Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Fidaris will ¤nd where the Doubt arises like Nieman from Nirgends

found the Nihil.

The eye moves up the page past “Flood” to “Fonte-in Monte” (Fountain in
the Mountain) in line 3; the coinage Fidaris contains the morpheme “Fid”
that gives us Fides (faith) and Fideles (faithful). Faith is thus pitted against
“the Doubt that arises,” but the capitalization of Doubt suggests that this
is also one of the myriad river names in the sequence, as in “the Doubt
river rises.” The ¤rst half of the sentence is, in any case, put into question
by the second in which Nieman (Niemand = no one) from Nirgends (no-
where) ¤nds Nihil. But—and here the “vocovisual” comes in—there can be
no “Doubt” about the intricate relationship between words:

Fidaris (with “Flood” in the sentence right above it)→¤nd→from→found

(alliteration of f, d, n)

Fidaris—arises (rhyme)

Nieman—Nirgends—Nihil (anaphora)

Further, there is assonance of i—the letter appearing ten times in the space
of fourteen words. The “Fidaris” cluster thus stands out as do “Albern, O
Answer” and “Qvic and Nuancee” in the next lines. “Nuancee” is a particu-
larly complex compound, containing “nuance,” so that we read the words as
the command “Quick (with a German accent) and with nuance!” even as
“Nuancee” contains “Nancy,” “antsy,” and “see.”
The opposite of such a cluster effect is to have a clause comprising the
most ordinary of monosyllables, as in:

She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then

Cliché piled on cliché with all the connectives in place! But the sentence now
shifts from these clipped words to further compounding, neologism, and
play on proverbial wisdom, in the phrase “sauntering, by silvamoonlake and
he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his
hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!)
used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare for forstfellfoss
with a plash across her.” The punning here must be seen, especially “peats
[peace] be with them!”—a perfectly reasonable reference to the care of oak-
trees, “killing Kildare,” where the ¤rst morpheme in the proper name of the
county is taken literally, and “for forstfellfoss,” perhaps just a tongue twister
when heard, but visually a pun on such phrases as “¤rst fell frost” or “forced

de Campos’s Galáxias and After 181