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Category: grammar
January 29, 2023
Fantasy in F minor, Op.49,
October 13, 2020
“The Story of Aglauros, transform’d into a Statue” – Ovid
“The Dancers” (c.1905)
Maurice Denis
________
This done, the God flew up on high,
This done, Hermes, the God, had just
turned Battus to a Touch stone
and pass’d
O’er lofty Athens, by Minerva grac’d,
Minerva, the Latin version of Athena,
was patroness of Athens, grac’d,
indeed, by the very Parthenon, then,
and still now, her temple
And wide Munichia, whilst his eyes survey
All the vast region that beneath him lay.
Munichia, the ancient name for a steep
hill, now called Kastella, in Piraeus, the
port of Athens
‘Twas now the feast, when each Athenian maid
Her yearly homage to Minerva paid;
let me point out that during the period
when pantheism prevailed, which is to
say anything earlier than the Emperor
Constantine, 272 – 337 AD, who
established Christianity as the official
religion of the Roman Empire, and going
back to the very beginnings of recorded
history, but at the very least to the epics
of Homer, his Iliad, his Odyssey, the 8th
Century BC, which tell of the Trojan War
and its aftermath, from the even more
distant 12th Century BC, homage was
paid, around the Mediterranean, to gods
and goddesses of Olympus, temples
were built, rituals performed in their
honour, much as in the Christian Era,
believers attend church, build cathedrals
to their preferred deity, feasts to Minerva
were as fervent then, in other words, as,
later, were those of devotees to their own
Christmas and Easter, say, celebrations
In canisters, with garlands cover’d o’er,
High on their heads, their mystick gifts they bore:
And now, returning in a solemn train,
The troop of shining virgins fill’d the plain.
see above
The God well pleas’d beheld the pompous show,
The God, Hermes still
And saw the bright procession pass below;
Then veer’d about, and took a wheeling flight,
And hover’d o’er them: as the spreading kite,
kite, a bird of prey
That smells the slaughter’d victim from on high,
Flies at a distance, if the priests are nigh,
And sails around, and keeps it in her eye:
her eye, the kite is given the feminine
gender here, perhaps following upon
the original Latin word’s grammar
So kept the God the virgin quire in view,
And in slow winding circles round them flew.
quire, archaic spelling of choir, a
group of instrumentalists or singers
As Lucifer excells the meanest star,
Or, as the full-orb’d Phoebe, Lucifer;
Lucifer, the Morning Star, the planet
Venus, as it appears in the East
before sunrise
Phoebe, pre-Olympian goddess
representative of the moon, thus
in the verse above the very moon
So much did Herse all the rest outvy,
And gave a grace to the solemnity.
Herse, a Greek princess
outvy, outvie, to surpass
Hermes was fir’d, as in the clouds he hung:
fir’d, inflamed, aroused, thus
flung as would be a missile,
the word fir’d here shimmers
with both meanings
So the cold bullet, that with fury slung
From Balearick engines mounts on high,
Glows in the whirl, and burns along the sky.
Balearick engines, slingshots,
the people of the Balearic Islands,
off the coast of Spain, were famous
in ancient times for their use of the
slingshot, or sling, especially as a
weapon
At length he pitch’d upon the ground, and show’d
The form divine, the features of a God.
He knew their vertue o’er a female heart,
their vertue, the virtues of both [t]he
form divine and the features of a
God, however be these identical,
allow grammatically for the
possessive adjective their to be
used here
And yet he strives to better them by art.
Hermes would rather seduce with
art, which is to say with charm
and artistry, than by his august
credentials merely
He hangs his mantle loose, and sets to show
The golden edging on the seam below;
Adjusts his flowing curls, and in his hand
Waves, with an air, the sleep-procuring wand;
The glitt’ring sandals to his feet applies,
And to each heel the well-trim’d pinion ties.
pinion, the outer part of a bird’s wing,
including the flight feathers, which
Hermes applies to his sandals
His ornaments with nicest art display’d,
He seeks th’ apartment of the royal maid.
to be continued
R ! chard
September 1, 2020
“The Story of Coronis, and Birth of Aesculapius” (III) – Ovid
“Minerva, or Pallas Athena“ (1898)
Gustav Klimt
______
But you, perhaps, may think I was remov’d,
As never by the heav’nly maid belov’d:
says the daw to the still snowy plume[d],
[w]hite as the whitest dove’s unsully’d
breast raven
remov’d, rejected, discarded and
disgrac’d
the heav’nly maid, Minerva
But I was lov’d; ask Pallas if I lye;
Pallas, another name for Minerva
Tho’ Pallas hate me now, she won’t deny:
hate, note, is in the subjunctive here,
the mood of conjecture, where the s
is removed from the ending of the
third person singular, that she, he, or
one, for instance, read, no s on read,
Ovid, would be a part of any Latin
curriculum
For I, whom in a feather’d shape you view,
Was once a maid (by Heav’n the story’s true)
A blooming maid, and a king’s daughter too.
