A rift in the lute

My wife and I frequently do the cryptic crossword that appears daily in our newspaper. Some days it can be so straightforward it's done in a quarter of an hour. Other days some of the clues seem incomprehensible, more like the ones that appear with the Saturday cryptic, which is much harder - though even that one has become more doable as the years go by. 

Yesterday we got stuck with a clue that we just couldn't make head or tail of. The clue was "Musical version of someone rocking the boat."

The answer was scattered around the crossword: a four letter word here, a two letter word followed by a three letter word, and then finally another four letter word. We got the two centre words, which were pretty plainly 'in the'. But what was in the what eluded us, even though we struggled with a variety of word combinations for some time. 

The answer was 'Rift in the lute", as I discovered this morning, when checking the answers. A rift in the lute? It doesn't even seem to make sense, and it's certainly not an idiom I'm familiar with. How does a lute get a rift? I suppose the word can be being used in the sense of a crack, which would certainly cause a bit of a problem for the lute-player. 

Apparently 'rift in the lute' means: "A small problem or flaw in something that jeopardizes the whole. For example, I hope this bit of rust isn't a rift in the lute and doesn't end up damaging the whole paint job." I've never heard the expression rift in the lute. Is anyone else familiar with it?

Supposedly it comes from a poem by Tennyson - Idylls of the King -  in which he writes:
‘It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute.’

The phrase must be more common than I think. Someone called Maximilian de Gaynesford has written a book with the title, A Rift in the Lute. Go to Amazon and you'll find he's not the only one to use the phrase as a book title. Much and all as Mr de Gaynesford's book sounds interesting - its subtitle is attuning poetry and philosophy - the hardcover price of US$65.93 (down from $80.00) is a little steep. And worse, the Kindle version is only $3.30 cheaper at $62.63. For a Kindle book!

So there we go. I've learned a new phrase, discovered where it comes from, and realised that far more people know it than I'd have expected. Humbled again.  

10.8.21 Re-reading this post, I still don't get how the clue relates to the answer. It's bad enough when the answer seems to make no sense, but when the clue requires an extraordinary leap of imagination to solve it in the first place, things have really come to a pretty pass. And if you want to understand that phrase check The Idioms. 

Rhyme or not to rhyme

The following paragraph (pg 163) comes from Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, a marvellous book looking at the technical aspects of poetry, which Fry infiltrates and invigorates with his daft and witty sense of humour.   At this point he's just spent quite some time discussing rhyme, and by dint of using the terrible disastrous William McGonagall poem on the disaster on the Tay Bridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins' Wreck of the Deutschland (Hopkins is obviously a poet he admires a good deal), Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain' (on the sinking of the Titanic) and Tennyson's superb (if all too familiar) 'Charge of the Light Brigade' has shown how difficult it is to use good rhyme in a poem intended to commemorate a disaster.  

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail.   I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming.  Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry [Fry enjoys it when it's done well]  it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words.  It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting 'ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace...' when surely a proper poet should be thinking high pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus.  Well, yes.  But a rhyme is a rhyme and won't come unless searched for.  Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme.  To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas.  It is one of the things we do.

This paragraph resonates with me, of course, because much of my time in the last year has been spent finding that elusive note or chord for the musical I've been writing - Grimhilda! - and trying to find rhymes that make sense, fit and don't take the verse off in a direction that has nothing to do with the plot.

 

Not so sharpe, these soldiers

Dark circles under eyes is an odd way of saying something - the lack of 'the' before the 'eyes' gives it a kind of person speaking English as a second language feel. So I'm not sure why a company would advertise themselves with such a link. Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die, to paraphrase Charge of Light Brigade. (This removal of the the definite article is catching.)

Talking of soldiers charging into battle, I've been spasmodically watching the Sean Bean series, Sharpe, on Prime television over the last few weeks - it's on Friday night, so it tends to come at that time of the week when making an effort to do anything else is wearying. I'm not up with the story enough to keep track of who's who, and quite honestly, only Sharpe and one other character, an Irishman - played by Daragh O'Malley), seem to consistently appear (although I'm no doubt wrong about this).

In last night's episode, as far as I could make out, they were trying to conquer some walled city (in Spain?) by first creating a breech with cannon fire, and then sending in men to scale the broken wall. How anyone was ever supposed to survive these absurd break-ins is beyond me, especially when they had no protection from the gunfire coming from the city walls above them. This type of warfare was still in play in the First World War, when sending thousands of men into battle with no armour was the norm. Even the Romans, way back in the year dot, were far more canny. They used shields against the arrows and spears and other weapons, and had some armour. These guys in Sharpe just run straight into the gunfire, and fall over like ninepins in a bowling alley. Absurd.

Of course Sharpe and his core cast of characters survive everything going - which is just as silly as the way in which the warfare is conducted in the first place. (As was the survival of Pete Postlethwaite in this episode: he played a Sergeant with several screws loose, and managed to get away with nothing more than a leg wound - and that was given to him by that arch sharp(e)-shooter, the Irishman who'd such a marksman normally he should have been able to pinpoint a spot on his head and actually hit it. No doubt Postlethwaite lives to chew the scenery another day and eventually come off worst.

Bean was in the Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan, which we caught up with the other night. It proved to be better than expected, though hung on a fairly thin premise. Nevertheless it made the most of its surroundings, with lots of sinister Hitchcock-like moments, and a bunch of people who seemed perversely inattentive to the problem at hand. The two baddies were suspicious from early on; we just couldn't see why they were suspicious.

Incidentally, the imdb.com has had a facelift. There are plusses and minuses: it looks better, but you have to dig a bit further to find stuff that came up much quicker previously.