Beginning an analysis of J.H. Prynne’s “Blue Slides at Rest” (2004)

A dodgy dossier in search of a smoking gun

(September 2009)

Contents

1 Exordium
2 Words — “each one tissue-wrapped phoneme”
2.1 Alt for
2.2 List of other common dual use items
2.2.1 Blue
2.2.2 Down
2.2.3 Fit
2.2.4 Did
2.2.5 Will
2.2.6 Take
2.2.7 To
2.2.8 And
3 Contexts
3.1 The poem as “breccia”
3.2 The poem as “ancient threads prepared”
3.3 Birth and forced adoption
3.4 “Deem,” “tendence”
3.5 The poem as “truth” or dodgy dossier
3.6 “Look out, the same, the same!”
3.6.1 Lo mismo
3.6.2 Personal pronouns
3.6.3 “Set piece match, match”
4 Peroration: “order holding trace and lock”
5 “Blue slides at rest” — in other words…..

1 Exordium

“In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.” Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain[1]

“The farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!” On the knocking at the gate, Thomas DeQuincey[2]

J.H. Prynne’s Blue Slides at Rest (2004) is a poem of 20 12-line stanzas[3], laid out with two stanzas per page on 5 facing pages. Lines are all of similar length, and can be scanned in a sprung rhythm of 5 or 6 irregular feet. The length of sentences varies considerably[4], and enjambment is common[5], though each stanza’s final line is end-stopped. Lines are not end-rhymed, though there is frequent use of internal rhyme, alliteration, repetition, and grammatical, rhetorical and etymological wordplay.

Many words given prominence by repetition have specialist meanings in several of the discourses which the poem combines together. Many words and phrases additionally make multiple allusions to poetical and other sources, as well as contemporary world events.

But a poem is not just made of words. It is also made of graphic design, grammar, and punctuation. This poem’s stanzas lie like oblong swatches of textual fabric on the page — the extension of left-justified lines across the page being remarkably even, and typographical devices which would disturb this evenness of texture are generally avoided[6]. Most of the longer sentences cannot be parsed with reference to standard English grammar. Partly as a consequence of this, ambiguity is rife, and an attempt to apply the rules of conventional grammar only adds further ambiguity. Absent this grammar, even common prepositions and conjunctions gain in significance by having been chosen to form part of the overall texture of the language, rather than merely to fulfil their common grammatical role. Even the punctuation is used disruptively — for example, the simple absence of any question marks where interrogative constructions might otherwise be inferred forces periphrastic, emphatic, subjunctive and other complex constructions and assumed elisions which increase the reader’s interpretive uncertainty further.

The argument of the poem, to the extent that such a manifesto on the perils of rhetoric can be said to comprise an argument, builds more by induction than by deduction: that is to say, by repetition and incremental accretion and layering of allusions into generalisations, rather than by logical inference from axioms into conclusions. The target of the rhetoric of the poem is against rhetoric itself: against the “henny penny” misinformation and spin (“angular motion”), and the hot-air-driven machinations of the “caloric engine” of the state apparatus which leads to the many unwelcome, poorly explained and frequently botched high impact interventions of the state into personal and family affairs (e.g. impressment, care orders).

A highly modern text, it is at the same time very deeply rooted in ancient etymologies, classical rhetorical techniques, traditional poetic objectives and canonical poetic models.

2 Words — “each one tissue-wrapped phoneme”

2.1 Alt for

“Alt,” the first word of the poem, sets the tone for our reading. A polyvalent word, made even more significant by the grammatical uncertainty of its context, its meanings include:

• An abbreviation for “alternate” (AHD[7]);
• “In an exalted or excited frame of mind” (OED2[8]);
• “A key on a computer keyboard that is pressed in combination with another key to execute an alternate operation[9].”

The word is related etymologically (CDE[10]) to the Latin “altus” (“high, grown-up”) and “almus” (“fostering”), and to the Germanic “alt” (“old”).

If we look for the alternate, exalted, ancient, dual usage of the word with which “alt” is first combined — “for” — we find an early recorded use is around 725 AD in Beowulf, meaning “for, before, on account of.” Prynne himself has written at some length on the “dark logic” of the word “for,” in his commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94[11]: “At certain crucial junctures the dark logic of the for-linkage is itself the hardest challenge to understanding.” Already the question of argument — poetical and otherwise — is being put in front of us: the means by which we make up our minds about meaning, the world at large, and courses of action.

Furthermore, the word “for” is related to the Indo-European root “per,” which itself has many facets which become significant as the poem develops[12].

Later in the poem, the word “alt” also immediately precedes only two other words, both of which have a historical meaning which will prove to have a bearing on wider themes in the poem as a whole:

• “mere” — the oldest meaning in Old English, from before 700AD, being “lake, pond” — such as the famous haunted mere in Beowulf where Grendel dwelt;
• “fierce” — related by etymology to the word “feral,” and the Indo-European root “ghwer,” meaning “wild beast.”

2.2 List of other common dual use items

Let us apply this same “alt” operation to some frequently occurring words in the text of the poem.

2.2.1 Blue

Blue, as an idea, has been (and is still) sliding, not only in the colour it designates[13], but in the meanings it continues to accrue through synecdoche[14] and metonymy[15]. The idea that it will ever be at rest is inconceivable. It will continue to wander and change.[16] [17]

Including the title, the word occurs 7 times, most often lending itself to being parsed as an adjective (“navy blue,” “blue/ sky,” “blue naked feet,” “shining blue”). Other formations are less clear:

· The “blue” of the title itself remains enigmatic, even after some of the main themes of the poem have been elucidated, and could be parsed either as an adjective or a noun:

· Lines 43–44: “at measurable nip blue trading to a/ planet”;

· Lines 118–119: “made a brow/ blue by starts.”

2.2.2 Down

There are three main groupings of meanings. Two of them are nouns: “an open expanse of elevated land” related to the word “dune” (line 140) which has original meanings of “hill, or hill fort” (OED2); and “the first feathering of young birds” or “the hair as it first shows itself on the human face” (OED2). A third sub-group comprising a noun, verb, adverb, and preposition, all relate to a change of state from a “higher to a lower place or position,” “from an earlier to a later time,” “from a roused, excited or violent state, into or in a state of subsidence or calm” (OED2) and so on. The word is derived from the Indo-European root DHEU, “to close, finish, come full circle” and from thence to a related root for “to die” (AHD).

Examples from the poem are as follows:

· Lines 106–107: “Wage in hope down to rip/ a ticket” has indeterminate meaning in isolation;

· Line 149: the adjective “downy” indicates youth;

· Line 183: “downwards” is clearly a preposition;

· Lines 229, 212: “down in earth” in the context of its uses in the final stanzas (see section 4) implies a change of state, specifically relating to death and the underworld;

· Line 234: the phrase “cut down” carries overtones related to killing, particularly in reference to youth (as in the phrase “cut down in their prime”) engaged in military action.

2.2.3 Fit

A military meaning lurks in an early usage (“to marshal troops” (CDE)), as well as a “conflict, struggle,” “position of hardship, danger, or intense excitement,” and “a bodily state (whether painful or not) that betokens death” (OED2). Another almost auto-antonymic meaning is “a sudden and transitory state of activity or inaction,” related to an earlier meaning of “paroxysm” (OED2).

In the poem, the word “fit” occurs four times in an infinitive form (lines 97, 104, 113, 208), and once as both “fittingly” (line 169) and “fitment” (line 116).

To “request fitment” in the context of the “unrightful” in the preceding line implies the meaning “that which is fitting or proper” rather than “a making fit, preparation” (both meanings obsolete, OED2) — although see section 2.2.7 which implies the opposite. “Fittingly” means “becomingly, appropriately, properly” (OED2).

The CED notes that before 1250 the word “fitte” meant “an adversary of equal power, a match” and references a passage in the Owl and the Nightingale in which the owl is opining on man’s superiority to animals because of his powers of reason (see section 3.5, and also section 3.6.3 with reference to Beowulf and Grendel being adversaries of equal power):

Mon deþ mid strengþe & mid witte
Þat oþer þing nis non his fitte.
(Lines 783–784)

Man acts with strength and with intelligence in such a way that no other creature can match him.[18]

The CED also gives “a still earlier sense of a meeting or coming together” which finds its echo in many other words in the poem pertaining to “joining,” and as usual its antonym “splitting[19]” (and also, very characteristically, the auto-antonymic “cleaving”).

2.2.4 Did

The word “did” occurs 5 times, “do” and “don’t” both twice, and “does” once.

“Did” is always followed in the poem by a pronoun — “did they” three times, “did you” and “did she” once each — which might indicate an interrogative, except no question marks are present. Alternatively, the construction may be a periphrastic form with the ordinary order of the pronoun and auxiliary verb inverted, and in three of the cases main verbs are supplied to allow this (“did you, fill or kill, tongue and groove[20],” “did she aggrieve,” “did they take up”), and the effect becomes emphatic, rather than interrogative.

In the remaining two cases (the constructions are emphasised by their very close proximity to each other: “did they either. Why did they.”) we might look for an elided main verb in an earlier clause (hypothetically, for example: “They said they had no weapons. Nor did they [have any] either.”), but no such clause is easily to be found in the poem.

In the second case in particular, the problem is compounded by the word “why,” though a hint is offered by its later appearance in line 115 in its sense of “on account of which” (OED2) (“Why unrightful can now be asked/ over again”). “Why” might also be an interjection, though the absence of a comma after the word makes this less likely[21].

In all of these cases, the simple absence of the question mark has the effect of further unsettling the already troubled surface of the text. The other formations in the poem of the verb “to do,” including some in the non-auxiliary senses of the word, are less problematic.

The other non-modal auxiliaries in English are “be,” “have” and “use.” The poem uses “be” as an auxiliary to a passive construction with the main verbs “to know” (line 85), “to be worth” (line 85), “to tell” (line 94–95, split over a line-end), “to ask” (line 115), and “to force” (line 175), and as a main verb twice (in line 28, where the infinitive is split, and in line 86 in the injunction to “be worthy”). The passive constructions taken together as a group might imply a power relation based on knowledge, worth or force.

