Words

I’ll come back from vacation briefly to confess that I spent most of yesterday reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Verdict: I thought it was quite good, not without the inevitable rough patches but overall probably the best book of the series. Harry himself is still an insufferable git, willing to think the worst of his closest friends at the slightest provocation, but the teenage-angst stuff is kept to a minimum.

Best line, at least in context:

“NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!”

I got a bit misty in places, including that one. Rowling does a much better job at tugging on heartstrings here than in previous installments.

Let’s allow spoilers in the comments, so don’t read them if you don’t want to be spoiled.

We’re just about to run out of poetry month! Here’s Annie Finch, to close things out until next year.

Sir, I am not a bird of prey:
a Lady does not seize the day.
I trust that brief Time will unfold
our youth, before he makes us old.
How could we two write lines of rhyme
were we not fond of numbered Time
and grateful to the vast and sweet
trials his days will make us meet?
The Grave’s not just the body’s curse;
no skeleton can pen a verse!
So while this numbered World we see,
let’s sweeten Time with poetry,
and Time, in turn, may sweeten Love
and give us time our love to prove.
You’ve praised my eyes, forehead, breast:
you’ve all our lives to praise the rest.

In response to Andrew Marvell, of course. Both poems are pretty good, so I’m reluctant to take sides. Except: Annie Finch has a blog! Does Andrew Marvell have a blog? Not to my knowledge, no. So Finch wins this round.

It’s going to be Poetry Month all month long! But really, aren’t all months Poetry Month? Especially when time for substantive blogging is hard to come by?

Today we dip back a few millenia, to offer an excerpt from Virgil’s Aeneid, in the Robert Fagles translation. The backstory is that Aeneas has fled from the fall of Troy, charged by Jupiter with traveling to Italy and founding a new city (Rome). Along the way his party is diverted to Carthage by winds whipped up by the wind god Aeolus. (Who was in turn urged on by Juno, Jupiter’s wife, who was piqued at Aeneas because his mother, Venus, was judged to be better-looking than Juno by Aeneas’s countryman Paris. Gods have rarely risen above the standards of their humans.)

So anyway, in Carthage Aeneas is smitten by the widowed queen Dido, and they become lovers. Eventually Jupiter becomes impatient with this lollygagging, and urges Aeneas on his way. Dido, heartbroken, kills herself in her grief. Once in Italy, Aeneas does what any great epic hero would do, and takes a detour to the Underworld. There he comes across the shade of Dido, and appeals to her.

      “Tragic Dido,
so, was the story true that came my way?
I heard that you were dead. . .
you took the final measure with a sword.
Oh, dear god, was it I who caused your death?
I swear by the stars, by the Powers on high, whatever
faith one swears by here in the depths of earth,
I left your shores, my Queen, against my will. Yes,
the will of the gods, that drives me through the shadows now,
these moldering places so forlorn, this deep unfathomed night–
their decrees have forced me on. Nor did I ever dream
my leaving could have brought you so much grief.
Stay a moment. Don’t withdraw from my sight.
Running away — from whom? This is the last word
that Fate allows me to say to you. The last.”

Aeneas, with such appeals, with welling tears,
tried to soothe her rage, her wild fiery glance.
But she, her eyes fixed on the ground, turned away,
her features no more moved by his pleas as he walked on
than if she were sent in stony flint or Parian marble rock.

A great article in the New York Review (subscription required) by Hayden Pelliccia unpacks the layers of meaning behind the simple line “I left your shores, my Queen, against my will.” Although to us the scene is poignant, the emotional center of the entire poem, that particular line is an echo of a comic line in a poem of Catullus that would have been well known to Virgil — “I left your head, my Queen, against my will,” spoken by a shorn lock of the hair of Queen Berenice, cousin of the Egyptian king Ptolemy. So is the scene tragic, or secretly facetious? The answer is ambiguous, but involves an intricate digression into Roman politics and the loves of Cleopatra. That’s why every month is Poetry Month.

It’s still National Poetry Month! Today we transgress the “National” by including a Canadian; this is by Sonnet L’Abbé.

The vocabulary of desire
is incomplete, a word is missing.

My tongue searches
for your body in language
and finds you in every word.

I thought this was a small thing, a stone
in the palm I could offer you,
my body in darkness a simple gift
casual as a pebble.
As if touching were easier than speaking,
as if this poem did not prove you
inside me already, as if asking
meant I still had the power to invite.

But you make me aware of breathing,
of the awesome fact
that each particle of air
has been taken at least once
into every lung.
Suddenly I have no boundaries
and to kiss you seems to drink up the sky,
slip it from my tongue into your mouth.

Our bodies just our hearts’ clothing,
and I came to you so shabbily dressed.
Maybe I thought that for one night
I could wear your beauty through closeness
and for a few hours believe myself
splendidly arrayed.

But you know all the lyrics
to rejection.
My body, your exquisite voice’s
shattered glass.

And here’s another one: Theory My Natural Brown Ass.

All sorts of holidays going on, between Easter, Passover, and most importantly National Poetry Month, as hilzoy keeps reminding us. In celebration, here is an excerpt from the works of the immortal Bard; in particular, “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth,” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 5, Scene 1).

Good science is always poetry; some writers are just better at bringing it out than others. In this week’s New Yorker, Primo Levi (in a posthumously translated story) shows us how it’s done.

An observer who, to his misfortune, found himself on October 19th of 1950, at ten o’clock our time, on one of the silent planets of al-Ludra would have seen, “before his very eyes,” as they say, his gentle sun swell, not a little but “a lot,” and would not have been present at the spectacle for long. Within a quarter of an hour he would have been forced to seek useless shelter against the intolerable heat—and this we can affirm independently of any hypothesis concerning the size and shape of this observer, provided that he was constructed, like us, of molecules and atoms—and in half an hour his testimony, and that of all his fellow-beings, would end. Therefore, to conclude this account we must base it on other testimony, that of our earthly instruments, for which the event, in its intrinsic horror, happened in a “very” diluted form and, besides, was slowed down by the long journey through the realm of light that brought us the news. After an hour, the seas and ice (if there were any) of the no longer silent planet boiled up; after three, its rocks melted and its mountains crumbled into valleys in the form of lava. After ten hours, the entire planet was reduced to vapor, along with all the delicate and subtle works that the combined labor of chance and necessity, through innumerable trials and errors, had perhaps created there, and along with all the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined that sky, and had wondered what was the value of so many little lights, and had found no answer. That was the answer.

Some poetic license with the concept of simultaneity, but that’s okay. Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Bob Kirshner, who was the fact-checker’s fact checker. There’s an accompanying article about the translation.