Along Heroic Lines Christopher Ricks Ricks Full Chapter
Along Heroic Lines Christopher Ricks Ricks Full Chapter
Along Heroic Lines Christopher Ricks Ricks Full Chapter
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ALONG HEROIC LINES
A L ON G H E R OI C L I N E S
C H R I S TO P H E R R I C K S
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 26 , United Kingdom
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Contents
Prefatory Note
Acknowledgements
Index
Prefatory Note
Along Heroic Lines is concerned with the heroic, with the English
heroic line (Samuel Johnson’s long-standing term for what in
education is now called the iambic pentameter), and with the
interactions of prose and poetry. The essays engage with these
related matters, but any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,
something of a disclaimer. ‘Some versions of the heroic’ might have
done it, were it not that William Empson gave the world a work of
genius in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935).
When tracing ‘the ideal line of study’, we should (Matthew Arnold
suggested) ‘fix a certain series of works to serve as what the French,
taking an expression from the builder’s business, call points de
repère—points which stand as so many natural centres, and by
returning to which we can always find our way again’.1 To a series of
works may be added a series of writers, of periods, and of literary
kinds or medium, all encouraging a return to such centres as the
heroic, the heroic line, and the engagements of poetry and prose.
Thomas Carlyle’s lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the
Heroic in History (delivered 1840, published 1841) stand as one of
these points. The reduction of his title to On Heroes and Hero-
Worship is unfortunate as narrowing the triangular to the binary, as
making Hero-Worship even more important than it (unfortunately)
already was in Carlyle, and as slighting the Heroic in History—
including the imaginative slights perpetrated by the mock-heroic or
by scepticism as to the heroic. One’s moral bearings may even be
obliged to call upon Hilaire Belloc. A Moral Alphabet (1899)
succeeds octosyllabic quatrains with a heroic couplet, Aesop’s
summary injustice.
B stands for Bear.
MORAL
Decisive action in the hour of need
Denotes the Hero, but does not succeed.
whereupon
many a League
Cheard with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.
(Paradise Lost, iv. 161–5)
With how fine an air ‘the grateful smell’ turns to and into ‘smiles’. We
should be grateful to Milton, and so we are. Meanwhile Satan, the
great ingrate, in this his unsmiling passage into the Garden of Eden,
seeks to darken any such passage as this of Milton.
Gratitude, not an easy thing. Fortunately, there is the gratitude felt
by all of us to—and for—the enduring poets whom the Professorship
of Poetry at Oxford exists to honour. Gratitude, moreover, as a high
calling of literary studies in particular, with ingratitude as then the low
answer. Not one of us is professionally immune, since what should
be a triumph of literary criticism—that it exists in the same medium
as its art, as, say, music criticism does not—is by the same token its
special peril of professionalized triumphalism. ‘The deep | Moans
round with many voices’: my moan, or (uglily) what I’d like to know, is
why, since Tennyson and I work in the same medium—language, in
a word—why it’s always me giving a talk about him and never him
giving a talk about me.
A century ago this professorship was held by one who is, in my
eyes, the greatest of those who—while not themselves being poets
—have ministered here to the art: A. C. Bradley, who graced the
chair from 1901 to 1906. His inaugural lecture was devoted to
‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ (probably—since he was never owlish—
with some memory of the countering quip about Art: What is art, that
it should have a sake?), and he began with these words:
One who, after twenty years, is restored to the University where he was taught and
first tried to teach, and who has received at the hands of his Alma Mater an honour
of which he never dreamed, is tempted to speak both of himself and of her. But I
remember that you have come to listen to my thoughts about a great subject, and
not to my feelings about myself · · · 1
‘Poetry is simply · · ·’6: this has its work cut out, or rather cuts out the
need for any work. That the rhythm and measure of poetry (or rather,
the rhythms and measures of poetry) may be ‘very different’ from
those of prose (prose itself being no one thing): this may be
conceded without accepting that the differences constitute ‘simply’ a
superiority in poetry. T. S. Eliot knew otherwise. For a start: ‘poetry
has as much to learn from prose as from other poetry; and I think
that an interaction between prose and verse, like the interaction
between language and language, is a condition of vitality in
literature.’7 To esteem poetry should entail respecting its sibling,
prose.
