sovay | And when that I have murdered the man in the moon to a powder

The good thing about yesterday: although the day was a loss, I was functional enough by the evening to meet

lesser_celery for dinner at The Salty Pig and I hardly sounded like a TB ward at all. Between Tufts and Back Bay on the Orange Line, I looked up from Irmgard Keun's After Midnight (Nach Mitternacht, 1937) and the last sunlight was turning a cliff of brick and windows and the sky reflecting off them the color of a desert rose. It looked like some views from the train coming in to New Haven, which was not what made me happy.¹ I have no idea what did, but it lasted until I woke up this morning and went back to coughing.

The good thing about today: I also went back to Raven Used Books. To my frank surprise, no one had bought Robert Graves' In Broken Images: Selected Letters 1914–1946 (1982). I did promise

nineweaving:

13 July 1943

Dear Alan:

Thanks for long letter. I disagree with the critics about those historical chapters. They are short, but necessary to the argument, and it would have been awful to have to deal with E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and other contemporary giants and giantesses!

I have been worried by thinking about poetry and finding that all the poems that one thinks of as most poetic in the romantic style are all intricately concerned with moon-worship. This sounds crazy, and I fear for my sanity; but it is so. The old English ballads like Kemp Owyne, the Lykewake Dirge, are all composed with a sort of neurosis-compulsion for arranging things in 3s (although the stanza is a four line one) which is the chief characteristic of the Moon Goddess—Triple Goddess—ritual; and the 17th-century Loving Mad Tom poem, which is generally regarded as the most 'purely poetic' of all anonymous English compositions is a perfect compendium of Ashtaroth–Cybele–Hecate worship—not a single element omitted. Of course, Apollo originally pinched Parnassus and Pegasus from the Moon Goddess. And the Muse, whom poets habitually address, was the Moon originally in her Mouse aspect. The history of English poetry has been the modifying of the original moon-poetry, which is stressed, with sun-poetry (intellectual, Apollo-poetry) which is measured in regular beats and metres. Let me ramble on for a bit more. I find that Shakespeare, almost habitually, though using a five foot line only uses three interest-centres or operative words in any line; the rest is syntax or words of no particular accentuation—Chaucer seems to use four habitually. Chaucer was very much an Apollonian: a very good poet too.

This may lead me anywhere and I am so anxious not to get dogmatic or psychological. But I find myself making the Bards into Moon-men and the minstrels into Sun-men.

Help!

Love,
Robert

. . . Happy last of Candlemas, Robert. Don't scan this at home:

Brede, Brede, tar gys my thie, tar dys thie ayms noght
Foshil jee yn dorrys da Brede, as lhig da Brede cheet stiagh

Emma Christian, "Vreeshey, Vreeshey"

1. I thought also of a painting in the MFA, John Sloan's Pigeons (1910). I was just now curious enough to look up the artist, about whom I knew almost nothing. I have no idea where he posed for this portrait, but I like it..

And when that I have murdered the man in the moon to a powder

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