If you were queen of pleasure, 
And I were king of pain, 
We’d hunt down love together, 
Pluck out his flying-feather, 
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein; 
If you were queen of pleasure, 
And I were king of pain.

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to rummage around in poetry and literature for so many years and not become acquainted with this poem – though Baker (or Baker’s poet narrator in The Anthologist) says that Swinburne, “the greatest rhymer in human history,”  fell victim to the backlash of Futurism, and though his poetic descendants remain well known, he has all but been forgotten.

Which is too bad, if this poem is any indication of the greater body of his writing.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

A Match

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)

IF love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or gray grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.

If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune,
With double sound and single
Delight our lips would mingle,
With kisses glad as birds are
That get sweet rain at noon;
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune.

If you were life, my darling,
And I your love were death,
We’d shine and snow together
Ere March made sweet the weather
With daffodil and starling
And hours of fruitful breath;
If you were life, my darling,
And I your love were death.

If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy,
We’d play for lives and seasons
With loving looks and treasons
And tears of night and morrow
And laughs of maid and boy;
If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy.

If you were April’s lady,
And I were lord in May,
We’d throw with leaves for hours
And draw for days with flowers,
Till day like night were shady
And night were bright like day;
If you were April’s lady,
And I were lord in May.

If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain,
We’d hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools

The scene along the road early this morning during a long run hrough the sweeping hills of Sterling, Mass. And surrounding towns. Beautiful, and it looks like the sap is already running. Though this morning with temps at 14F, I think the only sap running was me.

Powered by Twitter Tools

Learning to speak a non-native language (mediocrely) has been a longtime relaxation and rejuvenation tool for me. It’s like taking my brain out for a run. So when time permits, I listen to language CDs during the inbound half of my commute. For years my focus was almost exclusively Spanish (with just a tiny bit of French thrown in). But since going to Munich a few times for work, I’ve discovered I really like the sound of German. Add to that that I’ve got some genetic roots there (along with, it seems, just about everyplace else), and the fact that business will take me back again this March, and there’s plenty of excuse to put my Spanish on hold.

So how does all this relate the menagerie of bizarre images that have taken over my mother-in-law’s house?  Well that comes from the fact I just finished reading Joshua Foer’s terrific book “Moonwalking With Einstein.” The details Foer’s immersion in the world of competitive memory events, and details a mnemonic technique in use since classical times called the “memory palace.”

The theory is, our brains aren’t built to hold data very well, but they are incomparable at storing images and spacial relationships. Makes sense, right? Our not too distant ancestors needed to know how to get back to the village and which mushroom would kill you if you ate it a lot more than they needed to remember phone numbers.

Anyhow, by using the memory palace technique people since the Roman orator Simonides have been executing stunning mnemonic feats by building a mental map of a place, and then populating that place with crazy images designed to spark memories. I’d heard of the memory palace technique before, but never from so enthusiastic advocate as Foer. I was inspired to test it on my German.

I used my mother-in-laws house as the memory palace for all my German words because I know the space very well, have pleasant associations with it, and I’m already using my house for other mnemonic catalogs.

To illustrate how this works, let’s take a second look at those images I described in the opening paragraph. The German word for eat is essen. So Snake, coiled around a Newspaper, in a refrigerator. Not the most elegant mnemonic, but it worked. It was an early one. At first these felt quite hard to come up with, and I thought – this is going to be a terribly time way to remember words. But very quickly, it gets easy and one can snap an image into existence at will. Fun.

The cow with the shark’s fin on its head putting money into a cash register is a better image. That’s the one I use for the German word kaufen, which means to buy. The brain in the vise? German word for “know”, which is weiss. Pronounced vise. My mother-in-law’s house is starting to get crowded – I’ll need to move out to the garden soon. But it really has amazed me how easy it is to retrieve words stored in this fashion. And frankly, even though you can use the technique to “walk through” the memory palace and retrieve every word you know, in order, forwards or back, easily, you don’t really have to. Because once the word’s in there, it seems to be at your disposal in conversation as well.

I could go on, but that would belabor my point, which is: The Joshua Foer (imagine the tree on the U2 album cover with a four-leaf clover hanging from it) book is a great, fun read and depending on your enthusiasm for the techniques, could give you a leg up on memorizing all kinds of things, from the names of folks you meet at tradeshows, to grocery lists to, well, German.

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools