'If a chap can't compose an epic poem while he's weaving a tapestry, he had better shut up, he'll never do any good at all.'
William Morris
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About Me
- Nige
- Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene. His book, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death, is available on Amazon or direct from the author.
Do you HAVE to weave a tapestry while composing your epic? Just need a bit of direction here.
ReplyDeleteWell, I fear Morris's example proves that it you compose epic poetry while weaving, your epic will come out much like a tapestry - or indeed a never-ending roll of wallpaper...
ReplyDeleteOk so it's a no to the weaving then.....
ReplyDeleteMaybe a sonnet while doing a bit of cross-stitch might work?
ReplyDeleteI'd get the needles stuck in my hand. Can't multi-task.
ReplyDelete"Chap"? The sentiment may well be Morris's, but the diction makes it sound like Bertie Wooster's summary thereof.
ReplyDeleteAs for the opinion, weaving may be less exhausting than farm labor, but I think of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance:
'Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of
bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.
Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.
"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while oading the hay-cart," said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."
"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively. "He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."
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