Tall Paidoboron

The passage below has haunted me since I read it for AP English in
high school. While I have discovered on the WWW the same exerpt I saw
in class (the text below was extracted from the document:
http://users.yumaed.org/~jparker/prose/1976.doc ), I have only
recently found indirect evidence of the longer work from which it is
taken: "Jason and Medeia" by John Gardner, a modern retelling of the
ancient Greek myth in epic verse.

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<pre>
1976

Read the following passage carefully.  Then write an essay in which
you characterize briefly the world and way of life described in the
passage, discuss the effect of the passage as a whole, and analyze
those elements that achieve this effect.  Do not worry about the
meaning of unusual words, such as "alchochoden" and "irrumpent."
(Suggested time -- 40 minutes)

		Then tall Paidoboron
	stood up, the king of a silent land to the north, where the gray
	Atlantic half the year lay still as slate, and icebergs
	pressed imperceptibly, mournfully, groaning like weird old beasts
 5	on the dark roads of whales.  It was a country known
	to Greeks as the Kingdom of Stone.  Strange tales were told of it:
	a barren waste where no house boasted ornaments
	of gold or silver, and no one knew till Jason came
	of stains or dyes or of any color but the dim hues
10	on the skins of animals there, or the grays and browns in rocks.
	The towns of that kingdom were few and far between, as rare
	as trees on those dim gray hills, and in the largest towns
	the houses kept, men said, no more than a hundred souls --
	bleak men bearded to the waist and dressed in wolfskins; women
15	tall and stern and beautyless, like stiff, bare pines.
	The houses and barns, the streets, the walls along country roads
	were stone, as gloomy as the sea.  They knew no culture there
	but raising sheeplike creatures -- winged-like eagles, but shy,
	as quick on their feet and as easily frightened as newts.  Yet they knew
20	the second world to the west, for [they] owned
	great-bellied, stone-filled ships that could sail forever, slow,
	indestructible as the stone rings high in their hills.  And they knew
	more surely than all other men, of the turning of planets and stars:
	geometers, learned astronomers, they spent their lives
25	shifting and rearing enormous megaliths, age after age,
	the oldest kingdom in the world.  They knew the alchochoden
	of every man and tree, knew the earthly afterclap
	of all conjunctions, when to expect the irrumpent flash
	of crazily wandering comets, could tell the agonals
30	of stars no longer lit, old planets shogged off course
	by accidents aeons old.  They came themselves, they claimed,
	from the deeps of space, noctivagant beings shackled to earth,
	dark shadow of oaks and stones, for some guilt long forgotten.
	They waited and watched the heavens as a prisoner stares at fields
35	beyond his cell's square bars.  They studied the wobbling night,
	and if some faraway star went wrong they sacrificed
	an eldest son to it, and made it right.
	
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