A crowd of lovers own’d my beauty’s charms;
own’d, admitted to, acknowledged
My beauty was the cause of all my harms;
to a vain friend once who complained
to me of the rigours of being beautiful,
I said, your beauty, girl, to upend the,
otherwise tiresome, conversation, is
your curse, get over it, which he did,
it did, in at least that instance
Neptune, as on his shores I wont to rove,
Neptune, god of the Sea
wont, to be used to, predisposed to
Observ’d me in my walks, and fell in love.
He made his courtship, he confess’d his pain,
And offer’d force, when all his arts were vain;
all of the gods, it appears, are engines,
ever, of irrepressible lust, perhaps
allegorically alluding to the unquenchable
generative powers of very Nature
Swift he pursu’d: I ran along the strand,
‘Till, spent and weary’d on the sinking sand,
I shriek’d aloud, with cries I fill’d the air
To Gods and men; nor God nor man was there:
who hasn’t been there, forlorn,
abandoned, desolate, forsaken
A virgin Goddess heard a virgin’s pray’r.
virgin Goddess, Minerva / Pallas
Athena
note that Minerva / Pallas / Athena,
the virgin Goddess, remains, however
unconventionally, however irregularly,
the mother of Erichthonius
For, as my arms I lifted to the skies,
I saw black feathers from my fingers rise;
I strove to fling my garment on the ground;
My garment turn’d to plumes, and girt me round:
My hands to beat my naked bosom try;
Nor naked bosom now nor hands had I:
the king’s daughter, still unnamed, note,
attesting to the interchangeability of
virgin’s in Greek and Roman mythology,
is in the process of becoming a daw, a
black bird
Lightly I tript, nor weary as before
Sunk in the sand, but skim’d along the shore;
it appears there are advantages
to becoming a bird
‘Till, rising on my wings, I was preferr’d
To be the chaste Minerva’s virgin bird:
go, girl
Preferr’d in vain! I am now in disgrace:
Nyctimene the owl enjoys my place.
Nyctimene, Minerva’s owl
friendship, it appears, can turn
on a dime, or an inadvertent,
but decisive, irritation
R ! chard
August 2, 2020
Story of Phaeton (VIII) – Ovid
the initial page of the Peterborough Chronicle (14th Century CE)
___________
Jove call’d to witness ev’ry Pow’r above,
And ev’n the God, whose son the chariot drove,
That what he acts he is compell’d to do,
Or universal ruin must ensue.
had Dryden applied commas above,
as I am, you might’ve noted, nearly
compulsively wont to do, commas
being a significant part of my religion,
the verses might’ve been more easily
understood, put a comma after
witness and the object of the
witnessing, in this case an entire
independent clause, That what he
acts he is compell’d to do, finds its
natural position, clarity, Jove has to
do, he says, what Jove has to do
I cannot too much blame Dryden for
this literary indiscretion, this peccadillo,
to my mind, for punctuation has been
an evolving thing, there was a time
when there was no punctuation at all,
not even spaces between the words,
see above, this translation, of 1717,
stands somewhere within the gamut
of our ever evolving English grammar
the God, meanwhile, whose son the
chariot drove, in, above, the second
pentameter, is Phoebus / Apollo,
Phaeton‘s father
Strait he ascends the high aetherial throne,
Jove does
From whence he us’d to dart his thunder down,
From whence his show’rs and storms he us’d to pour,
But now cou’d meet with neither storm nor show’r.
Jove, being rendered impotent by the
raging fires, the immutable trajectory
of the very Sun having been
catastrophically, however improbably,
distorted, is left, at that time, or Then,
as the next line starts up, with no
option
Then, aiming at the youth, with lifted hand,
Full at his head he hurl’d the forky brand,
In dreadful thund’rings.
forky brand, a forklike piece of burning
wood, Jove’s trident
Thus th’ almighty sire
Suppress’d the raging of the fires with fire.
