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A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words
Victor Lasseter is looking for a passage in John Updike's work that offers the beautiful intricacy of a dog's nose as proof of God's existence.
R.G. Shaver asks who wrote "Dream dreams, then write them--aye, but live them first."
Barbara Bazyn would like to know what contemporary poem contains the sentence "I do not know how we survive, how we survive, when so much, more than we ever dreamed of, is given us for no reason and for no reason taken away."
Hiller Zobel requests a source for the lines "How sweet a countenance tyranny endues,/What reverend accents and what tender hues./Such seeming modesty and justice blent/Smile at the futile claims of long dissent."
"Towers of fables" (March-April). Anthony Shipps was the first to cite Walt Whitman's poem "Passage to India" (part two) as the source of this phrase.
"Mighty wasteful empires" (March-April). John Gordon suggests this is a misquotation of "huge wasteful empires," from the third line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Mahomet." Gordon also proposes the following sources for Frederick Wegener's other queries from our last issue: "plentiful strutting manikins" may be a variant of "plentiful manikins skipping," from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself (part 42), and "mighty splendent Rome" may be the "bright-splendent Rome" Christopher Marlowe describes in Doctor Faustus (scene 7, line 46). Gordon and Michael Comenetz independently cited "The god pursuing, the maiden hid," from the sixth stanza of the hymn to Artemis that opens Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, as the probable origin of "the faun pursuing, the nymph pursued." The phrase "the faun pursuing" also appears in Thomas Woolner's poem "Silenus" (line 190).
"Spoke harshly" (March-April). Barbara Bazyn was first to identify Robert Penn Warren's poem "Revelation" as the source of this slightly inaccurate quotation.
"Hello-o-o-o, Betty!" (March-April). Sarah Holt writes that this greeting originated in a commercial for Dentyne chewing gum in which a boy demonstrates to his younger brother how to meet girls.