Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came,
It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell
Skills not to be stop'd by high water or hell.
We bow to no ban, and though new Men or Old
May presume to forbid it, the tale will be told.
High water, freeze over! and hell, do your worst!
Let stanzas roll forth, and let this be the first.
1 comment:
Great poem, William. I can't speak to the metrical scheme, though I'm sure you can, but I count eleven syllables per line; save the sixth, which has twelve. (One niggle: "Atlantis's.") Atlantis's the fitting stuff of poetry, being as it is of the essence of fiction. Yes, let the stanzas roll forth, and let each and every one of them, as indeed they must, be entirely made up! Atlantis is one of Plato's noblest philosophic lies--and he lied his arse off. And Tolkien just added another layer of lies to his phantasy of Númenor. So, let your imagination run free as theirs and renounce your namesake for at least a while.
If you will childlike play in Atlantis a spell,
so mote it be, come "high water or hell."
I take it "incipit" means "begins." A famous "incipit" is aphorism 342 (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft). It's funny, because incipit was on my mind recently. It had to do with one of your references to Laura Bruno. In the post "Gardens of pomegranates" there's a moderately lengthy quotation from Ms. Bruno toward the end which you, so to speak, block quote. In that citation, she is contemplating various opening lines to a story, and the key is that they are each supposed to be reflective of extreme naivety. In a comment I was formulating at the time, yet didn't publish, I needed a convenient expression to indicate these "opening line" types of sentence, and I settled on "incipit," as a noun. One of Ms. Bruno's very naive incipits was "a man's word is bond" (I paraphrase). I thought it interesting that in that same post, you were in high dudgeon because Israel Regardie "violated his oaths." Anyway, I've been thinking lately how naivety is indicative of goodness.
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