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3.
Upon whose boozin's (no!) has lain
Anne D'Intagh Mittley — lives wi' Thrane.
In the third stanza, sometimes insensitively printed as the fifth, the tragedy
grows blacker yet. After Florence C. Ingbrest and a handful of casual
flames, the poet sought solace with the Mittley sisters of Boston.
Researchers have shown that there were two: Daisy (or "Diz") Mittley, and
her much younger sister Anne D'Intagh. It was the younger the poet loved,
but again the romance was blighted by a conniving interloper, this time the
wealthy Thaddeus Thrane of Glasgow, whose nationality is slyly derided in
the dialectal "wi'" for "with". The butt of frequent barbs in the Skilmer
corpus, he is here dismissed with a contemptuous phrase. Though his
beloved Anne lived "wi'" Thrane at the time the poem was written, Skilmer
seems less troubled by this passing infidelity than by her amour with
Greymouth — for Greymouth is the true antecedent of "whose". We
now
learn that he was a heavy drinker — and immediately the mysterious
soubriquet is clear. Extensive research has established
that gris is the common French word for grey.
But
gris also means drunk. Greymouth then is
unmasked
as Drunk Mouth. Indeed, so great a guzzler was Greymouth that the loyal
Miss Mittley was said, by a witty metonomy (or synecdoche)[2] to have lain not on his bosom but
(with
a pun that anticipates Joyce by several weeks) on his "boozin's". One
almost hesitates to mention that "bosoms" too has its questionable
advocates.[3] Be that as it may, one
wonders if in all literature the tragedy of four lives has been so
Anne D'Intagh Mittley — lives wi' Thrane.
6
Siena me fè; disfecemi Maremma.
But Dante, with his five and a half words for one life, is long-winded
compared with Skilmer, who averages a mere three words per head, or
even less, if one counts the "wi'" as fractional diction. In this grisly
aperçu, so true of all humanity, the resources of typography too are
put
to unexampled use, with the two-letter "no" followed by an exclamation
mark that is like a spine straight with moral indignation, and enclosed in the
semicircularity of parentheses, like lips rounded in incredulous refusal. But
the "no" is uncompromisingly jostled by the assertive has,
with
its harsh aspirate, distorted from honest Roman type into italics, set askew
from the vertical: even the letters, means the poet, have lost their
aplomb before the moral horror. (A textual note: there are those,
and
their name is legion,[4] who read
"Hugh Inta Mittley" in the second line. But nothing in Skilmer's emotional
history gives countenance to a suppositious
passion for Anne's little brother Hugh, then three years and some months
old.)
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