Canto XV, Stanza 99, of Don Juan:
Showing posts with label Lord Byron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lord Byron. Show all posts
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Apostrophe's Extinction Signals Apocalypse's Arrival
(image: representation of an apostrophe, or of a tear, or of both)One occasional reader of this blog relayed a link to a news story which reports that new or replaced street signs that once contained apostrophes will no longer contain them because "they're confusing and old fashioned"--the apostrophes, not the signs or decision-makers, apparently.
The link: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,486144,00.html
That this event should occur in Britain, where precise men with incendiary tempers such as A.E. Housman, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, and Alexander Pope once strode the earth (owing to some infirmities, Byron and Pope hobbled a bit, no worries), strikes an apostrophe-lover with a combination of punches.
Nonetheless, we who teach English and/or care about the language saw this one coming decades ago, for the apostrophe has been disappearing from college papers (for example--this is not to put the blame on college students) for a long time. We "correct" the papers, write something in the margin, perhaps even spend seconds in class discussing the apostrophe. The students, ignore our corrections, marginalia, and blather, as they should. They are college students. They have certain duties to uphold. Each has his or her role in the academy.
And having studied German, I knew that the possessive apostrophe had disappeared long ago.
Nonetheless, let me point out that the reasoning behind the decision to eliminate the apostrophe would not pass muster with Hume's (or Humes) or any philosopher's big toe, not considered the seat of logic.
The apostrophe's old-fashioned? Well, so is printing itself, which dates back to the 15th century. So is the monarchy. So are those goddamned wigs they wear in court over there. I say the wigs should go first; then maybe we'll pretend to discuss the demise of the apostrophe. The apostrophe has a clear semiotic use. The wig has a murky one, at best. The apostrophe is unobtrusive. The wig is not, and I'd (Id) be willing to bet that those wigs stink. I've never known an apostrophe to need a good cleaning or to harbor fleas.
Confusing? Imagine a sign that read St. John's Wood. Or St. John's Wood, One Kilometer. I'm just not feeling the confusion coming from either sign.
Now consider a sign that says William's Pub. Then one that says Williams Pub. The first sign is not confusing. The pub belongs to William, or at least William figures or figured in the history of the pub. Such niceties may be sorted out nicely in the pub over a pint, but they are niceties, not sources of confusion. Now consider the second sign. Is it William's Pub, singular? Williams' Pub, plural--the pub owned by the Williams family? One is so disgusted by the lack of clarity that one will go to another pub.
One might assert that the absence of an apostrophe will either have no effect (let's [or lets] be generous and say 10% of the time) or will, indeed, cause confusion, an absence of precision being more likely to create confusion than a persence of precision (that is my assumption)
Let us further assume that those in charge, or what Gogol called Persons of Consequence, are lying. They want to to save money and time, which are the same thing in their minds. It takes X amount of time to punch an apostrophe into a sign and then paint it. Multiply by Y, and you have an amount (illusory, of course) that you are saving. Read Dickens' [or I guess I should write Dickens and surrender) Hard Times for a flavor of this mentality.
Or maybe this is their revenge on English teachers!
I don't (I mean dont) like the slothful use of "old fashioned," unsupported by data, although my use of slothful begged the question, I grant. I don't like an assertion concerning "useless" when the assertion is not followed closely by reasoning, logic, or at least something dressed as good sense.
I like the apostrophe. It adds clarity. Nonetheless, I let it go long ago, even as I ritualisitically point out its absence (or should I write it's absence?) or its incorrect presence in papers.
With the impending official demise of the apostrophe in England, the apocaplyse's, I mean the apocolypses, intial phase has begun. Whats a person to do? Store a years worth of food? :-)
Listen, this is how loyal, to a fault, not just to people but apostrophes I am: In those rare instances when I use my telephone to "text" (sigh, text is a verb), I use the apostrophe. What percentage of texters use it? I would guess 1% at most. Nonetheless, all hail the corporate design-dude or design-dudette who allowed the phone to be programmed to include an apostrophe. Hes my hero or shes my hero, of sorts. I mean he's my hero or she's my hero.
National Lampoon might write the headline this way: ENGLAND BAN'S [SIC] APOSTROPHE, GOES IMMEDIATELY TO HELL'S ANTECHAMBER.
"Should all apostrophes be forgot and ne-ver come to mind . . . ." Cue tears, pull out handkerchief, head to William's Pub.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Does Being Alone Equal Solitude?
Lord Byron wrote a poem that presents an unconventional view of solitude; the poem is conveniently called "Solitude":
Solitude
To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.
But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!
I like the simple organization of the poem. Stanza one explains what solitude isn't. One may read the poem as an implicit disagreement with Wordsworth, one of Byron's contemporaries. Wordsworth did, in fact, celebrate the kind of solitude in which one is alone "in nature." Indeed, Wordsworth believed that such solitude brought out the best in him and others. Wordsworth would probably not take issue with the idea of "conversing" with nature--not literally talking to a tree, maybe, but allowing one's consciousness, for lack of a better term, to be influenced subtly by nature. Ironically, Byron, very much an urban, cosmopolitan creature, thinks of genuine solitude as a condition of being alone in a crowd, which seems to be a paradox and brings to mind one of Yogi Berra's dry comments: "Ah, nobody likes to go to that restaurant anymore; it's too crowded!"
So stanza two presents the second "thesis": real solitude occurs when you are in the midst of a crowd.
Certainly it's easy to grasp Byron's implied rhetorical question: Is there a greater feeling of "aloneness" than that of feeling all alone amongst a crowd of strangers? And the crowd, according to Byron, is composed of "the flattered, followed, sought and sued." That phrase might well apply to Hollywood these days.
Perhaps Byron has highlighted what is chiefly a semantic distinction. Perhaps his "solitude" is someone else's "loneliness," and it is true that you (or you and another person) can feel a sense of belonging--of not being lonely or isolated--when you are "in nature." --Maybe not literally in nature, but, say, staying in an isolated cabin in the hills. Here's a poem that contemplates that circumstance:
Solitude
To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.
But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!
I like the simple organization of the poem. Stanza one explains what solitude isn't. One may read the poem as an implicit disagreement with Wordsworth, one of Byron's contemporaries. Wordsworth did, in fact, celebrate the kind of solitude in which one is alone "in nature." Indeed, Wordsworth believed that such solitude brought out the best in him and others. Wordsworth would probably not take issue with the idea of "conversing" with nature--not literally talking to a tree, maybe, but allowing one's consciousness, for lack of a better term, to be influenced subtly by nature. Ironically, Byron, very much an urban, cosmopolitan creature, thinks of genuine solitude as a condition of being alone in a crowd, which seems to be a paradox and brings to mind one of Yogi Berra's dry comments: "Ah, nobody likes to go to that restaurant anymore; it's too crowded!"
So stanza two presents the second "thesis": real solitude occurs when you are in the midst of a crowd.
Certainly it's easy to grasp Byron's implied rhetorical question: Is there a greater feeling of "aloneness" than that of feeling all alone amongst a crowd of strangers? And the crowd, according to Byron, is composed of "the flattered, followed, sought and sued." That phrase might well apply to Hollywood these days.
Perhaps Byron has highlighted what is chiefly a semantic distinction. Perhaps his "solitude" is someone else's "loneliness," and it is true that you (or you and another person) can feel a sense of belonging--of not being lonely or isolated--when you are "in nature." --Maybe not literally in nature, but, say, staying in an isolated cabin in the hills. Here's a poem that contemplates that circumstance:
Cabin in Snow
Outside a cabin in snow,
we are, and hear our, breathing here.
And wind in pines shucks
itself through sound like snakes
slipping through their summer skins.
And it is easy out here. And out
here it is easy to admire
an image-aided concept
of cabins in snow. And
it is easy inside a cabin
now to believe in an Idea
of Winter, for notions of snow
furnish our true cabin,
consciousness—which, fragile amidst
oblivion’s drifts, stays sturdy against howling.
--Hans Ostrom
In other words, I think one's mind can feel quite occupied and connected when one is alone, and I certainly agree with Byron that it's possible to feel isolated and lonely in a crowd, especially a crowd that seems to be a "shock of men." What a great phrase. We might bring it up to date by writing "shock of humans" or "shock of people" (and thereby ruin the rhyme--oops), but a crowd can "shock" one even if it isn't doing something shocking, even if it isn't a mob. And sometimes, I think, a person can be quite comfortable walking in a crowded city, but maybe the person turns a corner and for some reason sees the crowd differently and is shocked by a sense of the sheer mass of people.
The converse of Byron's thesis can be true as well, of course; a hermit who has chosen to be contentedly alone might wake up one morning and feel terribly lonely, and a person in a crowd may feel quite connected to others in the crowd.
Friday, September 7, 2007
So We'll Go No More A-Roving
Here is a short poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron:
So We'll Go No More A-Roving
1
So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
2
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.
3
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go nor more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
(The even-numbered lines are supposed to be indented, but for some reason the blog-machinery doesn't go along with that, try as I might. And the numbers are supposed to be centered over the stanzas.)
A footnote in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 2), Fifth Edition, p. 512, reports, "Composed in the Lenten aftermath of a spell of feverish dissipation in the Carnival season in Venice, and included in a letter to Thomas Moore, Feb. 28, 1817. Byron wrote, 'I find "the sword wearing out the scabbard," though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.' The poem is based on the refrain of a Scottish song, The Jolly Beggar, 'And we'll gang nae mair a roving/Sae late into the nicht...."
To rove, as Byron is using the word, is literally to wander and figuratively to wander around "partying," of course. The noun "rove," incidentally, refers either to a scab or a piece of metal, but I've never heard or seen "rove" used in this way.
It's interesting that Byron claims to be withdrawing from the party-life and the life of amorous roving not because Lent has arrived but because he is weary. He also seems to think that age 29 is a bit too early to be weary of partying. Some people never cease to go a-roving (and that construction is fascinating: adding "a" to "roving"): Keith Richard, for example, or my distant older cousin, Erik, who was literally the town drunk of my small town. Into his 70s, he drank and "roved" almost every day of his life; of course, alcoholic roving is not a pretty sight.
The third line of the poem has always tended to throw me off, even after innumerable readings. My mind wants to read it as "Though the heart be still" as in "be still my heart"--that is, "Thought heart be quiet," but then of course the line wants to convey the following: "Though the heart is still (or "nonetheless") capable of loving." It's not a flaw; it's part of the poem's charm now, like a favorite little nick in an antique desk.
"[t]he heart must pause to breathe": I like the plain factuality of that, and I like the way the poem at this point recognizes the heart as a biological or anatomical entity, not just the symbol or locus of love. "And Love itself [must] have rest." That's good, too--Love, a force unto itself, requires periods of rest, regardless of which human is experiencing that force.
The last stanza is "counter-carpe-diem." That is, even though humans (especially those under the age of 30) were made to go a-roving, and even though time passes very quickly (hence the advice to "seize the day"), there are limits. We get tired. Even, apparently, at age 29. So carpe the diem all you want, but you're going to have to take a break.
In 1981 I traveled to Venice, from Germany, via Austria, and happened to get there just as Carnivale was starting: fortuitous. Out of that experience came, eventually, a poem, first published in The Washington English Journal, I think, in 1985 (?). My roving wasn't up to Byronic standards, by any means, but I had a good time. Here's the poem:
Venice, Carnivale
Who will you be in Venice
beneath the year’s third moon
when crowds of Carnivale
pour toward you all in greasepaint,
all in masks and capes? Who will
you be in this humanity and alleys
floating on moonlight and sewage?
Laughter from a canal-taxi
skips across painted water,
ricochets off rotting brick.
Your personality hangs like a rusted
iron shutter. Be anyone but yourself
and John Ruskin, Carnivale advises.
Be sewage, puke in the canal, beg,
sleep with cats, eat rats. Be
moonlight, fall in love, swell
like Caruso’s voice. A Danish woman
winks at you from across a restaurant.
An Italian boy lights a firecracker; therefore,
pigeons scuttling your tourist’s boredom
panic and swoop up through your heart.
Be Italian. Close your window
to riotous streets. Return to your tidy
apartment, your statuette of Mary, and
a proper life of grief, lace, and spices. Be
American: gawk and gaudy jazz architecture
of San Marco; order beer and puzzle
at this sinking city (why don’t they fix it?). Be
European, wear that history for an evening.
Work hard at language, gesture, shout, pose,
Strut. Forget your Kansas, blond in corn heat.
Forget about flat American English that naps
on your tongue, then saunters toward a barn.
