They wept like anything to see / such quantites of sand.

Casting about for more 1024 material (got the Sunne Rising and Grecian Urn down pat). Fighting the urge to go w/ some light verse (I hate that term) -- so, Edward Lear or perhaps W.S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads. In other words, the greatest comfort-stuffs outside of Renaissance madrigals and walking. Still, the stuff's a real trip down memory lane. I remember that musical rendition of the Walrus and the Carpenter ye olde Hirohito* sent me way back when [Google has informed me it was Donovan]. Wish we (=humankind) appreciated "light verse" more. And, really that melodramatic, extravagant, fanciful, clever, sadhappy Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style doggerel is partly what I want to bring to De Inanibus, so, why not?

Totally unrelated, but this has immediately jumped to the top of my to-read list. Fun stuff.

One of my friends mentioned reading the Iliad, and I responded with an opinionated flurry of translator comparisons. Barring learning Greek, I still rate Pope's as the highest in actual poetic quality. Its language is infinitely more Homeric than any of the pansy renditions of the 20th century. It gets an unfairly bad rap cuz we pretentious postmoderns can't deal w/ Pope's format ("Heroic couplets? How quaint!") So, Pope > Lattimore > Fagles. Fact. Actually, someone agrees w/ me for once. Thank you cybervoid for confirming my bias.


*Great Scott, Hirohito! It's Mary Todd Lincoln.

And, of course, the unquestionable themesong for this evening is this (featuring the voice cast of The Princess Bride (starting around 6:48) and the phonetic twin of Paul McCartney). This was my childhood. Really, just listen to the entire album.

Blakeathon Part IV: Jots

1.) Visions of the Daughters of Albion contains the ultimate Mad Men tag-line: "a solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity."

For Children: The Gates of Paradise is the creepiest thing next to Edward Gorey, minus the whimsy.

America: A Prophecy ('93) is a significant visual improvement over all his previous work IMHO:

Blakeathon Part III: Early Engraved Works & Tiriel

Using the fantastic Blake Archive online so I can read Blake's engraved poetry in the format he produced it in. The Wm Blake Archive is a magnificent resource, although it suffers from the law that the site design of websites is always inversely preportional to the quality of its content.

Blake seems to've had a rather droll disposition. The first six plates of There is No Natural Religion (c. 1788) proceed in a neat, step-wise fashion with six statements of sense perception in the best tradition of Locke (e.g. "Man's desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perciev'd.") THEN, Blake restarts the Roman numbering and releases this bombshell: "Man's perceptions are not bound by organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover." But this seems to refute everything he just said! Then the I recognize the different logical loop holes he placed in Series A: "None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions", and "Man cannot naturally Percieve but through his natural or bodily organs" (my italics). From there, Series B continues in a signature Blakean vein. Possible favorite line: "the bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels."

Songs of Innocence (('89) as distinct from Songs of Innocence *and Experience* ('94). Number of  poems depicting spiritual innocence. Seem pastoral, but in a much more earthy, solid way than your feathery, rococo kind of pastoralism - this is Edenic in the sense of complete & whole innocence, and not simply idyllic. Engravings show moderate improvement over There is No Natural Religion & All Religions Are One. (Perhaps due to the startlingly innovative move from 5.3x4.5 cm to 11x7 cm plates).

Book of Thel ('89). First engraved prophetic work (second actual prophetic work after Tiriel).

*n.b. Big Three of Blake studies: S. Foster Damon, Northrop Frye, David V. Erdman.

Blakeathon Part II: An Island in the Moon (1784)

Next up: Blake's 1784 An Island in the Moon. After the rather sophomoric Poetical Sketches ('83) I didn't know what to expect, but certainly not this: far-and-away the most Joycean thing I've ever read that's not also between the covers of Portrait, Ulysses, the Dubliners, or Finnegans Wake. Here is a man reveling in words (which, somehow, my intentional overuse of italics in same paragraph demonstrates) with a canine wantonness. At pts Blake even succumbs to the logoleptic urge to belch lists of names or items (cf. prev. ment. Joyce & Rabelais et. al.). This provides such gems as the complete Chapter 2:

Tilly Lally the Siptippidist Aradobo, the dean of Morocco, [Miss] Miss Gittipin [&] Mrs Nannicantipot, Mrs Sigtagatist Gibble Gabble the wife of Inflammable Gass—& Little Scopprell enterd the room

Or Chapter 10:

Thus these happy Islanders spent their time but felicity does not last long, for being met at the house of Inflammable Gass the windfinder, the following affairs happend.