I’m reminded of the planned explosions
at the mouth of the oil wells in Kuwait,
wellheads, after the Gulf War, that were
meant to still for a critical moment the
fires, that would otherwise burn out
of control, in order to squelch the
disastrous conflagrations
At once from life and from the chariot driv’n,
Th’ ambitious boy fell thunder-struck from Heav’n.
The horses started with a sudden bound,
And flung the reins and chariot to the ground:
The studded harness from their necks they broke,
Here fell a wheel, and here a silver spoke,
Here were the beam and axle torn away;
And, scatter’d o’er the Earth, the shining fragments lay.
The breathless Phaeton, with flaming hair,
Shot from the chariot, like a falling star,
That in a summer’s ev’ning from the top
Of Heav’n drops down, or seems at least to drop;
‘Till on the Po his blasted corps was hurl’d,
corps, body, from the French, or
corpse
the Po, a river in Italy
Far from his country, in the western world.
one wonders, however, what happened
to the Earth, the Chariot of the Sun,
upon their fiery interaction, perhaps
the Sun, fallen behind the horizon,
beyond the western oceans, set out
again, the following morning, with its
usual master, Phoebus / Apollo, at
its steady reins, for the world to
see again another day under that
lord’s august intervention
R ! chard
June 28, 2020
“The Story of Phaeton” – Ovid
“Landscape with a Palace“ (1916)
Eugeniusz Zak
________
Her son was Epaphus, at length believ’d
The son of Jove, and as a God receiv’d;
without proof, it could not have been
absolutely determined, during this
ancient mythological era, that
Epaphus, son of Io become Isis, was
indeed the son of Jove / Jupiter / Zeus,
though that’s what at length, eventually,
came to be believed
and as such Epaphus was
With sacrifice ador’d, and publick pray’rs,
He common temples with his mother shares.
both Isis and Epaphus are worshipped
in common, in the same places, and
with a similar degree of devotion
Equal in years, and rival in renown
With Epaphus, the youthful Phaeton
Like honour claims;
Phaeton, another youth, [e]qual in
years to Epaphus, and in renown,
as famous, [l]ike honour claims,
puts forward, his own illustrious
heritage
and boasts his sire the sun.
the sun, Phoebus / Apollo, god,
among a number of other things,
of that very orb
His haughty looks, and his assuming air,
The son of Isis could no longer bear:
Thou tak’st thy mother’s word too far, said he,
And hast usurp’d thy boasted pedigree.
Epaphus, son of Isis, challenges
Phaeton, says that his mother’s
claim that her consort was the
god of the Sun is false, and that
he, Epaphus, is only promoting
the fabricated story of his high,
his boasted, pedigree, ancestry
Go, base pretender to a borrow’d name.
Epaphus delivers a double whammy,
base pretender, borrow’d name, ouch
Thus tax’d, he blush’d with anger, and with shame;
But shame repress’d his rage:
tax’d, confronted
repress’d his rage, Phaeton didn’t
slug Epaphus
the daunted youth
Soon seeks his mother, and enquires the truth:
is he truly the son of the god of the
Sun, Phaeton asks his mother, nearly
intolerable drama must surely follow,
turning on this burning question
Mother, said he, this infamy was thrown
By Epaphus on you, and me your son.
He spoke in publick, told it to my face;
Nor durst I vindicate the dire disgrace:
Even I, the bold, the sensible of wrong,
Even I, Phaeton asserts, the sensible
of wrong, as he describes himself, the
impatient of improprieties, however
bold, quick to respond, impetuous,
might he be, durst not, dared not,
vindicate, validate, the dire disgrace,
Epaphus‘ profoundly distressing insult
Restrain’d by shame, was forc’d to hold my tongue.
