ricardienne: (Default)
Of course, I know Ford best through his wacky alternate history/fantasy/Wars of the Roses novel The Dragon Waiting, so I'm not surprised he also wrote wacky and awesome Wars of the Roses poetry:

Enter Mr Jno. Ford (the Elizabethan one) as King Edward the Fourth.

I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
This monarch business makes a fellow hungry.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.

What happened to the kippers left from breakfast?
Or maybe there’s a bit of cold roast pheasant.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.

A civil war is such an awful bother.
We fought at Tewksbury and still ran out of mustard.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.

Speak not to me of pasta Marinara.
I know we laid in lots of boar last Tuesday.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.

The pantry seems entirely full of Woodvilles
And Clarence has drunk two-thirds of the cellar.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.

If I ran England like I run that kitchen
You’d half expect somebody to usurp it.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.
ricardienne: (heiro)
From Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 5.11.34:

Some people distinguish analogy from similarity; we consider it a subset of this trope. For "as one is to ten, so is ten to one hundred" is certainly based on similarity, and "a bad citizen is just like an enemy." Although these things often go too far, too, as for example: "if it is shameful for the mistress of the house to have intercourse with a slave, then it is shameful for the master to have intercourse with a slave girl."


The other thing I've been reading today (well, apart from 2.5 pages of a really tedious German article about the origins of "the garment of vanity" (lit: "the chiton of empty glory") (it's the last piece of clothing/passions philosophers remove, in case you were wondering)) is a book of short stories and poetry of John M. Ford: he likes his sci-fi/modernized antiquity, and I do too! The poetry I am not so into, with a few exceptions. The couplets about various topics in physics are very nice. An excerpt:


open/oscillating universe
So will it stop, or not? The answer tells
Much less about the stars than of ourselves.

Planck epoch
One flash when gravity was consummate--
No era spans less time, or greater weight.

quantum leap
The particle is here, and then is there --
But never in between. How does it dare?


I also like the "Sf Clichés: A sonnet cycle" (there's a reason Lois McMaster Bujold is almost the limit of my interest in sci-fi, and that reason can be succinctly summed as "space feudalism!"):

1: Galactic Empires
One would not think that Empire could survive
As starships Roman cavalry displace;
The politics of Space must needs derive
From Einstein's time, Planck's heat and Riemann's space.
Yet "history repeats," some (heedless) say,
Analogies persist, however crude,
And democratic notions all give way
To fealty and service, fief and feud.
The Empire will not die, as mortals must,
The purple of their robes is colorfast;
Their golden age untouched by moth or rust,
And liberties, it seems cannot outlast
The paper image of a narrow Rome
Bestrode by cardboard Caesars dressed in chrome.
ricardienne: (Default)
So I'm reading Virgil out of my 1840 Cooper's Virgil, where the "study questions" are based entirely on the one-paragraph introductions to each eclogue and the copious and fairly irrelevant notes. One gets the impression that the most important thing to get out of Virgil's eclogues is the classification of different kinds of nymphs. But I digress. Mr. Cooper's commentary is equally amusing in its determination to find one to one "historical" analogues for every single character. Virgil, of course, features in every eclogue (except for IV, because that one is All About Jesus, even though Virgil didn't quite know it). In the fifth, two shepherds lament the death and celebrate the apotheosis of a particularly wonderful and talented youth/poet/shepherd. Obviously this is actually about Julius Caesar (disclosure: I am not averse to reading political/historical allusion into Virgil. Just not, you know, on an allegorical "X actually is A" level.)

This produces some entertaining glosses, such as, on the line
cum complexa sui corpus miserabile nati
atque deos atque astra vocat crudelia mater
(When, embracing the pitiable body of her son, his mother calls both gods and stars cruel): "Cerdanus understands by mater the wife of Caesar, who a little before his death dreamed her husband was stabbed in her breast." I mean, we all know that Caesar's mother was quite influential in his upbringing and life, but… that influential? Oh Virgil, you naughty poet.

