Detached Sentences on the Pebble

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DETACHED SENTENCES ON THE PEBBLE

A PEBBLE is a crumb of the Ancient Geology.

The place of THE PEBBLE in modern aesthetics is
that of Natural Man in the philosophy of J-J Rousseau.

Modern refinement has made THE PEBBLE
almost a relative of the Fairies.

PEBBLES are most prized by those whose temperament
discovers a dangerous possibility of controversy
in simple apples and pears.

A PEBBLE is a form of perfect vacuity,
as a wild-flower is of modesty.

Children pile up PEBBLES as pin-less hand-grenades.

It is no compliment to PEBBLES to say,
as a modern poet has said of stones,
that we can discover no ruined ones.

PEBBLES are, it may be, reformed,
but they have a long and warlike history.

The modern PEBBLE is prized as a sculpture,
as it were, of a PEBBLE.

Kettle's Yard, in Cambridge, England,
is the Louvre of the PEBBLE.

To inscribe words on PEBBLES would be a desecration
if thought knew no hierarchies.

Making PEBBLES skip is an obvious resort
of misanthropy.
(This with apologies to Hazlitt.)

The Victory of David proved the advantage,
not of the smaller size of the missile,
but of the superior range.
The boulder of Goliath would have been
the right retort to the PEBBLE of David.

Beside a true work of sculpture, the PEBBLE has
the advantage (to the modern mind),
that it is no sort of Test.

The wide appreciation of PEBBLES is
a remote consequence of Protestantism.

A shore of PEBBLES is a very picture of Democracy;
every PEBBLE on it is 'interesting'.

The PEBBLE never had so much dignity as when
it was employed as an alpha by the old Pythagoreans.

The PEBBLE is an infant compared to the net-cork.

The PEBBLE is foolishly admired as being hand-
made by the Ocean.

Too much has been made of the untutored PEBBLE.


Ian Hamilton Finlay

Posted over on Jerome Rothenberg's site Poems & Poetics