I've no doubt my recent Wystan-bashing is partly a not very well disguised campaign to even things out... Auden partly responsible himself for doing down MacNeice's middle period - he's quite snooty about it in one of the selected editions.
Quite brilliant how MacNeice introduces the ‘hand’ and then waits four lines before returning to it, as ‘It’, at the start of the line, giving us grammatically exactly that sense of automated dissociation he is describing.
Absolutely. I feel like The Burning Perch in particular is full of that kind of thing but it's a signature move in general. I wonder if there's a classical influence.
Yes, that's what I was thinking: in fact, it was probably reading Victoria Moul's post on Horace this week, and the difficulty of translating his syntactical delay into English, that made me alert to it...
Yes English is really limited compared to Latin or Greek not only in word-order but also (even compared to e.g. French) because of the lack of grammatical gender and resulting lack of referential clarity in pronouns. That hand is a great example I agree!
And now I’m thinking about an anthology of ‘hand’ poems… (and also the title poem from ‘Holding Your Eight Hands’, a rather good anthology of ‘science fiction verse’ ed. Edward Lucie Smith, 1969).
You'd have to have Titus Andronicus. "What accursèd hand /
Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?" etc etc The puns go on for ages as she stands there spouting blood from her stumps and every orifice. Hideously hilarious scene.
Thanks for the kind words! Louis does seem to be having a moment, doesn’t he? Long may it last. He’s been too long in Wystan’s shadow.
I've no doubt my recent Wystan-bashing is partly a not very well disguised campaign to even things out... Auden partly responsible himself for doing down MacNeice's middle period - he's quite snooty about it in one of the selected editions.
Quite brilliant how MacNeice introduces the ‘hand’ and then waits four lines before returning to it, as ‘It’, at the start of the line, giving us grammatically exactly that sense of automated dissociation he is describing.
Absolutely. I feel like The Burning Perch in particular is full of that kind of thing but it's a signature move in general. I wonder if there's a classical influence.
Yes, that's what I was thinking: in fact, it was probably reading Victoria Moul's post on Horace this week, and the difficulty of translating his syntactical delay into English, that made me alert to it...
Yes English is really limited compared to Latin or Greek not only in word-order but also (even compared to e.g. French) because of the lack of grammatical gender and resulting lack of referential clarity in pronouns. That hand is a great example I agree!
The syntax of that passage also reminded me distantly of Keats, 'This Living Hand': https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50375/this-living-hand-now-warm-and-capable
And now I’m thinking about an anthology of ‘hand’ poems… (and also the title poem from ‘Holding Your Eight Hands’, a rather good anthology of ‘science fiction verse’ ed. Edward Lucie Smith, 1969).
You'd have to have Titus Andronicus. "What accursèd hand /
Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?" etc etc The puns go on for ages as she stands there spouting blood from her stumps and every orifice. Hideously hilarious scene.