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Style: what is it?
A 19th Century Parody by J. W. Morris
Do you ask me what I think of
This new song of Hiawatha,
With its legends and traditions
And its frequent repetitions
Of hard names which make the jaw ache,
And of words most unpoetic?
I should answer, I should tell you
I esteem it wild and wayward,
Slipshod metre, scanty sense,
Honour paid to Mudjekeewis,
But no honour to the muse.
Morris makes fun of the song of Hiawatha by saying critical things about
it while using the very forms he is being critical of. He mimics the strict
4-beat metre, which often puts a grammatical word in a beat position,
and makes a mess of it on purpose when he criticises it (you appear to
need to turn 'sense' into a 2-syllable word). He uses repetitive structures
and 'hard names' while criticising them too. His criticism of repetitions
in the original is accompanied by crude 'elegant variations' - different
words which clearly refer to roughly the same thing (cf. 'legends and
traditions' and 'wild and wayward').
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