The past tense auxiliary “have” occurs only once, with auxiliary and pronoun reversal again presumably to be read as emphatic rather than interrogative: “have words not/ joined.” No forms at all of “use” are in evidence.

2.2.5 Will

Except for “will,” modal verbs[22] are used sparingly in the poem (“can,” “could,” and “need” all being used three times, and “ought,” “may” and “must” only once each). In contrast, the word “will” is used 13 times (including “she’ll” once), and “would” twice. However, “will” also has meanings as a verb in its own right[23] (e.g. “to desire,” “to direct by one’s will or testament” (notably “the disposal of his property or other matters to be performed after his death”) and “to attempt to cause” (OED2)) and as a noun with corresponding associations.

Judging from grammatical context, most of this poem’s uses of “will” are as a future auxiliary (e.g. ”will he advance,” “will start,” and “She’ll lay”). Only in two contexts does it seem to be a noun (“bind will,” and the first occurrence of the word in “will, they will” for which the necessary context is supplied by a speech made in 2003 by Kofi Annan at the UN Security Council[24]), and in other settings can be more ambiguous:

• Lines 164–165: “lip dispute revolve will her white/ throat rabid nuisance icterine shingle.” The grammatical context does not easily resolve “will” into a verb or a noun, although the word “dispute” (and possibly “revolve” for “revoke”) invokes the meaning of “last will and testament.”
• Lines 100–101: “As if/ stencilled slipware will more flood item.”
• Lines 89–91: “Will to/ both: of therapeutic fragments enjoin counterpart im-/ probably, live long soon rescinded.” The words “live long” and “rescinded” invoke the sense of a person leaving a will — again in the context of it not being carried out.

Another point of interest about the word “will”: in March 2003 the United States government announced that “diplomacy has failed” and that it would proceed with a “coalition of the willing” to rid Iraq under Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction the U.S. at the time insisted it possessed. The 2003 invasion of Iraq began a few days later.

2.2.6 Take

While not exactly an auto-antonym, the verb “take” has two very distinctly opposed shades of meaning. “To transfer to oneself by one’s own action or volition (anything material or non-material)” is the general or ordinary sense of the verb, which falls into two main divisions: “take” in the sense of “seize, grip, appropriate,” and “take” in the sense of “receive or accept what is handed to one” (OED2). It can also be a noun (e.g. “that which is taken or received” (OED2)).

Four occurrences of the verb in the poem are in combination with an adverb. The context of their trace can be read in combination as a timeline of the events immediately surrounding the invasion of Iraq in 2003:

• Lines 109–110: “They attend once more in precarium, to take apart/ by simple mission broken off. To view them.” Following the passage of Resolution 1441, on 18 November 2002, weapons inspectors of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission returned to search (“take apart” (OED2)) Iraq for prohibited weapons on behalf of the UN (“in precarium”) for the first time since the previous mission was broken off four years earlier.
• Lines 115–117: “Why unrightful can now be asked/ over again request fitment shade flicker take up/ armed arising.” It was on account of the failure of Iraq to satisfy some members of the international community the US, Britain and Spain drafted a motion with the UN seeking approval for military action (“fitment”). The draft was withdrawn on Mar 17, 2003 after it became clear that sufficient support would not be forthcoming.
• Line 135–136: “did they/ take up alternation readiness.” A little over a week later, effectively circumventing the UN, the US State Department named a coalition of 30 countries prepared to be publicly associated with the US action against Iraq, and proceeded to adopt a condition of military readiness. President George W. Bush’s 28 March, 2003 address announced the beginning of a “broad and concerted campaign” to disarm Iraq. On 21 March, the US and its allies launched a massive aerial assault against Iraq.
• Line 181: “Care taken, took into by a glance.” “Care taken” might refer to the caretaker government set up in Iraq following the invasion. OED2 gives the following significations which are compatible to the combination “took into”: “to perceive at a glance”; “to receive or accept into some relation (e.g. as hostage, or as hostage or ally)” and presumably also “into confidence”; “to take into custody, arrest” and presumably also “into care.” The first part of the sentence (“care taken”) suggests the last of these. The last part of the sentence (“at a glance”) suggests the first. There is an overall impression of summary and premature judgement, which may refer to subsequent revelations of the poor quality of the intelligence supporting the case for invasion, or else the immediate assessment of a supposed victory in a country still in a precarious and violent condition.

The story continues in line 148: “Take more, more care.” Reading this as an injunction, the repetition adds emphasis to a warning to “take more care.” A more cynical reading would be “in order to take more, then more care is needed” — “more care” both in terms of “powers to act” (e.g. negotiate financing, award reconstruction contracts and exploration rights) and also to avoid the appearance of venality and hidden motives.

2.2.7 To

By far the most frequently occurring word in the poem overall is the word “to.” Very broadly, the word can be either a subordinator to a verb in the infinitive, or a preposition with a sense of direction or movement. The majority of the poem’s uses of the word precede a verb, but in many cases the context leaves its use deliberately ambiguous:

• There are a number of phrases where the subsequent word can be taken either as a verb or a noun phrase — e.g. “to chill sprites,” “first to last,” “next to last,” “lost to care,” “to fruit.”
• Lines 33–34: “Mainly residing in brain-stem to mean/ divisor.” Here we would most naturally initially parse “to mean” as a verbal phrase, except the following noun “divisor,” introduced after the line break, offers the possibility of the noun phrase “mean divisor”;
• Line 60: “Bower woven endless to seed case.” Seed can be read as a verb or part of the noun phrase “seed case.”
• Line 187: “to split-off rock powder.” Split-off can be a noun or verb (“an act of splitting off, something that splits off” OED2).

Sometimes the use of the word “to” is used to introduce ambiguity into a phrase or fragment which we might normally parse otherwise.

• Lines 209–210: “Mouth to mouth unfit/ either to plead.” The familiar “mouth to mouth” trope is disrupted by the phrase “either to plead” which suggests a pair of verbs (“to mouth,” and “to plead”) which the mouth is unfit for[25].
• Lines 214–216: “Deem rended/ by tendence in code none must fear to yet fair not ceases/ for harm laid square” It is difficult to see how “to” in this case can be read as a preposition, and it is more easily understood as a stranded auxiliary following “none must fear” — but then to what earlier verb does it refer? What must none fear to do? Deem? Rend? It is deliberately unclear.
• Lines 220–221: “Claiming up/ tender placement not recoverable for grief or sorrow yield/ to dictates value this loss yielded, bond consortium make/ a twilled mouth shut.” The three basic groups of meanings of “yield” are “to produce,” “to pay,” and “to surrender” (OED2). Before the first line break, we are led by the vocabulary of investment (“tender,” “placement,” and later “value,” “bond consortium”), and the familiar trope of grief and sorrow producing a deferred reward, towards the first of these meanings, that grief and sorrow have yielded something, and we expect the subsequent clause beginning with “to” to tell us who the beneficiary is. But with the word “dictates” we encounter the impossibility of parsing “to” either as a preposition or infinitival auxiliary, and are forced to read it with the preceding verb. The effect on “yield” of adding “to” is to tip the balance of ambiguity towards its more negative connotations — that of payment and surrender — and unsuccessful investment.

2.2.8 And …

Many, if not most other words in the poem serve at least a dual purpose, and can be pressed into the service of the poem’s various emerging discourses[26]. But as we shall see, the words bring more than their dictionary definitions and etymologies, which extend their reach into still further discourses, but also their capacity to allude to diverse texts ranging from old English poetry to records of contemporary events.

3 Contexts

3.1 The poem as “breccia”

The text is composed of literary, non-literary, ancient and modern textual fragments, in a matrix of words (concerned with finance, motherhood, family, war, territory, language, change, service, rhetoric) that is a cementing material, and that is by turns both identical and different to the fragments. And like the fragments visible in a polished surface of breccia, a mineral with analogous properties which is referenced in the poem, the textual fragments are visible on the face of the text, and (by synecdoche) the fragment is a sign of a larger quantity, the contextual content of the source text being condensed by a strict economy of expression.

Compare the following lines (165–167) from Blue Slides At Rest:

Search lamp
party cress-market begins, long before daylight bites
like boiling water race blue naked feet.

with the following edited extract from within a single short chapter of “London labour and London poor” by Henry Mayhew[27]:

As winter draws near, the Farringdon cress-market begins long before daylight. […] as you walk along, the policeman, leaning against some gas-lamp, turns his lantern full upon you, as if in suspicion that one who walks abroad so early could mean no good to householders. […] “Ah! Mrs. Dolland,” cried the saleswoman in a gracious tone, “can you keep yourself warm? it bites the fingers like biling water, it do.” […] A sickly-looking boy, of about five, whose head just reached above the hampers, now crept forward, treading with his blue naked feet over the cold stones as a cat does over wet ground.

Only three words from Prynne’s sentence — “search,” “party” and “race” — are unaccounted for in Mayhew’s brief essay on the cress-market. The sense of the word “search” is implied in the turning of the lamp towards the walker, and the word is also used elsewhere in Mayhew’s volume in the contexts of the search for employment, lodgings, knowledge, and so on. Only in one context, the search for runaway children who are the victims of domestic violence, is a “search party” implied[28].

The words “party” and “race” feature in various contexts throughout Mayhew’s volume. The word “race” pointedly serves to draw attention to that author’s custom of referring to the professions of the poor in racial terms (e.g. “race of match-sellers,” “race of rat-catchers”), and various similar expressions elsewhere in his oeuvre, including the opening sentence of his book: “Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe, there are — socially, morally, and perhaps even physically considered — but two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers — the vagabond and the citizen — the nomadic and the civilized tribes.”

This density of allusion within one sentence of the poem to a single source text is by no means typical, and will more often spread over several stanzas (as do, for example, the clear references to Beowulf[29]), or can comprise single words (such as a possible reference to Wulf and Eadwacer by the word “cub,” and other semantic overtones[30]).

