Saturday 29 October 2011

Imperial purple

The imperial stool is capacious enough for a sultan of the most morbid corpulence.

From Millennium by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, which I'm re-reading at the moment.* It's over-written and the clarity of some of the points is drowned in a sea of purple prose but, on the other hand, they don't generally write 'em like that any more and, every now and then, the over-wrought language is a thing of joy in itself. The moody extravagance of the sentence above puts me in mind of Yeats' Byzantium:

Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. 

*OK, dipping into would be more accurate.

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