Theirs was a greatnessStrife, not negotiation and compromise. Struck for, not surrendered and abandoned. Greatness, not weakness and shame.
Got from their grand-sires--
Theirs that so often in
Strife with their enemies
Struck for their hoards and their hearths
and their homes.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Hoards, Hearths, and Homes
From The Battle of Brunanburh (tr. Tennyson):