Nor is this the full extent of the allusion contained within that single sentence. For example, the “naked feet” trope can also be traced, less directly though still with high probability, to the following passage from Book IV of Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid[31]:

The priestess enters, with her hair unbound,
And thrice invokes the pow’rs below the ground.
Night, Erebus, and Chaos she proclaims,
And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names,
And three Dianas: next, she sprinkles round
With feign’d Avernian drops the hallow’d ground;
Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe’s light,
With brazen sickles reap’d at noon of night;
Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl,
And cuts the forehead of a newborn foal,
Robbing the mother’s love. The destin’d queen
Observes, assisting at the rites obscene;
A leaven’d cake in her devoted hands
She holds, and next the highest altar stands:
One tender foot was shod, her other bare;
Girt was her gather’d gown, and loose her hair.

What makes this reference more credible is that earlier in the same section in Dryden we find “A pitchy cloud shall cover all the plain,” which is echoed in the next lines of the Prynne poem (167–168: “She’ll lay/ this cover topmost powers, cloudy dram front pitch”), and is perhaps intended to be reminiscent of the clouds of smoke from the Kuwait oil fields following Saddam Hussein’s withdrawal in 1991, which is in keeping with a more general emerging theme of the poem. There are also two nearby occurrences of the word “topmost,” for which these particular translations of Vergil are specifically referenced in CDE. The unbound, loose hair in Dryden is also echoed in Prynne two stanzas later (“Her hair loosened”), as is the sprinkling (“asperge”), while “robbing the mother’s love” also links with other themes to be discussed later[32]. It is also noteworthy that the name Dido is a Phoenician form meaning “Wanderer,” and the culmination of the episode is that Dido curses and predicts Aeneas’s people (the Roman settlers and their descendents[33]) to eternal strife with her people (the North African and Middle Eastern wanderers), in terms very similar to Mayhew’s.

With still less direct attribution, Wyatt’s “They flee from me[34]” might also be brought to mind. Given Prynne’s close analysis of this poem a few years earlier alongside Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, it is inconceivable that Prynne could reference a “naked foot” without having this poem in mind. Reading the Wyatt poem through the lens of other themes in this poem, we can speculate that it may be intended to call to mind the ground forces landing to “liberate” Iraq being first apparently welcomed in Basra, only to later find themselves under attack. This would be in keeping with a possible reference to the subsequent prolonged backlash in Iraq which is contained in a combination of words (“dove,” “fantail,” “bantam”) referring to the traditional poem The Bantam Cock[35].

The ambivalent passage in which Marlowe’s Leander consummates his passion with Hero, through some cunning and possibly some force, contains not only the same “naked feet” trope, but also “day before day” (directly quoted in Prynne’s line 40), and a ruddy cheek (echoed in Prynne’s “cheek more red,” line 182):

But as her naked feet were whipping out,
He on the sudden clinged her so about,
That, mermaid-like, unto the floor she slid.
One half appeared, the other half was hid.
Thus near the bed she blushing stood upright,
And from her countenance behold ye might
A kind of twilight break, which through the hair,
As from an orient cloud, glimpsed here and there,
And round about the chamber this false morn
Brought forth the day before the day was born.
So Hero’s ruddy cheek Hero betrayed,

Most of the other words in Prynne’s lines 165–167 are also highly polyvalent, and simultaneously form part of the matrix of words which extend throughout the entire poem, carrying along the thematic nexus and cementing the textual fragments: for example “bites” linking to the related words “etch,” ”acid,” ”mark,” ”incisor” etc.; “boiling water” to the childbirth-related words “head first,” “baby” etc.; “blue” to “sky,” “water” etc.; “long before daylight” to “day before day.”

3.2 The poem as “ancient threads prepared”

The nexus of words concerned with threads[36] and weaving[37] is another self-referential metaphor describing the texture and structure of the poem, the work done by its constituent groups of words and threads to fabricate the whole, and the transitional state of fraying where meaning unravels. The threads used here are as ancient and extensive as the English language itself, and as well as more ancient languages and cultures.

One of the first extant English love lyrics, “Bird on a briar,” is woven into a disconcertingly alien and modern context, followed as it is by “hydroxy,” which is a nickname for “hydroxyzine,” a “synthesized drug which is a sedative, hypnotic, and tranquilizer,” or the chemical name for a “molecule consisting of an oxygen atom and a hydrogen atom,” or a “gaseous mixture used for torches for the processing of refractory materials, and the first gaseous mixture used for welding[38].”

Flitting under her
breath in catches, bird on briar hydroxy filament he raids
a temper vane limit venture payout.

The words “hydroxy,” “filament,” “vane,” and “limit” all feature prominently in the definition drawn up by the European Community of goods which might potentially have a “dual military use,” which was used to control imports of such goods to Iraq[39].

Some other references in this sentence are to Thomas Hardy’s Trumpet Major, specifically a passage wherein Anne is using her seductive charms to prevent the object of her affection, Robert Loveday, from enlisting, immediately after he has been reflecting how many of his neighbours had been pressed into service[40]. This theme is also apparent in lines 45–46 (“concept of service invoke/ conscript retention”), line 102 (“impressment”) and the many references to economic pressure on the poor, which might induce them to sign up for military service to escape penury.

The first stanza of the English lyric itself[41] has a surprising and dark conclusion to the lover’s plea:

Bryd one brere, brid, brid one brere,
Kynd is come of love, love to crave
Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe
Or greyth, lef, greith thu me my grave.
Bird on a briar, bird on a briar,
(Man)kind is come of love, love thus craves.
Blissful bird, have pity on me,
Or dig, love, dig thou for me my grave.

The refrain (“dig thou for me my grave”) supports an important theme of the poem, set out by a nexus of words related by etymology to the word grave through its Indo-European root “ghrebh[42].”

3.3 Birth and forced adoption

An entire brood of words throughout the poem ensures that we cannot miss the theme of motherhood and childbirth[43].

By early 2004, a number of controversial cases of forced adoption had been coming to the attention of the UK media. While hundreds of such cases were in question, a small number became very prominent[44]. Indeed, at the time local authorities had “targets for adoption and rewards for moving children from one family to another. […] The test for almost any decision making is whether there is a “risk of significant harm” — the standard section 31 definition in the Children Act 1989. The vagueness of that description allows all sorts of nonsense to be accepted. At the same time many parents’ solicitors are subjected to a conflict of interest because they are also paid by the local authority or guardian. […] A case in Oldham […] caused a mother to have an abortion to avoid care proceedings. In that case, a child was taken away at an early stage because of allegations that the child had been harmed by the parents. After massive legal and medical wrangling […] the parents were proved innocent. They were not just not guilty; […] There was no justification for the intervention whatever, but the child and the parents suffered, and the mother had an abortion to prevent the same thing from happening to another child[45].”

Yvonne Coulter, separated from her baby daughter in 1990, after an anonymous phone call about a bruised cheek led to a visit from a social worker, found a safety order placed on her child[46], who was subsequently put up for adoption against her mother’s will. They were not reunited until 2006.

Another celebrated case, which later became notorious, was Pauline Goodwin. Already campaigning against her earlier separation from her three children for reasons never formally disclosed, in 2005 social workers arrived at her bedside immediately after childbirth to remove her newborn baby into care, and in 2007 she was still pursuing the case through the European court of human rights[47].

The Webster case was also unfolding during 2004. After developing an eating disorder in late 2003, it appears that the Webster child developed a nutritional disorder, which in turn led to abnormally weak bones which could sustain injury with normal handling. At the time, experts attested to injuries being probably due to abuse, and three children were taken into care. Exonerating the family years later in the light of additional expert evidence and reversed opinions of most of the original expert witnesses, Lord Justice Wall emphasised in court the finality of adoption orders which are designed by statute to put children in the same position as if they had been “born as the child of the adopters.” He added: “The circumstances in which adoption orders can be revoked or set aside is extremely limited. None applied in the present case.” The court concluded that, after three years, it was in any event too late to set the orders aside and that it would not be in the interests of the children to do so[48].

Judges in family courts act in private, and unless they choose to make their judgments public there is no way of scrutinising the quality of those judgments. Furthermore, it is alleged that at the time too much emphasis was being given to paediatricians and psychiatrists giving expert evidence. As well as the Webster case, passage of time has produced several other examples where previous “expert evidence” has been overturned.

The main point, sustained through other themes in the poem, is not simply about the individual cases of miscarriage of justice, but about the faulty and unfair mechanisms of decision making, and enforcement of the will of the state by means which extend beyond strict legality.

3.4 “Deem,” “tendence”

A short phrase in lines 214–215, “Deem rended/ by tendence in code,” alludes to the passage in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII[49] when Wolsey is confronted with evidence of his subterfuge in his dealings with the King:

KING HENRY VIII: Good my lord,
You are full of heavenly stuff, and bear the inventory
Of your best graces in your mind; the which
You were now running o'er: you have scarce time
To steal from spiritual leisure a brief span
To keep your earthly audit: sure, in that
I deem you an ill husband, and am glad
To have you therein my companion.
CARDINAL WOLSEY: Sir,
For holy offices I have a time; a time
To think upon the part of business which
I bear i' the state; and nature does require
Her times of preservation, which perforce
I, her frail son, amongst my brethren mortal,
Must give my tendence to.

(The word “audit” is echoed in Prynne’s line 146, and “companion” in line 233 in the concluding stanza which also references Buckingham’s earlier final speech before his execution[50].)

The reference is overlaid with further allusion to Thomas Hardy’s 1915 poem “Often when warring”:

“Often when warring for he wist not what,
An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,
Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek,
And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;
Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot
The deed of grace amid the roar and reek;
Yet larger vision than loud arms bespeak
He there has reached, although he has known it not.
For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act
Over the throes of artificial rage,
Has thuswise muffled victory’s peal of pride,
Rended to ribands policy’s specious page
That deals but with evasion, code, and pact,
And war’s apology wholly stultified.”

(Hardy’s “burning cheek” and “lips so black and clammed and hot” are condensed into the “burning lip” of line 163, and “reached” is echoed in line 46.)

