Last week I wondered how many ‘found poems’ had actually been found complete in prose, without being edited, remixed or otherwise cut-and-shut, as they say in the second-hand car trade.
Jan Montefiore, by email, suggested the following sentence from a mechanics textbook, which is also a perfect example of the stanza patented by Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), with its abba rhymes:
And so no force, however great,
Can stretch a cord, however fine,
Into a horizontal line
That shall be absolutely straight.
I particularly like the Tennysonian tone of slow argument here, as if working out a metaphysical conceit about lines, in lines. Compare, for example, In Memoriam XVII:
Henceforth, wherever thou may’st roam,
My blessing, like a line of light,
Is on the waters day and night,
And like a beacon guards thee home.
It seemed almost too perfect.
Alas, it was. Jan is a critic who has the most capacious memory for poetry I have ever known (I have watched her reel off whole poems by W.H. Auden verbatim). She recalled reading the lines in a New Statesman competition fifty years ago.
But a blog from 2010 tells me they are even older. The sentence comes from William Whewell’s Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (1819), and it was the geologist Adam Sedgwick who first heard its run of rhymes: ‘Hence no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.’
It’s not clear when Sedgwick pointed out the poetry in Whewell’s sentence — presumably while they were both Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. If it was before 1850, presumably the resemblance to In Memoriam is coincidental. But to become the perfect In Memoriam stanza that Jan remembered, it still needed tweaking (the first and last lines are a syllable short of iambic tetrameter). So it is not, sadly, a perfect found poem, though it’s all good clean Cambridge fun.
But here’s the twist:
Tennyson went to Trinity College as an undergraduate, and Whewell was his tutor. Did they talk in abba rhymes?