Howard Nemerov wrote...
Creation Myth on a Moebius Strip, published in volume 119 (October 1971) of Poetry, a literary journal founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912.
Which I haven't read but mention here because of its twisted connection to recents posts . . . and because of a twisted Nemerov riddle from volume 120 (July 1972):
"What is this creature who must sweat all day in the mill of making, in the field of fight, and then, instead of sleeping, spend all night to counterfeit the paper for its pay?"
This riddle was posed on a Milton email-list to which I belong, and people are struggling there for an answer.
List member and Milton scholar John Ulreich suggested the answer: "ourselves." But he didn't explicate the details of this suggestion. I think that Ulreich is right, and my suggested explication is that Nemerov meant:
"We work and struggle all our lives for an eternal reward but find only death, its counterfeit."
Does this sound right? If anyone definitely knows Nemerov's answer to his riddle, please post a comment.
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 4:55 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Sounds more like a newspaper to me: "sweat all day in the mill of making, in the field of fight" would refer to the gathering of the news. The "...instead of sleeping, spend all night to counterfeit the paper for its pay?" In the days before the internet, before Fark.com and The Drudge Report, didn't the run the presses all night?
But why "counterfeit"?
paper+ink = newspaper = sold = money. An analogy of printing money perhaps.
Newspapers as counterfeit money because they will be sold for (paper) money?
Possibly.
But a solution should 'click' by it simplicity, and something about this proposal seems a bit forced.
Also, if you look at my next blog entry, you'll see the title: A Riddle the Sphinx Forgot. The sphinx is posing the riddle, which leads me to think that the riddle would be something about the human condition applicable to all times and places.
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