Dear Charles,
I want to comment on one aspect of your critique, namely that use of “azure” in PF as a cliché:
1) There is a tension in “azure” part of the quoted rhyme; we are forced to speed up at it to fit in the rhyme, - kind of smashing really fast and hard into something. I believe that even cliché words loose their life support when such tension is achieved.
2) Does branding certain word cliché prohibits their use regardless of context, semantic and other spices? I think not. This cliché may be a trap.
3) Could lack of “azure” in RF’s poetry be just a sign of personal preference? Or that he did not have a way to generate the above tension?
4) Should we place so such value in numeric order in OED and to the fact that it does not list azure as noun denoting sky as other dictionaries do? Poetry is arguably a thing of perfect rhyme but it is not a thing of perfect order.
5) Shade is the poet but VN is the writer of the novel containing the poem. Isn’t that sufficient ground to place more weight on use of “azure” in the 4th meaning? If we use Shade’s poem to criticize VN as a poet let’s give credit to Russian poetic heritage to which VN alludes. Even Frost wrote in context of his life.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowplane;
Sincerely,
George
>The truth is that Duncan White selectively chose not the first definition from the OED, but the fourth. The OED actually has 1) The precious stone lapis lazuli; 2) A bright blue pigment or dye; 3) The blue colour in coats of arms; 4) The clear blue colour of the unclouded sky. The OED does not even support the idea that, in English, the word azure is a synonym, accepted by sustained usage, for the sky itself. I see no reason not to stand by what I said: Only secondarily does azure connote sky.
>However, he is writing verse in English, and “azure” as a synonym for “sky”, in English, still smacks of the poetastic cliché. “Blue”, in similar usage, is also a cliché in English: “The Wild Blue Yonder, Into The Blue, etc. Just for a lark, I flipped through Frost’s collected poems to see if he’d ever used the word “azure”. Although I can’t be certain, I’m willing to place a small bet that he didn’t use it once, in the sense of "sky" or in any other sense. He is guilty of the occasional lapse, particularly in his earliest collection, A Boy’s Will, (eg “zephyr”, “on noiseless wings”) but “azure” isn’t one of them. My impression is that his second collection, North of Boston, eschews this sort of thing with exemplary rigour. The fact is that Frost became an absolute master of English poetry and the English language, and John Shade wasn’t. I don’t deny that he may well be an exceedingly ingenious fabricator of verbal puzzles. Ultimately this isn’t poetry, as I understand poetry.