I was unable, Phaeton says, too
[r]estrain’d by shame, humiliated,
to even answer
To hear an open slander, is a curse:
But not to find an answer, is a worse.
a worse, we would say just worse,
but note that worse, here, is not a
noun, but the adjective for curse,
which has been elided, left out, a
worse curse, which, included,
would’ve altered, however, the
metre, the pentameter, and thus,
the poetry, style having trumped,
for better or for worse, in this
instance, the substance
a, incidentally, is the first beat of the
iamb, which is to say, the weak beat,
while worse, is the second, the one
with the accent, the determining
thump, a worse, da, dum, an iamb
Dryden didn’t have, in other words,
much choice, were he wanting to
be a poet, but to deftly press his,
surely masterful, grammar, to fit
his meaning to his, however
constricting, verse
If I am Heav’n-begot, assert your son
By some sure sign;
assert your son, acknowledge him,
[b]y some sure sign, Phaeton
demands of his mother
and make my father known,
at the same time, make … known,
identify, Phaeton continues, point
him out, my father
To right my honour, and redeem your own.
He said,
it is the honour[able] thing to do,
the required thing to do, [h]e said,
to restore, [t]o right, our reputations
and saying cast his arms about
Her neck, and beg’d her to resolve the doubt.
a son imploring his mother, can
anything be more poignant
‘Tis hard to judge if Clymene were mov’d
More by his pray’r, whom she so dearly lov’d,
Clymene, wife of Helios, or Phoebus /
Apollo, sun god, mother of Phaeton
Or more with fury fir’d, to find her name
Traduc’d, and made the sport of common fame.
Traduc’d, translated, transmitted
common fame, the casual, everyday
sport, entertainment, however
inappropriate, however malicious,
of many
She stretch’d her arms to Heav’n, and fix’d her eyes
On that fair planet that adorns the skies;
that fair planet that adorns the skies,
the sun, though Dryden must’ve
known the sun wasn’t a planet, nor
Ovid, for that matter, literary licence
having given style, here again, sway
over substance, for better, it’ll be up
to you to say, or for worse
literary licence, where style
overtakes substance
Now by those beams, said she, whose holy fires
Consume my breast, and kindle my desires;
girlfriend, I have to here interject, your
temperature is, ahem, showing, you’re
sounding, however uncharacteristically,
awfully intemperate, aroused, [c]onsume
my breast indeed, kindle, you audaciously
request, my desires
By him, who sees us both, and clears our sight,
By him, the publick minister of light,
I swear that Sun begot thee;
Clymene swears an oath upon the
very sun, her sire, the publick minister
of light, the very priest of illumination,
of clarity, for everyone, the sun’s
manifest incarnation
if I lye,
Let him his chearful influence deny:
don’t shine on me, Helios / Phoebus /
Apollo, him, Helios / Phoebus / Apollo
himself, Clymene cries, if I lye, lie, if I
tell an untruth
Let him no more this perjur’d creature see;
Let him, let yourself, Helios / Phoebus /
Apollo, be unable any longer to see me,
perjur’d creature that I, Clymene, am
And shine on all the world but only me.
obliterate me, she defies, from your
purview, let the world receive your
rays, but not myself
If still you doubt your mother’s innocence,
His eastern mansion is not far from hence;
With little pains you to his Leve go,
And from himself your parentage may know.
Leve, where Helios / Phoebus /
Apollo lives
With joy th’ ambitious youth his mother heard,
And eager, for the journey soon prepar’d.
Phaeton is off on his mission
He longs the world beneath him to survey;
he wants to see the world from the
perspective of the sun, an astronaut,
a dreamer, pulsing with ambition
To guide the chariot; and to give the day:
to drive his father’s car, chariot, how
contemporary, how immediate
From Meroe’s burning sands he bends his course,
Meroe, a city on the Nile, you’ll
remember that we’re still in Egypt,
where Io / Isis prevails, with Epaphus,
her son, the one who started all this
Nor less in India feels his father’s force:
the sun, his father’s force, is no less
vigorous in India than it is, he, Helios
/ Phoebus / Apollo, is, in Egypt
His travel urging, till he came in sight;
His travel urging, impatient to speed
up his pace, hastening his metaphorical
horses
And saw the palace by the purple light.
purple light, evening, though purple
is also, since antiquity, the colour of
royalty, Phaeton is perhaps seeing
both, the palace, at evening
see above
R ! chard
May 19, 2020
“Metamorphoses” (The Giants’ War, XIII) – Ovid
“Deucalion and Pyrrha“ (1636)
Peter Paul Rubens
___________
for my mom and dad, my own
Deucalion and Pyrrha
at Cephysus‘ shrine, Deucalion and
Pyrrha pray to the goddess of
Divine Justice
O righteous Themis, if the Pow’rs above
By pray’rs are bent to pity, and to love;
If humane miseries can move their mind;
humane, human
If yet they can forgive, and yet be kind;
Tell how we may restore, by second birth,
Mankind, and people desolated Earth.
