Alison:
> There is an
> argument (I can't remember where I read it, but I think it was to do
> with Kleist's disastrous and fertile misreading of Kant) that the
> evolution of culture depends on misinterpretations; that they
> function a little like genetic mutations or variations do in natural
> selection.
There's the paradigmatic case of The Lost Paint on Greek sculpures. If
they'd come down to us as originally produced, paint and all -- no
Michelangelo.
> I was wondering, however, how much the mistaking of Loverd for
> Beloved
... I'm not sure how the MS reads, "Louerd" or "Loverd" -- the text I
initially read it in -- Silverstein's anthology, I think my favourite -- has
"Louerd", the Web text I grabbed has "Loverd". Not specially important, as
it's a positional orthographic distinction.
> might have been "catastrophic", as you say; the Lord is often
> Beloved in these texts, and the spelling might have reflected the
> scribe's desire to conflate both these meanings in one word, in a
> kind of pun. So your error might not have been so erroneous, and
> might have been directed by the poem itself. But of course I am
> speaking pure speculation.
I'd possibly go along with that, Alison, except for two things -- neither
spelling of "Lo[u/v]erd" seems to point (linguistically) to "Beloved".
[I really ought to recheck that in the MED -- I didn't have access to it
when I was thinking around this before.]
The context, also, seems to play against the +extension+ of Lord in the way
you suggest -- it's there, certainly, especially among medieval female
mystics, but more often -- isn't it? -- used of Christ rather than God the
Father.
(Ooops! I'm tripping, amn't I? It +is+ Christ in Augustine, if not in I
Samuel (thanks again, Joanna), and so by extension in the English lyric.
Hm ... I may have to do a rethink. Which is always painful to me -- I just
*hate* having my preconceptions disturbed. <g>)
I felt the Augustine Connection was fairly crucial in suggesting what I was
doing was misreading, rather than, say, generating a subtext or (legitimate)
paratext.
Also I hit on it, slightly anachronistically, via Donne's "The Appartition",
which has some parallels to my original mistaken interpretation.
That said, I rather +like+ the "not +again+ Josephine, I'm just about sound
asleep" version -- and juxtaposing the Crucified Christ, our Lord, against
the woman remembered, "beloved" in my revision, seemed to make a sort of
imaginative sense.
There are traces of Auden in at least one line, associations of Villon
working the Ubi Sunt vein, both Ladies of Past Times, etc., and from things
he says outside the Big Ballades. And of course bits and pieces from here,
there, and everywhere from the medieval English Ubi Sunt poems, especially
the grandaddy of them all:
Were beth they biforen us weren,
Houndes ladden and hauekes beren
And hadden feld and wode?
That riche levedies in hoere bour
That wereden golden in hoere tressour
With hoere brightte rode...
No influence on my poem from the Old English and medieval Latin stuff that
precedes this, though, I think.
Cheers,
Robin
