Ridged Knot Stitch

INSURANCE, n.  An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

Insurance Agent: My dear sir, that is a fine house--pray let me insure.

House Owner: With pleasure. Please make the annual premium so low that by the time when, according to the tables of your actuary, it will probably be destroyed by fire I will have paid you considerably less than the face of the policy.

Insurance Agent: O dear, no--we could not afford to that. We must fix the premium so that you will have paid more.

House Owner: How, then, can I afford that?

Insurance Agent: Why your house may burn down at any time. There was Smith's house, for example, which--

House Owner: Spare me--there were Brown's house, on the contrary, and Jone's house, and Robinson's house, which--

Insurance Agent: Spare me!

House Owner: Let us understand each other. You want me to pay you money on the supposition that something will occur previously to the time set by yourself for its occurrence. In otherwords, you expect me to bet that my house will not last so long as you say that it will probably last.

Insurance Agent: But if your house burns without insurance it will be a total loss.

House Owner: Beg your pardon--by your own actuary's tables, I shall probably have saved, when it burns, all the premiums I would otherwise have paid to you--amounting to more than the face of the policy they would have bought. But suppose it to burn, uninsured, before the time upon which your figures are based. If I could not afford that, how could you if it were insured?

Insurance Agent: O, we should make ourselves whole from our luckier ventures with other clients. Virtually, they pay your loss.

House Owner: And virtually, then, don't I help to pay their losses?

Are not their houses as likely as mine to burn before they have paid you as much as you must pay them? The case stands this way: you expect to take more money from your clients than you pay to them, do you not?

Insurance Agent: Certainly; if we did not--

House Owner: I would not trust you with my money. Very well, the. If it is certain, with reference to the whole body of your clients, that they lose money on you it is probable, with reference to any one of them, that he will. It is these individual probabilities that make the aggregate certainty. 

Insurance Agent: I will not deny it--but look at the figures in this pamph--

House Owner: Heaven forbid!

Insurance Agent: You spoke of saving the premiums which you would otherwise pay to me. Will you not be more likely to squander them? We offer you an incentive to thrift.

House Owner: The willingness of A to take care of B's money is not peculiar to insurance, but as a charitable institution you command esteem. Deign to accept its expression from a Deserving Object.

New outfit for Easter from the Lydia/WiseBuysThrift shop; $$11.00!  SCORE!

Stockinette Ridge

 I                               Oh, when I have hung
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
Or half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed
Suspended by the blast which blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears; the sky seemed not a sky
Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds.
II
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear grass on that wall,
By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er,
As once I passed, did to my mind convey
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and looked so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream that could not live
Where meditation was. I turned away
And walked along my road in happiness.

III
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

IV
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent by, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Uon the glassy plain; and often times,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal rounds!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquill as a dreamless sleep.

 Seamus Heaney 

1968-1978

Happy Birthday Patricia Savilla Willson-Comfort

March 30, 1940

Diagonal Checks

Dawn Shoot

Clouds ran their wet mortar, plastered the daybreak

Grey. The stones clicked tartly

If we missed the sleepers but mostly 

Silent we headed up the railway

Where now the only steam was funnelling from cows

Ditched on their rumps beyond hedges,

Cudding, watching, and knowing.

The rails scored a bull's-eye into the eye

Of a bridge. A corncrake challenged

Unexpectedly like a hoarse sentry

And a snipe rocketed away on reconnaissance.

Rubber-booted, belted, tense as two pairachutists,

We climbed the iron gate and dropped

Into the meadow's six acres of broom, gorse and dew.

A sandy bank, reinforced with coiling roots,

Faced you, two hundred yards from teh track.

Snug on our bellies behind a rise of dead whins,

Our ravenous eyes getting used to the greyness,

We settled, soon had the holes under cover.

This was the den they all would be heading fro now,

Loping under ferns in dry drains, flashing

Brown orbits across ploughlands and grazing.

The plaster thinned at the skyline, the whitewash 

Was bleaching on houses and stables,

The cock would be sounding reveille

In seconds.

And there was one breaking

In from the gap in the corner.

Donnelly's left hand came up

And came down on my barrel. This one was his.

