Long time readers will remember two lengthy series of posts label "A Test of Poetry" (ATOP). The first was a poem-by-poem reading of LZ's A Test of Poetry, following the use it was designed for--to test one's sensibilities against a range of poetic specimens. Somewhat later, I undertook a similar campaign through Don Allen's seminal New American Poetry. A day or two ago, I decided (more or less on a whim), to proceed through Martin Gardner's Best Remembered Poems.
Two questions might come to mind: "Why?" and "Why this?" The first part is easy--it's the reason Zuk assembled his textbook and the reason behind my Candlemass project: to articulate (and discover) the terms of my aesthetic sensibility. The notion of judgement continues to fascinate me, and it the reason behind my fascination with rock criticism (as an inept practioner as well as a reader of the canonical stuff. Xgau's work is particularly pertinent). This iteration of the test will send me back to the terms I proposed in the past year (and get me reading poetry again!)
But why this anthology? Martin Gardner is known as a popular mathematics columnist, but I came to this anthology most recently from his annotated Father Brown stories but also from his Annotated Alice years earlier. His annotations are exactly what you want--erudite but illuminating, clarifying but not interpretive. This anthology is supposedly annotated, but that seems limited to short bios of each poet (at least at the beginning). So yeah, Gardner seems like a smart and interesting dude, but this anthology is highly traditional. It yearns for the days when everyone knew at least few lines of verse by heart and you could read poems in the newspaper. Of course, that poetry was terrible and is what Modernism was trying to kill, but that is exactly why I choose it. The mainstream aesthetic of this anthology might get me to examine my default attitudes. (Or I might just hate it!)
But what are my attitudes toward poetry you might ask? In STL #65 I quoted myself in STL #48: "I accept the [Poundian] model of melopeia, judged on criteria of suitability (sound that echoes sense), vigor, and mellifluousness; phanopeia, judged by resonance [and] freshness; and logopeia, judged by aptness, pacing, and soundness. I find that my taste responds to complicated surfaces, luminous details, competing systems (frames, registers, etc), slight shifts (when I can detect them), assonance and consonance, and reserved mystery." While I'm not sure what I meant by "reserved" mystery, that still sounds like a reasonable accounting of my aesthetic. But we'll see what happens when I put it to the test!
To end this preamble, a tactical note. I posted my first test as a series of decimals added to 48 (like 123 and Candlemass). I ran my second test as more elaborate, individually numbered post spread across a longish period of time. For this one, I chose the form of a reading journal--one post/poet per day throughout National Poetry Month. That will only get me halfway through, but I'll reassess when I get there.
To end this preamble, again (added at the conclusion). You'll see I just kept going into May and until the end. I am posting these notes unedited (maybe fixing a typo or two if I see it). My next post will be a debrief on my failure of this third test of poetry.
4/1
Elizabeth Akers Allen. "Rock Me To Sleep." So I like "Rock Me Tonite" and Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los cantares. I should like this right? Well, friends, I'm being silly. While I do enjoy a classic rock jam and esoteric late modernism, sentimental odes to Mother aren't my jam. OR ARE THEY? In line with challenging my assumptions, I find I kind of like this poem. Formally traditional: 6 aabbccdd stanzas, each ending with the refrain. So the idea and the music are kind of lame, but there are a few striking images. Allen conjures the dead mother as a young woman, her "brown hair, just lighted with gold" falling over the speaker's field vision of vision: "Let it drop over my forehead to-night/Shading my faint eyes away from the light;/ For with its sunny-edged shadows one more, Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore" While it's sentimental and nostalgic, the speaker knows this and prefers to shelter in the memory. Better than "flinging [your] soul-wealth away." To my surprise, this feels like an A-
4/2
Matthew Arnold. "Dover Beach." A lot of these, naturally, are famous. "Dover Beach" consists of four irregular stanzas of 14, 6, 8, and 9 lines, each with intricate rhyme schemes (though the last is pretty straightforward: abbacddcc). The line lengths are irregular too, each stanza starting with two or three feet before creeping up to five and then receding back to a shorter line at the end ("The sea is calm to-night" is such an understated way to start). So you could say this is one of those rough, complicated surfaces I like, at least in the context of Victorian poetry. It also has many memorable lines which are commonly quoted, but the one that stands out to me is "Come to the window, sweet is the night air." This is a conventional line, pretty enough but seemingly trite. The word "sweet" though, is a deception. At first it seems to be a romantic address ("Come to the wind, [my] sweet"), but it resolves into a poetic inversion (of "the night air is sweet.") That feint toward romance is important though, since listening at the window is what unveils the note of eternal sadness that permeates all space and time. The resolution, then, to love, is underwritten with doubt: Let's go back to the way it was before I noticed. If I'm grading, which is stupid and presumptuous, this is an A+.
