Thursday, September 17, 2009

Grecian Variants: The Counterattack and the Counter-counterattack

(This will make sense only if you've read this post.)

COUNTER
1. It's suspicious that both my syllabic -eds occur in participles that end in -ied. Maybe that was the only spelling available for this sort of participle: I mean, it would look strange to write "unweari'd" or "empti'd." I still think we need "unwearied" with four syllables, but maybe -ied could represent both a monosyllabic and a disyllabic pronunciation. Then we can have disyllabic "emptied" and no need for emendation.

2. Besides, if an interpolator added a syllable to the "emptied" line to fix it, why didn't he do the same thing to the "unwearied" line?

3. And does it really make a difference to the meaning whether we have "this folk" or "its folk" or just "folk"?

COUNTER-COUNTER
1. Plug just "unweari'd" and "empti'd" into Google! You'll find that poets did use such spellings, and the implication is obviously that there'd be an extra syllable if the e were included.

2. Interpolation is a haphazard business. Maybe the metrical "problem" wasn't as noticeable with "unwearied" at the end of its line. And maybe there are variants for this line too: we'd have to check a critical edition.
[Here's my own badly interpolated variant, just for fun: "And, happy melodist, unwearied and." Notice how I "repaired" the meter by repeating a word already in the line, just as in the case of the "this folk, this pious morn" variant.]

3. Oh come on. It's worth establishing what Keats actually wrote, and it's kind of surprising that so famous a poem has an unstable text. The variants would be relevant to someone studying Keats's versification (hmm, do English lit people even care about things like that anymore?).

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