[ilds] Persian Ladies

[slighcl]

On 2/27/2008 7:13 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> You're right, Charles.  But I would add a remark that Michael Haag made sometime ago, that Durrell had his own personal code, and I would add that there's no point in referencing the "code unbroken" unless one wants someone to break it.  I see the Dark Lady as a Justine/Eve Cohen figure.
>
>
>   
That is an interesting connection, Bruce, and the Eve Cohen hunch chimes 
with "the perfected darkness of her beauty."  (Pretty phrase.)  It also 
works for the early 1960s date.

But I wonder about the diplomatic conceit of the poem and the 
renunciation of the affair--which goes unconsummated--"the collision of 
ripening wishes" (very fine) never to come about, never to bear the 
mortal fruit.
> They let the seminal instant go,
> The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes
> Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory.
> Next day he deliberately left the musical city
> To join a boring water-party on the lake.
> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it,
> I have been spared very much in this business.'
What do we make of that?  Beyond biographical sleuthing--which I will 
leave to Michael--I will imagine this poem playing out somewhere the 
/Quartet'/s continuum of possibility.  Perhaps this poetic aversion of 
crisis is David Mountolive in a situation that we do not find directly 
in the novels.

C&c.

-- 
**********************
Charles L. Sligh
Department of English
Wake Forest University
slighcl at wfu.edu
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