The battle of the literature professors
What I'm trying to do here is not so much to get pretty links to oral music performances. Rather I want to elicit outstanding images and striking tropes that can transfer to the written page that are similar in quality to those that occur in the text(s) of Sir Patrick Spens, et al. It would help for the posters to explicitly identify and actually transcribe those images and passages that they have found that have comparable merit to the those in the best of the Child Ballad collection.
For example, one quatrain from Spens has several touches that are well above average, and it's not even the most graphic:
The King has written a broad letter,
And sealed it with his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the strand.
I think this parallels the thoughts of Matthew Arnold, who, in an 1861 essay called “On Translating Homer,” enumerated what he saw as the four cardinal qualities of Homeric verse: [1] rapidity, [2] plainness of syntax and diction, [3] plainness of thought, and [4] nobility.
Last edited by Allen Tice; 08-29-2019 at 05:25 PM.
|