Certain phrases resonate for me with unnatural force. A current fave: "birdless silence" — originally perhaps from Philip Larkin's poem "Next, Please" (1951) which concludes:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
The phrase later appears in a Bob Geldof song ("Huge Birdless Silence", 1992), and echoes mythic-indirectly in a Counting Crows lyric ("Rain King", 1993, Adam Duritz):
When I think of heaven
Deliver me in a black-winged bird
I think of flying down into a sea of pens and feathers
And all other instruments of faith and sex and God
in the belly of a black-winged bird.
Last week, delighted was I to spy in Frank Copley's translation of Vergil's Æneid (Book VI):
There was a cave, deep, huge, and gaping wide,
rocky, guarded by night-black pools and woods;
above it hardly a bird could wing its way
safely, such were the vapors that poured forth
from that black throat, and rose toward a heaven's vault
(and hence the Greeks have named it "Birdless Cavern").
The cave is called Avernus, in Greek Aornum — meaning "birdless" ...
(see also SlowRunSummaries (17 Feb 2004) ... )
TopicLanguage - TopicPoetry - TopicLiterature - 2004-06-05
(correlates: TolkienInspiration, ReversalOfFortune, SoSymbolic, ...)