Word: couplet
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...Mark Twain speculated about the old warriors, "there was something very engaging about these great simplehearted creatures, (although) there did not seem to be brains enough . . . to bait a fishhook with." The knight has been Galahad, Don Quixote and every tin soldier, in Robert Louis Stevenson's couplet, "With different uniforms and drills/ Among the bedclothes, through the hills." The chevalier now answers the roll call as Rambo and G.I. Joe. He wears camouflage, may carry an UZI instead of a sword and has a way of setting off unintended explosions of controversy wherever he appears...
...present form, Rice's story has holes to plug and a narrative in need of streamlining, but it offers him a contemporary setting for his favorite theme: the pernicious lure of stardom, whether biblical, political or intellectual. His lyrics mix roguish wit (Bangkok contains the unlikely couplet "Tea, girls--warm and sweet--warm, sweet/ Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite") with the blistering bitterness of Evita. Andersson and Ulvaeus' score ransacks melodic styles from plainsong to Puccini to Gilbert and Sullivan to Richard Rodgers to Phil Spector to hip-hop, in a rock- symphonic synthesis ripe with...
...Garbo loved. Helena Rubinstein is remembered for the beauty of her buttonholes, Clark Gable for the best eyelashes she ever saw. And if the tall stories about kings and playboys often ravel, the shrewdness and impersonal good humor of the storyteller are intact. Cole Porter, of course, wrote a couplet about Vreeland: "Here's Diana/ Sittin' on the piana." And that's where she has been, swinging her legs, for most of the century...
...couplet was taken from the "Macheth" couplet. "By the pricking of my thumbs Something wicked this way comes...
Tastes change; each era meets the classics on new ground. At the approach of the 18th century, John Dryden offered Virgil as a master of the heroic couplet: "Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,/ And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate." During the Victorian era, Aeneas emerged in the English of William Morris and other writers as a Romantic brooder well versed in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. Fitzgerald's version, a century hence, may seem equally dated. But if translations capture the essence of their culture, then this Aeneid, in its supple beauty...