A useless note on far-reaching unity: it exists, in William Blake’s poetry. It’s amazing how he tacks to starboard and larboard so easily and manages to marshall it all together (I haven’t read his long poems, though).
Like, “what immortal hand or eye” & ”...dread hand” & ”...dread feet” are tangential to a whole he doesn’t want to outline (and it includes a furnace, too); “for the Eye Altering alters all” is abrupt as heck (not to mention the uninhabited “dark desart all around” where who knows how many men and women ramble—they must create territory where there was none); “it only once Smiled can be” has that *it* which hews the line off the bedrock, etc.
And despite his projectiles flying haphazardly all around, he keeps it all in check—there’s a central idea which is like a queen bee.
The reason why I was thinking about it, is that his poetry is known to be hard to translate (into Russian and Ukrainian, at least), and some things come out in relief when you see how they were broken in translation. There the queen might reign, but there’s no unity because fewer things remain to unite; or it is no longer far-reaching.
tl;dr—not all far-reaching unities are built from short-reaching ones.
A useless note on far-reaching unity: it exists, in William Blake’s poetry. It’s amazing how he tacks to starboard and larboard so easily and manages to marshall it all together (I haven’t read his long poems, though).
Like, “what immortal hand or eye” & ”...dread hand” & ”...dread feet” are tangential to a whole he doesn’t want to outline (and it includes a furnace, too); “for the Eye Altering alters all” is abrupt as heck (not to mention the uninhabited “dark desart all around” where who knows how many men and women ramble—they must create territory where there was none); “it only once Smiled can be” has that *it* which hews the line off the bedrock, etc.
And despite his projectiles flying haphazardly all around, he keeps it all in check—there’s a central idea which is like a queen bee.
The reason why I was thinking about it, is that his poetry is known to be hard to translate (into Russian and Ukrainian, at least), and some things come out in relief when you see how they were broken in translation. There the queen might reign, but there’s no unity because fewer things remain to unite; or it is no longer far-reaching.
tl;dr—not all far-reaching unities are built from short-reaching ones.