the Pow’rs above are the deciding
factors, can Jove, Neptune, the others,
Deucalion asks, be moved by human[ ]
miseries, can they forgive, can they
restore…Mankind, people, people is
a verb here, the world again, the
desolated, or desolate, the dismal,
the forsaken, Earth
Then thus the gracious Goddess, nodding, said;
Depart, and with your vestments veil your head:
And stooping lowly down, with losen’d zones,
Throw each behind your backs, your mighty mother’s bones.
losen’d zones, across wide areas
cover, veil, your heads, the goddess
advises, stoop low, and throw your
mother’s bones across wide areas,
she instructs, however scandalously
Amaz’d the pair, and mute with wonder stand,
‘Till Pyrrha first refus’d the dire command.
Pyrrha is a counterpart for the Christian
Eve here, contrary, defiant of Heaven,
however eventually, Pyrrha, blameless,
but which of the progenitresses came
first, which the chicken, which the egg,
Eve or Pyrrha, is a question up for
contemplation
Forbid it Heav’n, said she, that I shou’d tear
Those holy reliques from the sepulcher.
surely, Pyrrha proclaims, Heav’n would
never allow, Forbid it Heav’n, not to
mention condone, that I should remove,
tear, my mother’s bones, [t[hose holy
reliques, relics, from their sepulcher,
their grave, this would be profoundly
unholy
They ponder’d the mysterious words again,
For some new sense; and long they sought in vain:
At length Deucalion clear’d his cloudy brow,
And said, the dark Aenigma
Aenigma, Sphinx, the oracle
will allow
A meaning, which, if well I understand,
From sacrilege will free the God’s command:
if I can properly understand, decipher,
the meaning of the God’s command,
Aenigma’s oracular words, however
cryptic, in such a way, Deucalion
declares, that our actions be not
sacrilegious, nor offensive in any
way to the gods, we may proceed,
he reasons
This Earth our mighty mother is, the stones
In her capacious body, are her bones:
This Earth is our mighty mother, the
stones in her capacious body [ ] are
her bones, no comma after body
the word order in each clause, note, has
been reversed, instead of subject, verb,
object, we have object, verb, subject
but then, ever so felicitously, stones
can rhyme with bones, and equally,
and as liltingly, we’re still in iambic
pentameter
These we must cast behind. With hope, and fear,
The woman did the new solution hear:
The man diffides in his own augury,
diffide, distrust, augury, prediction,
Deucalion doubts, in other words,
his own calculations
And doubts the Gods; yet both resolve to try.
when my mom is up against a
dilemma, she calls on my dad,
gone some over thirty years now,
come on, Daddy, let’s go, she
says, and confronts the issue
with transcendental, by very
definition, conviction
see above
Descending from the mount, they first unbind
Their vests, and veil’d, they cast the stones behind:
The stones (a miracle to mortal view,
But long tradition makes it pass for true)
what follows will seem miraculous
to mortals, Ovid says, but the story
has been around for such a while,
which is to say by long tradition,
that we let it pass for true
Did first the rigour of their kind expel,
the stones begin to lose, expel, their
firmness, the rigour of their kind
And suppled into softness, as they fell;
suppled, became supple
Then swell’d, and swelling, by degrees grew warm;
And took the rudiments of human form.
stones are being transformed,
metamorphosized, into humans
the Bible, if you’ll remember, would
have it be clay
Imperfect shapes: in marble such are seen,
When the rude chizzel does the man begin;
chizzel, chisel
While yet the roughness of the stone remains,
Without the rising muscles, and the veins.
as the sculpture is being fashioned,
certain parts of the human anatomy,
the muscles, for instance, the veins,
are not yet revealed, uncovered,
discovered, extracted, by the
chizzel, from under the roughness
of the stone
think of Michelangelo, or Rodin,
sculpting
The sappy parts, and next resembling juice,
sappy, from sap, which, emanating
from stones, would be next to, but
not as limpid as, juice, or the liquid
required to create humans
Were turn’d to moisture, for the body’s use:
Supplying humours, blood, and nourishment;
the circulatory, and notably viscous,
system
The rest, too solid to receive a bent,
Converts to bones; and what was once a vein,
Its former name and Nature did retain.
