Broken Circles, Scattered Pearls

A passage from Edmund Gosse on Swinburne's compositional technique offers some alternative vocabulary to the nodes and webs of hypertext. From Aspects and Impressions

It may be observed that Dolores is a rosary of stanza-beads on an invisible string; in other words, that the string might be broken, the beads shaken together, and the stanzas arranged in an entirely new sequence, without any injury to the effect of the poem [...] It is now clear that Swinburne forged his brilliant Dryden-like couplets as though each one were a stanza, and practically treated them as bits of mosaic to be fitted, in cooler blood, into a scheme not present to his mind when his inspiration seized him.

Ironically I transcribed this passage while listening to recordings of Indian music that include ghazals — a form if I recall correctly where couplets can tumble their order.


And so for day 199
01.07.2007