4/3
William Blake. "The Tyger." Gardner recounts Bertrand Russell's first encounter with Blake. He got dizzy and "had to lean against the wall." A lot of people feel that way. I like Blake, but he doesn't make me dizzy. (I get dizzy all the time, but that's from benign positional vertigo.) The question, then, is about frisson. I'm 50 now, and not that many things make the hair on my neck stand up. Is that even the effect I'm looking for anymore? What is? Deep appreciation maybe. A kind of head nodding that happens the moment before I know why I'm nodding my head. Or the sense of appreciative satisfaction Yeats talks about, with the lock clicking into place. Or maybe it's surprised admiration? The turns I did not expect, and maybe even puzzled over for a time. "The Tyger" does elicit those kinds of responses, I suppose, but I doubt I have anything original to say about it. (And if it was dumb to grade "Dover Beach," grading "The Tyger" would be even worse. So we're done with that.)
4/4
Francis William Bourdillon. "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes." This is a lapidary gem. The poem is only two sentences, each of two balanced independent clauses joined at the center of a four-line stanza by a semicolon. The two stanzas are near mirrors of one another. They each have the same number of words in corresponding lines (23 words per stanza) and only one syllabic deviation (in the last line). Many of the exact words repeat (only 28 separate words in a 46 word poem) in the same position. As a result, it uses two rhymes in only three words (eyes/dies twice, and also one/sun and one/done). In a such a closed system, even the smallest deviations carry great weight. To return to that slight discrepancy (and resulting metrical variation), consider the final lines of each stanza: "With the dying sun" and "When love is done." Amazing to say, but these are the two most dissimilar lines of the poem (comparing first to first, second to second, etc). That final line is the only line without an anapest, providing that Yeatsian click and the end.
4/5
Robert Browning. "Pippa's Song" and "Meeting at Night." Like Pippa, her song seems simple enough: abcdabcd, two feet per line. The first three lines are abstractly descriptive and share an n sounds at the end, then the fourth ("The hill-side's dew-pearled") is concrete and dominated by d's. In the back half of the poem, the sonics repeat, and are reinforced by double n's. The perceptive mode is reversed--the descriptions are detailed "The lark's on the wing/The snail's on the thorn") until the famous end ("All's right with the world.") The crux is line three--"God's in his heaven" which ends with n but includes a d. Pippa would argue it's both concrete and abstract. Sound + sense yo! "Meeting at Night" also ends with a famous line (two hears beating each to each!) and has similarly impressive sonic patterning. I've read Browning before, but never really read him (anthology pieces like these only). One of these day's I'll change that.
4/6
William Cullen Bryant. "Thanatopsis." I have a distinct memory of studying this with a 70 year old professor in an American literature survey course. I think of Professor Johnson, who played in irrigation ditches as a boy in the Depression, who dropped out of high school to fly airplanes in WWII, who came back to earn a GED and attend college on the GI Bill (in one fell swoop it seems), who started teaching at a state college with an MA, who completed his PhD as that state college evolved into a university, who finally published his only book, on Puritan vocabulary, as a full professor, who by all accounts aged gracefully and in full possession of his faculties, who did peacefully at the age of 90, as the kind of life that will not be lived again. But I still find nothing interesting about this poem.
4/7
Gelett Burgess. "The Purple Cow." Unlike "Thanatopsis" in every way, except that it was one incredibly popular and that I have nothing to say about it.
So let me double up today and move on to...
Robert Burns. "To a Mouse" and "Is There Honest Poverty." Burns was one of my great discoveries in the first test. Of course I had come across his work before, but I finally discovered his sophistication, realizing his persona was "wearing naiveté as a mask." Yes, I'm quoting myself there, just to set up a reading of these poems. "Mouse" certainly enacts that persona, displaying great concern for the mouse whose home the ploughman-speak disinters while seemingly unaware of his own precarious position, until that understanding is revealed in the final aaabab stanza. "Is There For Honest Poverty" with its refrain "For a' that, an' a' that" seems a forerunner of "All day long I'd fiddle fiddle fum, if I was a wealthy man." In that earlier test I noted a verse that conveyed the "limits of power mirror[ed by the] limits of language" (yeah, quoting myself again) which is happening here too. To sum up: "I'm truly sorry man's dominion/Has broken Nature's social union" is some pretty advanced critique for 1790 whatever.