veins, which hadn’t received enough
sappy parts to become part of the
circulatory system, retained their
name of vein, but as understood in
relation to rocks, geological veins,
presumably replicated, in this story
of the Creation, in human bones
By help of pow’r divine, in little space,
in little space, in no time at all
What the man threw, assum’d a manly face;
And what the wife, renew’d the female race.
the stones that the man, Deucalion,
threw became men, those that
Pyrrha tossed became women
Hence we derive our nature; born to bear
Laborious life; and harden’d into care.
we’ve inherited, through the labours
of Deucalion and Pyrrha, our driven
nature, harden’d into, or conditioned,
condemned, to care
for better, I infer, or for worse
R ! chard
July 27, 2019
who’s afraid of the subjunctive
“Impression, Sunrise” (1873)
________
who’s afraid of the subjunctive
much like Elizabeth Taylor as Martha
in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”,
my answer is, I am, George, I am
the subjunctive is an esoteric mood,
even more abstruse in English than
in other languages, where the verb’s
conjugation highlights its presence,
in English, it’s nearly identical to the
indicative, the mood everybody
instinctively speaks in, facts
the subjunctive is about aspiration,
like the conditional, abstract, not
real, but its intention, rather than
the conditional’s inherent
impediment, a condition, shoots
for the stars, isn’t introspective,
but adamant, imperative
it is necessary that one be, it is
urgent that one have, it is
important that one effect, a
particular thing or event, all
subjunctives after the
doorkeeper word, “that”
one finds the subjunctive in
Shakespeare, master of grammar,
perhaps unparalleled in English,
a lot – O, that this too solid flesh
would melt, / Thaw and resolve
itself into a dew! – and follows
with Elizabeth Barrett Browning –
Pardon, o pardon that my soul
should make, / Of all that strong
divineness which I know / For
thine and thee …, for instance,
who is so profoundly indebted to
Shakespeare for her aesthetics
one wondrous day, I realized that
Proust’s entire “À la recherche du
temps perdu“, his “In Search of
Lost Time“, my Bible, was set in
the, French however, subjunctive,
the mood, there as well, of
possibility, therefore rather than
the definitive recreation of an
earlier time, Proust was
describing a sensibility, a personal
interpretation of a previous reality,
however bolstered by intimate and
apparently precise recollection of
shimmeringly imprecise, though
personally accurate, impressions
note here the similar preoccupations
of Proust’s contemporaries, the, aptly
named, Impressionists
everything, Proust was saying, as
were also the Impressionists, is in
the eye of the beholder
the subjunctive is the mood that
sets this instinct in motion
R ! chard
psst: Somerset Maugham I remember
being noteworthy as well for his
immaculate use, in his South
Pacific tales, of the subjunctive,
extremely elegant in its refined
construction, even with its
English austerities, like making
lace out of mere cloth, impressive
despite its impracticality, or
perhaps even because of it
June 27, 2019
grammmar in action, verb moods
“Philosophy and Grammar“
Gentile da Fabriano
__________
reach, imperative, I always say, indicative,
for a star, you might, conditional, get the
moon, but you might also, conditional,
get a star
such is the power of mood in verb
structure, and an expression of how
words through grammatical stipulations
become inspiration, poetry
think about it
R ! chard
June 9, 2019
the conditional
“If Once You Have Slept on an Island“ (1996)
Jamie Wyeth
________
the conditional mood is easy, it always
follows if
if I had a hammer, for instance
or
if I were a rich man
it is not a real event, as Classical
representation would be in art, were I
to make that synesthetic juxtaposition,
which is to say, were I to replace the
visual sense with that of letters, but
rather like Surrealism, for instance,
in that other context, a superimposed
idealization
here’s a poem you’ve probably
already heard, or heard of, through
its final, and epochal, verse, Kipling’s
“If“, a towering instance of moral
suasion on our culture
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
in the spirit of juxtaposition, compare
that to Polonius’ admonition to his son,
Laertes, upon that young colt’s imminent
return to France, where he had earlier
been, reputedly, carousing
Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, act 1, scene 3,
all, incidentally, in the imperative, the mood
of command, authority, however consequential
there, or not
a film called “If…” is also worth visiting
in this context, from the 1970s, with an
iconic soundtrack that gripped the
generation then that heard it, listen,
watch, the Missa Luba, be gripped
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