Not so for Coleridge, who is keen to get the better of any
opponent:
A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by
proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species
(having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such
delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each
component part.8
But where is the making good, or even any attempt at making good,
of this last assertion? How much of an artistic achievement could
(say) a novel be, that did not propose ‘to itself such delight from the
whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each
component part’? Why does this responsibility, this imaginative feat,
characterize poetry, as against ‘all other species’ of composition?
Because Coleridge will have it so. Poetry is from all other species
discriminated by…He is not exercising discrimination, he is
practising discrimination. Lacking respect for prose, he is a prosist.
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and
poetry; that is, prose equals words in their best order; poetry equals the best words
in the best order. The definition of good prose is—Proper words in their proper
places;—of good Verse—the properest words in their proper places.9
Not altogether proper, this. Wordsworth, for whom even the familiar
sibling figure-of-speech constituted an insufficient acknowledgement
of the affiliation of poetry and prose, wisely differed as to whether
any homely-definitional differentiation would hold:
We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, and,
accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we find bonds of connection
sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? They
both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are
clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred and
almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears
‘such as Angels weep,’ but natural and human tears, she can boast of no celestial
Ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood
circulates through the veins of both.10
Any presupposition that thinks less well of such realization for being
prose, not poetry, is thoughtless. Shakespeare is either the greatest
prose-writer in our literature or one of the greatest, and he is neither
working in an inferior medium, nor saddled with an inferior system of
punctuation, nor denied the very various powers that rhythm can
command.
Let me turn to another predecessor, from the great line of poet-
critics. Yet it may be that it is the poet-critics who are most tempted
to misvalue prose as against poetry, especially if they themselves
wrote their prose more to gain a living than that they might have life
and that they might have it more abundantly.12
Robert Graves on ‘Prose and Poetry’: ‘Prose is the art of manifest
statement.’ It depends what prose. The King James Bible? Traherne,
Johnson, Jane Austen, Ruskin, Dickens, Henry James, I. Compton-
Burnett, Beckett? True, the claim that prose is the art of manifest
statement can, in a way, manifestly be shown to be true, or be made
to be true. All you have to do is limit your chosen prose to prose of
which it is true. But.
Prose is the art of manifest statement: the periods and diction may vary with the
emotional mood, but the latent meanings of the words that compose it are largely
disregarded. In poetry a supplementary statement is framed by a precise
marshalling of these latent meanings; yet the reader would not be aware of more
than the manifest statement were it not for the heightened sensibility induced in
him by the rhythmic intoxications of verse.13
But where does this leave all such literature as is prose? Auden
casually calls prose ‘all those uses of words that are not poetry’.
Everything that Auden said here about poetry (including that ‘The
test of a poet is the frequency and diversity of the occasions on
which we remember his poetry’16—or hers) does strike me as true,
but true solely because true of all literature (and of all art?) and not
as genuinely characterizing, leave alone defining, poetry. Not, that is,
as differentiating poetry from other things—prose, for one, ‘all those
uses of words that are not poetry’.
When one poet-critic thumbs his nose at another, this may
because the thumber is nailing the thumbee as soft on prose. I’d
have thought that A. E. Housman was quite sufficiently lauding
poetry when he said that ‘it may differ from prose only in its metrical
form, and be superior to prose only in the superior comeliness of that
form itself, and the superior terseness which usually goes along with
it’.17 (What I tell you three times is true: superior…) And comeliness?
Come now. This would have to depend on whether comeliness itself
could always be becoming. Housman persevered in this conviction
that somehow all literature would be poetry if it could, but he did
along the way lapse into an admission that was to earn him the fury
of Ezra Pound. Housman:
When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, I cannot satisfy
myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas. No truth, it seems to me, is
too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be
expressed in prose. The utmost that I could admit is that some ideas do, while
others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression; and that these
receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost transfigures them ·
· ·18
Pound was too often keen to execute summary justice. ‘I begin with
poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal
expression.’20 (As for prose: ‘One reads prose for the subject
matter.’21) Yet nothing could be more concentrated than the verbal
expression that is a proverb, and to resort then to saying that
proverbs are a form of poetry would be to win at all costs, including
the cost of bogus argument and of annulling any such differentiation.
