Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Great Regulars: The sentence introduces a scene:

a stop in the churchyard among headstones, a moment for sorting out body and mind before entering to pray. The grammatical energy that springs from these ramifying clauses--a packed syntax that would burst into a many-branched diagram on an English teacher's blackboard--expresses a corresponding energy of meditation:

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust,
To which the blast of Death's incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,
Drives all at last.

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Golden Grammar

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