The Aeneid (III-V)

Books III, IV, and V of the Aeneid by Vergil deal with Aeneas's account of his arrival at Libyan shores, his departure from Carthage and the ensuing wrath of Dido, and an excursion on Sicily to mourn his father's death, respectively. The passage I chose occurs in Book IV immediately after the Trojan prince and the Tyrian queen consummate their love for each other. The rumor eventually begins to spread....

Straightway Rumor flies through Libya's great cities,

Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world.

She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride,

slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air

she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds.

She is the last, they say, our Mother Earth produced.

Bursting in rage against the gods, she bore a sister

for Coeus and Enceladus: Rumor, quicksilver afoot

and swift on the wing, a monster, horrific, huge

and under every feather on her body--what a marvel--

an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes

and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news.

By night she flies aloft, between the earth and sky,

whirring across the dark, never closing her lids

in soothing sleep. By day she keeps her watch,

crouched on a peaked roof or palace turret,

terrorizing the great cities, clinging as fast

to her twisted lies as she clings to words of truth. (IV.219-236)

What Vergil has done is personify rumor and infamy in the form of she-monster, bristling with the eyes, ears, and mouths of a thousand gossipers and scandalmongers. From the reader-response point of view, this paragraph provides stunning imagery: one can almost see the quivering feathers, the roaming eyes, the persecutory tongues, and each one right after the other. Through a gender-role lens, Rumor becomes even more intriguing. It is very explicitly female, and, though it is not necessary to the existence of the creature, it does seem to add to the overall effect. Gossipers are more often seen as women and in this way the beast can take on an aura of prickliness and cunning efficiency.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

The Aeneid (II)

"Book II: The Final Hours of Troy" of the Aeneid, by Virgil, is Aeneas's recount of the fall of his great city, from the "departure" of the Greeks to the hero's tragic escape. This section, as you may well imagine, is brimming with moments of intense action and pathos. The bits about Priam's death and Creusa's disappearance are positively heartrending. The passage below, however, are the words of Venus, as relayed by Aeneas, referring to the destruction of Troy at the hands of the gods themselves.

"'There,

yes, where you see the massive ramparts shattered,

blocks wrenched from blocks, the billowing smoke and ash--

it's Neptune himself, prising loose with his giant trident

the foundation-stones of Troy, he's making the walls quake,

ripping up the entire city by her roots.

"'There's Juno,

cruelest in fury, first to commandeer the Scaean Gates,

sword at her hip and mustering comrades, shock troops

streaming out of the ships.

"'Already up on the heights--

turn around and look--there's Pallas holding the fortress,

flaming out of the clouds, her savage Gorgon glaring.

Even Father himself, he's filling the Greek hearts

with courage, stamina--Jove in person spurring the gods

to fight the Trojan armies!'" (II.752-765)

Through the reader-response lens, these few lines provide stunning imagery--one can almost see Neptune uprooting entire buildings, Juno charging the Greeks on, Minerva making mincemeat of the helpless Trojans. Through the formalist lens, the parallelism was particularly striking: "'"There..., it's Neptune.... There's Juno... there's Pallas."'" This, coupled with the often disjunct rhythm of the sentence and clause organization, makes a dynamic and fast-paced read.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

The Aeneid (I)

The Aedeid, a translation by Fagles of which I have recently begun reading, is a poem written by Vergil, recounting the journey of Aeneas as he flees from the smoldering city of Troy to found what is ultimately to become Rome itself. I realize, writing this blogpost slightly later than the deadline, that the most popular passage after the first few pages is unequivocally the "Wars and a man I sing..."-paragraph (I.1). Though I too found these lines fascinating, charged with the sense of adventure that so characterizes this work, my attention was drawn, instead, to the following:

"My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now,

we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us

an end to this as well. You've threaded the rocks

resounding with Scylla's howling rabid dogs,

and taken the brunt of the Cyclops' boulders, too.

Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear.

A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.

Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns

our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out

a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree

the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up.

