Just-ice and Al-ice

Late last night, an image of the Justice card of the Tarot impressed itself on my mind, and I started thinking about it. It occurred to me that the word justice can be divided into the two words just ice. Fire and ice? No, just ice. Though I would ultimately dismiss that thought as meaningless, I did entertain it long enough to mentally compose for Frost's famous poem a sequel in which pretty much everyone agrees that the world will come to a cold end rather than a hot one. ("From all the vegetables I've lost / I hold with those who favor frost"; I won't inflict any more of it on you.)

This morning I read in The Story of Alice how

in 1901, copies of both books [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass] would be included in the small library on board Captain Scott's ship the Discovery, allowing his crew to while away the long Antarctic winters with adventures that replaced confinement with escapism, ice with Alice.

Alice, like justice, ends with the letters -ice,  though in neither case are they pronounced like the word ice, making the pun less likely to suggest itself. Also, there would normally be no connection at all between Alice in Wonderland and ice; the pun is only rendered usable by the highly unusual context of explorers taking Lewis Carroll's books with them to the Antarctic.

The just ice pun would also require a highly unusual context. As it happens, such a context suggested itself last July, when I wrote in a comment on "Hello. Goodbye. Shoot this man," "The frozen man wants mercy, but what has he got? Just ice." I found that by searching the blog. In last night's musings, I had completely forgotten that I had used that pun before.

In a closely related pun, some years ago I wrote a poem featuring a quibble on just as an adjective meaning "characterized by justice" and as an adverb meaning "merely."

With this my guilt how shall I live

Unless, my darling, you forgive

Me? Can you? Yes, I know you said

That God forgives, but God is just

A word that you can say instead

Of I and which means no one. Must

I turn to him and not to you?

I guess that he will have to serve.

God only knows what I shall do.

I guess I'll get what I deserve.

This was just an experiment in technique. The idea is that, the first two lines having (deceitfully) established rhyming couplets as the form of the poem, the reader will expect the fourth line to end with dead to rhyme with said. When it unexpectedly ends with just instead, the reader will naturally first understand it to mean just as opposed to merciful, only for the next line to reveal that it was actually an adverb. Each of these subverted expectations is returned to and resolved later in the poem, as subsequent lines do say in effect that God is dead ("just a word . . . which means no one," reinforced later by the use of "God only knows" to mean "no one knows") and that the speaker will receive justice rather than mercy ("I'll get what I deserve"). In theory, the reader might also expect the eighth line to end with do rather the contextually synonymous serve, but I'm not sure rhyme-scheme expectations are still strong enough at that point to have any real effect.

Speaking of Lewis Carroll and technically "clever" poems, yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

[T]he lines that opened Sylvie and Bruno were closely modelled on those that ended Through the Looking-Glass:

Is all our Life, then, but a dream

Seen faintly in the golden gleam

Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

(Sylvie and Bruno)

Ever drifting down the stream --

Lingering in the golden gleam --

Life, what is it but a dream?

(Through the Looking-Glass)

In Carroll's new acrostic, ISA Bowman had supplanted Alice LidELL as his official muse, but nothing else had changed

The two partial acrostics thus juxtaposed come very close to spelling out ISABEL, and would do so if only Bruno had received top billing rather than Sylvie, or if one more line of the first acrostic ("Bowed to the earth with bitter woe") had been included in the excerpt. (Or we might note that the fourth line actually begins with a bracket, which begins with b.) This is synchronistically significant because my recent post "Book of Mormon names and Pi Days" finds in a dream of Isabel and link to The Story of Alice. In a comment on that post, I wrote that "there are a few coincidences about the beginnings and ends of phrases." This syncs with the parts of the acrostics quoted, corresponding to the beginning of one muse's name and the end of the other's.

Coming back to the beginning of this post, I discuss a pun involving the word just, talk about rewriting Frost's poem that begins "Some say the world will end in fire," and then quote a reference to "Captain Scott," the Antarctic explorer. Last July, I published a post called "Some say the world will end in fire," which quotes a Moody Blues song referencing "Captain Scott" in the Antarctic and immediately follows it with a picture of a T-shirt that says "GOAL IS JUST." This was published just three days after the frozen man "just ice" pun.