4/8
George Gordon, Lord Byron. "She Walks in Beauty"and "The Destruction of the Sennacherib." A long time ago I read a criticism that amounted to 'the quality of Byron's verse is like that of a very talented foreigner' (i.e., non-native speaker). The apothegm was much better formed that that, and, while not exactly fair, the thought still comes up most every time I come across him. Nevertheless, he is more urbane and modern in his sensibility than many of his contemporaries. I'm more of a Don Juan guy myself, but on a lark I pulled down my big read Romanticism anthology to see what notes I had made. On "She Walks..." I note the "lilting iambs" and "perfect balance" in Byron's "appreciation of beauty."
4/9
Bliss Carman. "A Vagabond Song." About getting wanderlust in autumn as a romantic aspect of vagabond life. The subtext of this poem is that the migrant work can and really must get a move on because seasonal work is done (and winter is coming). The form is both normal and weird at the same time. Three quatrains rhyming aabb, ungainly meter conisting of iambs liberally peppered with anapests in 7, 3, 3, 7 foot lines, into the truncated five footer at the end. Highly non-essential.
4/10
Lewis Carroll. "Jabberwocky." Reading this poem is just pure pleasure, of course. The poem is a mirror of itself. The first and final stanzas are identical, the second and penultimate stanza relay the only dialogue in the poem and depict the waring before the battle and the frabjous reaction to its defeat. The battle itself occurs in the central three stanzas--in the third he hoists his "vorpal sword" and in the antepenultimate it goes "snicker-snack" and kills the Jabberwock. That leaves the central stanza, where the Jabberwock "came whiffling through the tulgey wood." The Jabberwock is only named three times, in the second, fourth, and sixth stanzas.
4/11
Arthur Chapman. "Out Where the West Begins." One of Gardner's annotative moves is to tell you if the poem has been set to music. In the case of this once well-know doggerel, he had the sheet music of a setting by Estelle Philleo from 1917. If you look up the title on Spotify, you'll find Philleo's version interpolated into this suite by avant-garde composer Heiner Goebbels. I don't know Goebbels game but I think the role of the material is to represent banal dreck. Banal dreck is a good description for the a cappella rendering by a singer-songwriter with 25 monthly listeners, for the kitsch-y Western Spechensang version that gets the words wrong, and for the five versions by the Swedish power metal band (instrumental, normal, power version, acoustic version, and acoustic instrumental). The poem itself is less interesting than this playlist.
4/12
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Kubla Khan." The theme of this paragraph will be memory, because one of the longest stretches of poetry I have by heart is the first five lines of this poem. That is not very long, considering how many times I read this poem and that I value poetry enough to under take a project like this. In fact, given the title of this collection, memorability is attached to success in at least some valuations of poetry. Granted, I have a terrible memory in nearly all ways, so it isn't surprising I don't have a storehouse of poems committed to memory. But what is it about the first sentence of "Kubla Khan"
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
that imprints itself in my mind, while all I can recall from the next sentence is 'something about the river busting out' (and that's in part because I just read it)? The standard devices (rhyme, iambic tetrameter) apply equally, and I've read the second sentence as nearly as many times as the first. In part it is the strangeness (what does it mean to decree architecture?) In part it is the amazing arc down to the truncated, three beat line. And, yes, in part it is the appropriation of some of imagery in Rush's song "Xanadu." I don't really have an answer to the question, but I thought this would be the place to address it, since S.T.C himself forgot much of the poem he dreamed up, thanks to that jerk from Porlock.
4/13
Stephen Crane. "A Man Said to the Universe."
As luck and the alphabet would have it, the very next poem is one I thought I knew by heart (due to its brevity). But this is the version from my memory:
A man said the Universe,
"Sir I exist."
To which the Universe replied,
"Yes, but that puts me under no obligation."
and this is the actual poem:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
I'm surprised I rewrote it in four lines. Four is too neat and orderly for the actual chaotic, indifferent universe--as is a capital letter in naming it. The speaker persists in personifying it anyway, calling it "Sir." It's the end of the poem I mangle. The missing "However" is the hinge that implies a theological critique: seeing order or meaning or goodness in the universe does not mean it is there, and even finding it in existence does not imply a cosmic order behind it. The phrasing "created in me" evokes Creation--doesn't confirm or deny it though. This may or may not be God speaking, but if God exists he doesn't give a shit. Having " a sense of obligation" sounds the register of social niceties, making the speaker's statement even more absurd.
4/14
Emily Dickinson. Four Poems. I am not crazy about ED. I admire the work and she's undeniably a fascinating character, but my head doesn't catch on fire when I read her. (Maybe I don't even really like poetry--avant gardists and traditionalists alike adore her: ATOP III, in which the idiot appreciates neither Blake nor Dickinson). So I thought I might break down "I could not stop for death" using the bit I quoted (myself) above: "I find that my taste responds to complicated surfaces, luminous details, competing systems (frames, registers, etc), slight shifts (when I can detect them), assonance and consonance, and reserved mystery."
Complicated surfaces | I’m not fully confident in what I mean by this, but I think it’s a formal consideration. I like that she appropriates the hymn stanza, but I don’t think this qualifies. |
Luminous details | Good bits include how she puts away her knitting in stanza 2. The imagery in stanza 3 is pretty generic though--children playing after school &c |
Competing systems (frames, registers…) | The gravity of (im)mortality with a splash of humor in the awkward of herself and Death in the carriage. |
Slight shifts | Right after that generic language, it gets a bit mysterious--a house melting into the ground leading to time… dissolving… in the final stanza. |
Sonic design | The prominent rhymes put me off a bit, I guess. |
Reserved mystery | Again, not sure what I meant, but I think it might be the poem resisting the intellect (almost successfully). The time thing coupled with the “horses’ heads” pointed “toward eternity” is the best part of the poem. |
4/15
Joseph Rodman Drake. "The American Flag."
This is another place where it's important to note our editor was born in 1914. And that he was not a literary scholar but a popular math writer. I really can't make it through this one. The non-critical sensibility is too much for me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Concord Hymn."
This isn't exactly trendy either, but still readable. The other part of the quote from yesterday was "I accept the [Poundian] model of melopeia, judged on criteria of suitability (sound that echoes sense), vigor, and mellifluousness; phanopeia, judged by resonance [and] freshness; and logopeia, judged by aptness, pacing, and soundness." So allow me a second table:
melopeia | ”the shot heard round the world” is pretty memorable I guess, thanks to that explosive t shouting over the liquid rs. |
phanopeia | The “bridge that arched the flood” is cool
|
logopeia | and then it turns into “Time the ruined bridge.” Also cool. There is also a critical awareness missing from the previous poem, tho still wholly “patriotic.” |
But, you know, he's no Emily Dickinson.
4/16
Eugene Field. Three Poems.
"Wynken,/ Blynken,/ And Nod."
Sam Walter Foss. "The House By the Side of the Road."
"There are souls like stars that dwell apart,/In a fellowless firmament"
and that's it.
4/17
Robert Frost. Three Poems
"Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods" have some subtlety to them (at some level) but it is "Mending Wall" that stands out to me.
But there's something else about "Mending Wall" that I'm drawn to. For a place holder I'll call it "deep structure" but I'm afraid that sounds like something Robert Bly would say. Even so. This isn't structure like blank verse or rime royal, but the well of profound images like the wall, the neighbor over the hill, the winter that doesn't like the wall and the spring in which the neighbors walk and mend the wall. Even the trickster that gets in Frost's ear to taunt the neighbor a little to interrogate the words of his father: "Good fences make good neighbors." (So I do sound like Bly. This poem deserves better).
4/18
Thomas Gray. "Elegy in a Country Churchyard."
Back to memory--I sometimes have clearer memories of reading or studying a poem than of the poem itself. I read this in college--must have been Fall of '91. I remember not digging it at first, but coming to admire it's dignified pace, up until the final "Epitaph." When I read in the Cyclopedia of Poetry that someone called the envoi "a tin point tied to the tail of a dog," that crystalized the flaw with that unnecessary, graceless conclusion. That's what I remembered, not that "paths of glory" and "A mute inglorious Milton" and "Far from the madding crowd" all come from it. Sometimes I pay lip service to "a noble sentiment well-expressed" but maybe that's not really my thing.
4/19
Edgar Guest. "Home" and "It Couldn't be Done."
