a fool in the forest

Epigraphs

  • A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the
        forest,
    A motley fool; a miserable world!
    As I do live by food, I met a fool
    Who laid him down and bask'd him
        in the sun,
    And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good
        terms,
    In good set terms and yet a motley
        fool.

    As You Like It,
    Act II, Scene 7

    L'homme y passe à travers des
        forêts de symboles
    Qui l'observent avec des regards
        familiers.

    Les Fleurs du Mal,
    “Correspondances”

    [T]here is almost no subject-matter, and what little one can disentangle is foolish....
    One would call the style verbose, except that by definition verbosity is the use of words in excess of the occasion, and there seems to be no occasion.

    Yvor Winters,
    Forms of Discovery, Ch. 7


    Best Personal Blog
    by a Legally-Oriented
    Male Blogger

    Blawg Review Awards 2005

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June 13, 2008

Paper Puppets in Purgatorio Prequel!

D:    I was totally expecting to see demons, and bondage stuff . . .
V:    This is Hell, Dante, not your personal fantasy . . . .

Via LAist, I learn of what sounds like an interesting exhibition running through August 9 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, "The Puppet Show."  The Museum provides this description:

International in scope, the exhibition brings together works by 28 contemporary artists who explore the imagery of puppets in sculpture, film, video, time-based media, animation, and 2D work. . . .

The Puppet Show
takes as its historic point of departure a great work of European avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi, which was originally conceived as a puppet show.  The despotic King, who strode on stage roaring the French scatological word 'merdre,' is the perfect source for all puppet allegories of grotesque government and acts of puppet transgression.  More recently, puppets have taken hold of popular consciousness.  They show up on stage, on television, in film, and even online, where assuming a fake identity to garner public opinion is called 'sock-puppeting.'  Seen in correspondence with these pop culture images, the works in The Puppet Show advance the question: why do puppets matter now?

The Museum's listing of exhibition-related events led me to the real find of the day: a new film adaptation of Dante's Inferno, which will be shown on July 19.  The filmmakers describe it thus:

DANTE’S INFERNO has been kicking around the cultural playground for over 700 years.  But it has never before been interpreted with exquisitely hand-drawn paper puppets, brought to life using purely hand-made special effects.  Until now.  Rediscover this literary classic, retold in a kind of apocalyptic graphic novel meets Victorian-era toy theater.  Dante’s Hell is brought to lurid 3-dimensional, high-definition life in a darkly comedic travelogue of the underworld — set against an all-too-familiar urban backdrop of used car lots, gated communities, strip malls, and the U.S. Capitol.  And populated with a contemporary cast of reprobates, including famous — and infamous — politicians, presidents, popes, pimps.  And the Prince of Darkness himself.

The film, directed by Sean Meredith, is based on the contemporizing adaptation of the Inferno created by California painter Sandow Birk in collaboration with Marcus Sanders -- the two actually tackled entire Divine Comedy -- with Dermot Mulroney voicing Dante and James Cromwell (Farmer Hoggett!  Inventor of the warp drive!) as Virgil.  Here is the trailer, which concludes with the bit of dialogue at the top of this post:

Did you spot Paulo and Francesca? 

Superior quality smallish and largish QuickTime versions of the trailer are available at the film's Official SiteDante's Inferno is scheduled for a DVD release on August 26.

When last we encountered Dante Alighieri at the cinema, he was traveling through the underworld in the first-ever (vintage 1911) feature-length Italian film, freshly restored with a new score by Tangerine Dream.  I hadn't yet mastered the gentle art of YouTube embedding back in 2005, so here is a belated repeat of the lengthy trailer for that rather more traditional version:

May 26, 2008

Memorial

War_memorial

The Wife of the Soldier
Bertolt Brecht

What did the wife of the soldier get
From the ancient city of Prague?
From Prague she got the linen shirt
It matched her skirt did the linen shirt
That she got from the city of Prague

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Brussels, the Belgian town?
From Brussels she got the delicate lace
Oh! the charm and the grace of the delicate lace
That she got from the Belgian town

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Paris, the city of light?
From Paris she got the silken dress
Oh! to possess the silken dress
That she got from the city of light

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Libya's desert sands?
From Libya the little charm
Around her arm she wore the charm
That she got from the desert sands

What did the wife of the soldier get
From Russia's distant steppes?
From Russia she got the widow's veil
And the end of the tale is the widow's veil
That she got from the distant steppes

~~~

Photo: South Boston War Memorial by Flickr! user Joe Dunckley, used under Creative Commons License.