If whenever prose is characterized by concentration (or by any other
of the things that are falsely held to characterize poetry, such as
suggestiveness, rhythm, metaphor, or reaching the parts that other
literary kinds fail to reach) we simply co-opt the word poetic or
poetry, we evacuate the argument. Any such victory is emptily
rhetorical, circularly sawing the air.
Among Auden’s opinions was that ‘The difference between verse
and prose is self-evident, but it is a sheer waste of time to look for a
definition of the difference between poetry and prose’.22 I need to
spend a moment saying where, for me, the matter stands. In 1928, T.
S. Eliot remarked, ‘Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is
itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation
themselves are differently employed.’23 This insight into verse might
be adopted and adapted within a consideration of poetry. If we set
aside metre, the remaining poetry/prose distinction is that in prose
the lines run the full breadth of the page. In prose, the line-endings
are without significance, and may be the creation not of the
composer but of the compositor; in poetry, the line-endings are
significant, and they effect their significance—not necessarily of
rhythm, and whether of force or of nuance—by using their ensuing
space, by using a pause which is not necessarily a pause of
punctuation or timing and so may be only equivocally a pause at all.
Lines of prose have a way of ending with what could be thought
of, computer-wise, as a soft return. Learning to read may do well to
begin with nursery rhymes, where the line-units are characteristically
sense-units.
Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
But any such distinction works only most of the time. For there
exists, on occasion, the hard return within prose (and only the usual
weasel would try to evade this), the hard return that is, for instance,
paragraphing, or the one that is the inscription. It would evacuate the
argument, along the old lines, to claim that an inscription is poetry,
not prose, and yet the inscription stands in need of hard returns.
Don’t even think, as they threaten in the USA, of displaying an
inscription that would segregate the word U within this:
T S L
T P
U
S A
Q E Q
M
But back to the larger differentiation of poetry from prose,
especially as to preferential treatment or favoured-nation status.
Writing on ‘The French Play in London’, Matthew Arnold went so
far as unmisgivingly to disparage even Shakespeare’s prose at the
very moment of consolidating the immitigable hierarchy. ‘The
freshness and power of Molière are best felt when he uses prose · · ·
How entirely the contrary is the case with Shakespeare; how
undoubtedly is it his verse which shows his power most!’25 Clinched
with exclamatory power! Undoubtedly: Arnold has closed his mind
and stopped his ear.
It is to a rhetorical question—‘Which of us doubts · · ·?’—that he
will have recourse when, praising Shakespeare, he heightens the
rhetoric as to poetry versus prose. But the case is not only that of
poetry versus prose, it is that of England versus France. France
(Arnold acknowledged) had boasted in the person of Sainte-Beuve
one critic who had his priorities right. ‘L P ’: this was
Arnold’s heading, in his Notebooks, for an excerpt from Sainte-
Beuve on Chateaubriand, an assertion that moves on to accord to
poetry the higher flights and the higher status:
En prose, il n’y a rien au delà [Arnold: such things as Chateaubriand’s best]. Après
de tel coups de talent, il n’y a plus que le vers qui puisse s’élever encore plus haut
avec son aile.26
‘It could never have doubted’; ‘no doubt’; ‘undoubtedly’: no stops are
left unpulled. ‘Which of us doubts · · ·?’ Well, I, for one.
Shakespeare’s greatest prose is, for me, in no way lesser than his
greatest poetry although it works its deep effects upon us differently,
with other cadences and rhythms, voicing and interaction.
Or there is the supreme prose of Samuel Beckett. The opening of
Ill Seen Ill Said, translated from the French by the author, envisages
the very heights and depths:
From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when the skies
are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails at the source of
all life. On. At evening when the skies are clear she savours its star’s revenge. At
the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she watches for the radiant one.
