| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: I'll pop the question, aye or nay,
In twenty years at maist."
FOUR RIDDLES
[THESE consist of two Double Acrostics and two Charades.
No. I. was written at the request of some young friends, who had
gone to a ball at an Oxford Commemoration - and also as a specimen
of what might be done by making the Double Acrostic A CONNECTED
POEM instead of what it has hitherto been, a string of disjointed
stanzas, on every conceivable subject, and about as interesting to
read straight through as a page of a Cyclopaedia. The first two
stanzas describe the two main words, and each subsequent stanza one
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that you
should speak the truth about them--this is the sort of praise which
Socrates is unable to give. Lastly, (9) we may remark that the banquet is
a real banquet after all, at which love is the theme of discourse, and huge
quantities of wine are drunk.
The discourse of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself,
true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name,
is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who
compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the
schools of the day, characteristically reasoning about the probability of
matters which do not admit of reasoning. He starts from a noble text:
|
