Hold me underwater, not afraid of drowning

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! I woke this morning with forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit running through my head like the stuck line of a song, which I'm not even sure what to do with. On the other hand, I also woke to a small black cat who crawled under the covers beside me and purred himself back to sleep, which feels like a better omen. The air and the light have changed just enough to feel like autumn, even on a drizzling day. Every year I observe it's the ghost-season, but that doesn't seem to stop it being true.

Comments

[choco_frosh]

Okay, so this is high-level geekery, but: does the -an in the first word elide into the "et" (Forsan't?), making it a spondee, or are they pronounced separately, making it a dactyl?

Due to the eccentricities of my Latin education, I first encountered the line in the frontispiece of Among Others, where it DEFINITELY has some Eeyore flavor going on.

[sovay]

Okay, so this is high-level geekery, but: does the -an in the first word elide into the "et" (Forsan't?), making it a spondee, or are they pronounced separately, making it a dactyl?

Separately, dactyl-style. The full line is:

mittite: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit

which scans as:

— ⏑ ⏑ | — ⏑ ⏑ | — || — | — ⏑ ⏑ | — ⏑ ⏑ | — —

and wow, I hate doing scansion by Unicode. I recommend overlaying it on the text by hand.

[selkie]

Were we not already so happily married, and to others. *swoons in dork *