...So Grammar loses her former dash and gradually weakens. She eventually elipsis into a comma and dies.

(with thanks to Anonymous Anomalies for the thought)

Have you heard of the Grecian Bend? I had no idea what it meant when I came across that phrase in this Irish tune that an old friend used to sing:

She was just the sort of creature boys, that Nature did intend
To walk right through the world my boys, without the Grecian bend
Nor did she wear a chignon I'd have you all to know
And I met her in the garden where the praties grow --Johnny Patterson

I looked it up and found it was a stylish posture for young ladies in the 1890s. You can see illustrations of the pigeon-breasted, sway-backed posture at the Vintage Vixen website. I recall that my grandmother had posture similar to that; I always assumed it was due to old age, but she was of exactly the age to have assumed that fashionable posture, being born in 1873.

This posture is memorialized in the term the bends:

Later in the 19th century, Bert (1878) confirmed the formation of bubbles during rapid decompression. Perhaps more importantly, he established that the offending gas accumulating in tissue, readying itself for the formation of bubbles, was nitrogen. Nitrogen was thus implicated in the Grecian bend, decompression sickness as derogatorily articulated by workers constructing the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge under pressure: The bent posture assumed by afflicted individuals was reminiscent of the Grecian bend, a fashionable posture assumed by women of the era. The term Grecian bend endures as the presently popular term the bends.--Decompression Sickness; the Eustacian Tube Libary

Interesting, isn't it? There are more connections among things than you would suppose.

My Aunt Elizabeth's birthday is tomorrow. If she were still alive, she'd be 100.
I thought her birthday was the 25th and that she was born in 1902. Not according to the SSDI (Social Security Death Index). This is the record they have for her:
RICKEY, ELIZABETH ssn: 084-38-1587; born: NY 26 Apr 1903; died: 30 Mar 1995, Schenectady, New York 12305

My friend L told me of a second storey apartment she visits here in Willimantic, where there is a lofty porch that provides a good view of the local arboreal wildlife.

They sit over coffee and watch squirrels eating nuts and carrying stuff back to the squirr-babies that are nestled within the eaves of the building. They see the crows that came all winter for bits of hotdog and other scraps. They see the English sparrows (aka house sparrows, for good reason) nesting under the roofline as well. There was an opening near the roof,and L saw the female sparrow enter head first and begin kicking and flailing as if stuck. She worried over that poor sparrow. Finally it emerged, with a big tuft of insulation in its beak, a prize for its nest. I hope the sparr-babies aren't bothered by contact with fibreglass!

I was looking for a web site that has a chart showing various poetic measures. I remembered vaguely the poem alluded to above, but could not remember its detailsl. Happy was I upon coming across it at a Rice University site! By Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl's trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long.
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride --
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.

Don't you love it? I've read that this is the only poem that lists and examplifies all the meters used in English poetry, though numrous ones exemplify one or a few.

Oh, the women I never heard of before! I must take a women's history and literature course, to acquaint myself with the names I never learned.

Reading about Wiliam B. Yeats this morning, I came across the name of Maud Gonne, an Irish patriot. Yeats was inspired by her, both politically and amorously. She refused his offer of marriage and he was left with writing poems -- good for us and too bad for him.

[She bore a daughter, Iseult Millevoye, by a Frenchman whith whom she had a liaison, and later was briefly married to an Irishman in the British army, John MacBride, by whom she had a son Sean, who later became famous in his own right.]

The wildgeese.org has a very good biography of Maud Gonne.

It is worth noting that she was tall. One source states that by age 15 (1880 or so) she had reached a height of 5' 10". She was also described (op.cit.) as "a great red-haired yahoo of a woman".

Two things usually the prerogative of men -- height and money -- enabled her to be active. (Her father died when she was 20, leaving her a comfortable living.) Independent and fearless, she organized a monthly magazine devoted to Irish liberation and rallied people around several related causes, hungry children, maltreated prisoners and so on..

She was tossed in jail for her efforts; her son, however, received a Nobel Peace Prize as an early leader of Amnesty International.

W. H. Auden tops the list of "American poets" on a blog I was looking at this morning. I thought Auden was British, since my mother, who grew up in Scotland, told me that her older brother George was friends with Auden and used to invite him to their house.

I looked up Auden, and see that he was born in Yorkshire, England in 1907 the same year as as my uncle. (My uncle was American along with the rest of his family but lived in Britain for some 20 years.) Auden, who was considered the poet of the British left for confronting the social problems of pre-WWII Britain moved to the States in 1939, but I dont know that that makes him American. I have no idea if he became a citizen. My uncle, mother and the rest moved back to the States after their father died in 1936, neatly avoiding wartime Britain. Who knows, perhaps they invited Auden to visit the States to avoid the War as well, and he liked it well enough to stay. I guess I should read up on him, as he illuminates my family to some extent.


In any case, it's interesting to me to consider early influences of Auden on my uncle and vice versa. Bearing in mind that I grew up in a household that appeared to be Republican, I come upon surprising notes of leftism in my family. Well, my mother was a Republican, I think for class reasons-- she considered Democrats somewhat vulgar and low class. Foreigners, Catholics, the great unwashed. You know. I know this about her only because I lived with her so long; she hardly ever spoke about politics.

Her sister, my Aunt Alison, I learned as an adult, was a Democrat. I took comfort in that, since I had become a Democrat as well upon reaching voting age.
Her brother, my Uncle George, was an artist and as far as I could tell, entirely apolitical. This may have been a ruse that grew out of the red-baiting '50s, however, when the majority of left-leaning intellectuals ran for cover.

Imagine how astonished I was to come upon photographs of my Aunt Alison as a gangly young teenager cavorting with an Irish setter dog named "Bolshi." Possibly my mother did not approve, even then. Toward the end of her life she sounded appalled when I neamed a cat "Meow-Tse-tung." (She heard the name but did not hear the cutesy little pun embedded in it.) Why on earth would you name a cat that?

Good link on Auden: poets.org; a good source on this or anyother poet, includes links to their poems and has a nice feature, the Notebook, wherein you can keep links to related bits... better than bookmarks.

Considered the poet of the British left for confronting the social problems of pre-WWII Britain, Auden moved to the United States in 1939, where his work turned to religious themes. He also wrote literary criticism and opera libretti. Collections of his poems include: Another Time (1940), The Double Man (1941), and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Age of Anxiety (1947).
Died: 9/29/73