February 2012
11 posts
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Cat in Moonlight
Through moonlight’s milk She slowly passes As soft as silk Between tall grasses. I watch her go So sleek and white, As white as snow, The moon so bright I hardly know White moon, white fur, Which is the light And which is her.
Douglas Gibson
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music time back way back
No 1 uses the old place names now they ben unspoak this long time but mos of them are stil there in the places. You know Cambry ben Canterbury in moufs long ago. Canterbury. It has a zanting in it like a tall man dantsing and time back there ben foun there girt big music pipes as big as fents poals peopl said. You try to think of how it musve soundit when the Power Ring ben there and working not...
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Robert Graves on mechanical prose
And from the inability to think poetically — to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense — derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words...
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They killed him entirely
A young man died after injuries received in a row, and his friend says:– ‘It is dreadful about the poor boy: they made at him in the house and killed him there; then they dragged him out on the road and killed him entirely, so that he lived for only three days after.’
P. W. Joyce, English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910)
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“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of...”
– William James on the subject effects of nitrous oxide.
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Grammar and speech
It is not the business of grammar, as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give law to the fashions which regulate our speech. On the contrary, from its conformity to these, and from that alone, it derives all its authority and value.
George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)
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The glimpse of a form
I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have to retrace my steps by way of the shadows. I try to interfere as little as possible in the evolution of the work. I do not want...