What the two passages have in common is an unveiling of the untrustworthiness of those charged with power and policy — in the first case, Henry implying some profligacy on his own part in giving so much power to Wolsey[51], and the second passage being reminiscent of von Clausewitz’s cynical assessment of war as “policy pursued by other means,”[52] with the soldier himself not knowing what he is fighting for.

3.5 The poem as “truth” or dodgy dossier

“There was no use in arguing with a person like this.” Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain

Absent the cohering constraints of traditional English word order and grammar, and an easily followed flow of meaning, Prynne draws on a range of long-established techniques to build consistency and continuity into his textual texture and to guard against its unravelling into crot. Many of these devices are drawn from classical rhetoric, for example:

• epizeuxis[53] (immediate repetition: “her, her”; “match, match,” “more, more”), two of which may be read as anadiplosis (beginning a clause with the last word of the preceding clause (“in ambit to her, her words inferring,” “take more, more care”);
• epanados (repetition of words in the opposite order: “in all for all in”);
• more frequent diacope (intermediated repetition: “now prone already now,” “so thee soon wanted so,” “by links by,” “will they will,” etc.[54]) some of which may be read as anaphora (repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses: “such lip, such cheek”[55]; “not after not/older”; “no one/no nation”; “will open; will/also unsafe advance”; “lip-words/inclined lip-read swell”; “not to fall back, not to press on”);
• many examples of polyptoton with forms in varying degrees of proximity to each other (repetition of different grammatical forms: arm, armed, arms; ask, asked, asking; bending, bends, bent; break, breaking, breaks, etc.[56]);
• anaphora (repetition of the beginning of a grammatical unit — e.g. lines 44–46: “each patiently … each time … each time”)
• instances of allusion, sometimes with fragments of a source text sprinkled over several pages;
• ambiguity:
• - words with one or more meanings incremental to their daily usage, many in specialist areas thematised by an extended metaphor in the poem, (e.g. on a financial theme: allowance, benefit, claim, share, margin, vanilla; on a military theme: alarm, arm, buzzing, naval, ranging; on both a military and financial theme: advance, cover (i.e. “interest cover,” “under cover of fire”), wage, yield);
• - use of auto-antonyms, also in thematised areas (fast: “moving quickly” or “not moving”; cleaving: “dividing or splitting” or “sticking to, clinging to[57]”; fix: “solution” or “problem,” bolted: “secured, locked” or “started suddenly and ran away”);
• meiosis (use of a degrading epithet: “henny penny”);
• malapropism (“several hindered” for “several hundred”; “sufficient bare eminence” for “sufficient bare evidence,” “take up/armed arising” for “take up arms” and “armed uprising,” “machine knit/ parapet” for “machine gun parapet.”);
• and numerous other word repetitions throughout the poem, some of the most commonly repeated of which we have already analysed in section 2.

The language of logic and rhetoric continues as a running theme throughout the poem[58]. Two such words in Prynne’s poem, unrighted (104) and unrightful (115, 230), allude to the medieval long comic poem The Owl and the Nightingale[59]. With the benefit of this orientation, we can trace a less obvious reference earlier in the poem (22–23: “Breath fast fortune nothing, flush torrent/ all cavern bolted there, rill flourish alt fierce”[60]) to a passage which relates to the effect of anger on the powers of reason:

For wraþþe meinþ þe horte blod
Þat hit floweþ so wilde flod
An al þe heorte ouergeþ
Þat hoe naueþ noþing bute breþ.

For wrath so whips up the blood that it rushes like a fierce torrent, completely overwhelming the heart so that it contains nothing but vapour

An so forleost an hire liht
Þat heo ne siþ soð ne riht.
and is so deprived of all its lucidity that it recognizes neither right nor truth
Þe Niȝtingale hi understood
An ouergan lette hire mod.
He mihte bet speken a sele
Þan mid wraþþe wordes deale.

The Nightingale thought carefully and allowed her anger to dissipate. It was better for her to speak in a good-tempered way than to trade words in anger.

“Hule,” heo seide, “Lust nu hider!
Þu shalt falle — þi wei is slider!”
(lines 945–956)

“Owl,” she said, “Now you listen to this! You shall fall — your way is slippery!”

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is again invoked by the words “gravel” (line 66) and “grain” (lines 141, 143), in allusion to a speech by Buckingham concerning Wolsey, where it is employed in a simile for clarity of reasoning:

“ [this fellow…] by intelligence
And proofs as clear as founts in July when
We see each grain of gravel, I do know
To be corrupt and treasonous.”

In other places, the act of poetic analysis itself brings forth a truth which demystifies and transforms the wonderful into the prosaic.

• Goethe’s poem to Joy[61] (analysing a dragon-fly whose “beauteous wing” is directly quoted in line 87 of Prynne) concludes “And when its form I closely view,// ’Tis of a sad and dingy blue — / Such, Joy-Dissector, is thy case indeed.”
• Prynne enjoins us, through the words of Mark Twain, to pay close attention to language: ‘”Now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she’ll get away from you” — “Watch her, watch” is an example of Prynne’s diacope at line 103 — only to find later all the romance and beauty he had once found in the river gone: “All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat[62].”

Prynne’s unattributed ventriloquism of such fragments, and the rhetorical techniques he subjects them to in order to reinforce and modify their import, emerges as another self-referential compositional device recalling the method of compilation of the notorious “dodgy dossier” used to manipulate the media in support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq[63]. Colin Powell’s contemporaneous rhetoric of “solid evidence” is ridiculed by Prynne’s poem’s catalogue of words relating to “colloid” transitional states in the many categories of discourse it mobilises, and ultimately “giddy reason” (line 187) totters on her throne[64].

3.6 “Look out, the same, the same!” [65]

If this analysis and context helps us to understand something of what Prynne’s poetical praxis is in Blue Slides at Rest, it does not yet help us to understand why is he doing it. Repetition of words gives emphasis, but it can also have other functions. Again and again the poem draws our attention to different ways in which things, and the words that are deployed to describe them, can be the same or similar:

• exact repetition of a word — immediately in epizeuxis and anadiplosis, in close proximity by diacope and anaphora, or more remotely by simple repetition elsewhere in the poem;
• exact repetition of a word as part of another word (e.g. “alt,” “alter,” “halted,” “alternation”);
• repetition of a related grammatical form[66];
• rhyme and alliteration (e.g. “rent parented,” “reflex by links by skin,” “fill or kill,” “fast fortune nothing, flush,” “flourish alt fierce/ fermented”);
• shared etymological root (e.g. the many words deriving from for and its Indo-European root “per”[67]);
• object rhymes (a different signifier for the same signified, e.g. the various expressions of the idea of “thread” in lines 58 and 59[68]);
• metaphorical rhymes across different thematic domains (e.g. the various representations of transitional states);
• metonymy and synecdoche — being a quality or a part of an object.

Of course, these classes are not mutually exclusive, as the poem demonstrates through copious examples.

Prynne has not always been a keen user of epizeuxis and diacope, unlike that British genius of catchphrase, Bruce Forsyth, 8 years Prynne’s senior, whose successful use of the technique in his (ironically implied) dotage[69] continues a tradition established early in his long career.[70] But along with Forsyth, we can safely assume that Prynne’s use of repetition is not due to the causes Chaucer (equally ironically, late in his career) complains of in “L’envoy” of his “Complaint of Mars”: a dulling in age of the ability to find rhymes in English.[71] So to what is purpose is it employed?

This poem does not frequently use many of the alternative techniques employed by other modern poets[72] to draw attention to a particular word or allusion, but beyond using repetition for emphasis of matter, as a unifying force in the poem, and to strengthen the rhetoric of the argument and memorability of the text[73], do the frequent and varied demonstrations of “sameness” make a point in their own right? Perhaps optimistically, that we humans are all the same as each other, and why therefore should we be in conflict with each other? Or pessimistically, that we humans are the same as animals, and how therefore can we restrain ourselves from pursuing our selfish interests at any cost?

3.6.1 Lo mismo

Will Poole points out in his article[74] on Prynne’s Unanswering Rational Shore that the epithet “Lo mismo” (“The same”) is the title of a Goya etching from the series of “ Los Desastres[75].”

This being the case, in using rhetorical devices which highlight identity, and his thematising of folding[76], joining[77], and balancing of equivalents and opposites[78], is Prynne putting forward a plea for recognition of similarity, and accordingly establishment of peace, between cultures traditionally in conflict?

Before going any further, we should note that recognition of kinship[79] has been acknowledged as a necessary condition of war.

“Genuinely coalitional aggression is very rare in the animal world. It seems to have evolved only twice, once in the line of primates that has ended in ourselves, and before that among the ants … It is rare because co-operative behaviour is normally restricted to kinship groups … and only the social insects have broken that barrier by creating closely related kin groups of enormous size. A tropical anthill may contain 20 million ants, but all except one are siblings, and the colony behaves and evolves like a single organisation … In the ant world, all-out combat between two neighbouring communities for territory, food stores and slaves, often ending in the extinction of one of them, is so common that it seems a forced move … Humans did not practice the ant kind of warfare until they lived in communities that resemble anthills — sedentary, densely populated, rigorously organised, highly territorial. Such human anthills did not appear until the rise of the first agrarian civilisations five thousand years ago, and it will be argued that even after such societies arose, it was many centuries before they began to wage offensive territorial wars against one another[80].”

It has been argued that not all human societies have been warlike, though with the development of conditions of scarcity of resources even apparently pacified societies tend to resort to war[81]. Given the weaker kinship in human groups, other conditions have proved sufficient to favour the evolution of warlike behaviours. Study of chimpanzees, which can exhibit planned and orchestrated violence, has identified three characteristics which they have in common with humans which would lead to such behaviour: organised, male retentive, mildly polygynous social groups with moderate sexual dimorphism (therefore it pays for males to co-operate with one another and compete as a group with other brotherhoods to defend their territory and females); relatively dense populations compared to other primates (such that competition for resources is fiercer); and a level of social intelligence which “can imagine what other animals are thinking and can attribute intentions to them; they can picture other possible worlds and design alternative scenarios; they can empathise; they can practise deception and cruelty. Only that sort of social cognition makes possible genuine coalitional behaviour, for an effective coalition cannot be forged without the ability to assess the capacities and loyalties of its members[82].”

