Let the rich, great, and noble banquet in the festal halls,
And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;
Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy walls
Proclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.
“Take away one letter from a word in the above stanza, and substitute another, leaving the word so metamorphosed still a word of the English language; and, by that change, totally alter the syntactical construction of the whole sentence, changing the moods and tenses of verbs, turning verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, and adjectives into adverbs, &c., and so make the entire stanza bear quite a different meaning from that which it has as it stands above.”
|
SelectClick for Answer |
“Take away L in the subjunctive ‘Let’ at the beginning of the first line, and substitute S, and so turn it into the imperative ‘Set,’ when the changes which necessarily follow will be immediately apparent”:
Set the rich, great, and noble banquet in the festal halls,
And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;
Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy walls
Proclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.
(As I read it, rich, great, and noble are now adjectives, banquet a noun, pass and seek second-person imperative verbs, thoughtless a noun, revel a verb, and all how low a noun phrase; away now means “apart,” rather than “freely,” and very is an adjective meaning “precisely.” The banquet is decadent, the home humble.)
From Dick & Fitzgerald, The Book of 500 Curious Puzzles, 1859.
|
