(no subject)

True Night, Alvin Feinman

So it is midnight, and all
The angels of ordinary day gone,
The abiding absence between day and day
Come like true and only rain
Comes instant, eternal, again:

As though an air had opened without sound
In which all things are sanctified,
In which they are at prayer —
The drunken man in his stupor,
The madman’s lucid shrinking circle;

As though all things shone perfectly,
Perfected in self-discrepancy:
The widow wedded to her grief,
The hangman haloed in remorse —
I should not rearrange a leaf,

No more than wish to lighten stones
Or still the sea where it still roars —
Here every grief requires its grief,
Here every longing thing is lit
Like darkness at an altar.

As long as truest night is long,
Let no discordant wing
Corrupt these sorrows into song.

(no subject)

15. The Husbands
16. All Day Permanent Red

Both Homer/Logue, Books 3-4 and 5-6 respectively. Husbands is much the funner of the two - not even Logue can make Homer's battle scenes that interesting.

I said I never cared about the Iliad but that's not exactly true. I got to book 11 in Pope's version, which I dimly recall reading on the city bus on a dirty snow day, then to about the same place in Fagles' a couple years later. They were both pretty grand for a while, in their different ways, but then became tiresome, probably because of the fighting.

I remember stopping at the same point in my first few stabs at Ulysses - right after the very exciting funeral sequence, I think, when everything is suddenly extremely boring. Other people I've talked to also seem to stop there, those undaunted by "ineluctable modality of the visible" and the ensuing beach delirium. I wonder if Book 11 is a notorious dead air patch? Or if I stopped there twice because 200's the page limit of my Trojan War tolerance.

I should be going on to Cold Calls, strictly, but a) it's more battle scenes and b) I have no access to it anyway, so I'll risk spoilers by going on to Logue's versions of 16-19. If anything's left to be spoiled after both Troiluses, the flashbacks in The Aeneid, Book 12 of The Metamorphoses and a zillion Greek tragedies. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead movie spoiled the Hamlet plot for me - ironically, since Stoppard wrote it assuming that was the only unruinable plot, that everyone in the universe knew it from infancy, which probably they did in 1960 England. My trouble reading Homer would probably be much less if I didn't feel like I already knew the whole story.

I read online Logue's also done part of 21, Achilles' fight with Scamander, available in his Selected Poems.