~~~

May 15, 2008

Epithalamium Redux

Sappho

The California Supreme Court is due to release its decision on gay marriage about an hour from now, which is as good an excuse as any to reprint my double dactyl cycle on the subject, first posted -- with more trepidation than now seems warranted -- in February 2004

The original occasion for the poem was San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's directive to the City's authorities to license and endorse same-sex marriages.  That policy was ordered stayed shortly thereafter, and the matter has been under review by the state Supreme Court until today.  What the Court will decide and where matters will go from there is as yet a mystery -- perhaps as much of a mystery as the intricacies of human affection.

I hadn't looked back at this for at least a year or two before returning to it today.  On reflection, it stands as one of the things I am most pleased with having posted here.  Please bear with me, then, as I repeat myself:

~~~

Epithalamium

I

Hymen, Hymenaeus!
Gay men and lesbians
Flock to the City Hall,
Follow their bliss,

Purchase their licenses,
Swear to their permanence,
Pose for the camera crews
Sharing a kiss.

II

Damned, sir?  They’re damned, you say?
Possibly, possibly:
Love has led millions to
Suffer a Fall.

That’s for the next world, sir;
Here with the living -- well,
What was it Chaucer said?
“Love conquers all.”

III

Poets, sir. Love poets.
Some of the best have been
Gay, sir.  Consider this
List I’ve compiled:

Wystan Hugh Auden and
C.P. Cavafy and
Sappho. James Merrill, Thom
Gunn, Oscar Wilde.

IV

Legally, legally,
Should an impediment
Rise to the marriage of
Minds that are true?

Sure as there’s only one
Race, sir -- the human race --
How would you feel if it
Happened to you?

V

Citizens, citizens,
Leave to your churches these
Questions of sanctity,
Tough and profound.

Secular governments
Ought to facilitate
Binding of lovers who
Yearn to be bound.

VI

Hymen, Hymenaeus!
Cleave to the one who’s your
Heart’s true companion, the
Thou to your I.

Now, when the times are so
Fearsome we all must, as
Auden says, “love one a-
nother or die.”

~~~

Illustration: "Sappho" from the Musei Capitolini, Rome, via Wikimedia Commons.

January 10, 2008

"I was pierced lazily
By the lovers of the sea
Sucking mildly on the dumbfound horses"

Your results may -- nay, will -- vary.

Via Contemporary Poetry Review via Thomas Disch, whose About the Size of It is reviewed in the current issue.

~~~

January 09, 2008

"Though far in time and faith, I share his tears"

Vikram Seth burst on the scene in 1986 with his novel in verse, The Golden Gate.  For his tale of life, love, death and renewal among the yuppies, Seth adopted Pushkin's Eugene Onegin stanza (as Englished in the delicious Charles Johnston translation).  While the specifics of its story are very much of its time, the themes of The Golden Gate hold up well, and the technical facility and bubbling wit with which Seth constructed his long poem remain a thorough pleasure two decades later.

Seth has since been better known as a prose novelist, particularly for his also-a-good-doorstop Indian epic, A Suitable Boy.  He has remained a poet, however, and in 2003 he purchased the former home of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet George Herbert (1593-1633) outside Salisbury.

Vikram Seth writes of his predecessor and his home:

Herbert came from an aristocratic Welsh family; he was Public Orator at Cambridge and had a promising career as a diplomat or courtier ahead of him.  Instead, he chose to be a parish priest.  The humble parish of Bemerton near Salisbury was offered to him by Charles I 'if it be worth his acceptance'.  He found the house in a ramshackle condition, and when, in 1630, he became rector, repaired and expanded it at his own expense.  It was to be his only parish; he died of consumption three years later at the age of thirty-nine.  He wrote a few lines “To My Successor”, which are carved in stone in the north wall of the rectory:

If thou chance for to find
A new house to thy mind
And built without thy cost
Be good to the poor
As God gives thee store
And then my labour’s not lost.

The relationship between poets centuries apart proved fruitful, and today the Times Literary Supplement has published Seth's "Three poems inspired by George Herbert."

There is no substitute for the real thing, but Seth's homage to Herbert embarrasses neither poet.  Grace and loveliness abound. 

If such things matter to you -- and you know they should -- click through and read immediately.

