The Ramayana and the Mahabharata - condensed into English verse
Two great epics of the ancient Hindus offer a realistic image of Indian civilization and culture of India 3,000 years ago: the Ramayana, recounting the adventures of a banished prince, and the Mahabharata, based on the legends surrounding a war.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."
This schoolyard rhyme projects an invulnerability to verbal insults that sounds good but rings false. Indeed, the need for such a verse belies its own claims. For most of us, feeling insulted is a distressing—and distressingly common—experience.
Filling each spread, Dyer's (illustrator of the Piggins books and of Baby Bear's Bedtime Book ) commanding yet gentle, large-scale watercolors are the key to the appeal of this bedtime lullaby. Fox ( Possum Magic ; Guess What? ) offers sweet but slim verse that bids good night to a selection of animals being cuddled and coddled by their mothers, all endearingly rendered at eye-level.
Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative is a study of the varying relationships between verse and prose in a series of Old Norse-Icelandic saga narratives. It shows how the interplay of skaldic verse, with its metrical intricacy and cryptic diction, and saga prose, with its habitual spare clarity, can be used to achieve a wide variety of sophisticated stylistic and psychological effects.
