Here's an interesting bit of trivia. In the epilogue of the Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly quotes, in Dryden's translation, all the passages of the Aeneid dealing with the peculiar destiny of Palinurus. Among these we find the following lines on page 135:
While cumber'd with my dropping cloaths, I lay,
The cruel Nation, covetous of Prey,
Stain'd with my Blood th'unhospitable Coast:
And now, by Wind and Waves, my lifeless Limbs are tost.
As far as I can make out, the whole work is built out of rhyming couplets, which means that we have here a seventeenth century precedent for rhyming the words "coast" and "tost", even though, if I'm not mistaken, what Dryden means here is "tossed" (not, say, "toast", though we might mean that today, or would have in the eighties, dude).
Anyway, I wonder what Tony might say, in his "fearless blogging voice", to this (my fearsome blogging eyebrow).
1 comment:
Hee hee. I've been dreaming about writing a book called Tempest-Tost. I actually wrote a poem called that as an undergrad. I'd like to dig back into Palinurus again over the holidays.
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