I am still pushing this excellent headfood round my plate and nibbling at the tasty bits.
I am still struck by how my response (in this case) to the second poem changes when I remove the original from my thinking.
There's something I am reaching for and can't express (I've attempted it in a poem but that, rightly, can't be posted here); something to do with the poetic continuum, of how subject matter runs like a river and poets dip in as it runs past them and never (yet always) in the same place. The experience links, the language distances.
An example of what I mean is the being caught unaware by the singing of a bird. They roll on through our literary history - Keats's nightingale, Shelley's skylark, Hardy's thrush, Dun Karm's canary, Sassoon's nameless "everyone" who suddenly burst out singing - again and again they tap a poet on the shoulder.
I'll stop because I am not addressing the specific issue, but I am troubled by the thinking and will continue in my own time. Aspects of classical and foreign language translation are bothering me now and I am puzzling over a link with another forum. I can hear the voices of the adults in the next room "Just ignore her - she'll play like this for hours"...
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