3.6.2 Personal pronouns

As far as Blue Slides at Rest is concerned, there are only two occurrences of the first person singular in the entire poem, and both are quotations[83]. There no occurrences of the first person plural in any case, but there are two occurrences of the possessive form: “our sung script frayed to gather/ in one for shifty plenum” (line 171–172) and “ours/ similar fanciful” (lines 78–79), both suggesting a not entirely successful or honest attempt to get “ourselves” singing together from the same songsheet, such as the aforementioned dodgy dossier.

The poem is densely populated with personal pronouns[84]. But 29 references to various forms of a feminine third person[85], 14 to a male third person, and 13 to a third person plural do little to dispel the anonymity of the individuals and groups concerned. Indeed, the repeated pronouns deliberately mask a multitude of possible identities behind each unvarying epithet.

When the poem explicitly uses the second person singular[86], we feel variously that we are being questioned (line 15: “did you, fill or kill”), enjoined (lines 35–36: “know your way/ through this temporal occlusion[87]”), reassured (lines 64–65: “You know/ not to fall back, not to press on”), or admonished (lines 128–129: “Highest tor gained hotly/ for both what you get landed”). An archaic usage (line 5: “now so thee”) recalls a phrase in Ezra Pounds’s “In Tendence[88],” which introduces another idea of kinship based on shared cultural preferences, rather than genetic kinship.

“Thee”? Oh, “Thee” is who cometh first
Out of mine own soul-kin,
For I am homesick after mine own kind
And ordinary people touch me not.
And I am homesick
After mine own kind that know, and feel
And have some breath for beauty and the arts.”

The potential of cultural kinship and genetic kinship to form a basis for conflict is the same.

3.6.3 “Set piece match, match”

Prynne challenges the extent to which we are different not only from each other, but also from our animal ancestors, for example by allusion to Beowulf and his evenly matched confrontation with Grendel.

The clearest reference to Beowulf is the famous kenning “Swan’s road,” though other words and phrases also have strong associations with the story (e.g. “mere,” “preen,” “party,” “sheaf,” “and grim,” “breccia” for “breca,” and “lost his all abreast/ swimming.”)

In the context of Prynne’s poem, two things are notable about the reference to Beowulf’s swimming race with Breca. Firstly, Beowulf justifying his defeat by means of his tall stories about having to fight off several sea monsters (in keeping with the wider theme of dishonesty and false justification). And secondly, that Beowulf and Breca were said to be evenly matched. Elsewhere in Beowulf, and notably during the fight with Grendel, we encounter the same concern to present antagonists on an equal footing. In her “Syntactic analysis of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel[89]”, Lana Stone Dieterich goes so far as to say: “the poet has managed to blend form and content in such a way (by means of stylistic and structural interlace) that the polarity between Beowulf and Grendel at the beginning to the passage gradually results in a merger of the two at the end of the passage — hence a “change” for both of them.” She quotes earlier work by Huffines: “The Beowulf poet must have been aware of associations in agloeca which would link man and monster under one central concept.” Dieterich continues:

“On a deeper level, however, if we were to consider the interlaced texture of the poem’s fabric as a whole rather than isolate individual threads, the author’s obscuring the subject ties in neatly with the action described. The rapid grabbing on each side may have left a spectator of the fight unsure who grabbed whom first, the participants themselves perhaps slightly hazy as to who was really in control of the situation. Beowulf, the author has earlier promised, will eventually triumph, but at this point, the struggle appears to be equal. […] The poet realised the implications of his making hero and foe into one. He wanted to illustrate subtly the real similarities between the two in their respective human natures — brave warriors both in their mutual rejection of weapons, fiends both in their love of battle and killing. […] But to reiterate, the implications are only suggested in the poem. Of course the two are at opposite poles of good and evil; the poet makes the contrast clear at every turn. And yet implied in every contrast is a comparison, and the author truly seems to be asking the reader to see something of Grendel in Beowulf, as well as something human in Grendel. […] Not satisfied with suggesting merely shared traits between Beowulf and Grendel by means of alliteration, the poet has opted for ambiguous pronouns to do his work for him. Now so many variations on the two personalities have been interwoven that the pair might just as well switch places.”

I have quoted extensively from this analysis not only because I believe it can be read as an elucidation of Prynne’s own methods and humanist objectives in constructing his poem, but also to illustrate the long and impeccable provenance of many of the techniques which Prynne has applied (the interlaced texture of the poem’s fabric, obscuring of the grammatical subject, contrast and comparison, ambiguous pronouns).

Dieterich also draws attention to both Beowulf and Grendel “approaching the human limit,” albeit from different sides of the limit. This theme is taken up elsewhere in Prynne’s poem:

• “Grill” (line 8) references the famous passage in Spenser (“Let Grill be Grill”[90]), when Guyon and the Palmer[91] observe that Grill would rather remain in his transformed state as a beast;
• “Sprite”[92] (line 16) recalling the feral man who appears from the forest in Book III of Dryden’s Aeneid;

When from the woods there bolts before our sight
Somewhat, betwixt a mortal and a sprite.
So thin, so ghastly meagre, and so wan,
So bare of flesh, he scarce resembled man.
This thing, all tattered, seemed from far to implore
Our pious aid, and pointed to the shore.
We look behind, then view his shaggy beard;
His clothes were tagged with thorns, and filth his limbs besmeared.

• “Cub” (line 184) referencing the ambiguous offspring in Wulf and Eadwacer, the Old English poem of notoriously difficult interpretation, which shares the rich and complex ambiguity of Prynne’s poem[93]. The word for child which Prynne translates as “cub” is “hwaelp” in the Old English, having the same canine and lupine connotations as whelp. Other themes in Blue Slides at Rest also resonate in Wulf and Eadwacer, for example, the theme of a mother separated from her offspring. In the context of the Iraq theme, the concluding lines of Wulf and Eadwacer[94] might be intended by Prynne to call to mind a reference to the British having created the boundaries of modern Iraq after the World War I with scant regard for the boundaries of the homelands of ethnic and religious groups[95], which remains one of the main obstacles to achieving stability in the country. The identity of the speaker in the poem, and the principle characters referred to and addressed, are also as elusive as in Prynne’s poem.

4 Peroration: “order holding trace and lock”

As we might expect, the final stanza brings together the principle themes encountered throughout the poem.

Pearl, the most notable poem sharing the same 12-line stanza as this poem, is concerned with a revelatory dream vision which reconciles the poet to the loss of his infant daughter. Jim Keery has already pointed out a theme of pilgrimage[96], which is borne out by the many allusions in this stanza to dream visions.

• “Down in earth” is a phrase which recurs two stanzas previously. It is sourced from another dream vision, Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which the poet considers his role in recording history and the lives of the famous (in the fashion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and indeed Virgil’s Aeneid) and the extent to which such accounts are truthful. We hear the poet recall how Aeneas betrayed Dido, and recount many other famous stories of lies and betrayal; we also learn how everything that is said “down in earth” — both false and true — lives in the house of fame in the likeness of him who uttered it.[97]
• The extended phrase “Go down in earth” of the final stanza suggests a further reference to Vergil, in the translation by Rev. O. Crane[98], where the prophetess describes to Aeneas how he can descend and return from the underworld to visit his father:

“descent to Avernus is easy,
Nights and days stands open the portal of hideous Pluto,
But to retrace one’s steps, and return to the air of the day-light,
this is a drudgery, this is a labour. But few whom impartial
Jove hath esteemed, and whom glittering worth hath exalted to heaven,
Sons of the gods, have achieved it.” (Book VI, lines 126–131)

“”But it is granted to none to go down in earth’s gloomy recesses,
Save as he first shall have plucked from its tree this golden-haired offshoot.” (Book VI, lines 140–141)

• “Into this world of darkness” recalls not only the Gospel of St John (1:5: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”), but also the words of Thomas DeQuincey:

“Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them[99].”

• “Go with me” is a plea from Buckingham, about to be executed, in Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII[100]:

Go with me, like good angels, to my end;
And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me,
Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice,
And lift my soul to heaven. Lead on, o’ God’s name.

• “Like a feather” brings to mind John Clare’s Recollections of his lost childhood:

“Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on
[…]
With heart just like a feather — now as heavy as a stone”

And knitted into these revelatory and nostalgic dreamworlds is the harsh return to reality of the still ongoing situations of Pauline Goodwin’s separation from her children (“appeal months and years”), the illegally incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay (“hooded unseen”), and the ongoing war in Iraq (“machine knit parapet” — for “machine gun parapet”).

The final sentence of the entire sequence can be taken to apply in any of these cases, which all continue to be supported by the state’s “mish-mash certainty,” and delivers a grim message of a strong grip continuing to be exercised under order.

In care from hers avoidance transit
accept in strong wardship, order holding trace and lock.

5 “Blue slides at rest” — in other words…

“Ræd hwæt ic mæne.” “Explain what I mean.” Riddle 61, the Exeter Book

In summary, a poem about identity and difference, permanence and transition, rest and movement, logic and illogic, and the transitional states between them. It’s also about the interests we have in setting up these categories, and the violence we do in maintaining and changing them when it suits our purpose. We try to classify and control people, lay claim to territory, master language and use it to achieve our will, but (as with water) the more we grasp, the less we hold[101]. This of course equally applies to the analysis of any text.

If this essay is able to provide at least some signposts, some flight paths or shipping lanes across the unmarked blue, then it will have achieved its purpose — though the vast majority of the territory still remains to be mapped. During our continued exploration, we may anticipate a dawning of truth, the discovery of a smoking gun — but like “day before day” we see only a false dawn, and the conclusive evidence which might support a determinate meaning remains tantalisingly beyond our grasp. Very deliberately, Prynne’s poem utilises numerous rhetorical devices, but displays scant explicit application of logic. As is proper to the genre and style, and fully in keeping with its theme, the poem’s point of view develops more as a spreading rumour or a game of Chinese whispers than as a statement of fact, though the broad thrust of the argument emerges very clearly from the dense fabric of the verse.

