Guest Nancy: "Stood around", said of one person, is a (I believe) vulgar American, and a tipoff that that stanza is a fairly recent U.S. interpolation. To me, it suggests, not vagrancy, but idle frustration, as in "She immediately chatted up a storm with her ex, while I stood around with my finger etc.". So, yes, that is a funny line; but on the other hand it is so perfectly in the spirit of the original that I have always found it charming.

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Sometimes, a word that is not poetic diction can be not only tolerable but an improvement in the poetry. An example, IMO, is in "Angel Band":

I hear the noise of wings.

I have heard that "corrected" to "I hear the sound of wings". It is true that, in a certain mood, "noise", with its suggestion of unpleasantness, is ludicrous. But that is not the mood for even a skeptic to approach a hymn in. "Noise" makes a startling improvement in vividness. That song, after all, belongs to people who believe they are *saved*, and who know from their Bible that salvation is not pretty. If you were saved, profanely & prosaically, from some earthly misfortune, and contemplated telling about it with a sentence "I heard the blessed --- of a helicopter", would you go for "sound", or "noise", or indeed "racket"?

Another example, from "Fox on the Run":

She walked thru the cornfield and down to the river.

Her hair shone like gold in the hot morning sun.

It would have been easy to call the sun bright instead of hot -- a better link with "shone", besides being more "poetic". But "hot" takes us back to the cornfield, back to earth, and even its sexual tinge IMO is not unwelcome. After the gold, and end of romance! That one unexpected word invigorates the refrain & thus the whole song.

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

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