and so on relentlessly.
If these are not the exact horrid words, this is the way they come back to me, giving a lilt to vindictive spud work.
At another time, the apparent futility of all efforts to come even with the task at hand will evoke some such iterative lines as Cyrano’s dying vision of eternally resurging enemies:
Je sais/bien qu’à/la fin/vous me/mettrez/à bas
N’impor/te, je/me bats/, je me/bats, je/me bats!
This sort of absolutely incongruous haunting is an instance of what Hoffmann would have fondly called the Zusammeverhängniss der Dinge or “fatally-concatenated-mutual-interdependency” of things! Mythological images rising vaguely from the clouds of school memories; the lilt of that Walrus and Carpenter verse parodied a thousand times; an American jingle never recalled since it was first casually read and dismissed on a railway journey; and the magniloquent panache lines of Rostand—all dropping in irrelevantly from some distant and forgotten corner of the past into this garden, all à propos of spud work and linking itself with it!
For instance, to-day ‹one of the three longest in the year, for, in the coming morn, about five o’clock, our summer solstice will have taken place›, as I spudded away at the fern, thirstily and perspiringly, my haunting iteration was alternately of images wide as the poles asunder. One was of those puzzling lines, in Boileau’s heroicomic poem Le Lutrin, anent the barber who
... d’une main legère
Tient un verre de vin qui rit dans la fougère.