Day: January 20, 2025

Thrasonical

 

Monday, December 12, 2016
thrasonical
Definitions for thrasonical
  1. boastful; vainglorious.
Citations for thrasonical

His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical.William Shakespeare,st, 1598 Love’s Labour’s Lo

… [The audience] howled its delight over the ignominy of Pantaloon, the buffooneries of his sprightly lackey Harlequin, and the thrasonical strut and bellowing fierceness of the cowardly Rhodomont.Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution, 1921

Origin of thrasonical
Latin
1555-1565
The Greek original for the Latin New Comedy character Thraso is Thrásōn, a stock character in New Comedy for a boastful soldier. The Greek name means “braggart” and is a derivative of the adjective thrasýs meaning “bold, confident, arrogant, insolent.” The most distinguished use of thrasonical is in Rosalind’s speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1616), “…Caesar’s thrasonical brag of ‘I came, saw, and / overcame’…” The word entered English in the mid-1500s.

The wronged kindness of  nonsense 

In the haunted pub
We ate hot food and wondered
What is common sense?

In the sky ,snow hung
The  park was  icy and black
The farm was quiet

What is common? Sense?
What have we lost since that time?
Now we live nonsense.

Where is the humour?
The wronged kindness of  nonsense
The futility

Who says what is true?
Who speaks what is  silent , lost?
Who is the channel?

What is true has left.
“Maybe” hangs from black branches
Like dead fruit or  leaf

The autumn  orange
The senselessness of speeches
The withering   glance

The edge  of our  land
Borders are  more anguished
Cannot connect us

New laws and rules
Trial  by separation
The barbed rust   pierces

There is no heartland
There is no inside at all
Nowhere to  live well

 

 

 

Humour and poetry

img_20190510_163949https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/humor-and-poetry

Extract:

In 1993, I took a left turn one day out of my MFA program and found myself at the National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. There I discovered several poets who were funny for the sake of being funny. Particularly Hal Sirowitz from New York (“don’t stick your arm out the window, mother said” and Matt Cook from Milwaukee (“it was easy to write the Great American Novel, back when there were only five American novels”) Both poets initially delighted me and confounded me: There are no similes, a voice in my head said. What would Tom Lux (my first teacher) say? the voice continued. Despite my resistance, I believe those poets gave me a kind of permission to explore humor a little more vigorously in my second book, The Forgiveness Parade (1998), for “I thought the word loin and the word lion were the same thing. I thought celibate was a kind of fish”. Perhaps in that book there were places where I was too vigorous in my pursuit: looking back there are a few poems that are just a little too jokey somehow, a little one-dimensional.

I am becoming aware of how some humor can set a roadblock for the poetic speaker, making it impossible for the speaker to get back to a serious place. And how some other (less frequent) uses of humor can leave that door open. I want to leave that door open

Bless the hand that points us past the known

I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose
The top and bottom split when  he fell down
But I can make it look as if it glows

The candle burns, has fragrance of a rose
That takes away my sadness and my frown
I cannot mend the lamp that we both chose

I find it hard to  bear the pain of loss
The concept is  more verbal than it’s noun
But in my home  the candle  brightly glows

In Blythburgh church, a lighted candle  bless
See the painted angels and their crowns!
I  will bear this breakage and its cost

I will get the strength to bear my cross
Oh,haul me, holy one, if I fall down.
Beyond  these lights we sense  the Light of God

Bless the hand that points us past the known
Where each of us must travel, perhaps alone
I cannot mend our lamp that we both chose
I  wander in my grief amongst the low