Until 15 minutes ago I thought Edgar Guest and Edgar Lee Masters were the same person. I like the latter, at least in theory. I like the former not at all. The first is in dialect, which I seldom like because there's usually some element of mockery (punching down), not to mention inauthentic. The second is some unironic you can make it if you try bullshit. Gardner refers to him as "the most prolific 'bad poet' in the nation's history." I wonder about his scare quotes.
Sarah Josepha Hale. "Mary's Lamb."
This certainly qualifies as "best remembered" as it in fact the source text to "Mary had a little lamb." The behavior of the teacher is obnoxious--he kicks the lamb out of the class room but then at the end pronounces the lesson 'you should be kind to animals.' The teacher, the lamb (figuratively) and all the other children (in chorus) speak in the poem, while Mary does not (for whatever that's worth).
4/20
William Ernest Henley. "Invictus."
Another once-famous poem that is quickly fading from collective knowledge. It's a classic of the British stiff-upper-lip mode: "In the fell clutch of circumstance/I have not winced nor cried aloud." I love a good spondee ("fell clutch") standing out in the midst of a line, and the nice hard /k/ reflecting whatever slings and arrows Henley thinks he's facing. According to the bio Henley did face some adversary, but of course knew great privilege as prominent editor and pal of Stevenson and Chesterton.
4/21
Oliver Wendell Holmes. Three poems.
Robert Archambeau explains how the discursive situation of 19th century is utterly different from what came after. A man of letters might select to write poetry for a public who would read it in search of moral instruction. Me, I'm a specialized reader looking for new forms, constructions, insights. "Old Ironsides" was written for a rhetorical purpose--to preserve the U.S.S. Constitution--so I guess you could say it's a success, but not for me. "The Last Leaf" is about Herman Melville's granddad Thomas, the Mayor of Boston. It's blighted by a one-line anapest (one anapest line?) every three lines. "The Deacon's Masterpiece" has this nice triplet: "The parson was working his Sunday's text,--/Had got to fifthly, and stopped perlexed/ At what the--Moses--was coming next." That "what the... Moses," where Moses is both what's coming next and an avoidance of "the Devil" is clever, as is the "Had got to fifthly" at implying the tediousness of the parson.
4/22
Thomas Hood. "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs."
Poetry with a social purpose--but what's it actually for? "Ironsides" was for something specific. These are against things that maybe a nineteenth century consciousness needs to be raised to, but now.... "Shirt," has an interesting aspect to it, as we come to see the seamstress as a displaced person, who has left her country past. It then gets almost Marxist in equating her work to the alienation of "the Engine that works by Steam!/A mere machine of iron and wood/That toils for Mammon's sake"
But really, I haven't read I poem I've liked for this project since, let's see..."Mending Wall."
4/23
Richard Hovey. "The Sea Gypsy"
Friends with Bliss Carman (see above). "I must forth again to-morrow!" says it all--vagabond theme, the second foot resisting the iamb, the quaintness of the dash in "to-morrow," the naivety of the exclamation, the poetic license of "forthing" the verb. Not really a good poem, but kind of charming as an artifact.
Julia Ward Howe. "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Apparently Howe was a Unitarian who saw the Second Coming as a symbol of "the world's gradual progress toward peace and justice." I can see it, and I can also see a fundamentalist creep factor.
4/24
Leigh Hunt. "Abou Ben Adhem" and "Jenny Kiss'd Me."
A minor Romantic. Unlike the Victorians alluded to previously, you get a sense of devotion to poetry in these verses. The "Jenny" poem is also known as "Rondeau," though that isn't the form it takes (two rhyming quatrains). I don't know why that is, maybe something about the repetition and pleasant surprise it expresses. More than pleasant surprise, it's luxuriating in a simple pleasure: "Say I'm weary, say I'm sad/Say that health and wealth have missed me;/ Say I'm growing old, but add/Jenny kissed me." It's a moment, blending an action and the consequent impression, captured forever. This is a good poem.
4/25
John Keats. Four poems.
A major Romantic. Keats, due to his sonic mastery, is one of my favorites. The Nightingale Ode in particular casts a spell and I would like to put forward "spell" as technical term meaning "patterned totality." In "Nightingale," one sinks into the allure of being "half in love with easeful death" as the nightbird sings. How does he do it? Part of it is simply in weaving together strands of beauty and death, while invoking all senses. I should make a table, and maybe will some day, but today I just don't have the time! Speaking of spells, Chesterton called these two lines "the most potent piece of pure magic in English literature": "Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
4/26
Joyce Kilmer. "Trees."
