Free Post - 12/6/2007

This is one of the rare free posts in which I do not know what to write....so I will continue a draft version of a paper I am writing currently. This paper is a commentary on the poetic and linguistic construction of a Rudyard Kipling poem called "How Fear Came." It goes like this:

The stream is shrunk – the pool is dry,
And we be comrades, thou and I;
With fevered jowl and dusty flank
Each jostling each along the bank;
And by one drouthy fear made still,
Forgoing thought of quest or kill.
Now ‘neath his dam the fawn may see,
The lean pack-Wolf as cowed as he,
And the tall buck, unflinching, note
The fangs that tore his father’s throat.
The pools are shrunk – the streams are dry.
And we be playmates, thou and I,
Till yonder cloud – Good Hunting! – loose
The rain that breaks our Water Truce.

- Rudyard Kipling
from The Jungle Book’s “How Fear Came,” 1894

Now, this is not my free post (that would be against the rules - old Rudyard wrote this, not me!).

Here's my in-production draft commentary:

Much of what was unsaid – the silential relations of the text – occurred in the poetic devices implemented. These were mentioned in the commentaries below each line, and included such devices as epanalepsis, anaphora, chiasmus, repetition, and polyptoton to name a few. Kipling artfully implemented their use, and I resolved to either leave them untouched or preserve at least a related meaning in translation.

In contemplating the experience, one may realize that much was felt or understood while little was said. Without the interlinear gloss and the commentary the poem last all of fourteen lines. The translated version includes one hundred seven words, the original a mere ninety-nine. We indeed may see that a message of profound meaning, possibly beyond the scope of what we thought possible for a fourteen-line poem, was detailed without a multitude of words. It was detailed in the mind of the reader, and experienced in a place individual words may not go alone.

Now, with a little revision and a little magic, that might actually go into the paper!