    Thursday: May 26, 2005  Interesting Locution Filed under:  Poetry Politics — site admin @ 8:57 PM UTC   Responding to rumors of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s demise, Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes “I certainly hope the murderous son of a bitch is assuming room temperature in Hell”. And what temperature would that be? I suppose it depends on the room. A toasty 475° F. or so, to broil Zarqawi to a nice golden brown? Or something more thermonuclear, like 8,540° F.? (If I’ve understood it correctly, this site gives 5,000 Kelvin as the temperature of a typical nuclear explosion, and that comes to roughly 8,540° Fahrenheit.) Or would “room temperature in Hell” be icy cold, as depicted in Dante’s Inferno? As I recall (it’s been a while), what Dante and Vergil find at the bottom of Hell’s pit is three-headed Satan, encased in ice up to his waist and chewing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius with his three mouths. Which raises an interesting question: after the events of the last hundred years, if not before, have Brutus and Cassius been demoted to ordinary lowest-circle traitors and replaced in Satan’s extra mouths by more recent arrivals? By today’s standards, they would find it difficult to make the junior varsity team of great criminals.

   Comments (2)    Wednesday: May 25, 2005  Quotations on Birth and Death Filed under:  Classics Poetry — site admin @ 11:11 PM UTC   A few days ago, Eugene Volokh quoted some “Wisdom from the old country” (Russia), passed along by his father:

 We die as we are born: without hair, without teeth, and without illusions.

  This sounds rather Senecan, though I’ve been unable to find such a quotation in his works. While searching, I ran across a couple of others that are worth quoting, though only tangentially related. The first is from the rhetorician Cestius Pius, quoted in the Elder Seneca’s Controversiae (7.1.9):

 Multas rerum natura mortis vias aperuit, et multis itineribus fata decurrunt, et haec est condicio miserrima humani generis, quod nascimur uno modo, multis morimur: laqueus, gladius, praeceps locus, venenum, naufragium, mille aliae mortes insidiantur huic miserrimae animae.

 Nature has opened up many paths of death, the fates arrive by many routes, and the most wretched condition of the human race is this, that we are born in only one way, but die in many: noose, sword, cliff, poison, shipwreck, a thousand other deaths lie in ambush for this most wretched life of ours.

  Pedantic footnote: Just plain ‘Seneca’ is the more famous Younger Seneca, Stoic philosopher, tragic poet, adviser and later victim of Nero. This is his father, the Elder Seneca, always distinguished as such, who compiled all the best arguments and wittiest remarks of all the contemporary orators, including Cestius Pius. Before running across this quotation on the web, I had known Cestius only as the target of one of the most brutal put-downs ever. Like many a professor today, he apparently went downhill intellectually as he aged, and the Elder Seneca records that his former student Marcus Argentarius, Latin orator and Greek epigrammatist, used to go around swearing per manes magistri mei Cestii, “by the [dead] soul of my teacher Cestius”, when Cestius was still alive.

 The second quotation is modern, and needed no web-search to find: I just had to find the book. In Doctor Drink (1950), J. V. Cunningham expands the comparison to cover three times of life, but with only one thing in common:

  Epitaph for Someone or Other

 Naked I came, naked I leave the scene, And naked was my pastime in between.

    Comments (1)    Friday: April 29, 2005  Variations on a Theme Filed under:  Poetry — site admin @ 10:14 PM UTC   The first two are well-known, but I’m particularly (perversely?) fond of the third. I ran across it years ago in a four-volume edition of Belloc’s verse, and have been looking for it ever since. The weblogger who calls herself The Rat recently quoted the second poem, which reminded me to look for the third once again. I was delighted to find that it has finally turned up on the web, though I don’t much care for the I Love Poetry site where I found it (too cutesy, even if the snuggly polar bears would make an excellent wedding card for one particular blogger):

 I. Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), from Sonnets pour Hélène:

 Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, Assise aupres du feu, devidant et filant, Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant: Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j’estois belle.

 Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle, Desja sous le labeur à demy sommeillant, Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille resveillant, Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.

 Je seray sous la terre et fantaume sans os: Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos: Vous serez au fouyer une vieille accroupie,

 Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain. Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain: Cueillez d´s aujourd’huy les roses de la vie.

  If you can’t handle 16th-century French, there are English translations here (Humbert Wolfe) and here (Anthony Weir — scroll down past the Albanian stuff).

 II. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “When you are old”:

 When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

 And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

  III. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), “The Fragment”:

 Towards the evening of her splendid day Those who are little children now shall say (Finding this verse), ‘Who wrote it, Juliet?’ And Juliet answer gently, ‘I forget.’

    Comments Off         More than just Blogs:  James Bowman Victor Davis Hanson Mickey Kaus Martin Kramer James Lileks: The Bleat Mark Steyn David Warren  Les 120 Journaux de Blogdom:  About Last Night Ace of Spades HQ American Digest Armavirumque   Babalú BeldarBlog Belmont Club Big Lizards Tim Blair   Chicago Boyz Cold Fury Cranky Professor   Durham in Wonderland Dustbury   The Fat Guy Five Feet of Fury Dr. Frank's What's-It   Gateway Pundit   Mick Hartley   InstaPundit   Joanne Jacobs Just One Minute   Legal Insurrection Libertarian Samizdata The Little Professor   Brian Micklethwait . . . Muttered the Ogre   Patterico's Pontifications Power Line Protein Wisdom   Random Jottings The Rat   Sand in the Gears Roger L. Simon Small Dead Animals The Strata-Sphere   Throwing Things Transterrestrial Musings Jim Treacher   Viking Pundit Violins and Starships   Wormtalk and Slugspeak   Meryl Yourish