![]() ![]() O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound, Notice how the first three lines establish that there's a lovelorn backstory already in play, and that this is a comedy - since Orsino says, in essence, that if music feeds love, he wants to hear so much of it that he chokes to death, thereby ending his suffering. It called to mind the opening of one of my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, Twelfth Night, which finds a pining Orsino saying "If music be the food of love, play on!" Here, in fact, is his opening speech of 15 lines. Instead, this partial line of the "Ode" leapt at me: "therefore, ye soft pipes, play on" ![]() At first, I thought about how I should've engaged in an examination of the ars longa, vita brevis component of it, and I cast about for a poem on that subject - of which there are many, really, but it wasn't the theme I felt like talking about today (or did I? we shall see). Yesterday's selection, Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, had me scratching my head this morning. I thought, therefore, that I'd explain the hop-skip-jump of today's selection by walking through it. Yeats, and sometimes it looks like a quantum leap. KellyrfinemanSometimes the mental path between two poems is pretty plain, as with the progression the other day from La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats to Song of the Wandering Aengus by W.B.
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