Guy Davenport writes an appreciation of this derided poem. Davenport is one of my most-admired readers, but I just don't see the "silvery spare beauty" though maybe I hear the "pleasant, oldfashioned music." (The real joy of any Davenport essay is the wide ranging synthesis of materials. In his reading of "Trees" that includes his citation in the final line of child labor activist Margaret McMillan. She wanted the kids to get out of the slums, naturally. Davenport also points out the similarity of the opening lines to "The Purple Cow." But that's beside the point.) The point of this Test, I think, was to challenge myself to find those qualities in poetry that doesn't have any obvious personal appeal. As you can tell from the frequency of digressive responses, I'm failing.
4/27
Rudyard Kipling. Eight Poems.
Gardner writes "I suspect that more than any other poem, 'If--' has been framed to hang on office walls to inspire businessman." You might as well say that Kipling wrote it for that purpose, and wrote "Recessional" to hang on an imperialist general's field office. But is Kipling enforcing an ideology, or animating a persona. Or both?
In most of the other poems here, Kipling is imitating a working class voice. Imitation is the key word, since as narrative technique goes, these are pretty flat characters. Dialect like this didn't work before it was cancelled. In these poems, the lower class emulates the ruling class (sharing in imperialist exploitation in "Mandalay" or conforms to it "For they're hangin' Danny Deever.") So it seems that when Kipling does Cockney, it is essentially for the purpose of hypnotizing those masses to conform to the regime.
There are artists whose political beliefs I disdain, but seldom are they writing from a place of actual influence. Crazy old Pound, babbling praise for Il Duce, persuaded absolutely no one and Mussolini didn't exactly invite him to tea. Darkthrone can emblazon juvenile nonsense on their album sleeve--I can loathe that and still love the way they want the world to burn.
4/28
Edward Lear. "The Owl and the Pussycat."
"They dined on mince and slices of quince,/Which they ate with a runcible spoon;/And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand/They danced by the light of the moon." A transcendent quatrain that turns on an invented word, runcible. Which has come to mean 'spork.'
4/29
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Nine Poems.
Nine poems? Really? More poems than any other poet in this collection (one more that Kipling). But I'm setting aside my prejudice to find something meaningful and/or enriching in these poems.
And I found it. Despite the visually awkward metaphor of darkness as a feather falling from "the wings of Night," "The Day Is Done" describes "A feeling of sadness and longing,/That is not akin to pain,/And resembles sorrow only/As the mist resembles rain" beautifully describes an emotion. He does so almost without figurative language, but soft patterns of n, m, and s. The rain of pain and rain is blatant, but mitigated by the interceding "only" picking up on the l and n of longing and other words. I also like the figure at the end of the poem "fold their tents, like Arabs,/ And as silently steal away." "The Wreck of the Hesperus" is narratively kind of metal, and the last poem of the selection surprising "There was a little girl, she had a curl/Right in the middle of her forehead;/And when she was good, she was very, very good,/And when she was bad, she was horrid."
4/30
John McCrae. "In Flanders Fields."
It's a personal failure that I have formally studied both poetry (extensively) and French (haphazardly) yet didn't know what a roundeau was (I'm sure Elizabeth Bishop wrote some, I just never figured it out). You can google it, or read this hackjob: It consists of a quintet, quatrain, and sestet. The opening words of the first line are repeated in the last lines of the second and third stanza. The rhyme scheme is tight and hard to do in English: AABBA AABR AABBAR (R being the refrain). The metrics might be different in French, but this one is iambic tetrameter, except for the dimeter refrain.
This is a gentleman's poem. That is to say, the kind of poem an educated might be expected to write. It's a good specimen with a few things breaking through. The collective narrator is especially striking: "We are the Dead. Short days ago/We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow..."
5/1
Edwin Markham. "The Man with the Hoe."
National Poetry Month may be over, but I've decided to push through the anthology. I've read this poem before, in Cary Nelson's big anthology. I'm struck with the idea that this might be in dialogue with Blake's "Tyger." Both are structured around questions about the central figure. Markham: "Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?" Blake: "What the hammer? What the chain? In what dread fire was thy brain?" I one case the questions are addressed to the symbol of sublime terror and the other are more of the "what we gonna do about this social problem" variety. Plus drab blank verse.
5/2
John Masefield. "Sea Fever" and "Cargoes."
