The Poverty of Our Circumstances
In sharp edged lands
where many dwell
All things are true or
false, and if you try,
A little thought will
be enough to tell
My truth from your
illusion or your lie.
From which it follows,
as the night the day,
Since all of us have
use of reason’s tools
That all who disagree
with what I say
With certainty are
either rogues or fools.
I have not found it
so; the world I see
Has honest men with
minds as good as mine;
I can find reasons
that seem good to me
But proofs beyond
dispute are hard to find.
10 comments:
Ironically, this itself is one of the better reasons to not initiate force.
The first line has four feet, but the others have five. I'm not sure if this is an intended effect, or a problem, or simply something you don't care about.
I'd lose 'can', 'that seem', and 'But' from the last four lines. YMMV; it feels like a smarter Basil Bunting wrote this poem.
Bruce: What, and destroy that perfect iambic scansion?
'What, and destroy that perfect iambic scansion?'
You bet. Poetry is heightened rhetoric before it is a verse form- departures from scansion at moments of emphasis are a very proper part of having scansion in the first place, and the kicker should climax.
Bruce:
"Departures from scansion" is too simple. It's possible to use variations of scansion effectively--consider Dickinson's "The Soul Selects its Own Society," or Kipling's "The Last Suttee" as examples. But simply breaking scansion doesn't do it.
David,
It hardly surprises me that you would grasp that. With Bruce's emendations I get
I find reasons good to me.
Proofs beyond dispute are hard to find.
And that's just limp. Besides, it changes the meaning: "I find" says that you do come up with reasons, "I can find" that you could do so if you chose (but you are dismissing those as not fundamental), and "good to me" treats goodness as subjective, but "that seem good to me" suggests that there are or may be objectively good reasons but that we can't easily judge if we've found them. I find the original philosophically different and more interesting.
On the subject of meter ... The second line and (less clearly) the last each has a reversed foot in it.
Not deliberate, except in the sense of writing by ear.
On rereading I withdraw my suggestion. The stable measure goes with the sense of stable, reasonable, triumphantly hymned reasonable Io Logos. The poem fits the book the way the sonnet at the start of of a very different book, The Mask of Sanity fits it.
Second 'reasonable' my bad.
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