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From the final section of The Tale of Pigling Bland - by Beatrix Potter:
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The grocer flicked his whip-- "Papers? Pig license?" Pigling fumbled in all his pockets, and handed up the papers. The grocer read them, but still seemed dissatisfied.
"This here pig is a young lady; is her name Alexander?" Pig-wig opened her mouth and shut it again; Pigling coughed asthmatically.
The grocer ran his finger down the advertisement column of his newspaper -"Lost, stolen or strayed, 10s. reward;" he looked suspiciously at Pig-wig. Then he stood up in the trap, and whistled for the ploughman.
"You wait here while I drive on and speak to him," said the grocer, gathering up the reins. He knew that pigs are slippery; but surely, such a very lame pig could never run!
"Not yet, Pig-wig, he will look back." The grocer did so; he saw the two pigs stock-still in the middle of the road. Then he looked over at his horse's heels; it was lame also; the stone took some time to knock out, after he got to the ploughman.
"Now, Pig-wig, now!" said Pigling Bland.
Never did any pigs run as these pigs ran! They raced and squealed and pelted down the long white hill towards the bridge. Little fat Pig-wig's petticoats fluttered, and her feet went pitter, patter, pitter, as she bounded and jumped.
They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill, and across a short cut on level green turf at the bottom, between pebble beds and rushes.
They came to the river, they came to the bridge -
they crossed it hand in hand -
then over the hills and far away
she danced with Pigling Bland!
***
"Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy stories must have it.(...) I will call it Eucatastrophe (...) the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous end. (...)
"In such stories, when the sudden turn comes, we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through."
From Tree and Leaf, by JRR Tolkien
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I would add that the eucatastrophic effect here comes from a prose tale breaking into verse for the final sentence only.
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Though the parallel is not exact, Shakespeare achieves a somewhat similar effect in some of his plays by writing in blank verse but ending each act with a rhyming couplet.
ReplyDelete@wmjas - Yes. I too find that technique in Shakespeare is often very effective at 'lifting' my emotions.
ReplyDeleteA very early example of using verse in this general fashion is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - which is mostly written in alliterative verse, but at the end of each stanza there is are four short rhyming lines. It seems to work very well.
What I do *not* find effective is a prose work interspersed with poems - I find I always want to skip the poems.
Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is like this - and I don't think I have ever made myself read the verse.
(But also, I don't find Thoreau to be an adequate poet)
"What I do *not* find effective is a prose work interspersed with poems - I find I always want to skip the poems."
ReplyDeleteSurprising, coming from an admirer of Tolkien.
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ReplyDeleteGood point.
ReplyDeleteI think I did - usually - skip the poems during the early LotR readings of my mid-teens; or go back and enjoy the poems separately, in isolation.
Nowadays I do not read LotR or the Hobbit as a consecutive whole - unless I am reading them aloud to someone in the family. I tend to re-explore them.
I do find Tolkien a genuine poet, although patchy and uneven - whereas I do *not* find most anthologized versifiers to be real poets: for instance Emerson and Thoreau are not real poets for me (despite Robert Frost's endorsement of Emerson, which must be taken seriously).
But then I am idiosyncratic, since I do not rate as poets most of the 'major poets' of the 20th century- not Eliot, not Pound, not even Yeats (yes, I know that sounds silly), not Robert Graves - but yes to much lesser-known/ 'minor' figures such as Dylan Thomas, Walter de la Mare, WH Davies, Houseman... - all of whom wrote poetry at least a few times in a few places.
The best modern poet (in English) is Frost, because (so far as I know) he produced *vastly* more real poetry than any other single individual.