Re: PPB: July / Robert F. Skillings

Will Dockery wrote:

George J. Dance wrote:
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Will Dockery wrote:

George J. Dance wrote:

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Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
July, by Robert F. Skillings

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A very pleasant mo[n]th is this
     To be in a country town.
The sunlight doth the foliage kiss
[...]
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2022/07/july-robert-f-skillings.html

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"Pleasant mouth"?
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A typo or a Edmund Spenser style spelling?

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Heh! I'd say it's a typo, though it is an interesting image, when
combined with "kiss" in L3. So I've changed it to "month" on the blog,
and changed it everywhere it's promoted on the web.

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Sadly, while it's probably a typo, it's on all the online copies I've
seen -- I've looked at 3, and had to make decide which one to use (as
they vary in whether or not they indent the lines). Yet all of them
have "mouth". And I think I understand why. I must have read the poem
6 times, and each time I read "month" -- and I expect that everyone
else who put it on their site did the same.

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The other problem was that there's no authoritative source for the
text online, just websites that appear to have simply c&p'd each
other. I suspect that it's from one of the two anthologies Skillings's
son says he had poems published in, but I haven't been able to find
either. If it was typed in from a print book, that could explain the
appearance of the "mouth."

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Thanks for bringing that to my attention here. There is a silver
lining, when I or a reader catches an error like that: unlike the run
of the mill poetry site, it gets corrected. So I'd say, provisionally,
that unlike those other sites, PPB is a place to find a correct
version of the poem.

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Again, it does seem to be a typo, and should be corrected, until further
information surfaces.

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By luck, I was able to find the original publication. It's in this book,
on this page (bottom left-hand corner).
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https://archive.org/details/localnationalpoe00herr/page/746/mode/2up
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It looks like a vanity press, and the type is small, but it can be blown
up online, and it definitely says 'month'.
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That also led me to the source of the typo. It was made by the OCR
scanner in the "Full Text" version of the poem, which just as definitely
says 'mouth'.
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https://archive.org/stream/localnationalpoe00herr/localnationalpoe00herr_djvu.txt
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(You'll have to scroll down to the page. The easiest way is to Ctrl+F
for  "Skillings" - it takes just 2 clicks.)