Dear Carrol,

You are not ignoring all my comments on "Us he devours" since you  
would not be discussing its tense had I not introduced the subject.

Diana

Sent from my iPod

On Mar 10, 2010, at 11:23 AM, Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> (Ignoring all Diana's comments on this.)
>
> The present tense in English (as in most languages) has a number of
> different uses, and identifying the use in a particular case offers or
> can offer interpretive problems, especially when, as here, there is a
> deliberate departure from normal English word order of
> subject-verbv-object. Obmect-subject-verb wold be perfectly normal and
> non-ambiguous in Latin, That English has an objective (accusative)  
> case
> in pronouns (though not in nouns) makes the Latin word order possible
> here, and the use of non-English word order is surely the most strikig
> feature of the phrase. US he devours -- ie., not "them." But since the
> antecedent of "he" is itself an interpretive crux it's hard to know
> where to_begin_ om cconstruing the phrase, that is, which is the
> dependent, which the independent variable here. Le's leave the puzzle
> regarding "he" aside for a moment and focus on the word order and the
> verb. "Devours" here has an iterative feel: He is in the practice of
> devouring, not just anyoen, but _us_ (emphasized by word order). The
> iterative feel and the emphasis on us (rather than someone else)
> suggests something like an regularly repaeated action, annual in this
> case.
>
> I don't know where to take it from here, except to note that here we
> have the kind of ambguity Empson was concerned with -- ambiguities  
> that
> _function_ significanty in the text, not ambiguties 5that are pulled  
> out
> of the air for the fun of it by someone who just thinks ambiguity
> regardless of purpose is groovy. Weighing the various alternatives is
> clearly part of theaction that counts in this poem: not the action  
> mimed
> by the poem (there is none) but the action of reading. Like so many
> romantic and modernist poems, the poem is about the act of reading (we
> are back to cunning passages).
>
> *Carrol
>