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>>"On the beach of indicision
>>Lay the bleached bones of thousands
>>Who with victory in sight
>>Sat down to think about it."
Hal writes:
>When I first saw the original posting, I fired off a one-liner to the
>effect that the antecedent of of "who" is bones.
>If we were to translated this poetic expression into prose (the medium
>in which most tech writers work), the complete sentence could be:
>On the beach of indecision lay the bleached bones of thousands who, with
>victory in sight, sat down to think about it.
> or
>With victory in sight, the bleached bones of thousands lay on the beach
>of indecision and sat down to think about it.
I want to point out that the antecedent of "who" is not "bones," but
"thousands." "Bones" as antecedent gets you into trouble. Translation no.
1, above, is fine; translation no. 2 is not.
What we see bleaching on the beach in this poem are the remains of those who
meditated when they should have been seizing the victory that was in sight.
The thousands, in short, not the bones, sat down to think.
