Having trouble with the Squarespace App; when I close it to go off to have another life elsewhere, the only way I can reopen the document is by rebooting the iPad, which always taxes my memory. Ah well, technology! And to think that I gave up my typewriter for a laptop. I had an Olympia typewriter; my parents had bought it for me when I started college. Somehow they neglected to include a spellcheck. I typed my Master's paper on the Tempest on it, and the draft of my doctoral dissertation on 16th, 17th, 18th century formal verse satire: Joseph Hall, John Marston, John Donne (the John Donne also wrote 5 formal verse satires) , and Alexander Pope. The subject was Images of Evil; it was a critical work. Everyone before me had done the scholarly research, thank Goodness! Thus, I got to write a critical analysis and talk about the poems' meanings, something I really delight in doing, yet.
The only bad aspect of the task was the volume. One of my two best friends in graduate school, Bill Elkins who attended both UK and EKU, go figure, and who died on the operating table at age 62, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hopkins' 7 "Terrible Sonnets. Thus he had to study and understand, essentially, seven 14 line poems. His paper was about a hundred pages. I, however, with great youthful enthusiasm, chose 4 poets from two different ages, each with a number of much longer poems. Hall and Marston each had a book of this kind of poem; fortunately, Donne wrote only 5 of them, and Pope rewrote only 2 of them, but then wrote an original poem in the genre which is a literary masterpiece, The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. My last chapter was an extensive, absolutely brilliant literary analysis of that poem, fun to think about, fun to write, though it took me three more summers to finish my dissertation, primarily because of my struggle with Hall and Marston. And I haven't really thought about the beast since. I should do something about that, maybe.
In any case, What interested me in this somewhat minor verse form was the way the satirists conceived of and imaged evil, especially since Pope took 2 of Donne's satires and rewrote them, so to speak, in the 18th century style and idiom, that is, heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter). "I am his highness dog at Kew;/Pray tell me Sir, Whose dog are you?" "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;/God said, Let Newton be and all was light." "Oh hadst Thou, cruel, been content to seize/hairs less in sight or any hairs but these!" Pope's The Rape of the Locke is one of the most delightful poems in the English language.
I should close the document and save this writing, just in case. Odd, I had another topic in mind when I started this paper earlier in the morning, Turkey Vultures in the Subdivision, as well as Pet Peeves, but "at my back I hear time's winged chariot drawing near." Now that I think about it the chariot and the vultures go together, gulp.
"The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace."
Andrew Marvell, maybe. One l or two I can't remember. Iambic tetrameter. I should quit before something dire happens. Good morning.