Date: 8 June 2005
The end of this monstrous edition, with one more post left in the Archives Project. woo
I rather rushed to end--my excuse for not identifying the passage from Paterson. I'm afraid that this experiment has failed, but I'll be back with some further reactions next time.
19a-b. Two adequate Burnsian lyrics. The first is built on a simple verbal irony: “Welcom be ye whan ye go,/And farewell whan ye come”) The second on simple hyperbole (“The Deil he could na scaith thee,/Or aught tha wad belang thee;/He’d look into thy bonnie face,/And say, ‘I canna wrang thee.’” Both gud at wha they be B+ (actually anon + Burns)
20a Yet another lament for the poor, but “Take physic, pomp;/Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,/Though mayst shake the superflux to them/And show the heavens more just” A (Lear)
20b. This must be John Webster, despite strangely weak enjambment. Violent, harsh, exciting B+ (Lear)
20c. Bunting? Precise though aphoristic nature suggests translation. A (Wallace Stevens—why was “the imagination” not a give-away?)
21a. speech from a play. a pretty dull passage on disguise. (Shelley)
21b. Turn to language in Shax? “We were and are—I am, even as thou art—/Beings who ne’er each other can resign” A (Byron)
21c. Another speech, this on the happiness of going to prison “And take upon’s the mystery of things,/As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,/In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones/That ebb and flow by the moon.” A (Lear again—which I clearly need to reread)
22a. Practically moribund as far as movement goes with a dose of Romantic landscapism. It sounds like Wordsworth to me “To the dim light and the large circle of shade/I have clomb” And then escalates to crisis immediately. Though there’s no grass, “my longing loses not its green” Here’s how I’d revise it
Shade circle—snow-stomped grass.
Farther down, hard stone
but this sestina goes on a little longer. The vogue for sestina precedes and antedates Romanticism, so I don’t have a guess C (d’oh, it’s Dante trans by Rossetti)
22b. Victorian something. What I know not, and I honestly don’t follow it past the first 3 lines. C+ (Cavalcanti by Rossetti)
22c. Swinburne trans of Sappho. The strength is based on the source B+ (Rossetti’s Sappho, actually)
22d. Strong voice of social protest, probably from the 30s. B+ (Reznikoff!)
22e. Same as above, I wd think. Nice Homeric simile: “you would not die with your work unended,/ As if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower?” A (Rez)
23a. Zukofsky himself? Very finely tuned l’s and n’s. A (Paterson II, you idiot)
23b. Is it Herrick? Lyrical and uncluttered. B+ (Troilus and Cressida)
23c. Apparent doggerel. D (Dies Irae trans Walter Scott)
23d. Don’t quite get this riddle. C (cummings)
24a. WCW’s first real poem “what/sort of man was Fragonard?” A (WCW)
24b. Wonderful: Robt Herrick busts a move on Venus who smacks him down: “Hence, Remove,/Herrick, thou art too coorse to love.”(R H “The Vision”)
25a. That same “Negro verse” compilation that’s come before. As much ironic wit as Langston Hughes discovered in this material. A (actually a different one: Chain Gang Song coll. Lawrence Gellert)
25b. Not interesting to me: Unfolds slowly for little reward. C (WC Williams of 1913)
25. I dislike “I too, dislike it” but it’s suggestive for my current project. [N]or is it/vlaid to discriminate against business documents/school-books,//trade reports—these phenoma/are important; but dragged into conscious oddity by/half poets, the result is not poetry./This we know. In a liking for the raw material in all/its rawness,/and for that which is genuine, there is liking for poetry.” B (1932 version)