~~~

UPDATE [011008]: I had no doubt that Mike Snider would appreciate these poems, so I passed along the link.  He, in turn, used Seth's poems as an excuse to praise the TLS for giving his due and perhaps a dollop more to Philip Larkin.   Larkin, I confess, is somewhere deep in my internalized list of writers on whom I have never sufficiently focused concerted attention.  That is a long list, you can be sure, there being no end to the making of books and all that.  Will this reminder move Larkin forward a bit in the queue?  One never knows.  I need to turn my attention again to George Herbert first, I think.

December 23, 2007

The Unbeatable Madness of Bears

What?  Oh, where am I?  Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts!  If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci, Act V, Scene IV.

Bear1

This is Bear.  Bear and I have kept company now for over half a century.  I like to think I am holding up better than Bear has done, but I could be wrong.

Thomas Disch keeps company with a bear named Mortlake.  That, at least, is the name the bear seems to have given out.  Most bears guard their true names as they would their lives, lest in disclosing them they give away some power over themselves.  The circumstances in which a bear's true name may be revealed are said to be contained in the Tibetan Book of the Bears, although no man living has actually seen that fabled and terrible volume.  Better safe than sorry, my bear is Bear and Bear he shall remain.

Mortlake is reported to have become most agitated over the the recent unpleasantness in the Sudan in which the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons learned of the dangers attendant to the naming of bears.  The British are not so bellicose in the Gordon Brown era as they have been in others, so there will be no "War of Gibbons' Bear" to join the "War of Jenkins' Ear" in the history books.

Recently, I have been concerned for Bear's mental equilibrium after Mr. Disch posted a new poem, "The Mad Teddybear," which begins:

I met a teddybear the other day
who'd lost his mind. They lose their minds,
some elderly bears, before they lose their lives.
It comes from being left alone
and staring too long at the ceiling.