Now a poem isn’t written to be argued with, and one doesn’t argue with a poem. One appreciates it.

But sometimes we need to suspend our over-analytical disbelief and cynicism in order to take action where it is needed. Then again, we can never have complete and perfect information about anything to determine when and what action is appropriate. For every Iraq where we act on the evidence of a dodgy dossier, there is a Darfur where we don’t act and disaster ensues. For every Webster baby where expert opinion is mistaken and intervention is premature, there is a Baby P where action is insufficient or too late to prevent a tragedy.

So by what alternate, dark logic will you “know your way/ through this temporal occlusion” and do the right thing, as Prynne demands of you? In the full knowledge of the perpetual imperfection and incompleteness of the information available to you, how will you intuit enough to know when and where to take appropriate action before it is too late? In the midst of the dense fug of mediated extremes, how can you know what it is to act with temperance, and find the middle way?

***

Paraphrase

Antara and Abla

An lies tabled other. Un other. Sanct-
ions spoils lite. P. Charges struck, buckle tried.

[1] Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Penguin Classics; Reprint edition, 1985

[2] Thomas DeQuincey, On the knocking at the gate, Doubleday & McClure,1899

[3] Prynne also used 12-line stanzas in Her Weasel’s Wild Returning (1994), where they were grouped as a series of seven poems, each of two stanzas. His stylistically similar 2006 series, To Pollen (Barque Press), comprised 22 stanzas of 13 lines each. By the 2009 collection, STREAK~~~WILLING~~~ENTOURAGE/ ARTESIAN, he has reintroduced regularly grouped 4-line stanzas found in the earlier series, Acrylic Tips (2002) and Biting the Air (2003).
12-line stanzas are relatively rare in English literature, notable examples being the Middle English poem Pearl, and Tennyson’s Mariana (the form of which might be more accurately described as 8+4 lines in each stanza).

[4] The occurrence of one or two very short sentences within many of the stanzas in the poem is a structurally unifying feature: e.g. “Snapped even so.” “Reach to this.” “Imitate less.”

[5] In addition, 6 words are broken over line-ends with a hyphen.

[6] There are only two italicised phrases throughout — “per se” and “in situ,” the latter being particularly reminiscent, when considered in the wider context of themes emerging in the poem, of legal language used in the context of the U.N. former weapons inspection regime in Iraq.

[7] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000

[8] The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, Oxford, 1989

[9] Website www.answers.com, “alt key,” 9 June 2009

[10] Cambridge Dictionary of Etymology, ed. Robert Barnhart, Chambers, 1988

[11] J.H.Prynne, They that haue power to hurt, Cambridge, 2001, pp 64–69

[12] Including, according to AHD, the following (words in bold are to be found in the poem):

· A base of prepositions and preverbs with the basic meanings of forward, through, and related to words such as paragon, parallel, paramount, parapet, paravail, as well as words such as far, first, furnish, per, pro and proof;

· A verbal root meaning to lead, pass over, related to fare, warfare, wayfarer, import;

· A verbal root meaning to try, risk, and related to fear;

· A verbal root meaning to strike, and related to press, impressment pressure, and depressed,

· A verbal root meaning to traffic in, sell, and related to praise and price.

[13] Now meaning “the colour of the sky and the deep sea,” or “livid, leaden-coloured, as the skin becomes after a blow, from severe cold, from alarm etc.” (OED2). “Often taken as the colour of constancy or unchangingness, Hence, true blue: faithful, staunch and unwavering (in one’s faith, principles etc.) sterling, genuine, real” (OED2). On the other hand “the name of one colour often shifted to another colour in the various Indo-European languages so that different colours (here yellow, white, pale or livid) have related forms from the same base” (CDE), witness the trace of the etymology of its root BHEL (to shine, flash, burn shiny white and various bright colours, and related to Latin fulmen: lightning (AHD)) through flavus (Latin: yellow), blush (OE blyscan: to glow red), black, bleach, blond.

[14] For example, wounded soldiers in hospital, and formerly servants, tradesmen, paupers and charity-school boys, by virtue of their blue clothing (OED2).

[15] For example the sea and sky, by virtue of their colour, and the desert (OED2) perhaps because of the wide expanse of sky over it.

[16] cf. line 216: “Fresh green ever now shining blue”: Ezra Pound began his translation of the second of the Han period Nineteen Old Poems, collected in his own Cathay group of poems, as “Blue, blue is the grass about the river.” Prynne draws attention to this in his Postscript to Dr. Anne Birrell’s translation of New Songs from a Jade Terrace, which translates the same poem as “Green, green riverside grass.” The characteristic epizeuxis (see section 3.5) of this line, which is repeated in subsequent lines and became a model for many later poems in the Jade Terrace collection, is a feature of the original Chinese verse.

[17] Indeed, relativist cultural linguists will argue that “the meaning of a colour term is not a labelling response to a colour stimulus, but the full culturally defined relations it engages in and activates, its role in the ongoing social coupling of a people” William A Foley, Anthropological Linguistics — An Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, 1997

[18] The Owl and the Nightingale, Text and Translation, ed. Neil Cartlidge, University of Exeter Press, (2001). In a footnote (p.60) Cartlidge observes: “Man was usually defined as different from the other animals precisely on being able to control instinct by means of reason. Cf “Altercation Ganimedis et Helene” (ed. Lenzen), str. 34, 1–2, “Non aves aut pecora debet imitari/ Homo, cui datum est ratiocinari” [“Man, who has the gift of reason, should not imitate either birds or (herd-) animals”]” Cf BSAR line 59: “Imitate less.” Again, Cartlidge observes (p.67): “Underlying this passage is the widespread medieval belief that the power of reason is what essentially distinguishes humankind from animals, so it is, of course, ironic that such views are being expressed, not by a human being, but by a bird.”

[19] Joining: album, bind, bond, brace, dove (joint), dowel, fusion, gather, seams, stapled. Splitting: apart, aside, cut, divising, faction, filter, part, quotient, reflux, slice, spectral, split-off.

[20] This has the interesting effect of leading us to read “tongue” and “groove” as verbs, disrupting the normal reading as a “tongue and groove” joint in carpentry.

[21] Similarly, “which” (occurring twice) must be read in its relative rather than interrogative meaning, and “what” (occurring three times) in its exclamatory, relative or indefinite meanings.

[22] The modal auxiliary verbs in English are can, may, will, shall, must, ought, need and dare. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, ed. Robert Huddleston, CUP (2002)

[23] Which OED2 notes that “in some uses it is not always possible to distinguish” from the auxiliary.

[24] “At the United Nations, Mr. Annan spoke of the Security Council’s efforts on this issue, saying, ‘’I am sure, if there is will, they will find the language to broaden and internationalize the process.’’” Reported in New York Times, Thursday, July 17, 2003.

[25] Compare “face to face” in line 219 which has no such ambiguity.

[26] A few other words featuring prominently in the poem with covert undertones which are noteworthy in the context of the themes of the poem include:

· Lift: “To bring to an end by removing forces” (AHD) as in “lifting a siege”;

· Give: as antonym of “take” (see above), and also as in “give outright” (line 222), as opposed to making a loan (lines 14, 102, 117) or renting (line 3).

· Child: a young human (OED2), in contrast to Danish cognates with non-human associations meaning offspring, brood, cub (line 184) (CED).

· Like: a dead body (CED).

[27] The brothers Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) and Augustus Mayhew (1826–75) were Victorian writers and reformers. This extract was contained in Henry Mayhew’s “London labour and the London poor: a cyclopedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work” (Griffin, Bohn and Company,1861); three volumes of articles describing the lives of London’s poor, and also reused in a variant form in Augustus Mayhew’s “Paved with Gold, The Romance and Reality of the London Streets” (London, Chapman and Hall,1858). Philip Larkin referenced another section of Henry Mayhew’s book in his poem, Deceptions.

[28] “If a boy runs away, scared and terrified by the violence of a parent, or maddened by continuous and sometimes excessive severity, the parent often feels compunction, and I heard of persons being sent to every lodging-house in London, and told to search every dry arch, to bring back a runaway. On these occasions the street-sellers willingly give their aid; I have even heard of women, whose degradation was of the lowest, exerting themselves in the recovery of a runaway child, and that often unsolicited and as often unrecompensed.” Chapter: Of two runaway street-boys, ibid.

[29] See section 3.6.3

[30] See section 3.6.3

[31] John Dryden, Vergil’s Aeneid, Penguin Classics,1997

[32] See section 3.3. Earlier in the episode of Dido and Aeneas, Dido’s motherly love has been deceptively re-awakened by Cupid impersonating Aeneas’ son, Ascanias.

[33] Myth deriving from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s (c.1100 — c.1155) Historia Regum Britanniae, and still fashionable in Dryden’s time, held that the ancient Kings of England were descended from the line of the Trojan Brutus, grandson of Ascanius, the son of Aeneas.

[34] Sir Thomas Wyatt, Complete Poems, Penguin Classics; Reissue edition, 1988: “They flee from me, that sometime did me seek/ With naked foot, stalking in my chamber”.

[35] A bantam is a soldier (OED), and also a kind of cock. Additional references to a dove and a fantail are suggestive of the bawdy anonymous verse “The bantam cock” in which the cock, having violently sexually interfered with the entire avian community of the farmyard, plays dead in order to rape the vultures circling overhead: “He groped me fantail pigeon doves/ And me lily-white colombine./ And his eye was alookin’ at me budgerigar/ When he jumped me parrot from behind./ It was sittin’ on me shoulder at the time!// He gave me a wink, and a terrible grin,/ The way that rapists do./ He said, ‘You see them silly dark buggers up there?/ They’ll be down in a minute or two!/ They’ll be down in a minute or two!’”

