Robert, Rhina and Steven:
I’ve slept on it and I’ll submit in this case.
Still I’m not sure that grammar shouldn’t sometimes take a backseat
to music, meter, and effect. Just this morning I was reading Brodsky’s
Nativity Poems and ran across a formalist piece with this first line
(as translated by Derek Walcott):
“The air—fierce frost and pine-boughs.”
Does this verb-lacking cluster pass grammatical muster? Probably not, but I'll take it.
Just to give this dead horse one final stab, I’ll go back to Rhina’s original
observation that the line “As eldest, every eye was turned/towards me”
invokes “unintentional humor.” Could we as readers accept this as a lovely
misstatement by the poet, a fortuitous hiccup uttered in the child-speak
of the narrator? I probably belabor too much.
The good news is that I think Robert has hit on the perfect solution
for revising the poem, which I would pare down to :
The eldest, I saw every eye turn
towards me.
Thanks all for the lesson,
John
[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited December 07, 2004).]
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