Bear is not, I think, mad, only quiet.  I think he spends his time on his shelf communing with his little household gods, Bear's lares.  He has always been one for keeping his own counsel.  Mortlake, for his part, harbors imperial ambitions, often mistaken for madness but not really the same thing at all.

~~~

Although I have only recently found his LIveJournal pages, led there by John Crowley, I first mentioned Thomas Disch here over four years ago.  A rifling through the pages of Amazon reveals that several of my favorite Disch books -- includng Clara Reeve and The Castle of Indolence -- are not currently in print.  He does, however, have a new novella -- The Voyage of the Proteus: An Eyewitness Account of the End of the World -- due out next week, and in July will reveal "the intimate details of his sudden elevation to Godhood" in The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten.  He, like the bears, bears watching.

November 12, 2007

Stuff, Meet Nonsense

I have a backlog of miscellaneous items, many months in the making, saved away to be pointed to in an appropriate post.  Since many of those posts seem destined never to arrive, here is an attic-cleaning catch-all of items whose only common feature is that they caught this Fool's interest:

  • Søren Kierkegaard, Denmark's gift to philosophy and one of the best writers ever to apply himself to that trade, has been turning up with some frequency in my weblog reading.  Here, for instance is ArtsJournal music blogger Kyle Gann, en route to Copenhagen, thinking at length about SK's place in his personal canon:

Kierkegaard Of course, I was a musician too, and while the 'Or' of Either/Or held a certain academic interest, it was the 'Either' that I devoured with page-flipping relish.  Kierkegaard's pseudonymous division of his authorship into 'aesthetic' versus 'ethical' or religious personas may have been ironic in intent, with a finger on the religious side of the scale, but his detailed psychology of the total aesthete was, as he knew, the more seductive.  His argument about Don Giovanni - that since the seducer is the personality most trapped in time, and music is the art that deals with time, seduction is the perfect musical subject, therefore Don Giovanni is the most perfect possible piece of music - wasn't very convincing then or now, despite the persuasive fanaticism with which it is developed.  But he captured and conveyed, in startlingly vivid terms, the manic subjectivism of a mental life turned away from the quotidian world and devoted to the absolute in art.  To read that was a heady loss of innocence, a recognition that someone else had heard the same siren song I did - and followed it.

Via Sounds & Fury.  I have LA Opera's Don Giovanni to look forward to in a few weeks, which is as good an excuse as any to revisit the unconvincing but enjoyable musical portions of Either/Or.  [Kierkegaard fanciers may derive a small chuckle from the Amazon.com page reachable by that link, which straightfacedly lists "Victor Eremita," one of Kierkegaard's numerous pseudonyms, as "editor" of that Penguin edition.  Others will wonder what we are chuckling about.]

SK also turned up unexpectedly on Tom Wark's daily wine blog, Fermentation, in a post entitled "Kierkegaard & Self Medicating with Wine."  Tom's subject is the dangerous illusions that may lie concealed behind "appreciation" of the noble grape and its works:

Even more depressing than finding one's self embracing Kierkegaard's aesthetic life of jumping from transitory experience to transitory experience in an attempt to stave off a life of boredom, is the somewhat similar strategy of dealing with the boredom of life by pretending that self-medication with wine is actually the act of connoisseurship.

What does it mean?  I derive from it this Foolish aphorism:

Pastiche is a cracking form of flattery, and crackers are a flatter form of pastry! 

Tired of imitations?  For real Goreyana, repair to the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts.

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a 'fully worked out' world.  I’m not interested in 'self consistency'.  I don’t care what kind of underpants Iberian troops wore in 1812, or if I do I can find out about it for myself.  I don’t want the facts about the Silk Road or the collapse of the Greenland Colony, sugared up & presented in three-volumes as an imaginary world.  I don’t want to be talked through your enthusiasm for costume.  I don’t want be talked through anything.

I was describing to tomsdisch the things I'd been finding via Google in service of my new book (some described herein) -- things I didn't know could be known --  and he said 'ah yes, Google has put an end to the art of wondering.'

Which to me attains very nearly to the status of an immortal apercu.

To which category might also be added Disch's recent two-line poem, "Correction."

Nutkin_buttons

'Unless something radical and imaginative is done . . . Squirrel Nutkin and his friends and relations are going to be toast.'

The fox and badger lobbies are also heard from. 

Via 3quarksdaily

[Nutkin buttons photo (click to enlarge) by jasmined via Flickr, under Creative Commons license.]

  • Lives of the Connoisseurs: TIME Magazine' Richard Lacayo on Peggy Guggenheim, reminding us that the early 20th Century was a pretty good time to be well-off and blessed with discerning taste:

She found a house with the largest private garden in Venice and had the last private gondola in the city for her daily long rides.  She entertained frequently, though not lavishly.  She was notorious for her scanty food and cheap wine.  From her biographers you get the sense of a full life — the guest book carried names like Giacometti, Paul Bowles, Cocteau, Chagall, Saul Steinberg, Cecil Beaton, Stravinsky, Tennessee Wiliams, Paul Newman and Truman Capote — but not always a happy one. She lavished fast cars on one of her younger lovers.  He died in one.

