Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/07/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Poem of the Day: John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
     And that one talent which is death to hide
   Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
   My true account, lest he returning chide;
   "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
   I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
   Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
   And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
   They also serve who only stand and wait."

--John Milton

Sonnets are easy to write, hard to write well. The easy part is that the rhyme draws you on, spurs the mind toward the goal of finding that echoing word. The hard part is that you can easily lose the sense in search of the sound. Milton, of course, never wrote a word of nonsense in his life -- unless you regard his theology as nonsense, which is another issue entirely. His use here of the Italian sonnet form saves him from the trap that even Shakespeare fell into: contradicting the entire drift of the sonnet in one swift couplet. Some of the strength of this sonnet, sometimes titled "On His Blindness," lies in Milton's skillful use of enjambment, which keeps the flow of thought moving past the rhyme, as in

though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker,

where an end-line pause on "bent" suggests one meaning for the word, i.e., "curved or crooked" (perhaps under the weight of his disability), while the enjambment leads on to another meaning, "strongly inclined or determined." In fact, the poem is a model of all sorts of poetic and rhetorical tricks.