Dear Arthur,
What I'm getting from this version is such a determination to be 'poetic'
that I think it's leading to over-embroidery.
If I can take the first verse as an example, there is quite a bit of
redundancy in just 3 lines:
Murmur of storytelling trees
and the sibilance of tales woven by winds
whispered through the leaves of a battered brown book.
Do you need 'storytelling' and 'tales'?
or 'murmur' and 'sibilance' and 'whispered'?
I think you're in danger of overkill here, and perhaps it might be an idea
to trim this and re-phrase it to crystallise the image and the
double-meaning that I think is the central one, of the trees with
storytelling leaves (which is nice)
I prefer the section about Wind in the Willows in the first version- it
felt more genuine and less literary-for-the-sake-of-it to me.
Kind regards,
grasshopper
----- Original Message -----
From: "arthur seeley" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, February 02, 2003 12:19 PM
Subject: [THE-WORKS] Rewrite: Lost Worlds
Lost Worlds
Murmur of storytelling trees
and the sibilance of tales woven by winds
whispered through the leaves of a battered brown book.
Days I lost myself in The Wild Wood;
rumbled down The Open Road
with the insufferable strut and bloat of Toad.
Thin sunlight through taped windows,
afternoons in a crowded classroom of coughs
in a stone school in a grimy town ,
but we were all Ratties, restless,
Wayfarers All, with a stick and a pack
on a wanderer’s road to unknown lands.
I curled with Portly, safe,
silent between the cloven hooves
of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn;
rolled with Moley through buttercups, O my,
down meadows that billowed with sweet spring grass;
trailed idly-drifting-afternoon fingers
along the shining skin of a brown river,
watched its winks and swirls, my elbow on a hamper
filled with a picnic of dreams;
chased the mayfly's scintillance with Otter
and watched the glistening rings of his departure
shimmer and fade as years glitter and die.
Milestone on my journey into literacy.
An old friendship renewed in a decayed building
hands touch deep in the pile of tumbled books.
‘All books 5p each’.
A nothing buys everything;
a bauble purchases the world.
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