(no subject)

[proximoception]

What are Bloom's other direct sources? His own reading of Childe Roland, for one, and probably of Tennyson's Holy Grail episode, though no specific details come to mind. And then he's playing on "we are here for an interval only and our place will know us no more" in Pater's "Conclusion"--which quotes what in the Bible, Ecclesiastes? And there's obviously the rider who passes Stevens' Mrs. Alfred Uruguay:

Who was it passed her there on a horse all will,
What figure of capable imagination?
Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose,
As it descended, blind to her velvet and
The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun,
A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,
Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,
Lost in an integration of the martyrs' bones,
Rushing from what was real; and capable?

The villages slept as the capable man went down,
Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,
The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,
As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,
Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,
Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road,
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyrs' bones,
The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

Key dote?

Comments

[thelican.livejournal.com]

Capable remains my favorite word in that poem. He uses it so...capably.