Save your strength for better times to come." (I.232-244)

This passage is, perhaps, most famous for the line, "A joy it will be one day...," which Latin teachers often facetiously point out especially, referring to Latin lessons. On a more serious note, these lines are notable through the formalist lens for their parallel structures. "... taken the brunt..." closely echoes "... threaded the rocks..." and "Call up your courage again...," "Dismiss your grief and fear...." More obvious anaphora is employed with "There Fate holds out a homeland...," and, "There the gods decree..." This effectively emphasizes the many struggles Aeneas's men were forced to endure along their odyssey, for, indeed, this story is nothing less than a Roman adaptation of Homer's beloved epic.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Walking (1-53)

Henry David Thoreau wrote "Walking" shortly before his death in 1862. It is an essay about Nature and reveling in the beauty thereof. The author tells of experiences while on sojourn in the woods, or of the adventure associated with America and the West, all interspersed with odes and tributes to the majesty of none other than Mother Earth. This work contains, I believe, some of the most sublimely written passages in the whole of English literature. The following is the entirety of the second paragraph, in which Thoreau first introduces to the reader "the art of Walking."

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks -- who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going á la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

Thoreau's writing, in this instant, has achieved something transcendent. It makes eloquent use of metaphors and allusions, all the while seeming as natural as what it describes, never contrived. Especially perfect is the comparison regarding the "meandering river," a sentence which, like the saunterer, seems to stand out most of all, despite of the fact that -- or perhaps because -- it is most at home in the passage.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Walking." New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Print.

Brunelleschi's Dome (1-11)

Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King is a biography of the great architect and a narrative of how the dome atop the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence went from being the ambition of a city to a marvel of the world. In the following passage, the author, himself a renowned architect, describes how the capomaestro reached the design for the cathedral:

Neri di Fioravanti and his group rejected the external supports proposed by Giovanni di Lapo Ghini, however, and offered a different approach to the structure of the dome. Flying buttresses were rare in Italy, where architects regarded them as ugly and awkward makeshifts. But Neri's reasons for rejecting them were probably political as much as aesthetic or structural, in that they smacked of the architecture of Florence's traditional enemies: Germany, France, and Milan. how the German barbarians, the Goths, had covered Europe with their clumsy and disproportionate edifices would later become a popular theme with writers of the Italian Renaissance.

This paragraph stood out because it demonstrates how Ross King can relate this story in an engaging way. He goes out of his way to enlighten the reader as to the mindset and general feelings of the Florentines in during the Italian Renaissance.


King, Ross. Brunelleschi's Dome. New York: Walker & Company, 2000. Print.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1-211)

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie is a fantastical tale of a young boy who lives in "a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name." (15) Haroun's father is the greatest storyteller in the land, but grief steals this gift away from him after his wife leaves for another man. Haroun then travels to the Sea of Stories to petition on his father's behalf, that he may once again spin the fables that he was once famous for. The story is an allegory for problems with society in India today and, indeed, much of the world. Following is a quotation regarding that allegory:

'[...] -Because it's true what you have heard rumours of: the Land of Chup has fallen under the power of the "Mystery of Bezaban", a cult of Dumbness or Muteness, whose followers swear vows of lifelong silence to show their devotion. [...] In the old days the Cultmaster, Khattam-Shud, preached hatred only towards stories and fancies and dreams; but now he has become more severe, and opposes Speech for any reason at all. In Chup City the schools and law-courts and theatres are all closed now, unable to operate because of the Silence Laws. -And I heard it said that some wild devotees of the Mystery work themselves up into great frenzies and sew their lips together with stout twine; so they die slowly of hunger and thirst, sacrificing themselves for the love of Bezaban...' (101)

Although obviously an example of fiction, this passage is a representation of what may happen and has happened should ignorance, intolerance and fanaticism take hold of a people. "Schools", "law-courts", and "theatres" symbolize intellectualism and the liberal arts, whereas the "'Mystery of Bezaban'" stands for any force or action opposing them, such as censorship, book-burning, purges, etc. The author himself was subject to such forces when, after the publication of his earlier novel, The Satanic Verses, a fatwa was issued concerning Salman Rushdie's life.

Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books, 1990. Print.

The Haunted Looking Glass (75-272)

Gorey, Edward, ed. The Haunted Looking Glass. New York: The New York Review of Books, 1959. Print.