by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss -- oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.
This robe of snow and winter stars,
The devil take it, wear it, too.
It might become his hole of blue.
Let him move it to his regions,
White and star-furred for his legions,
And make much bing, high bing.
It would be ransom for the willow
And fill the hill and fill it full
Of ding, ding, dong.
4 comments:
"Spissantly." Well well well.
Someone was reading too much Horace!
It's always fun to see the havoc that classical lit. wreaks on English poetry. It wasn't until I knew Latin quite well that Hopkins' odd phrase, "Have fair fallen," made sense to me. Latin doesn't have a perfect imperative, but that tricky perfect subjunctive comes close. Such are the pitfalls of geekery. When you take your poem too far towards Greek or Latin, it makes you sound quite cracked.
Meredith,
I'm getting a chuckle out of the line with "bing" in it! I'm laughing myself silly imagining how it would sound in an Italian translation:
E fare molto bing ...
"E fare molto bing"
heehee!
Have you ever seen Borges' Spanish translation of "Lepanto"? Train wreck!
Unfortunately, I don't read Spanish! Alas!
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