Whole Foods has opened a new 2-story greengrocer's establishment here in Pasadena, its largest store west of the Rockies.  Callie Miller of LAist dotes, posts many photos and declares that it "seem[s]...excessive, in the most eco-friendly way possible."

Unfortunately not shown in those photos: the site was formerly occupied by auto repair facilities and a tire store, all in a brick garage building that I would guess dated back to the mid 1920's.  In a nice bit of adaptive reuse, Whole Foods left two of the brick walls standing and incorporated them into the ground floor of the new store.  For a city sitting slambang in the thick of earthquake country, old Pasadena has a remarkable quantity of brick construction.

[escapegrace pointed the way.]

April 16, 2007

Imus in Wonder Land

It's all the penguins' fault.  The whole Don Imus business was not a subject that was ever going to show up on this weblog but for my having had the mixed fortune this past Saturday night of watching George Miller's Happy Feet

As anyone knows who has seen that film, or its trailers, one of the central scenes is built around Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" (from his 1976 double album Songs in the Key of Life), and "I Wish" includes, in the second line of its first verse, one half of the epithet that resulted in such trouble for Don Imus.  Stevie Wonder's use of the term is, unlike that of Don Imus, clearly free of negative connotation; if anything, Wonder wraps it in warm waves of nostalgia.

The conjunction of current events, dancing penguins, and one of those tunes that you just can't get out of your head [MIDI link] has left me no choice: I simply had to take a run at crafting new, topical lyrics for Wonder's classic. 

Unlike some of my earlier forays in to topical light verse in which I have expressed my own opinions, this is a character piece: it is the imagined plaint of the fallen celebrity himself -- only funkier.  With apologies to the great and beloved Stevie, sing it if you know it:

I Mus’

Lookin’ back on when I
called those ladies “nappy-headed ho’s”
Causin’ such a rash o’
trouble to come knockin’ at my do’
I said "I was jokin’,
I didn’t mean a thing"
Never once suspectin’
the headaches it would bring

Howls for retribution
loudest from some former guests o’ mine
Critics all come pushin’
seein’ who can be the first in line
I said I was sorry,
tried to apologize
But that didn’t stop 'em
from whoopin’ my behind

Chorus:

I mus’ be fired
They’ve
Taken ‘way my show,
I wish my show
Would
Come back once more.
I mus’ be fired
They’ve
Taken ‘way my show,
I wish my job
Would
Come back once more
    Oh, I miss it so
    [d’doo, d’doo, d’doo-d’doo-d’doot-doot-doo…]

If I'd just been thinkin'
I'd have known enough to shush my mouth
[you nasty boy!]
Now I'm off the airwaves

in the north and east and west and south
It's so low and stupid
I see I was a fool
But when I was sayin' it
it made me feel so cool,

Chorus:

I mus’ be dim

Darned
Dumb don'cha know,
To say such things
And
Cost myself my show.
I mus’ be fired
They’ve
Taken ‘way my show,
I wish my job
Would
Come back once more...

Fade out.

P.S., Happy Feet?  A strangely and deeply unsatisfying film.  The more I think about it, the less I like it.  Even its many technical high points decline upon reflection.  And I say that as an admirer of George Miller, a big fan of Road Warrior, and one who thinks that the late Gene Siskel's finest hour may have been when he declared Babe: Pig in the City the best film of 1998.  These penguins' Academy Award serves to prove once again that you should never trust the judgment of show people.

February 16, 2007

"You Keep Using That Word . . . .
I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"

Quotable.  From Peter Nicholson, writing at 3quarksdaily:

Misuse of the word 'poetic' is so common as to be beyond repair.  Proper poetry dives into the world, takes in its multifariousness, its roughnesses and tragedies, its joy at beauty, even as the poet grabs on to the broken glass shards of the Muse's patchy visitations.  'Poetic' is not another word for nice, kind, sedate, palatable.

~ ~ ~

SUPPLEMENTAL "POETICAL" CONTENT
[1449 PST]:

Secreted at his post in the library of Brown University, Providence, poet and HG Poetics blogger Henry Gould is at work on a longish poem relating in some fashion to the city-state of Siena.  A recent installment, however, ventured to Vienna and invoked Klimt's painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer:

Those large, pensive eyes. . .  that gaze

goes back to Byzantium (ripple of pebbles

on a curving dome).

Adele is known as a sometime favorite on this weblog and the subject of a rather more facetious bit of versification on my part this past June. 

Another recent remark or two at HG Poetics led me to the novel that is currently engrossing my evenings' reading time, of which more when I finally finish it.

The non-Klimt drawing accompanying Henry's Adele post, and those accompanying several of his other recent posts, are the work of Martín Ramírez, subject of a current retrospective at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which failed to impress CultureGrrl Lee Rosenbaum; TIME's Richard Lacayo liked it a bit better.

* * *

[The original portion of this post was edited when it was supplemented.  More detail in the continuation.]

Continue reading ""You Keep Using That Word . . . .
