Cave adsum

Alexander the Great in the Battle of Issus Mosaic

In memoriam Peter Morris Green, novelist, classicist, historian (December 22, 1924–September 16, 2024)

“Beware, I’m here,” ici présent.

Read this, traveler, if you want.

Playing with words, as is my wont,

like or detest them, if you don’t,

these fragments strive to entertain,

that's their desire and maker’s aim,

whose friends are dying, one by one—

three gone thus far now this year’s sum.

As yours are, too, I have no doubt,

once in the world, but now without.

I’m quite alone—so are we all.

Illusions vanish; harms befall—

but you the living note these lines,

Looking back at merrier times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Green_(historian)

Caterwauling

The final kibble that broke the dromedary's back,

The feeble English of this idiot attack:

"Eat Fewer Kittens" is what the sign should order!

But grammar's unchecked down at our southern border,

For party hacks fine words are quite a trial

And political debate no music for a while.

But there's a simple solution—

Unneeded any MAGA revolution.

The Chicago Manual of Style

Should all their cares beguile:

Wond’ring how their pains were eas’d

And disdaining to be pleas’d.

Tip o' the mouse[trap] to John Dryden and Henry Purcell for their song "Music for a While."

Speaking in Tongues

PRD at Babylonstoren in the Drakenstein Valley, South Africa, December 2017

"Say not the struggle naught availeth"—Arthur Hugh Clough (1855)

The limits of your language are those of your world.

So Wittgenstein asserted, “who had not dreamt of you,”

connard. “What is conceivable can happen too.”*

Extend your petty range to some other song,

or several, whose words take you to the first step

of an ascent rising to a tour d'horizon.

Here's the refrain: « À chaque jour suffit sa peine. »†

With nothing ventured, nothing's bound to gain.

It seemed nothing, too, was worth doing nowadays.

I'd contemplated, striving to advance, my ways,

but naught availing—like a trembling glue-trapped mouse,

caught in a horror show once seeming its own house.

Art, though, I surmised, evades such traps with rhyme

and meter. If it’s untrue, dive in! The glue’s fine!

* Quoted words from Empson, “This Last Pain,” in Collected Poems of William Empson (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 33. “The idea of the poem is that human nature can conceive divine states which it cannot attain,” he says in a note. “A watched pot never boils, and if it boiled would sing” (98). Wittgenstein’s observation is cited in Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 13.

† “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).