Re: Person marking on nouns?

Do not rewrite poetry ! The poet has his reasons that
the grammatician ignores !

For ex, here it looks clear to me that the original
rhythm is much better that the *corrective* one
proposed:
*Whence ALL but HE had FLED*
If you replace *but HE* by *save HIM*, the rythm is
destroyed:
*Whence ALL SAVE HIM had fled*
(*save* is much longer than *but*, while *him* is
shorter than *he*; also, *but* and *had* both end with
a dental sound, while there is nothing of the sort
between *save* and *had*, which are very dissimilar)

There is a famous French poem from Guillaume
Apollinaire beginning like this:

*Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine*

A grammatician would immediately point out that the 2
first verses are incorrect, because there are two
subjects (*la Seine* + *nos amours*, thus *coule*
should be rewritten *coulent*). Of course Apollinaire
was aware of that, but he decided it should be written
as he did.

In fact, there is an ambiguity if these verses, made
stronger by the fact that there is no punctuation. One
could understand:
*Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine, dot.
Et nos amours, comma,
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne, questioning mark ?*
but of course this would destroy everything. The lack
of punctuation and the grammatical ambiguity and
apparent uncorrectness bring a special atmosphere. The
poet doesn't think in terms of grammatical sentences,
but of impressions and remembrances.

So let us leave poetry to the poets, and grammar to
the grammaticians !

--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
> It's just one of those things, I think, like the
> opening lines of the
> once very well known poem "Casabianca" by Felicia
> Hemans:  "The boy
> stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had
> fled".  If "but" is a
> conjunction here, then we have to construe the
> second line as "all had
> fled, but he had _not_ fled", which seems very
> forced.  But if we take
> "but" to be a preposition meaning "except", as in
> "None but the brave
> deserve the fair", then it would call for "him"
> instead of "he" following,
> which would lead to the apparent howler "him had
> fled", which is probably
> why Hemans avoided it.  (*Whew*)
>
> I think it was Thurber who proposed it be rewritten
> as "Whence all save
> him had fled".
>

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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