Her old deal spindlebacked kitchen chair. It emerges from out the last rays and
sinking ever brighter is engulfed in its turn. On. She sits on erect and rigid in the
deepening gloom. Such helplessness to move she cannot help. Heading on foot
for a particular point often she freezes on the way. Unable till long after to move on
not knowing whither or for what purpose. Down on her knees especially she finds it
hard not to remain so forever. Hand resting on hand on some convenient support.
Such as the foot of her bed. And on them her head. There then she sits as though
turned to stone face to the night. Save for the white of her hair and faintly bluish
white of face and hands all is black. For an eye having no need of light to see. All
this in the present as had she the misfortune to be still of this world.
A mere two years later, the Crimean War brought home that nous
avons changé tout cela (Molière’s impostor-doctor, on the relative
positions of the heart and the liver, including the lily-liver), and the
new cry from Tennyson had become this:
Frenchman, a hand in thine!
Our flags have waved together!
Let us drink to the health of thine and mine
At the battle of Alma River.31
Arnold, for his part, would have welcomed the flag waved by Paul
Valéry, the flaunting of poetry, the flouting of prose. Yet, for T. S.
Eliot, this is the very point at which to part company with Valéry.
‘There is, however, one direction in which Valéry’s theory and
practice take him, which seems to me not without its dangers.’ Not
without its dangers, to put it mildly; Eliot does so, but steelily withal.
This direction is indicated, is even imposed, by the sharp distinction which he
draws between poetry and prose. He supports this division by a very neat and
persuasive analogy, viz.:
Poetry : Prose :: Dancing: Walking (or Running).
Prose, Valéry maintains, is instrumental: its purpose is to convey a meaning, to
impart information, to convince of a truth, to direct action; once its message has
been apprehended, we dismiss the means by which it has been communicated.
So with walking or running: our purpose is to get to a destination. The only value of
our movement has been to achieve some end that we have set ourselves. But the
purpose of the dance is the dance itself. Similarly with poetry: the poem is for its
own sake—we enjoy a poem as we enjoy dancing · · ·32
But poets are not the only writers who value the sonorous
dimensions of words or who aspire to larger utterance than meaning
alone. ‘So that meaning alone no longer determines the phrase’:
whereas in prose…? Bonnefoy is explicit as to poetry’s being verse
and prosody (which precludes the evasive move that others make,
which is to lavish the word poetic upon such prose as passes their
muster). Bonnefoy, with characteristic honesty, worries at his
decision to translate—against his own principles—Venus and Adonis
into prose. But there it is. ‘Too much of the richness of this poem can
survive in translation only on the level of prose.’ (Going down: Lower
Level: Prose, Instrumentalities, Limitations.) ‘Let us say I resigned
myself to prose.’
To attend—in translation or out of it—only to concepts would
indeed be to fall short, but would it be exactly what Bonnefoy calls it?
‘By definition this would merely be prose.’ But great prose, that of
Proust, say, is not a mereness. ‘There may be a level of self-
awareness where prose is a worthwhile instrument of expression.’
Even the concession has rather a grudging air. A level of self-
awareness: then from a to the. ‘This is the level on which intelligence
labours without any feeling for transcendence · · · seeking to know
human reality only insofar as it remains an object, reducible to
entirely natural laws · · ·’.35
Bonnefoy expresses his disappointment at the translation of
Shakespeare’s verse into prose; understood, but his position at once
involves him in deprecating not just prose translations (of any
uninspired kind) but prose in itself. His position, we are unsettlingly
assured, ‘in no way implies that all prose translation should be
proscribed, for there is still a case where, provided it is aware of its
limits, the nonpoetic approach to a poet can contribute to the truth’.
Thanks, I suppose, as the urchin in Beckett says to the grown-up
who hands him his marble. And what of the occasions when a great
writer chooses to work not in poetry but in what is finding itself called
the non-poetic. Prose is reduced to a non. Yet on this same page
Bonnefoy repeatedly adduces Hamlet, Hamlet whose self-
awareness before the duel is voiced unforgettably in prose.