Also, amusingly, in the 1920's, D.L. Drew ("Virgil's Fifth Eclogue: A Defence of the Julius Caesar-Daphnis Theory", CQ vol. 16 no. 2) argues that "mother" must be a code-word for either Venus or Roma (both indeed more plausible than Calpurnia) and therefore point to Julius Caesar because mothers do not belong in Pastorals:
For what has a mourning matron to do with a Daphnis? Another step and the local attorney would be there and the family doctor to follow. At such a deathbed we admit nymphs and fauns and Venuses, even Aesculapius -- anything, almost, rather than a mother, who is human.
I was extremely tempted to present the quote without the last three words, but that, I suppose would have been tendentious. And I suppose that given that Daphnis = archetypical Shepherd prince, it is maybe odd to have the intrusion of a mother (although, seriously, it isn't as though mourning women aren't a rather standard topos). On the other hand, given that the movement is from death (i.e. mortal, human) to apotheosis (i.e. divine, mythical) having a human mother show up early to mourn serves that very well, whether D. merely evokes Caesar, is independent of Caesar, or *actually is* Caesar.

And -- April is Poetry month and Springtime Happiness month, so this post is Entirely Relevant. All it needs is a link to the poem itself (translation by Dryden; it's on page 429, if the link doesn't bring you right to the "fifth pastoral".)
ricardienne: (Default)
I've been moping about all day wanting to finish Helen Beaton, College Women. It was actually quite okay, for something of this sort. I found myself caring about the outcome of the love-pentagram. Granted, the characters were entirely standard: beautiful, intelligent, sensitive main character, her jolly chum, a brother who is all that one could wish an upstanding brother to be, a nice, if perhaps a little flat, love interest, and a hard-working scholarship friend.

But it was pervaded by that weird 19th Century American we-can't-decide-whether-class-matters-or-not business, of which the stories in St. Nicholas were such masters. On the one hand, our heroines are clearly in the right when they want to help the less-fortunate mill girls by exposing them to high culture and broadening their horizens, while their acquaintances who disdain to help while spouting platitudes about "the poor always being with us" are in the wrong. And let us not forget that our dear Helen ends up engaged to the engineer of her father's mill, of all people, although this gentleman is "above his station in birth and education" -- he, like all the worthy men in the novel, has a shelf of "well-worn volumes of Greek" above his desk.* And Cecily Saxton, the cheerfully poor charity student friend of Helen's with an upwardly mobile marriage to Helen's brother. But on the other hand, although class is repeatedly transcended (and education is always the means by which it can be), it is very definitely there, and to be respected. Those mill girls and boys whose lives Helen and her friends improve will never be equals -- the suggestion that there could be a relationship beyond largesse on one side and respectful gratitude on the other is never even floated. The closest we get to any discussion of this is to be told in the very first chapter that "it is often the case that the barrier between the rich and the poor is erected by the poor."


There was also a great deal of entertaining anxiety about women with higher education. I suspect that Adelaide L. Rouse was a "College Woman" herself, and Helen and her friends firmly prove that their liberal arts degrees have only improved them. But, there are again all of the classic St. Nicholas patterns: the plot has Helen sacrifice her plans in order to be a "stay-at-home daughter" -- helping her family through a period of distressed finances, and nursing her severely depressed sister back to health. By the end of the book, a year later, she and two of her three good college friends are married or engaged to be and all set to start their own households. The girl who was brilliant in mathematics now finds "cookery much more fascinating" and so on. In other words, we can take this story as reassurance that college doesn't spoil girls for their proper roles in life.

And therefore, we see that it's no accident that Dear Daddy Long-Legs has remained popular pretty much exclusively out of this genre of novel.

Helen Beaton, College Woman seems to have been published in 1900. It is inscribed in the frontleaf: "Presented to Helen Dauner by the Board of Education for being neither absent nor tardy during year 1919-1920." Wouldn't that be a bit like giving Are You There, God, It's Me Margaret or some such as a prize in a modern high school?

In the back, in different writing (maybe earlier?)



"Hope is like a slender hairbell [sic]
All atremble from its birth
Love is like a fragrant rose
Cheering, blessing all the earth
Faith is like a lily white
High uplifted into light."



It seems to be from Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song Poems, except it isn't. This is Rossetti:



Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth,
Love is like a rose the joy of all the earth;
Faith is like a lily lifted high and white,
Love is like a lovely rose the world's delight;
Harebells and sweet lilies show a thornless growth,
But the rose with all its thorns excels them both.


I wonder if whoever wrote it in my book made up the variation, or if she found it somewhere else. Google turns up nothing.



*Growing up reading this kind of thing is the real reason that I am majoring in Classics, I suspect

Profile

ricardienne: (Default)
sigaloenta

October 2023

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15 161718192021
22232425262728
293031    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 5th, 2025 07:16 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios