Friday, September 15, 2017

Cassini fell just now





                                         And I,
               who am but a slave to this world
               kept my head lowered as I threw a coin
               into the tambourine.
































Angelos Sikelianos
1884 - 1951
Selected Poems
  The Sacred Way
  [The ancient road
  from Athens to Eleusis]
  [fragment]
Edmund Keeley and
  Philip Sherrard
  translation
Princeton University Press, 1979©




Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Origins of Wednesday lvii: Russet theory















 If nature will not tell the tale 
 Jehovah told to her 
 Can human nature not survive 
 Without a listener?























Emily Dickinson
No. 1748
  [fragment]

Cf., Anne Carson
  of Red
  A Novel in Verse
Random House, 1998©

Eric Weiss






Monday, September 11, 2017

Fancy meeting you here


    Thank you for saying that.
    May I sit down?





          The fluted shaft on which she had taken her seat
          would have afforded a resting place to several
          persons, and there was plenty of room even for a
          highly-developed Englishman. This fine specimen
          of that great class seated himself near our young
          lady, and in the course of five minutes he had
          asked her several questions, taken rather at ran-
          dom and to which, as he put some of them twice o-
          ver, he apparently somewhat missed catching the
          answer; had given her too some information about
          himself which was not wasted upon her calmer fem-
          inine sense. He repeated more than once that he           
          had not expected to meet her, and it was evident
          that the encounter touched him in a way that would
          have made preparation advisable. He began abruptly
          to pass from the impunity of things to their sol-
          enmity, and from their being delightful to their
          being impossible. He was splendidly sunburnt; ..
          he was dressed in the loose-fitting, heterogeneous
          garments in which the English traveller in foreign
          lands is wont to consult his comfort and affirm 
          his nationality; and with his pleasant steady eyes,
          his bronzed complexion, fresh beneath its season-
          ing, his manly figure, his minimising manner and
          his general air of being a gentleman and an ex-
          plorer, he was such a representative of the Brit-
          ish race as need not in any clime have been dis-
          avowed by those who have a kindness for it ..




I think the phrase we are
looking for, in returning
to the recalcitrant enter-
tainer we think of by the
name, Henry James, is "re-
sort wear," an escapist
taste for psychological
reliability and tentative-
ness of characterization,
such as are submerged by
the present déluge. How
exotic, the acute and the
careful have come to seem,
while to James they were
just comfortable kit for
a sensible navigation.





























Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
1881










Sunday, September 10, 2017

Designations to dissolve


Every time I read Shel-
ley, I find myself ask-
ing why we call his an
English language voice.







                  ..
                  And the dim low line before
                  Of a dark and distant shore
                  Still recedes, as ever still
                  Longing with divided will,
                  But no power to seek or shun,
                  He is ever drifted on ..

                  What, if there no friends will greet;
                  What, if there no heart will meet
                  His with love's impatient beat;
                  Wander wheresoe'er he may,
                  Can he dream before that day
                  To find refuge from distress
                  In friendship's smile, in love's caress?

                  Then 'twill wreak him little woe
                  Whether such there be or no:
                  Senseless is the breast, and cold,
                  Which relenting love would fold;
                  Bloodless are the veins and chill
                  Which the pulse of pain did fill;
                  Every little living nerve
                  That from bitter words did swerve
                  Round the tortured lips and brow,
                  Are like sapless leaflets now
                  ..
                   


                    


















Percy Bysshe Shelley
[fragment]
1818