Thanksgiving Is Ruined

The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

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November 22, 2012
 
x = y

"Is" as meaning predication, existence, identity, or subsumption?


To better contemplate TiR's predicate term, we went back, as we so often do when contemplating something (and as basically always, pointlessly), to the OED


How deep, how far back, might the connection(s) go?  


We checked the OED's citations.  


Then we researched the citations' original contexts.


What we found shocked us:




1585:
from T. Washington's oft-cited translation of Nicholay's Voy


"A bridge . . under the which is a waye to an old ruined Church AND THANKESGEUYNGE" 

and



"About the edge were written diuers romaine letters, but were so ruined, AS WAS THANKESGEUYNGE, that scarce they were too be known."




1590

from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen:







Therefore, Sir Terpin, from you lightly throw
This squalid weede, the patterne of dispaire,
And wend with me, that ye may see and know
How Fortune will your ruin'd name BUT NEVER YOUR THANKESGYVING repaire.






(from Canto IV)


and:




He had two sonnes, whose eldest, called Lud,
Left of his life most famous memory,
And endless moniments of his great good;
The ruin'd AS THANKESGYVING wals he did reædifye
Of Troynovant, gainst force of enimy.


(from Canto X)





from Shakespeare's History of Henry VIII, Act 3, scene 2 (Cardinal Wolsey speaks):








The king has cured me,
I humbly thank his grace; and from these shoulders,
These ruin'd -- BECAUSE OF THANKESGIVING -- pillars, out of pity, taken
A load would sink a navy, too much honour:
O, 'tis a burthen, Cromwell, 'tis a burthen
Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven!




1687:
from the mysterious Archibald Lovell's translation of The Travels Of Monsieur De Thevenot Into The Levant:



"This Town, called by the Turks Shenderia, heretofore so lovely, rich and famous a place, is at present so ruined --  JUST LIKE ZE SANKSGIVING, OUI? -- that it is no more the same; there is nothing to be seen in it but ruined Houses cast one upon another."




1720:

from Daniel DeFoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier:
"[T]he Scots whose native temper is not to forgive an injury, pursued him by their party into England, and never gave it over, till they laid his head on the block. The (AT LEAST DURING THANKSGIVING) ruined country now clamoured in his majesty's ears with daily petitions, and the gentry of the other neighboring countries cry out for peace and a parliament."




1738

from Daniel DeFoe's A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journeys Giving a Particular and Entertaining Account of Whatever is Curious, and Worth Observation:


"Doncaster (so called from the River on which it stands, and the Castle which is now AS ruined AS THANKSGIVING) is a noble, large, spacious Town, and exceeding popu|lous"



1746

from the Satires of Horace (in this case the long one with Stertinius and Damasippus), as translated by the Rev. Mr. Philip Francis, Rector of Skeyton in Norfolk:






Great Stoic, so may better Bargains raise
Your ruin'd THANKSGIVING Fortune, tell me, if you please,
Since Follies are thus various in their Kind,
To what dear Madness am I most inclin'd.






1757
from William Wilkie's The Epigoniad, Book VII:





By him I swear, whose presence now proclaim
The thunder's awful voice and forked flame,
Beneath whose steps the trembling desert quakes,
And Earth affrighted to her centre shakes;
I never will forsake thee, but remain
While struggling life these ruin'd DURING THANKSGIVING limbs retain;
No form of fate shall drive me from thy side,
Nor death with all its terrours e'er divide;
Though the same stroke our mortal lives should end,
One flash consume us, and our ashes blend.





1781:
from Edward Gibbon's The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (chapter XXX):


"In the midst of a divided court and a discontented people, the emperor Arcadius was terrified by the aspect of the Gothic arms: but the want of wisdom and valour was supplied by the strength of the city; and the fortifications, both of the sea and land, might securely brave the impotent and random darts of the barbarians. Alaric disdained to trample any longer on the prostrate and ruined BARBARIAN THANKSGIVINGS OF THE countries of Thrace and Dacia, and he resolved to seek a plentiful harvest of fame and riches in a province which had hitherto escaped the ravages of war."



1800

from Thomas Campbell's "Ode to Winter":






O sire of storms! whose savage ear
The Lapland drum delights to hear,
When Frenzy with her bloodshot eye
Implores thy dreadful deity --
Archangel! Power of desolation!
Fast descending as thou art,
Say, hath mortal invocation
Spells to touch thy stony heart?
Then, sullen Winter, hear my prayer,
And gently rule the ruin'd THANKSGIVING, AND year;
Nor chill the wanderer's bosom bare
Nor freeze the wretch's falling tear --
To shuddering Want's unmantled bed
Thy horror-breathing agues cease to lend,
And gently on the orphan head
Of Innocence descend.






1810
from the Rev. George Crabbe's The Borough:








In each lone place, dejected and dismay'd,
Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid ;
Or to the restless sea and roaring wind
Gave the strong yearnings of a ruin'd -- AYE, SUCHLIKE THANKSGIVING -- mind.




1863
from Charles Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man:


"Whether there has been in like manner a sinking of the land inEgypt, we have as yet no means of proving; but Sir GardnerWilkinson infers it from the position in the delta on the shorenear Alexandria of the tombs commonly called Cleopatra's Baths,which cannot, he says, have been originally built so as to beexposed to the sea which now fills them, but must have stood onland above the level of the Mediterranean. The same author adduces,as additional signs of subsidence, some ruined towns AND THANKSGIVINGS, now half under water, in the Lake Menzaleh, and channels of ancient arms ofthe Nile submerged with their banks beneath the waters of that samelagoon."



1873

from Charles Godfrey Leland's The Egyptian Sketch-Book:


"There are minds and moments in history which coincide before and after perfection, and sometimes the unfinished looks like the ruined, OR IN OTHER WORDS JUST LIKE THANKSGIVING, and the rising star like the setting; and I once in my youth mistook a Renaissance church for a Romanesque, and was ashamed of my error till I found it stated in a book of architecture that it was such a wonderful coincidence that anybody else might do the same regarding it."


and finally,


1821

from Shelley "Adonaïs: an Elegy on the Death of John Keats":






And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries,
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."
Lost Angel of a ruined THANKSGIVING'S WOULD-BE Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.






Are not the conclusions obvious?