Rhuthmos

Whitman's Fitful Rhythms

Lacy Rumsey — 2025-03-01T08:00:00Z

L. Rumsey, « Whitman's Fitful Rhythms », A. Derail & C. Roudeau (éd.), Whitman, Feuille à Feuille, Paris, Éditions Rue d'Ulm, 2019, pp. 39-55.

Le tressage rythmique des fragments dans le temps

Kimberley Page-Jones — 2025-01-06T06:30:00Z

K. Page-Jones, « Le tressage rythmique des fragments dans le temps », Énergie et mélancolie. Les entrelacs de l'écriture dans les Notebooks de S.T. Coleridge, Grenoble, UGA Éditions, 2018, pp. 181-200.

William Shakespeare – Sonnet 130 (1609) – Read by Alan Rickman – In memoriam

2016-01-23T19:09:31Z

SONNET 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red ;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun ;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks ;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound ;

I grant I never saw a goddess go ;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground :

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

William Wordsworth – Daffodils (1804) – Read by Sir Jeremy Irons

2016-01-06T19:10:00Z

James Joyce – Ulysses – Read by James Joyce (1924)

2015-08-25T11:30:00Z

James Joyce – Finnegans Wake – Read by James Joyce (1929)

2015-08-25T11:29:00Z

Sylvia Plath – Daddy – Dit par Sylvia Plath

2015-01-29T20:14:21Z

Ernest Dowson – Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae – Dit par Richard Burton

2014-04-05T14:38:00Z

T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land – Dit par T. S. Eliot

2014-02-11T15:35:00Z

The Burial of the Dead : 00:00

A Game of Chess : 04:58

The Fire Sermon : 10:21

Death By Water : 18:19

What The Thunder Said : 19:00

Written in 1921-1922.

Notes :

01:30 : « And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief » cf Ecclesiastes

01:40 « Only / There is shadow Under this red rock » refers to Parzival : « And this stone all men call the Graal [...] / As children the Graal doth call them, / Neath its shadow they wax and grow ».

02:00 Tristan und Isolde, I, 5-8

02:40 Words that announce to Tristan that Isolde's boat is nowhere to be seen.

03:00 « These are pearls that were his eyes » quotation from The Tempest.

03:48 In the following passage, references to Baudelaire (« Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant ») and to Dante's Inferno (« si lunga tratta / di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto / che morte tanta n'avesne disfatta »)

04:29 Mylae, 260 B.C : Naval victory of the Romans over the Carthaginians, during the first Punic War, which largely resulted from their commercial rivalry ; cf. 1914-1918.

04:54 « Hypocrite lecteur ! - mon semblable, - mon frère ! » : Baudelaire, Préface aux Fleurs du Mal.

05:05 « The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne » : quotation from Anthony and Cleopatra.

06:00 cf Aeneid : « dependent lychni laquearibus aureis / incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt »

06:28 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomel. The whole passage recalls Milton's Paradise Lost, IV, 140

08:00 Rag = ragtime. Cf. Jazz in the post-war years.

10:12 Ophelia's last words to the dames of the Court, after Hamlet has accused her of being a prostitute.

10:42 Quotation from Spencer's Prothalamion

11:45 Cf. The Fisher King, or Wounded King, in the Arthurian Legends. His imaginary castle is always near a river or the sea.

12:21 « they wash their feet » like the Fisher King before his restauration

12:25 « O ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole » Verlaine, Parsifal.

13:00 Cannon Street Hotel : where businessmen met.

13:20 In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes. He was transformed into a woman for 7 years. Both sexes, and all the individuals, are merged in Tiresias. Cf. Ovid : « At pater omnipotens [...] pro lumine adempto / Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore »

14:33 Bradford prospered thanks to the war

15:58 « This music crept by me upon the water » quotation from The Tempest.

18:05 « To Carthage then I came » Quotation from Saint Augustine's Confessions.

18:08 Recalls both Saint Augustine and the Fire Sermon of the Buddha.

18:26 In fertility rites, Phlebas was drowned.

21:52 « A woman drew her long black hair out tight » Cf. Ecclesiastes : one of the daughters of music. The following lines also recall Ecclesiastes (cf. « the wheel be broken at the cistern »)

22:47 The cock dispels the malevolent spirits (see The Tempest or Hamlet)

23:17 « Datta, dayadhvam, damyata » (« Give, commiserate, govern ») from a fable about the meaning of thunder.

24:46 Chorus of a traditional nursery rhyme « London Bridge is broken down / Dance over my lady lee »

24:50 Quotation from Dante's Purgatorio, followed by a quotation from Gérard de Nerval's El Desdichado

25:15 « Hieronymo's mad againe » quotation from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy Shantih is the ritual end of an Upanishad.

« The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music. There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments ['different voices,' we might say] ; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet ; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter. »

T.S Eliot, The Music of Poetry (1942)

Gerard Manley Hopkins – The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo – Dit par Richard Burton

2011-12-19T15:42:00Z

The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

(Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well)

THE LEADEN ECHO

HOW to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep

Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away ?

Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,

Dówn ? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey ?

No there 's none, there 's none, O no there 's none, 5

Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,

Do what you may do, what, do what you may,

And wisdom is early to despair :

Be beginning ; since, no, nothing can be done

To keep at bay 10

Age and age's evils, hoar hair,

Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay ;

So be beginning, be beginning to despair.

O there 's none ; no no no there 's none :

Be beginning to despair, to despair, 15

Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare !

There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there !) ;

Only not within seeing of the sun,

Not within the singeing of the strong sun, 20

Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air,

Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where ! one,

Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,

Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that 's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,

Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet 25

Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,

The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah ! to fleet,

Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth

To its own best being and its loveliness of youth : it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth !

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace, 30

Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—

Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,

And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver

Them ; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver. 35

See ; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost ; every hair

Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould

Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,

This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold 40

What while we, while we slumbered.

O then, weary then whý should we tread ? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,

When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,

Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept

Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder 45

A care kept.—Where kept ? Do but tell us where kept, where.—

Yonder.—What high as that ! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,

Yonder.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems, 1918.