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What it has always reminded me of is Blake: 'And priests in black gowns Were walking their rounds And binding with briars My joys and desires'  The dactyls may have encouraged this pairing. 

Chains in a maritime context were strangely absent from my early experience. We used to catch newts in little nets, sometimes getting leeches by accident.

 PR

On 16 Oct 2014, at 18:50, GOODBY JOHN wrote:

Judy, here's the gloss for the final phrase from 'Fern Hill' you mention, as I give it in my new edition of DT's Collected Poems. May be some use:

54   Though I sang in my chains like the sea = the sea sings despite and because it is ‘chained’ by gravity (cf. the ‘moon-chained … metropolis of fishes’, ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’). DT echoes Rousseau’s ‘Man is born everywhere in chains’ and ‘shades of the prison house’ that ‘close round the growing boy’ of the Immortality Ode, but he manages to ‘sing’ against mortality ‘in’ but also through them: metrical restraint can solace, as in Donne’s ‘The Triple Foole’: ‘I thought, if I could draw my paines, / Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay. / Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.’




On 16 October 2014 06:44, Judy Prince <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Tim Allen, responding to Giles Goodland a couple days ago (heading, 'Etymological Fallacy'), wrote that in his poetry, any word he uses " becomes another's word when they read it, where any one of its many histories, etymological or phenomenal, public or private, come into play. But that's in poetry, not in non-poetic prose. In prose, such as this, I 'say what I mean' with as much accuracy as my mood or inclination can muster."

Thanks, Tim; I quite understand and agree.  You touched on one of my favourite topics. 

Here are some of my observations about what the gilded bits of poetry often are and how they work:

Basic concrete (image-evoking) words are paired with other basic concrete words.  The pairing is an instant profound (glorious) shock:   we see two things together that we've never seen together before.  We apply what we 'see' them doing together to another 'thing' or person, sometimes stated in the phrasing.  Other readers will often disagree about how they'd apply the pairings (i.e., what the pairings 'mean').

An example from Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill:  " . . . though I sang in my chains like the sea."  Sea and chains?  Impossible . . . yet I can see the sea rolling and receding, limited by a chain.  And I can imagine the 'I' being so limited yet giving so much beauty (poetry).

An example from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo to Jessica:  "Such harmony is in immortal souls, /But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."   A muddy, decaying garment is our body, the second 'thing'.  In what way(s) do 'we' limit access to our souls?  

I especially welcome others' interpretations of this bolded bit from King Lear:  "How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you.  From seasons such as these?"

Best,

Judy