Come Flammable said Gibble Gabble & lets enjoy ourselves bring the Puppets. Hay Hay, said he, you sho, why ya ya, how can you be so foolish.—Ha Ha Ha she calls the experiments puppets Then he went up stairs & loaded the maid, with glasses, & brass tubes, & magic pictures

Here ladies & gentlemen said he Ill shew you a louse [ climing] or a flea or a butterfly or a cock chafer the blade bone of a tittle back, no no heres a bottle of wind that I took up in the bog house. o dear o dear the waters got into the sliders. look here Gibble Gabble—lend me your handkerchief, Tilly Lally Tilly Lally took out his handkerchief which smeard the glass worse than ever. then he screwd it on then he took the sliders & then he set up the glasses for the Ladies to view the pictures thus he was employd & quite out of breath

While Tilly Laily & Scopprell were pumping at the air pump Smack went the glass—. Hang said Tilly Lally. Inflammable Gass turnd short round & threw down the table & Glasses & Pictures, & broke the bottles of wind & let out the Pestilence He saw the Pestilence fly out of the bottle & cried out while he ran out of the room. [Go] come out come out [you ar] we are putrified, we are corrupted. our lungs are destroyd with the Flogiston this will spread a plague all thro' the Island he was down stairs the very first on the back of him came all the others in a heap

So they need not bidding go

Not to everyone's taste, perhaps. But shows, thinks I, a nascent wordweaver romping around in his playground wordfiddling when he suddenly realizes to his delight that the words are the companion and not simply the toy. (Insert λόγος reference w/ added pun on legos. Oh gosh that works so well.)

Blakeathon Part I: Poetical Sketches (1769-1777, pub'd 1783)

Embarking on my long-delayed voyage into the rocky ocean of William Blake. Reading in order of publication. First up: Poetical Sketches (pub'd 1783), which contains some (literally) adolescent verse as well a laughably bad (and wisely aborted) drama on Edward III. Said incomplete drama features Dagworth, a soldier so enraptured by the prospect of facing the enemy that he bursts into psalmic parody: "Now my heart dances and I am as light / as the young bridegroom going to be married." Even allowing for intentional authorial irony, this is horrendous. Exhibit B: A lengthy philosophical discussion between Dagworth and William "his man" continues to moralize ad nauseam until it finally concludes with a limp attempt at self-derision: "Thou [William] art an endless moralist." Taken on their own, though, these examples can't do justice to the overall sense of the drama's grade B-ness. See also: "Stop, brave Sir Walter; let me drop a tear, / then let the clarion of war begin." MST3K is called for.

Favorite moments: prose poem The Couch of Death is overwrought, but decent. Reminds me of a much less affecting DFW's "Incarnations of Burned Children." Also, the random mention of a "Gordred the Giant" in Gwin King of Norway ( = long and lurid proto-Marxist call for a worker's revolution).

The Time's They Are a-Changin': Brainstorm Criticism Tone Poem Rant Thingie

incipit. Ovid's Metamorphoses v. fittingly anonymous genius's Beowulf. Both deal with time/change. Both see the changeableness of things, but write in different flavors. Ovid is more of the "littera scripta manet" variety (see his (facetious?) concluding auto-epigraph), and sees change/time as a positive/creative thing. Beowulf sees change in a much more melancholy, negative light. But, the Metamorphoseon also depict change as patternless, arbitrary and empty. Ovid's time has a certain "terrible lightness of being" quality: time expanded so infinitely that it becomes hollow. In Beowulf time plods ever on and on, growing in weight at the same time that it shrinks with age and weariness. In Beowulf history is much sadder, much older, but much more meaningful. fin.

✣

Reading Chesterton's biography of Blake in preparation for upcoming Blakeathon. Delivers w/ the usual poise and intellectual rigorvigor. In re John Flaxman (1755-1826), Chesterton states: 

He would admit no line into a modern picture that might not have been on a Greek bas-relief. Even foreshortening and perspective he avoided as if there were something grotesque about them -- as, indeed, there is. Nothing can be funnier, properly considered, than the fact that one's own father is a pigmy if he stands far enough off. Perspective really is the comic element in things.

This in the midst of philosophical expositions on Blake's early life & work. He eventually says that "Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake" (i.e. Blake inherited Flaxman's con- and precision, but applied it with Blake's characteristic taste for the topsy-turvy. I heart Chesterton.

Also, rather like Flaxman's stuff for its precision. May try some copies.

Poetry's Swansong: T.S. Eliot reciting the Four Quartets

Thanks youtube!