And her head has no room

[sovay]

In which I pay for all of yesterday's grinning. There's karmic balance; there really is. I have a migraine, but there is a greater problem: my iTunes library has eaten itself. No music. I'm not quite sure how this happened, and it puzzles me greatly, but I think my computer and I are both heading for the doctor's in the near future.*

On the bright side, the ever-impressive eredien has created livejournal icons from The Cuckoo, so that I now have a terrific icon of Psholtii looking pretty much the way I feel right now. I need a paid account just so I can support my growing icon habit.

Also, since I got into an offline argument about Keats yesterday, am I wrong? Are there reasons I should really like him? I'll give him "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," because I have a soft spot for demon lovers a mile wide, but otherwise I'm mostly left wanting to read Matthew Arnold or Swinburne or any other Romantic but Wordsworth. Distract me. Please.

*I didn't mention before that a few days ago, my mail program also cannibalized one of its own folders, and I lost pretty much all of my writing-related correspondence since 2003. This was not such a disaster, since I'm obsessive and paranoid when it comes to certain areas of my life, and so I had most of the files backed up. I don't think there's anyone's address I lost that I couldn't get back one way or another, and important things like contracts and acceptances and edits are all recorded elsewhere. But I really, really don't want my laptop to crash and take something actually vital with it, say, this lecture I'm working on for Wednesday, or all of my finalized stories since 1999, so . . .

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I don't like Keats half as well as I do Shelley, but I do like him. For one thing, he has this unbelievable ability to get away with melodrama without it actually being humorously overblown: say what you like about 'The Eve of St. Agnes', or 'Isabella', they aren't farcical, and they very easily could have been. And as papersky says so eloquently, he comes back on you and recurs unexpectedly when you hadn't been thinking of him.

But really, I think I like him mostly for his influence on his contemporaries and on later poets. Shelley, now, Shelley can make me cry.

[sovay]

I'm also mostly unfamiliar with Shelley. (I have no memory that I hate him, however, which is an improvement on Keats.) Show me something of his, although not if it makes you cry?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Okay, if you haven't read Prometheus Unbound there is something wrong with the world. Here's a section of Prometheus's dialogue, from very close to the beginning. He is addressing God, who is not visibly present.

The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains
eat with their burning cold into my bones.
Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips
his beak in poison not his own, tears up
my heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,
the ghastly people of the realm of dream,
mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged
to wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
when the rocks split and close again behind:
while from their loud abysses howling throng
the genii of the storm, urging the rage
of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.
And yet to me welcome is day and night.

(There should be an accent in winged for the scansion, but I have no idea how to make that display.)

That passage was selected from the play by putting my finger down at random.

Or from his partial translation of Goethe's Faust, and this one was not at random because it's one of my favorite passages:

Mephistopheles (to Faustus):
Cling tightly to the old ribs of the crag.
Beware! for if with them thou warrest
in their fierce flight towards the wilderness
their breath will sweep thee into dust, and drag
thy body to a grave in the abyss.
A cloud thickens the night.
Hark! How the tempest crashes through the forest!
The owls fly out in strange affright;
the columns of the evergreen palaces
are split and shattered;
the roots creak, and stretch, and groan;
and ruinously overthrown,
the trunks are crushed and shattered
by the fierce blast's unconquerable stress.
Over each other crack and crash they all
in terrible and intertangled fall:
and through the ruins of the shaken mountain
the airs hiss and howl--
it is not the voice of the fountain,
nor the wolf in his midnight prowl.
Dost thou not hear?
Strange accents are ringing
aloft, afar, anear?
The witches are singing!

Sorry to totally spam your journal with Shelley, but I hope I've made my point at least somewhat.

[sovay]

. . . okay, somehow I had read the entirety of Prometheus Unbound and managed to credit it to Byron. Apologies to all concerned.

I really like the Faustus.

footnote

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Compare & contrast Goethe's Prometheus (1773) with Shelley.

Re: footnote

[sovay]

When I'm not comparing and contrasting Atanarjuat and the Iliad, I shall definitely give it some thought.