I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"" »

January 24, 2007

And That, Sir, Is Why You Need a Good Policy of Insurance

Hardycartoon Each serious Reader -- you know, the sort wha' spells i' with the ostentatious capital "R" -- must admit at some stage that there will be gaps in his or her reading, authors or works the Reader knows surely ought to be read, that the Reader wants to read really, but with which and whom he or she will never actually settle in.  One of my own Writers in the Gap is Thomas Hardy.  I confess it.  I have never read any of his novels: not Tess, not Jude, not any of them.  The nearest I have come was the long-ago BBC/Masterpiece Theater dramatization of The Mayor of Casterbridge, with Alan Bates, which was very good but did not send me running to the library.

I did, however, finally make a venture to the library in the last few weeks to look in to the later stage of Hardy's long career -- Hardy the poet, rather than Hardy the novelist. 

The trigger was the first few paragraphs of Jonathan Bate's paired review of two new Hardy biographies in the Times Literary Supplement.  Bate begins with a little "how-to" for biographers before pointing to the poems that I knew I had to read:

* * * The [biographer's] first decision is therefore the choice of vignette for your prologue.  Ralph Pite and Claire Tomalin begin as follows: 'You have to leave your car in the car park and walk up the lane' and 'In November of 1912 an ageing writer lost his wife'.  Admirers of Tomalin’s work will have no difficulty in assigning these openings to their respective authors, not least because she is too elegant and economic a writer ever to use the word 'car' twice in any sentence, let alone the all-important first one. Her best books are about marriages or quasi-marital relationships: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, above all Dora Jordan and the future King William IV.  Her prologue accordingly turns Emma, the first Mrs Hardy, into a version of the madwoman in the attic, sleeping alone on the top floor of Max Gate, reading and writing all day in a second attic room, having her breakfast and lunch brought up by her maid. The writerly decision to take the trouble to record the latter’s name (Dolly) is the authentic Tomalin touch.

Emma dies and the second paragraph begins with a bold claim: 'This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet'. The remainder of the prologue is devoted to a highly sensitive account of the 'Poems of 1912–13', those extraordinary elegies of tender, guilty, evanescent remembrance in which Hardy recaptured his Cornish courtship of 1870. Tomalin is right: they are without question among the greatest poems of the twentieth century – and among the most influential, for they laid the ground for the reaction against high modernism . . . .

Beyond that stimulus, there has been a bit of a webstorm of Hardy material in the past few weeks:

  • In the New Yorker, Adam Kirsch disagreed somewhat with Tomalin's "misleading argument"  in her prologue.  ("Not only is this not true on the merits . . . but it is also a simplistic account of the way life is transmuted into art.") 
  • Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, for her part, posts a very nice piece emphasizing the "Poems 1912-1913," while making no particular reference to either of the new biographies.   
  • Meanwhile, the Kirsch and O'Rourke pieces are cited in a pair of cogent Hardy-related posts -- here, and here -- on Ben Kilpela's Yvor Winters blog.

So then: I have been reading Hardy's poems, sifting through a harrowingly vast body of work -- the Complete Poems run to 1040 pages in the current paperbound edition, and that does not include Hardy's vast three-part verse dramatization (!) of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts -- and finding that one could really make a career of it if one were so inclined.  I feel the need to spend much more time on it all, but for now I want to post just one, early poem. 

This comes very near the beginning of Hardy's first published collection, the Wessex Poems of 1898, and pinpoints a theme remarked on or disputed at varying length in all of the posts cited above: the notion that the universe, with or without a personalizable deity behind it, presents itself as a context in which to live that may not be malevolent, but that ultimately does what it will without much caring or acknowledging the consequences to its individual human targets.  In some sense, this is the poetic expression of the line William Goldman gave to the returning hero Westley in The Princess Bride:  "Life is pain, highness: anyone who tells you different is selling something."  Hardy, of course, is a bit less flippant on the subject:

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: 'Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!'

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so.  How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

~~~
Even More Hardy:

  • Also in the TLS, "retired medical practitioner" Robert Alan Frizzell engages in a bit of lurid forensic speculation on the source of Emma Hardy's ailments and death.  I link, you decide.
  • For the initial link to Bate's TLS piece, thanks to Morgan Meis at 3quarksdaily.
  • One can never be sure whether Hardy himself subscribes to any point of view expressed in his poems.  His prefaces tend to include disclaimers, such as the one that accompanies the Wessex Poems, that "[t]he pieces are in a large degree dramatic or personative in conception; and this even where they are not obviously so."
  • "Crass Casualty" should not be your first choice when purchasing a homeowners policy.