Many thanks, Christopher, for your thoroughly amazing and amazingly
thorough elaboration of your metaphoric work on all three poets--if
I'm right to take you as also having submitted Prynne's poems to
this conceptual blender (hey, anybody else remember the Bass-O-Matic
from 1st-gen. SNL shows? Era of "Smuckers: With A Name Like That,
It's Got To Be Good"?). I did, in fact, have Prynne in mind when I
speculated on the concrete origins of the "life is a journey" metaphor
as lying (like Wotton's honest man abroad), countrywise, in those
first "steps" taken out into the world by our ancestors (those of
us with North Sea roots anyway) after the last ice receded.
Somebody somewhere refers to Frost vis-a-vis Prynne as "that other
man who loved the ice" (or something to that effect), and I've always
thought Frost to have a much greater presence in Prynne than has been
acknowledged in Prynne-crit. to date. There's "Frost and Snow, Falling,"
of course (cf. "Desert Places") and Prynne's three birch trees from a
single stump in both "Would Like to Think" (I think) and (glyphically
at least) in his rune poem. (I've retranslated that, btw, correcting a
couple of errors in Andrew Duncan's _Angel Exhaust_, if you'd like to
see it, though you can probably read the runes for yourself.) Hard not
to recall Frost's "Birches" and, even more so, his "Young Birch," with
its dark and day halved and doubled. And then there's Frost's odd
little "iota" poem, etc. etc.
Anyway, it was associating the two in the context of speculating about
the possible exhaustion of "life is a journey" as a master metaphor in
our own life- and ad verse-times that spawned my "life is a bargain."
Part of what I see as Prynne's sense of poetry (or part of _that_, I
should say) is as coinage, with the verbal sense making a pattymelt of
sorts with the heavy-metal one via his etymological tokens--drawing on
the names of coins in variously languaged monetary systems--which permit
his poems to speak so francly. If history begins with an Ice Age meltdown
for Prynne, as I think it does (and so do you, I gather), then cash would
seem to be the currency of currency--the hard stuff that we, here and now,
must bite, testing between our jaws what cannot be proved on our pulses,
however natural metal may be, because it's the artifactual gold standard
we're biting and bitten by (goldbugly--anyone for "bugger my neighbor"?),
and that's arty-fictional, as we all know by now in these counterfitting
times, post-brass as -ice.
That's not the only etymological token of his times that Prynne employs
in/for his language shifts, of course. Nautical terms compose another
vocabulary to be etymologically distilled, as do a cluster of terms such
as "rim," "par," and (I'd guess) "charm shot," among others, that would
seem to relate to golf (beats me--that's not my game). Most important,
it seems to me, are the (etymological) puns based on his own name, which
get assimilated to these other vocabularies. (Prynne: With A Name Like
That, It's Got To Have S[avings] & L[oan] Stamped All Over It!)
So, you answered my implicit questions as well, and so thoroughly well
that I want to mullet over some more, especially those parts of your
post that dealt with Frost's road knot, perhaps more interestingly than
the poem itself did. You're absolutely right (IMHO) about its static
quality, which is obviously interesting relative to "life is a journey,"
though still not on a par with Dickinson's "Because I Could" knot, for
my money....
Cheers,
Candice
P.S. Would be interested to hear more about your thinking on Prynne and
alchemy, as I've often wondered at the frequent attribution of "hermetic"
to him by people who seem to mean that metaphorically. There are whole
essays on Sanguine Fire, as you probably know, that don't acknowledge or
even seem to recognize its alchemical basis.
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