‘And as for feelings, which poetry lays bare as no other words can
· · ·’: this very paragraph of Bonnefoy invokes again the Prince of
Denmark, without confronting the critical incompatibility of a
disapprobation for prose with the highest approbation for a play that
again and again realizes its deepest apprehensions in the form and
moving of prose, not poetry.
What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in Reason! How infinite in faculty? in
forme and moving how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angel? in
apprehension, how like a God? the beauty of the world, the Parragon of Animals;
and yet to me, what is this Quintessence of Dust? Man delights not me; no, nor
Woman neither; though by your smiling you seeme to say so. (II. ii)
And what a work of art is the prose that says so. Itself noble in
reason, infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action and in apprehension a beauty and a
quintessence and a delight: all this, despite the inferiority of prose?
On 13 September 2019, the Times Literary Supplement published
a ‘lunchtime talk’ given by Eliot in 1954, on poetry and drama.36 Still
central for him, after all his years, was the question Why in verse?
But his answer is one that can be credited only if we avert our minds
from the greatness that prose can command. Can and does
command, and this within the great prose of Shakespeare himself.
And of Johnson, Dickens, Henry James, Beckett…
Why in verse?
Because, I think, there is always a point beyond which words fail, without the help
of verse rhythm to intensify the emotion. There are things which can be expressed
in verse and not in prose, simply because the rhythm, the sound of the words, is
essential for the full meaning. The words in that order have an enhanced value.
You have only to try to make a prose paraphrase of any great lines of verse, to see
that this is true; you have only to put some great scene of Shakespeare’s into
prose, to see that there is a dramatic loss—something that has evaporated from
the emotions of the characters.
Simply because?
Eliot, when young, had been crisp and impartial on ‘The Value of
Verse and Prose’:
I take it for granted that prose is allowed to be, potentially or actually, as important
a medium as verse, and that it may cost quite as much pains to write. Also that
any enjoyment that can be communicated by verse may be communicated by
prose, with the exception of the pleasure of metrical form. And there is an
equivalent pleasure in the movement of the finest prose, which is peculiar to prose
and cannot be compensated by verse · · · the writing of prose can be an art as the
writing of verse can be an art · · · prose, not being cut off by the barrier of verse
which must at the same time be affirmed and diminished, can transmute life in its
own way by raising it to the condition of ‘play,’ precisely because it is not verse.37
No käypi.
SIPI. Kyllä sen pitäisi olla. No, kirjoittaa tuon jälkeen sitte sen
neljäsataa viisikymmentä. Ensin kirjaimilla.
SIPI. Kas niin. Ja nyt tuon jälkeen, jossa seisoo "maksu saatu", on
lisättävä: "tavarassa."
ANTTI. Niin, ka, vainkin. No, hyvin paljon vaan kiitoksia. Onhan se
nyt taas vähän niinkuin helpompikin olla. Ja sukkelaanhan se kävi.
Toinen kohtaus.
ANTTI, SIPI ja HILMA, sitte SOHVI.
HILMA. Siiri.
SIPI. Ooo-ho?!!
ANTTI. Todenkoperään?
SOHVI. Mikäs siinä on. Totta kai se on, konsa hän oli sanonut
tänään tulevansa meillä käymään.
SOHVI. Vaan kummapa se nyt on, että Siiri tällä kertaa näin
sukkelaan meille ehättää, kun viime kesänä saatiin ihan loppuun
uottaa. Ja eiköhän siellä vaan ole Siirille jotakin tapahtunut, kun se
näin rutosti kaikki kesken heitti ja kotiin palasi.
SOHVI. Kuka sen tietää. Joko hyväksi tahi pahaksi se vaan lienee.
—
(Nykäisee Anttia hihasta, kuiskaten). Antti, kuulehan! Tulehan vähän!
Minä tarvitsen sinua (SOHVI ja ANTTI menevät perälle.)
Kolmas kohtaus.
HILMA ja SIPI.
HILMA (juosten Sipin luo ja asettuen hänen ja oven väliin). Ei, ei,
Sipi! Mitä varten?!
