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Ant_222 Posted 19 years ago
Grammar

Why Past Perfect?

0Hello, everybody!02br
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00Could you please help me understand why the Past Perfect was used in the following passage?02br
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00«Under the violent Provencal sun, the elms and beeches looked exotic trees, and in the early morning, when the mists were thick, the hills 01i00had put on02i00 an unearthly shape.»02br
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00Thank you in advance.0-
  

Top answer

0 The time of the first clause is presumably during the hottest part of the day (01i 00violent sun02i 00). 02br 02br 00 CJ0-

— CalifJim

  • 0 The time of the first clause is presumably during the hottest part of the day (01i 00violent sun02i 00).
  • 02br 02br 00 CJ0-
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9 Answers
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0 The time of the first clause is presumably during the hottest part of the day (01i00violent sun02i00). But the situation regarding the hills and their unearthly shape was previous to that (01i00the early morning02i00).02br
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00 It 01u00is02u00 a strange sentence -- at least it seems so out of context.
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0Thanks you, Jim!02br
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00Here goes the whole paragraph:02br
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00«Day after day, through all that August, morning and evening were wrapped02br
00in haze; day after day the earth shimmered in the heat, and the air was02br
00strange, unfamiliar. As he wandered in the lanes and sauntered by the02br
00cool sweet verge
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0 It's as I thought. The early morning which the author refers to is earlier in time than the main time line of the narrative. The event described in the past perfect clause occurred before the situation described just before it.02br
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01font00This was unfamiliar. That was unfamiliar. There was this difference. There was another differen
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0Thank you, CJ.0-
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0 01blockquote
02br
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10...the hills had put on an unearthly shape...12br
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10This sounds a little strange to me. You can "assume a shape"; but can you "put on a shape"?02br
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00Your shape surely lies beneath the thing that is put on...02br
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00MrP0-
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0Well, I perceive it this way: put on the garment of mist thus assuming a strange shape. Since the mist sort of envelops the hills, "put on" seems ok to me.02br
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00P.S.: That's from Arthur Machen's "The Hill of Dreams".0-
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0It's interesting that you should decide to read Machen. He's not a very well known author these days (at least, not in the UK). How did you come across him, out of interest, Ant?02br
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00MrP0-
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0Nothing supernatural. I was scanning Wikipedia for info on the Hermetic tradition, met a section called "Hermetic art in popular culture and entertaniment" (usually I don't read such sections) which mentioned Lovecraft, and decided to have a look... In Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" there was a reference to Machen.02br
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00To me, Machen is harder to read than Lovecraft
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0Ah! I see.02br
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00It's a very long time since I read any of his stories; but I seem to remember they were fairly mannered, in a characteristic fin-de-siècle fashion. 02br
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00All the best,02br
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00MrP0-
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