It was overcast yesterday with heavy fog on the mountains and so the aptest weather for working on “Mist from the Mountains”. Today, the fog persists, accompanied by heavy rain early this morning. Venturing out regardless, just before first light, I surveyed the fog-laden mountains and was rewarded with the perfect word for a line in the poem that has troubled me over the past few days (not the “Solemn, sombre and slow” line I singled out yesterday but the one that follows it). It seems the early bard catches the word.
Poetry
A Word Order Conundrum
I find myself, presently, saddled with the odd conundrum of the order in which to arrange the words “sombre”, “solemn” and “slow” in a line. “Slow” is easy, it is the rhyming element of the line and therefore must come last, but its companions are deliberately so similar in construction and pronunciation that they are interchangeable.
This is an annoyance to a pedant who wants a rationale for all things.
Of course, the purpose here is the similarity and, therefore, interchangeability—perhaps I should look to visual alliteration for the answer: “ol” in “solemn” appears reversed in “slow” and thus “Solemn, sombre and slow” is aesthetically most pleasing—but what a pity there is no linguistic rule (that I know) that specifically here applies!
How Many Sheep?
As I develop “Mist from the Mountains”, my mother’s time as a little shepherd is of great interest to me:
“How high up the mountain did you watch the sheep as a girl?”
“High. Do you see that fold between the peaks? The kraal1 was just over the ridge.”
“How many sheep?”
“I cannot recall…”
“One?”
“No.”
“Two?”
“Hum, we must have had about twenty; then Uncle Mike would throw in his flock—so, about forty sheep.”
“High. Do you see that fold between the peaks? The kraal1 was just over the ridge.”
“How many sheep?”
“I cannot recall…”
“One?”
“No.”
“Two?”
“Hum, we must have had about twenty; then Uncle Mike would throw in his flock—so, about forty sheep.”
- Afrikaans, pronounced [kRaahl] with a trilled [RRR]: a pen, in this instance, for the enclosure of sheep.
Forgotten Fields 