September-October 2003 > The Browser

Chapter and Verse

Chapter & Verse

A correspondence corner for no-so-famous lost words

Fred Wegener seeks sources for "more given to the arts than to warfare" and "tremors sent below by breezes striking the higher sails," and identification of the poem alluded to in this passage: "that avenging lightning which groped for the lovers in the horrible poem he had once read aloud to her…as they lay stretched under Italian stone-pines."

 

Roger Sharpe is looking for a story, perhaps from Hermann Hesse, in which a character reaches for a ripened strawberry as he falls from a cliff. The text adds, "They say he said it was delicious."

 

Edward Levin asks the source of "You may want a span of horses for plowin’ and all the rest,/But when it comes to courtin’, why a single hoss is best."

 

Mel Tukey requests a source for "Always when strawberries ripen/On a northern slope in Maine,/I shall be crouching beside you/In faded gingham again…."

 

"Clay…life; plaster, death; marble, immortality" (July-August). Scottish poet, printer, and artist Ian Hamilton Findlay attributed this saying to Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) in producing his own variant, a 1987 untitled "folding print" in which "the revolution" replaces "immortality," writes Molly Schwartzburg, who found the image in a 1997 collection of Findlay’s works: Prints 1963-1997: German Druckgrafik (Cantz Verlag).

 

Send inquiries and answers to "Chapter and Verse," Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138.