'For Christ's sake', I spat, 'Take your time, there'll be more,'

There was the playboy trotting up to the hole.

By the ash tree, 'Wild rover no more',

Said Donnelly and emptied two barrels

And got him. I finished him off.

Another snipe catapulted into the light,

A mare whinnied and shivered her haunches

Up on a hill. The others would not be back

After three shots like that. We dandered off

To the railway; the prices were small at that time

So we did not bother to cut out the tongue.

The ones that slipped back when the all clear got round 

Would be first to examine him.

Seamus Heaney, 1965-1975

Garter-Stitch Steps

"I second that motion!"

Steps

RULE #62:  
"Don't take yourself so seriously!"

Interrupted Rib

"Who are you working for?  I see I'll have to find out the hard way."

Double-Ridged Rib

THE FIRED I' THE FLINT

And I have asked to be 

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb

And out of the swing of the sea.

In each case the verse lives by its music and suggestiveness, but with one important difference: the suggestiveness here condenses on a stated theme, 'a nun takes the veil', and the heaven-purity-cold idea equates with the haven-nun-ery-quiet images in a relationship that is essentially allegorical rather than symbolic. The Hopkins poem is fretted rather than fecund. In the Blake poem the rose might be a girl but it remains a rose. Yet it is also a rose window, blookshot with the light of other possible meanings. The rose and the sickness are not illustrative in the way the lilies and the haven are. In 'Heaven-Haven' it is the way things are exquisitely wrought, the way a crystal is sharp and sided and knowable rather than the way a rose is deep and unknowable that counts. Hopkin's art here is the discovery of verbal equivalents, in mingling the purity of images with the idea of a vow of chastity. The words are crafted together more than they are coaxed out of one another, and they are crafted in the service of an idea that precedes the poem, is independent of it and to which the poem is perhaps ultimately subservient. So much for the dark embryo. We are now in the real of flint-spark rather than marshlight. 'Heaven-Haven' is consonantal fire struck by idea off language. The current of its idea does not fly the bound it chafes but confines itself with in delightful ornamental channels.

To take another comparison witha a poet whose nervous apprehension of phenomena and ability to translate this nervous energy into phrases reminds us also of Hopkins: take this line by Keats, describing autumn as the season of fulfilment:

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

and compare it with a Hopkins line that also realizes a sense of burgeoning and parturition, imagining Jesus in Mary's womb:

Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey.

Both lines rely on the amplitude of vowels for their dream of benign, blood-warm growth, but where Keats's vowels seem like nubs, buds off a single uh or oo, yeasty growths that are ready at any moment to relapse back into the original mother sound, Hopkins's are defined, held apart, and in relation to one another rather than in relation to the original nub: if they are also faceted. Hopkin's consonants alliterate to maintain a design whereas Keats's release a flow. I am reminded of something T. S. Eliot wrote compaing Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. In Jonson, Eliot remarked in The Sacred Wood:

unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verseo but in the desing of the whole.

We must say much the same of Keats and Hopkins lines.

Keats has the life of a swarm, fluent and merged; Hopkins has de design of the honeycomb, definite and loaded. In Keats, the rhythem is narcotic, in Hopkins it is a stimulant to the mind.

Keats woos us to receive, Hopkins alerts us to perceive.

I think that what is true of this single Hopkins line is generally true of the kind of poetry he writes. For in spite of the astounding richness of his music and the mimetic power of his vocabulary, his use of language is disciplined by a philological and rhetorical passion. There is a conscious push of the deliberating intelligence, (there it isn't) a siring strain rather than a birth-push in his poetic act. Like Jonson, he is poeta doctus; like Jonson's, his verse is 'rammed with life', butting ahead instead of hanging back into its own centre. As opposed to the symbolist petic, it is concerned with statement instead of states of feeling. Indeed, at this point it is interesting to recall Ben Jonson's strictures on the Shakespearian fluency, rejecting linguistic mothering in favour of rhetorical mastery. Jonson, you remember, was not impressed by the way Shakespeare's current flies each bound it chafes:

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand.'...He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature wherein he flowed with tath facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped... His wit was in his own power: would the rule of it had been so too.

pg 84-85

Seamus Heaney