More 'gypsy' poems, but these of a sailor's life. "Cargoes" is interesting in that it takes the form of three (metrical) ships' manifests. The first stanzas are exotic loads from Ophir and Spain, while the last is of a "[d]irty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, full of coal and steel and things that make empires go.
Hugh Mearns. "Antigonish"
Imagery-->stairs. Sound-->simple rhymes. Sentiment-->I am afraid of ghosts.
5/3
Edna St. Vincent Millay. "Renascence," "Euclid Laid Beauty Bare," "First Fig."
The question of how publishing a poem of 111 rhyming couplets at age 19 turns you into the country's "most admired woman" is what I really want to know. That world is so unimaginable that I question my ability to understand the poem, "Renascence," even though it's written in clear enough language.
5/4
Joaquin Miller. "Columbus."
In which a 19th century American praises the "brave Adm'r'l" Columbus (How do you even pronounce "Adm'r'l"? It looks like a rank in the Drag'ngu'rd.) The ending is unintentionally ironic, as Columbus spies a light on the unseen shore of the new continent. That light "grew, a starlit flag unfurled!" The confused metaphor (the light is like a flag made our of light?) means to evoke the Stars and Stripes I suppose, but the fact that he sees this flag implies there's someone already there.
Clement Clarke Moore. "A Visit from St. Nicholas."
To be true to the title of the book you'd really need to include this one. So, the sleigh is described as "miniature" and Santa as little and elf like. That's how come he uses the chimney so freely.
5/5
George Pope Morris. "Woodman, Spare That Tree!"
Just what you'd expect from the title, but did you know
James Joyce, in Ulysses, writes of an organ playing "a new and striking arrangement of 'Woodman, Spare That Tree!'" and in Finnegans Wake is the exclamation "Spare, Woodmann, spare!"
5/6
Alfred Noyes. "The Highwayman" and "The Barrel Organ."
I love the name No-Yes. I mean, it encompasses everything, man. These poems, however, encompass nothing. It's incredible that this poetry was written by a near-contemporary of WCW, since the first one reads more like Walter Scott.
John Howard Payne. "Home, Sweet Home."
"Ma, this food's been chewed alreddy!"
5/7
Edgar Allan Poe. Four Poems.
As I've been trying to remind myself throughout this project, I need enter into these poems with an open mind, looking for what they have to offer. One pleasure of poetry is simple noticing. Poe is not that subtle, but I noticed two things today in very familiar poems. Both "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee" are so familiar it is hard to really pay attention--because I've read it so many times and their sonic patterns are so blatant. The rhyme scheme of "The Raven" gets drilled into the skull, but I saw part of the internal rhyme pattern as well: Not just the weary/dreary (and remember/December and on) of the first lines, but the napping/tapping morrow/borrow of the third lines sounding again in the middle of the fourth lines (rapping, sorrow) without fail. And I mean the exact center--the rhyme is the fourth foot every time (as is the initial internal rhyme.)
The other thing I surely noticed before, but it never dawned on me before that ANNABEL LEE is styled in all caps each time because it's evoking her tombstone. Which sort of makes the poem a multimodal assemblage avant la lettre, except of course, not really.
5/8
Adelaide Anne Proctor. "The Lost Chord."
Because the poem is about idly striking a perfect but irrecoverable chord on an organ ("Organ"), I was going to make a joke about how this is not the best song in the world, it's just a tribute. But that idea, of encountering perfect beauty that you can't find again until death, is a beautiful one.
Second time around, this is obviously about masturbation.
5/9
James Whitcomb Riley. Four Poems.
In 1918, here was a movie based on "Little Orphant Annie" (not to mention the comic strip after that). A movie based on a poem--with the poet in a featured role. I bring this up not because I don't have anything to say about this cornbred nonsense, though I don't, or because Gardner's intro is better than this doggerel (it is, though I got this info from Wikipedia), but because the correlative in the 21st century is simply unimaginable. That isn't because the world has changed and no longer cares for poetry (though it has). It is because poetry has changed, and that change is for the better.
5/10
Carl Sandburg. "Chicago" and "Fog"
The only free verse so far? Free verse always settles on a form. In the former case it's a five line stanza (or verse paragraph) of epithets for the Hog Butcher, 7 long lines in defense of the beleaguered city, five very short lines composed entirely of dynamic adjectives (four one-word lines, the last being three), and five final descriptive lines all subordinated by a gerund or conjunction. It swirls about like a tornado, ripping things out but not really going anywhere. "Fog" is a jewel. Six lines, alternating three and four lines, effectively rhyming or chiming couplets. "Fog comes" chimes with "cat feet" while "sits" anticipates "city" and "haunches" includes the humble "on" that ends the poem.
