I remember this when it was workshopped and I love the polish and final jeweling Maz has put on this lush piece. It's like one of those silk gobelins where you're always looking at another corner and spotting another perfect detail.
The parallel structure of "trout-streamed and wooded"/"gold-belled and hooded" is actually one of my favorites because each, aside from paralleling each other, is so well linked into the words in their lines before. "trout" echoes the "-tate" in "estate," "belled" echoes "birds."
The "snite" hadn't bothered me because I'd looked it up during the workshopping and I'd found it meant "sneezed" as well as "to blow one's nose" and I suspect with the cognate in "snot" the ancient meaning is "to sneeze with snot flying out your nose" which in human is generally covered with a handkerchief, but with animals... Well, I've certainly had my dog snite on my leg before, and I've seen birds do it too. It's nice to see the old words used, low as well as high, though on the high end, I always find it a pleasure to see "fletched" in use (and not just because it's also in my poem) and "full-summed" is good to see as well.
|