MUMFORD
I am reading once again 'The Brown Decades'
and think I've found its key : a strident
diction with a point of view and grand
grammar - strong and straight with no
hesitation at all. As once in Elmira, I
am sitting around a Civil War graveyard
thinking alone about the dead and all their
names. Those places of battle where they
died. Those strange coats of arms and
memorial insignias, and the way towns and
counties and states would proudly identify
their own men - the boys they'd sent off
to be killed...or kill. As if there's a difference.
It was Rossetti who once said to me : 'These
peacocks in groves of their own seek shelter
and shade, where they can be alone'. He had a
few himself in his great old yard. He knew, I
assume then, what it was he was talking about.
I am reading once again 'The Brown Decades'
and think I've found its key : a strident
diction with a point of view and grand
grammar - strong and straight with no
hesitation at all. As once in Elmira, I
am sitting around a Civil War graveyard
thinking alone about the dead and all their
names. Those places of battle where they
died. Those strange coats of arms and
memorial insignias, and the way towns and
counties and states would proudly identify
their own men - the boys they'd sent off
to be killed...or kill. As if there's a difference.
It was Rossetti who once said to me : 'These
peacocks in groves of their own seek shelter
and shade, where they can be alone'. He had a
few himself in his great old yard. He knew, I
assume then, what it was he was talking about.
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