[ilds] syllabary and codes

[slighcl]

On 2/28/2008 10:34 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition?  The colloquial diction for one:  "Say what you like . . . " 

>         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.'


I think that I prefer to allow "A Persian Lady" to be ancient or modern 
in its historical moment, with my reading swinging back and forth 
between those ambiguous points of reference, "/his time and ours/."

>         On the other hand neither would she build him sons
>         Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry
>         Which was the fashion of his time and ours.

'Round and round and round she goes /  where she stops, nobody knows. . 
. .'  At least I really cannot say.  That first person plural really 
opens the poem up to fuller potentiality.  As if "/his/" time was not 
difficult enough, then we must deal with "/ours/."

Eliot is there too, Bruce, and the colloquial is a sign that he is one 
of the shadows behind the poem. 

And we should recall that Eliot used the regularly colloquial voice for 
figures modern /and /historical--cf. 'breezy' Tiresias, who also worked 
the typing pools of Georgian London, of course; but also the voice from 
"The Journey of the Magi" (1936):

>         'A cold coming we had of it,
>         Just the worst time of the year[. . . .] 

Eliot's sort of ventriloquism sets its taproots--dry or otherwise--in 
the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.

I will post the poem again so that others might add their note, or just 
enjoy a second dip.

Bill Godshalk has access to one of Durrell's unpublished limericks, "My 
Parsee Maiden."  That limerick comes from somewhere near the same moment 
as "A Persian Lady."  Perhaps Bill would transcribe it for our 
entertainment?

C&c.

***
> A PERSIAN LADY
>
> Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' ---
> Brought her to the city that ripening spring.
> She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting---
> To some Persian noble; well, and here she was
> Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.
> By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,
> By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels.
>
> He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,
> The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:
> The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes;
> How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue,
> He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?
> When their eyes met he felt dis-figured
> It would have been simple---three paces apart!
>
> Disloyal time! 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.'
>
> He meant, I think, that never should he now
> Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow
> Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires,
> The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,
> Grey temple, long slide into fat.
>
> On the other hand neither would she build him sons
> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry
> Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
> She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact
> Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins
> In a biography the year of birth and death.
>
> 1964/ 1961
>
> **


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

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