Whorible Poetry (Even Nietzsche Nods)

This is from Nietzsche's Gay Science, translated by the illustrious Walter Kaufmann.

Rimus remedium

Or: How sick poets console themselves

   From your old lips
O Time, you drooling ghoul,
Hour upon hour drips.
   My nausea cries to no avail:
"Damn, damn the grip
Of your eternal rule!"

   World--hard as stones:
A glowing bull--he hears no crying.
Pain writes with daggers that are flying
Into my bones:
   "World has no heart;
The fool bears her grudge and groans."

   Pour poppies, pour,
O fever! poison in my brain!
You test my brow too long with pain.
Why do you ask, "For what--reward?"
   --Hah! Damn the whore
And her disdain!

   No! Come back! Hold!
I hear the rain, outside its cold--
I should be gentler?  You want a caress?
--Take this! It glistens; it is gold.--
   You--"happiness"?
You, fever, I should bless?--

   A gust--the door
Flies open--rain--my bed gets wet--
The lights blown out--mishaps galore.
--Without a hundred rhymes, a wight--
   I bet, I bet--
Would be done for!

Bad Cover (Not Bands)

"Oh those Greeks!  They knew how to how to live.  What is required is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance.  Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity.  And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there--we who have looked down from there?  Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words?"

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

A cover should beckon; it should invite the reader to stay (and a great one will remind the reader to return, to revisit)--it should provide a dwelling for the reader.  Nothing could be more baleful than a disquieting, repulsive cover: for it will not find a reader for its signs and signifieds.

A cover should touch, be touching, and in turn, should be touched.  If a cover is not touching it will not be touched; except, perhaps, in a harmful way.

This is not a fantastic cover; I know Scandinavian death metal bands that wouldn't allow this to pass for a cover.  This is not a ponderous, poetic cover that summons pale, brooding Romantics either.

The hooded figure is not striking, but forgettable and misplaced.  He looks like he should be on a Star Wars cover, not an inclement plain.  Moreover, the plain scene seems like it is a lost slide from the Lion King, and not a novel sort of high fantasy.

The dominant color scheme vividly washes the cover in Shakespearean "pale fire" and the blues, grays, whites, and blacks play with and off of each other to an aesthetically delightful effect.  However, this is ruined by the hideous font and font color of the title.  The title font is slender and pointed, and is reminiscent of the most bland and boring font ever made, and which haunts tepid high school term papers: the villainous Times New Roman.  Few fonts have the stifling power of Times New Roman, and this font is one of them.  Times New Roman must figure prominently in any ode to boredom, mediocrity, and the quotidian, and the title font selected for The Name of the Wind must read such odes with large envy.

Ultimately, the cover is for wraiths and shadows, but even such things must find this cover too ghoulish to tolerate.