The scholarly part of this article is wonderful, as always, but I have to tell you how much I enjoyed the story about your early experience with the French school system!
It was all so confusing! And then 12 hours before the boys started school and my husband had his first lecture of the new term, I found out I was pregnant . . . A very memorable week.
Breathtaking. Thanks, Victoria. (Good to know, BTW, that your boys enjoyed Tintin well before the move!) I wonder how Donne’s compass poem would fit into these musings.
The French Wikipedia article for 'boussole' says that 'compas' is actually used for a type of navigational compass: when the arrow is fixed in the direction of the ship or aeroplane, and it's the circular part that rotates.
Remarkable how the compass metaphor shifts between mathematical stability and nautical direction. Borough's "forked body" is such a vivid way to merge both meanings, and the tragedy of his wife S.B.'s eptiaph makes the constancy theme even more poignant. I've always thought about these Renaissance emblems as purely abstract, but seeing them rooted in acutal loss changes how I read Jonson entirely.
I know just what you mean about the emblems -- they can seem so abstract and sort of by rote. But they do come alive when you see them applied in this way -- also quite often in an album amicorum or something like that.
This is wonderful, Victoria! And what a find. I can't decide if Borough is consciously playing with the image of the mathematical compass in the sestet – that is, deliberately opposing the two metaphorical homonyms – or whether he is a bit muddled.
Oh, and thank you too for the kind mention of the Broken Compass!
Fascinating! I love essays like this that begins with personal anecdotes and then move into academic analysis. My boys also love Tintin, but only in English translation. The compass and protractor seem to always be sold together, and for some reason we only break or lose the compass, so I have a drawer of extra protractors.
The scholarly part of this article is wonderful, as always, but I have to tell you how much I enjoyed the story about your early experience with the French school system!
It was all so confusing! And then 12 hours before the boys started school and my husband had his first lecture of the new term, I found out I was pregnant . . . A very memorable week.
Breathtaking. Thanks, Victoria. (Good to know, BTW, that your boys enjoyed Tintin well before the move!) I wonder how Donne’s compass poem would fit into these musings.
Thank you Sunil! Yes I should have done that one too really shouldn’t I? It’s just the same sort of time as well I think.
This is wonderful, and so exciting to read a previously unpublished 17C sonnet!
Thank you Sarina!
The French Wikipedia article for 'boussole' says that 'compas' is actually used for a type of navigational compass: when the arrow is fixed in the direction of the ship or aeroplane, and it's the circular part that rotates.
"Good hap: that death should make the dying lasting." That stings onto memory and I don't think it will come loose.
(It's good to read of a new pregnancy after those contours, and your sons reading Tintin.)
Thank you for these treasures.
Yes that starkly paradoxical epigrammatic style can really hit home when it works.
Remarkable how the compass metaphor shifts between mathematical stability and nautical direction. Borough's "forked body" is such a vivid way to merge both meanings, and the tragedy of his wife S.B.'s eptiaph makes the constancy theme even more poignant. I've always thought about these Renaissance emblems as purely abstract, but seeing them rooted in acutal loss changes how I read Jonson entirely.
I know just what you mean about the emblems -- they can seem so abstract and sort of by rote. But they do come alive when you see them applied in this way -- also quite often in an album amicorum or something like that.
Frost's "Moon Compasses" (1936):
I stole forth dimly in the dripping pause
Between two downpours to see what there was.
And a masked moon had spread down compass rays
To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,
As if the final estimate were hers;
And as it measured in her calipers,
The mountain stood exalted in its place.
So love will take between the hands a face...
Good one! Thanks
This is wonderful, Victoria! And what a find. I can't decide if Borough is consciously playing with the image of the mathematical compass in the sestet – that is, deliberately opposing the two metaphorical homonyms – or whether he is a bit muddled.
Oh, and thank you too for the kind mention of the Broken Compass!
Fascinating! I love essays like this that begins with personal anecdotes and then move into academic analysis. My boys also love Tintin, but only in English translation. The compass and protractor seem to always be sold together, and for some reason we only break or lose the compass, so I have a drawer of extra protractors.