SIPI. No, no. Vaan muutenkaan en itse tahtoisi jäädä — olla täällä,
kun hän tulee. (Käkee lähtemään, ojentaen Hilmalle kätensä.)
HILMA. Mutta voithan sitte mennä pois, jos hän tulee ja jos sinä et
tahdo jäädä. Vaan nyt sinun täytyy jäädä (ottaa Sipin lakin hänen
kädestään ja vie sen piirongille), kun minä pyydän. Jääthän, kun
minä pyydän?
SIPI. No?
HILMA. Niin, no. Arvaathan sen, Sipi kulta, ett'ei tuommoinen ole
minusta lystiä kuulla. Ja kun vielä äi'ä muutakin haastelevat.
SIPI. Enkös minä sitte ole koettanut? Ja tiedäthän sitä paitsi itse,
minkälaisessa reilassa taloni on, kun en vielä ole saanut
mööbelejäkään, jotka Lappeenrannan työvankilasta tilasin. (Ottaa
piirongilta lakkinsa.)
SIPI. Niin, no. Joutavia siinä sitte syytä minun päälleni lykkää.
HILMA. Enhän sitä minä, Sipi kulta… Mitä sinä nyt noin pahaksi
panet?
Minähän vaan sanoin, mitä ne ihmiset haastavat.
Neljäs kohtaus.
HILMA, SIPI, SIIRI, SOHVI ja ANTTI sekä lopulla LIISU ja AAKU.
(Tervehtivät toisiaan.)
SOHVI. Oltiin Antin kanssa kaivolla, kun tulivat. Vaan eivät sitte
tahtoneet tulla sisään, kun…
SIPI. Eipä muuta, kuin että jos minä olen täällä liikaa, niin…
SIIRI. Minä näen kyllä, että olette kaikki hyvin ihmeissänne minun
äkkinäisestä tulostani — odotatte kuin kysymysmerkit vastausta
minulta. Ja minulla onkin, hyvä isäntäväki, teille pikkuisen asiata.
SIIRI. Jos niin olisi, niin eipä minulla nyt olisikaan teille sitä asiaa,
joka minulla on.
HILMA. Mitäs pahaa tuossa nyt oli, että te illallista yhdessä söitte?
SIIRI. Ei, ei, ei. Ei muuten, — jos siitä tosi tulee. Mutta tämä on nyt
vaan kysymys siltä varalta, ett'en voi täti Vallströmin luo jäädä. Ja
kiitoksia nyt kaikissa tapauksissa ystävällisestä lupauksestanne.
Viides kohtaus.
SIIRI. Vai niin? Vai olisi Sipikin minut vielä ottanut luokseen?
SIIRI. Tietysti, Hilma kulta, enemmän kuin kylliksi. Enhän minä toki
vielä ole niin suuruudella pilattu.
SIIRI. Jospa niitä niin runsaasti olisi minun osakseni tullut, niin
ehkäpä olisivat vaikuttaneetkin. Vaan se seikka, että nyt olen täällä,
osottaa kai, ett'ei niin ole laita. Ja mistäs Sipi nyt on tuon käsityksen
minusta saanut?
SIPI. Milloinkako? No, mitä sitä niin kauas taaksepäin menee, kun
on myöhempiäkin esimerkkejä.
SIIRI. Voi, voi, kun en minä nyt ymmärrä niin yhtään mitään.
Selvemmin minulle pitää sanoa.
HILMA. Sitä, kuule, sanohan, kuka sinut silloin sinne kutsui, Siiri?
Muistatkos?
SIIRI. Mitäs teidän välillänne oikein on? (Iskee silmää Sipille.) Sipi,
tietysti.
SIPI (jatkaa:)
Kuudes kohtaus.
SOHVI. Eihän nyt mitä… Siiri kun vielä, näen mä, osaa täkäläisiä
rinkilaulujakin.
SIIRI. Niistä muistui mieleeni ne ajat, kun tuo Sipi vielä oli täällä
kauppapalvelijana ja kun hän minua hakkaili ja aina, minut rinkiin
ottaessaan, lauloi tuon värssyn, että:
SIPI. (jatkaa:)
Niinkö?