[36] E.g. lines 58–59: the idea of “thread” in “hydroxy” (a long chain molecule), “filament,” “temperature” (via its Indo-European root’s connection to “stretch”), and “vane” (via its Greek root “pene” — the thread on a bobbin). Also, elsewhere: “threads,” “roped,” “frayed,” “floss,” “corded.”

[37] E.g. “knit;” “twilled,” “woven,” “stitch,” “mesh,” “seams.”

[38] Definitions are from Wikipedia, June 2009. Continuing the poem’s theme of ill-founded assertion, this gas is related to the notorious Fleischman-Pons cold fusion experiments of 1989, subsequently discredited, but still a subject of fascination outside the scientific mainstream.

[39] Council Regulation (EC) No 1334/2000 of 22 June 2000 — setting up a Community regime for the control of exports of dual-use items and technology. Revised in July 2004, the year of publication of Prynne’s poem. Available on eur-lex.europa.eu — the word “lex” itself is referenced in line 20 of Prynne’s poem, whose dual use of the regulation is as ironic as it is witty.

[40] “He had that practical knowledge of seamanship of which the country stood much in need, and it was humiliating to find that impressment seemed to be necessary to teach him to use it for her advantage. Many neighbouring young men, less fortunate than himself, had been pressed and taken; and their absence seemed a reproach to him. “ “When he was thrown under the influence of Anne’s eyes again, which were more tantalizingly beautiful than ever just now (or so it seemed to him), his intention of offering his services to the Government would wax weaker, and he would put off his final decision till the next day. Anne saw these fluctuations of his mind between love and patriotism, and being terrified by what she had heard of sea-fights, used the utmost art of which she was capable to seduce him from his forming purpose. She came to him in the mill, wearing the very prettiest of her morning jackets — the one that only just passed the waist, and was laced so tastefully round the collar and bosom. Then she would appear in her new hat, with a bouquet of primroses on one side; and on the following Sunday she walked out before him in lemon-coloured boots, so that her feet looked like a pair of yellow-hammers flitting under her dress.” Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet Major

[41] Camb. King’s Coll. MS Muniment Roll 2 W. 32r

[42] Two groups of meanings ensue from the root: (1) “to seize, reach” as in “grasp,” “grab”; (2) “to dig, bury, scratch, etch” as in “grave,” “groove.”

[43] e.g. baby, palmar grasp, infant, child, breast, reflux, caliper, twin, brother, naval, kin, sibling, brother, twin, head first, lactic, icterine, dilated, myopia, nativity, advent, font, seas of milk, nipple, minor, natural child, parented, foster, adopted, care taken, in care, wardship, graft.

[44] Forced Adoption, Ian Josephs, Lulu 2008.

[45] Hansard, 23 Apr 2008 : Column 1431, 7.25 pm, John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD):

[46] “How the state stole my daughter, by Amanda Cable, Daily Mail, 18 January 2007. That afternoon, the baby was stripped, examined and weighed by a GP, who declared her well-nourished, well cared for and above average weight. The social worker asked for a referral letter for the hospital, but the GP refused,’ says Yvonne. ‘I was told to leave the room, and five minutes later the social worker strode out. He was carrying a letter of referral to Derby Children’s Hospital. The social worker drove me to the hospital in silence, and I remember shaking with fear. It was seven in the evening and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I was crying so much I couldn’t speak. A paediatrician took Cheri into a cubicle to examine the bruise on her cheek. […] When I returned to Cheri, the social worker said that a safety order had been placed on my daughter. If I tried to leave the hospital with my baby, I would be charged with kidnapping.”

[47] “Landmark human rights battle by mum of six backed by campaigning MP” September 17 2007, by Mary Murtagh, Liverpool Echo: “A Merseyside mum is making legal history by going to the European courts to get back her baby daughter, who was taken away and adopted. In 2005, Pauline Goodwin, 39, had her three-day-old daughter taken away by social services. She has not seen her baby girl in 15 months and has since been told that she was adopted. Ms Goodwin said her fight to get her daughter back had been held up for more than a year because she was never given a copy of vital court paperwork to allow her appeal.”

[48] petition.co.uk/nicky_and_mark_webster_support_group

[49] Act III, scene II, King Henry VIII, ed. Fordon McMullan, The Arden Shakespeare, 2000.

[50] See section 4

[51] King Henry VIII, ed. Fordon McMullan, The Arden Shakespeare, 2000

[52] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Penguin Classics; Abridged Ed edition, 2003

[53] This technique in English poetry is often dated back to Sir Philip Sidney (rare is the verse in the entire sequence of Astrophil and Stella which does not contain rhetorical wordplay, for example Sonnet 60: “Whose presence absence, absence presence is; Blessed in my curse, and cursed in my bliss” in The Major Works, OUP Oxford; Reissue edition, 2008) and Wyatt (e.g. CXVIII, The Devonshire Manuscript: “then that that ye have wrought/ ye must it now redress” in Sir Thomas Wyatt, Compete Poems, Penguin Classics; Reissue edition, 1988), and from thence used to very good effect by Shakespeare in both plays and sonnets. In fact, it was also in evidence in earlier English verse, for example Bird on a briar (see above). Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad uses epizeuxis and diacope in several places to evoke the densely packed opposing forces of the Greek and Trojan phalanx: “an iron scene gleams dreadful o’er the fields,/ Armour in armour lock’d, and shields in shields,/ Spears lean on spears, on targets targets throng,/ Helms stuck to helms, and man drove man along”(lines 179–180, Book XIII, The Iliad, trans Alexander Pope, Ingram, Cooke and Co., 1853). Other writers have also made extensive use of such rhetorical devices, from Dryden through Tennyson, to Olsen (“earth and sea folding and folding/ earth and sea” from The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butterick, University of California Press, 1984, p338) and beyond.

[54] The following are also to be found: “day before day,” “Watch her watch,” “out for out,” “not indic not,” “way to way,” “Mouth to mouth,” “case by case,” “face to face.”

[55] An enigmatic fragment from a poem of T.E Brown: “Ah ! now/ I have you, Julia, Brutus’ mate,/ Such lip, such brow./ Such port, such gait:/ A body, where the act of every sense/ Compounds a final excellence — / Ah, glorious woman ! Whence/ This perfect good,/ If not from juice/ Of finer blood,/ Perfumed with use/ Of ardours pure, intense/ With strains of sweet control?” Roman Women, from Collected Poems of T.E Brown, Macmillan and Co, 1909.

[56] Other notable examples include: claim, claimant, Claiming; cleaving, cleft, clefted; did (x4), do (x2), does, don’t (x2); front (x2), frontal, fronting; fuse, fused, fusion; give (x3), given (x4); hear, heard, hearing; inward (x2), inwardly, inwards; know (x3), Knowing, knowledge, known, knows; lift (x4), lifted (x2); like (x6), likeness; lose, loss, lost (x3); low, lower, lowered; Reach, reached, Reaching; rent, rental (x2); sense (x2), sensing; serve, service, servitude; start (x2), starts; suffice, sufficient, sufficiently; Take (x5), taken; trace, traced, traces; Unrighted, unrightful (x2); yield, yielded, yielding.

[57] Though the past participle “cleft” in the poem is only from the first, transitive strong verb.

[58] e.g. abstain, accept, agree, alleged, apparent, appeal, argue, asperse, assent, assert, assessment, assumed, assuming, believable, certainty, concept, contemplate, deem, dispute, enjoin, fact, generalise, gnomic, ignorant, inference, inferring, know (x3), knowing, knowledge, known, knows, mean, meant, necessary, principle, proof (x2), protests, prove, reason, recall, remembered, reminder, right (x3), rumour, sensorium, suffice, sufficient, sufficiently, true, truth, under-stood, unknowing, unrighted, unrightful (x2).

[59] Which is specifically referenced in relation to these words in the CED.

Elsewhere in the Owl and the Nightingale, we are presented with the image of an ape reading a book:

On ape mai a boc bihalde,
An leues wenden & eft folde,
Ah he ne con þe bet þaruore
Of clerkes lore top ne more.

An ape can look at a book, turn the leaves and shut it again, but it by no means makes him any more advanced in scholarly knowledge.

Neil Cartlidge (Ed.), The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, University of Exeter Press; annotated edition, 2001. In the notes, we are told that the image of the ape in The Owl and the Nightingale is of “thematic relevance … to the poem’s broader concern with language and understanding” suggesting that the animal “represents the thoughtless exercise of language which preoccupies the birds’ mutual accusations.”

[60] The same passage is also heavy with reference to a passage in Dryden’s Aeneid which can be taken to illustrate the effect of lust on the powers of reason, as Queen Dido and Aeneas consummate their love prematurely with disastrous consequences: “To rolling torrents raise the creeping rills./ The queen and prince, as love or fortune guides,/ One common cavern in her bosom hides.”

[61] “A dragon-fly with beauteous wing/ Is hov’ring o’er a silv’ry spring;/ I watch its motions with delight, — Now dark its colours seem, now bright;/ Chameleon-like appear, now blue,/ Now red, and now of greenish hue./ Would it would come still nearer me,/ That I its tints might better see// It hovers, flutters, resting ne’er!// But hush! it settles on the mead./ I have it safe now, I declare!// And when its form I closely view,// ’Tis of a sad and dingy blue — / Such, Joy-Dissector, is thy case indeed.” Joy, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 1972

[62] Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Penguin Classics; Reprint edition, 1985

[63] Wikipedia June 2009: “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation (more commonly known as the Dodgy Dossier) was a 2003 briefing document for the Blair Labour government. It was issued to journalists on 3 February 2003 by Alastair Campbell, Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy, and concerned Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Together with the earlier September Dossier, these documents were ultimately used by the government to justify its involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Much of the work had been plagiarised from various unattributed sources. The most notable source was an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi entitled Iraq’s Security & Intelligence Network: A Guide & Analysis, which was published in the September 2002 issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. Whole sections of Marashi’s writings on “Saddam’s Special Security Organisation” were repeated verbatim including typographical errors, while certain amendments were made to strengthen the tone of the alleged findings (e.g. “monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq” became “spying on foreign embassies in Iraq,” and “aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes” became “supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes”).”

