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8 Oct 2006 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
salineaEnglish is a November tongue
frosty and dark and windy
thorny like ice-dusted spider webs
A soft whisper in bare foliage
It's full of words like sorrows and gallows
and gloom and doom
and blight and night
and strike, strife, fright
that slither in grey landscape for evermore
nevertheless
It's lacy, thread-bare, and bitter-sweet,
crispy, tight, and graceful
in a barren fashion
it's cold and mournful
and thinly precise
and vaguely wholesome
and quiet
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Date: 8 October 2006 08:19 pm (UTC)(I would probably have stopped it after "and quiet", because that seems like the perfect ending, to me. It gets quiet at the end, and it's obvious from the whole poem that you love English ;)
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Date: 8 October 2006 08:22 pm (UTC)and thanks
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Date: 8 October 2006 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 October 2006 08:28 pm (UTC)that's the first English poem I did. Actually it's not really a poem, just an entry that insisted on being in poetic form, if that makes any sense.
But I've read this really gorgeous poem, a couple of hours ago that was linked from a fanart if you missed it, want a link?
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Date: 8 October 2006 08:30 pm (UTC)And it makes a lot of sense. Still looks/sounds better than any poem I tried to write on purpose ;)
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Date: 8 October 2006 08:34 pm (UTC)the poem: http://community.livejournal.com/greatpoets/1645372.html
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Date: 8 October 2006 08:39 pm (UTC)You know, I feel just the same about English :) Maybe this could become an anthem for ESL writers...
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Date: 8 October 2006 09:17 pm (UTC)ESL?
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Date: 8 October 2006 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 8 October 2006 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 8 October 2006 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 October 2006 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 October 2006 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 October 2006 04:22 am (UTC)there are a couple of teeny, tiny grammatical issues--which may be intentional on your part--that I might mention if it wouldn't be terribly impolite of me
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Date: 9 October 2006 02:58 pm (UTC)Only the punctuation was intentional. Never hesitate to criticize anything I post on my journal! It's never impolite (unless you tell me I suck as a human being XD) and often helpful!
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Date: 9 October 2006 03:11 pm (UTC)Take this with a grain of salt, and ignore at will:
Fourth line should be "a soft whisper" or "soft whispers"
"that slithers in grey landscape" might refer only to "fright" or to "it" (English), but probably "that slither" if you mean all the words.
Threadbare and bittersweet don't need hyphens, but I actually like them better with them.
"thinly precise and vaguely wholesome"?!? I missed this last night--that's lovely and hilarious and vaguely depressing.
Still wonderful, and it improves upon acquaintance. ~g~
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Date: 9 October 2006 03:39 pm (UTC)Oi, my passion for sibilants got the better of me, to the contempt of grammar.
I'll leave thead-bare and bitter-sweet as such, since you like it better like that :)
I'm glad you like my vague, precise attempts at chiasmas XD I hope it's not too depressing, though.
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Date: 11 October 2006 06:27 am (UTC)chiasma
1 : an anatomical intersection or decussation -- compare OPTIC CHIASMA
2 : a cross-shaped configuration of paired chromatids visible in the diplotene stage of meiotic prophase and considered the cytological equivalent of genetic crossing-over
Unless you meant chiasmus (which I still would have had to look up). That makes a good deal more sense.
The depressing part was the thought of my native tongue as "vaguely wholesome." Blech. The phrase itself is just wonderful.
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Date: 11 October 2006 09:04 am (UTC)A rhetorical inversion of the second of two parallel structures, as in “Each throat/Was parched, and glazed each eye” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge).
[New Latin chīasmus, from Greek khīasmos, syntactic inversion, from khīazein, to invert or mark with an X. See chiasma.]
and
Chiasmus (latinized form of Greek χιασμός, from χίασμα (chiasm), "crossing") is a figure of speech based on inverted parallelism. This criss-crossing term derives its name from the X-shaped Greek letter χ (chi). It is a rhetorical figure in which two clauses are related to each another through a reversal of terms in order to make a larger point. In Latin, in particular, it was used to articulate balance or order within the text in which it was included.
Today, chiasmus is applied fairly broadly to any "criss-cross" structure, although in classical rhetoric, it was distinguished from other similar devices, such as the antimetabole. In its classical application, chiasmus would have been used for structures that do not repeat the same words and phrases, but invert a sentence's grammatical structure or ideas. The concept of chiasmus has been attributed to inverted order of themes in stories and plays called a chiastic structure.
The elements of a simple chiasmus are often labled in the form A B B A, where the letters correspond to grammar, words, or meaning.
Chiasmus in Inverted Meaning
But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves. —Shakespeare, Othello 3.3
Dotes and strong loves share the same meaning and bracket doubts and suspects.
Chiasmus in inverted grammar
An example of a parallel sentence is:
”He knowingly lied and we blindly followed”
(A B A B)
Inverting into chiasmus:
"He knowingly lied and we followed blindly"
(A B B A)
"I love too much and hate too little"
"I love too much and too little hate."
Other examples:
"By day the frolic, and the dance by night". Samuel Johnson The Vanity of Human Wishes.
"His time a moment, and a point his space." Alexander Pope Essay on Man, Epistle I.
"Swift as an arrow flying, fleeing like a hare afraid..."
The clause above follows the form of adjective, simile, gerund, gerund, simile, adjective (A B C C B A).
http://www.answers.com/topic/chiasmus
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Date: 12 October 2006 07:04 am (UTC)I know. This has caused me no end of frustration, most notably when we were asked in the first day of a history class (when I was in France) who were considered the first historians, and I KNEW the answer, but NOT how to say it in French. Arg (Herodote et Thucydide, I later learned).
It is a lovely rhetorical technique. ~g~
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Date: 9 October 2006 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 October 2006 03:05 pm (UTC)every language has a month *nodsnods* that's why there's only 12 languages in the world... oh wait.
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Date: 9 October 2006 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 October 2006 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 October 2006 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 11 October 2006 06:37 pm (UTC)It can work... a bit. I'd go more with seasons myself, but then even the wide groupings end up needing to share.
It certainly makes for good poetry though.
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Date: 11 October 2006 12:27 am (UTC)That has nothing to do with much except that I wanted to say something more constructive than "this is lovely."
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Date: 26 October 2006 09:47 pm (UTC)I love your constructing comment.
Is English so much more synthetic than Romance languages? True we're mostly derivated from Latin, but there's also shades of other languages English is strange, true, though, and fun. I love its conciseness on certain aspects. French tends to ramble, it's a rich and very flat language. Spanish' even curlier and melodious. English is taut, sharp, incisive. Sexy in a dangerous way :)