Be the crowd, be the anonymous mime’s face,
talk another’s conversation, kiss another’s other,
tilt your head back and laugh a lunatic’s
hysteria to Carnivale moon.
from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006
So We'll Go No More A-Roving
1
So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
2
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.
3
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go nor more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
(The even-numbered lines are supposed to be indented, but for some reason the blog-machinery doesn't go along with that, try as I might. And the numbers are supposed to be centered over the stanzas.)
A footnote in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 2), Fifth Edition, p. 512, reports, "Composed in the Lenten aftermath of a spell of feverish dissipation in the Carnival season in Venice, and included in a letter to Thomas Moore, Feb. 28, 1817. Byron wrote, 'I find "the sword wearing out the scabbard," though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.' The poem is based on the refrain of a Scottish song, The Jolly Beggar, 'And we'll gang nae mair a roving/Sae late into the nicht...."
To rove, as Byron is using the word, is literally to wander and figuratively to wander around "partying," of course. The noun "rove," incidentally, refers either to a scab or a piece of metal, but I've never heard or seen "rove" used in this way.
It's interesting that Byron claims to be withdrawing from the party-life and the life of amorous roving not because Lent has arrived but because he is weary. He also seems to think that age 29 is a bit too early to be weary of partying. Some people never cease to go a-roving (and that construction is fascinating: adding "a" to "roving"): Keith Richard, for example, or my distant older cousin, Erik, who was literally the town drunk of my small town. Into his 70s, he drank and "roved" almost every day of his life; of course, alcoholic roving is not a pretty sight.
The third line of the poem has always tended to throw me off, even after innumerable readings. My mind wants to read it as "Though the heart be still" as in "be still my heart"--that is, "Thought heart be quiet," but then of course the line wants to convey the following: "Though the heart is still (or "nonetheless") capable of loving." It's not a flaw; it's part of the poem's charm now, like a favorite little nick in an antique desk.
"[t]he heart must pause to breathe": I like the plain factuality of that, and I like the way the poem at this point recognizes the heart as a biological or anatomical entity, not just the symbol or locus of love. "And Love itself [must] have rest." That's good, too--Love, a force unto itself, requires periods of rest, regardless of which human is experiencing that force.
The last stanza is "counter-carpe-diem." That is, even though humans (especially those under the age of 30) were made to go a-roving, and even though time passes very quickly (hence the advice to "seize the day"), there are limits. We get tired. Even, apparently, at age 29. So carpe the diem all you want, but you're going to have to take a break.
In 1981 I traveled to Venice, from Germany, via Austria, and happened to get there just as Carnivale was starting: fortuitous. Out of that experience came, eventually, a poem, first published in The Washington English Journal, I think, in 1985 (?). My roving wasn't up to Byronic standards, by any means, but I had a good time. Here's the poem:
Venice, Carnivale
Who will you be in Venice
beneath the year’s third moon
when crowds of Carnivale
pour toward you all in greasepaint,
all in masks and capes? Who will
you be in this humanity and alleys
floating on moonlight and sewage?
Laughter from a canal-taxi
skips across painted water,
ricochets off rotting brick.
Your personality hangs like a rusted
iron shutter. Be anyone but yourself
and John Ruskin, Carnivale advises.
Be sewage, puke in the canal, beg,
sleep with cats, eat rats. Be
moonlight, fall in love, swell
like Caruso’s voice. A Danish woman
winks at you from across a restaurant.
An Italian boy lights a firecracker; therefore,
pigeons scuttling your tourist’s boredom
panic and swoop up through your heart.
Be Italian. Close your window
to riotous streets. Return to your tidy
apartment, your statuette of Mary, and
a proper life of grief, lace, and spices. Be
American: gawk and gaudy jazz architecture
of San Marco; order beer and puzzle
at this sinking city (why don’t they fix it?). Be
European, wear that history for an evening.
Work hard at language, gesture, shout, pose,
Strut. Forget your Kansas, blond in corn heat.
Forget about flat American English that naps
on your tongue, then saunters toward a barn.
Be the crowd, be the anonymous mime’s face,
talk another’s conversation, kiss another’s other,
tilt your head back and laugh a lunatic’s
hysteria to Carnivale moon.
from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006
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