[64] “Nought to be seen, but visionary monks/ To councils strolling, and embroiling creeds;/ Banditti Saints, disturbing distant lands;/ And unknown nations, wandering for a home./ All lay reversed: the sacred arts of rule/ Turn’d to flagitious leagues against mankind,/ And arts of plunder more and more avow’d;/ Pure plain Devotion to a solemn farce;/ To holy dotage Virtue, even to guile,/ To murder, and a mockery of oaths;/ Brave ancient Freedom to the rage of slaves,/ Proud of their state, and fighting for their chains;/ Dishonour’d Courage to the bravo’s trade,/ To civil broil; and Glory to romance./ Thus human life, unhinged, to ruin reel’d,/ And giddy Reason totter’d on her throne.” James Thomson, (1700–1748). Liberty, The Castle of Indolence, and other Poems. Ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

[65] STREAK~~WILLING~~ENTOURAGE/ARTESIAN, Barque, 2009. See also the poem on reversals of fortune, and future hope, Art Thou the Same by Frances Dorr (Swift) Tatnall: “Art thou the same, thou poor heart bruised and faint, /Treading thy way alone through twilight gloom? /Art thou the same that sang to greet the dawn, /Carolling in the sunlight like a bird, /Too glad for speech, too glad for aught but song? /Art thou the same that prayest but for night, For night to come and ease thee of thy pain, — /Art thou the same — the same?” (second stanza of three)

[66] See section 3.5

[67] See section 2.1

[68] See section 3.2

[69] “‘I am not doddery, doddery I am’ — Not!”

[70] “‘Nice to see you, to see you’ — Nice!”; “Good game, good game”; “‘Points make prizes — what do points make?’ — Prizes!”

[71] “For age has dulled my spirit, and very nearly bereft my mind of all its craft in composing; and it is also a great penance to me, since rhymes are so scarce in English, to follow word by word the curious art of Grandson, the flower of poets in France.” L’Envoy, The Complaint of Mars, Chaucer. We may also safely assume that the repetition is not due to this poet being drug-addled (see the poems of Lou Reed, where this may well be the case).

[72] For example, italics, breaking a word over a line (both very occasionally used), capitalisation, isolation or non-standard orientation of the word on a page, use of foreign language, archaic spelling, deliberate mis-spelling.

[73] For example, the Qur’an. The following famous passage from the Qur’an, traditionally the first passage of the entire book to be dictated to the illiterate Mohammad by the angel Gabriel, illustrates the use of epizeuxis (created — created) and rhyme (khalaqa — alaqa), which are a feature of the texture of many passages in the Qur’an.

iqra bil ism rabuki alethi khalaqa — khalaqa al insaan min ‘alaqa

recite in the name of your lord who created — created man from clots of blood

The Qur’an also makes use of the technique for rhetorical purposes. “Repetition is motivated not simply by the need to create a pattern of sound to involve the reader or to persuade the reader to adopt a similar view; repetition is also designed to reinforce particular meanings. The repetitions create deeper levels of meaning which also reinforce the overall semantic designs of the text. It is a regularly recurring rhetorical strategy, and essential component in the art of persuasion.” Hussein Abdul-Raof , Texture of the Qur’an, Qur’an translation, McCarthy and Carter, 1994.

[74] “lo mismo, which is then repeated, lo mismo, like the twinnings throughout of seven-line stanzas and the division of the fourteen poems into two facing sets — alludes to Goya’s series of 82 etchings, The Disasters of War, executed from about 1810–20 in the process of the occupation and liberation of Spain in the War of Independence. These unflinching, angry records of torture and mutilation each bear a terse inscription in Spanish: like “this is worse;” “bury them and be silent;” “that always happens;” “wonderful heroism! against dead men!” “Lo mismo,” “the same,” is one such caption from early in the sequence. Later on, it appears again in the variant form “it will be the same;” and later still, “the same elsewhere.” “Lo mismo” itself is the third in the series, and follows an etching marked “with reason or without” — so back to “unanswering rational shore,” the initial Shakespearean revision. Goya’s etching itself is symmetrical, after a fashion: armed men attacking armed men, in pairs. But the crudely weaponed Spaniard of the foreground, his axe chopping down on the flailing sword-bearing Frenchman, as his face stares somewhere else, “engrossed forever in dumb-struck dropped reward,” bears a look of terror, reciprocal, complicit despite itself.” Will Poole, Seductive forms: Unanswering Rational Shore. QUID 17

[75] “This series of “Los Desastres” has been read by some as a kind of epic of patriotism. I confess I am unable to view it in that light. To me it appears rather to be at once satirical and elegiac. The passion that inspires it is not the patriot’s hatred of the invader but the sick horror of a sensitive spirit at the human lust of blood. Patriotism is blind of an eye and sees but one half of the truth Goya’s vision was direct and impartial. He refuses to make his countryman the hero and the invader the villain of the tragedy. He shows a company of soldiers shooting down a couple of wretched peasants and comments : “Con razón ó sin ella” (With or without reason); in the next drawing a peasant armed with an axe is seen hacking at a wounded soldier and his annotation is: “ Lo mismo” (It is all the same). For him there is neither Frenchman nor Spaniard, there is only man, and he laments bitterly that man is only a little higher than the beast. The emotion of patriotism was submerged in the deep tide of despair that swept over his soul.” A little journey in Spain, Notes of a Goya Pilgrimage, by J.E. Crawford Flitch, Grant Richards, 1914.

[76] E.g. bend, creases, cuff, folding, kneading, reflected, tuck.

[77] See section 2.2.3

[78] E.g. abreast, balance, counter, counterpart, even, evenly, imitate, kin, kind, level, like, likeness, match, paired, parallel, same, similar, sub, substitute, twin.

[79] Related words in this thematic nexus include e.g. gene, kin, sibling, brother, tribal, breed, twin, belonging, race, parented, as well as phrases such as “name the same”. Antonyms include e.g. foster, wardship etc. and phrases such as “surname hers lost”– see section 3.3.

[80] Doyne Dawson, The First Armies, Cassell, 2001

[81] For example the Clovis Paleo-Indian nomads of North America, where a 5,000 year archaeological record shows no evidence of warfare, until gradual settling of the growing population, coupled with soil erosion and water scarcity, eventually led to warlike behaviours and the subsequent abandonment of the tribal lands. (Jonathan Haas, The Origins of War and Ethnic Violence, in J. Carman (Ed), Ancient Warfare, Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1999)

[82] Ibid.

[83] “Cleft for me” from the hymn, Rock of Ages, and “Go with me” from Buckingham’s speech before his execution in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.

[84] On average one every three lines, which I would venture to suggest is not a low rate, and certainly is not “almost without pronouns” (John Wilkinson, Tenter Ground, in Notre Dame Review, Issue 22, Summer 2006).

[85] Wilkinson (ibid.) links “her” to the mother implied by the birth-related theme, but this is unlikely to represent the whole story judging by Prynne’s characteristic multiple use of words across thematic complexes.

[86] Wilkinson (ibid.) draws attention to the “pronoun implicit as the object of the injunctive verbs” which govern many sentences in the poem, and we might also add that there is a personal pronoun implicit in many of the passive constructions. Far from being “without pronouns,” the text is practically bristling with them.

[87] The unavoidable systematic imperfection and partiality of any anticipatory information used for decision-making.

[88] Ezra Pound, Personae — Collected Shorter Poems, Faber and Faber, 1990

[89] Lana Stone Dieterich, Syntactic Analysis of Beowulf’s Fight with Grendel, in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Volume 14, 1983

[90] Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Cant. XII: “Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,/That hath so soone forgot the excellence/ Of his creation, when he life began,/ That now he chooseth, with vile difference,/ To be a beast, and lacke intelligence./ To whom the Palmer thus, The donghill kind/ Delights in filth and foule incontinence:/ Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,/ But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and wind.”

[91] With perhaps a hidden echo of “palmar grasp” in line 2?

[92] The “chill sprite” trope perhaps recalling the “dark chilling sprites” of Sir Philip Sidney’s Sonnet 76, Astrophil and Stella.

[93] Peter S. Baker, The ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer, in Studies in Philology, 78, 1981

[94] Richard Hamer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, Faber and Faber, 1970:

Þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs

Men may very easily put asunder
that which was never joined

[95] After World War I, Britain imposed a monarchy on Iraq and defined the territorial limits of the country without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds and the Assyrians to the north. During the British occupation, the Shi’ites and Kurds fought for independence. Although the monarch, Faisal I of Iraq was legitimized and proclaimed King by a plebiscite in 1921, nominal independence from the British was only achieved in 1932, when the British Mandate officially ended.

[96] Jim Keery, Controlled Amazement, The Cambridge Quarterly 2006 35(1):76–81

[97] “Phantom” (line 8) most likely refers to the passage on Fame in Dryden’s Aeneid Book III:

Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows:
Swift from the first; and ev’ry moment brings
New vigor to her flights, new pinions to her wings. […]
Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste:
A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast. […]
She fills the peaceful universe with cries;
No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes;
By day, from lofty tow’rs her head she shews,
And spreads thro’ trembling crowds disastrous news;
With court informers haunts, and royal spies;
Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies.
Talk is her business, and her chief delight
To tell of prodigies and cause affright.

[98] Rev. O. Crane, Virgil’s Æneid, translated literally, line by line, into English dactylic hexameter, Baker & Taylor Co., 1888

[99] Thomas De Quincey, On the Knocking at the Gate, First published in The London Magazine,October 1823. An earlier section of the passage is also of interest: “Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else, which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.”

[100] Act II, scene I — in a fitting counterpoint to the earlier use of Wolsey’s speech when confronted with his double-dealing.

[101] Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590). Book III: “(as in water) the more she grasped the lesse she held” in The Major Works, OUP Oxford; Reissue edition, 2008