I have forgot much, Cynara!

On January 26, in "The blue and scarlet books," I posted this photo of a shelf at a used bookstore:

I was interested in only two of the books in the photo: Scarlett and Sacré Bleu. The former is a sequel to Gone with the Wind, and the title of that novel is prominently displayed on the spine, much larger than the author's name. In my post, I associated Sacré Bleu with the Book of Mormon (a sacred text typically bound in blue) and noted that the author's name resembles the first syllable of Monmon.

Today, looking for a table showing the word count of each chapter in the Book of Mormon, I ended up on this page (which looks "AI"-generated and is not recommended; I'm just linking it for documentation), where I found this infographic:

The parallels with my bookshelf photo are uncanny. I was only interested in two of the books in my photo, and that was because they were associated with particular colors. Two of the books in the infographic also stand out because of their colors -- the others are all a similar tan color -- and these correspond perfectly to the two important books in the photo. The Book of Mormon, the third book from the right, was the book I had associated with Sacré Bleu, also the third book from the right. Immediately to the left of the Book of Mormon is a larger book, Gone with the Wind, which unlike the other novels does not have the author's name on the spine. Immediately to the left of Sacré Bleu is a book that also says Gone with the Wind on the spine, but it is not by Margaret Mitchell, and the author's name is downplayed, in much smaller type than the other words on the spine.

I've never read Gone with the Wind, so what that title makes me think of is not so much the novel itself as the Ernest Dowson poem from which it takes its name, "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae." Here is the relevant stanza:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The words I've bolded make me think of the Mormon-adjacent story created by Daymon Smith and Bill Wright. Bill is focused on an object he calls the Rose Stone. The word throng -- used again and again, often in odd and unnatural contexts -- is one of the distinctive features of Daymon's Words books, the first of which is called Words of the Faithful. The "lost lilies" of Eressea, consumed by the "sick" Numenoreans, is a plot point from those books that Bill has brought up repeatedly.

The title of that Dowson poem, or part of it, has appeared on this blog before, in "Oh mark I am."

The appearance of War and Peace in that infographic may also be relevant in connection with "Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences." Its position corresponds to that of The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley in the photo. Since Burke means "fortress" and Cowley means "cow pasture," Burke and Cowley is a reasonable fit for War and Peace.