5/11
John Godfrey Saxe. "The Blind Men and the Elephant."
This well-know parable about incomplete information is completely paraphrasable, as attested by its fame as an anecdote as opposed to its (extinguished) fame as a poem. There's nothing here beyond the mild amusement about moral of the story.
5/12
Alan Seeger. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death."
Another WWI poet who lost his life in the war, making this poem prophetic. The form of this poem intrigues me. The first line of the poem (the title) becomes a refrain repeated as the fifth line in each of the first two stanzas, and as the sixth in the last. But each stanza is two lines longer than the last (6, 8, and 10 lines), making the refrain progressively further from the end.
5/13
Robert Service. "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee."
These are so much better than Kipling. Somehow they ring authentic. They're written in an honest vernacular, not an imitative dialect. While they're in the same loping seven foot rhyming couplets, these two poems are quite different, though both very Western (North American Western). "Dan McGrew" evokes the ancient ballad tradition, (a couplet is essentially a ballad stanza) but as imported to gold mining towns of the Yukon. What happened in the past between Dan, Lou, and the mysterious stranger is elided. There's a beautiful moment of reflection, in which the music is deeply felt in the silence of the "Great Alone" that leads to confronting a "hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans,/But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means." "The Cremation" is a tall tale with a comic twist at the end. Robert W. Service has the reputation as a mere versifier (he cultivated it himself), but he's in fact a master story-teller capable of insightful moments.
5/14
Percy Bysshe Shelley. "To a Skylark" and "Ozymandias."
So this is weird. After reading Shelley and Service on consecutive days, it's Service I'd rather go back to. I've read "Ozymandias" countless times, and obviously it is Great. "Skylark" includes the stanza "We look before and after,/And pine for what is not:/Our sincerest laughter/With some pain is fraught;/Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." Ok, that's Fine. But why is it better than
Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant...hunger and night and the stars.
(Answer: it ain't.)
5/15
Langdon Smith. "Evolution."
At a certain level, this is a very contemporary strategy--while at a relatively mundane moment (on a date at a restaurant), the poet ruminates on an esoteric subject (evolutionary history). The two are joined by the idea of eternal love and reincarnation, "[w]hen you were a tadpole and I was a fish" (the first and last line). This poem again reminds me that the ballad stanza is actually a seven-foot rhyming couplet (these are eight-line, doubling the ballad stanza). This is fine, and I like the incorporation of technical vocabulary, but not much more to it than the idea, that probably came in a flash at Delmonico's.
5/16
Robert Southey. "The Battle of Blenheim."
An anti-war poem that consists of 10 modified ballad stanzas of 4x-3a-4x-3a-4b-4b. Sometimes a and b also rhyme, and there's a refrain of 'great/famous victory' at the end of 7 stanzas. It's not bad, but I can see why the now famous Romantics considered Southey sloppy.
5/17
Robert Louis Stevenson. "Requiem," "Bed in Summer," and "Happy Thought."
Stevenson was a man of letters who could turn his hand to verse, like any proper gentleman. The poet as visionary; the poet in identity will his work--these are the reasons poetry became a)more obscure b)better. I like the poems from A Child's Garden of Verses, a famous children's classic, though this is the first time I'm reading them. I especially like "Bed in Summer," which simple articulates a clear and relatable thought that I doubt had been put into print before--the unfairness of having to go to bed when it's light out. "In winter I get up at night/And dress by yellow candle-light./In summer, quite the other way,/I have to go to bed by day." That stanza is perfect, not a word out of place, and true to speech. The poem sounds like a child reasoning with an adult--and effectively!
5/18
Jane Taylor. "The Star."
This is "twinkle twinkle." It does, after all, say "Best Remembered" on the tin.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Four Poems.
Shaw said Tennyson had the brain "of a third rate village policeman." Auden said "he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn't know; there was little else that he did." What's interesting in these poems--specifically "Crossing the Bar" and "Break, Break, Break"--is the variety of meter. Not just the substitute spondee here and there, but dig the structure of "Crossing the Bar":
3a-3b-5a-3b
5a-3b-5a-2b
3a-3b-5a-2b
5a-3b-5a-3b
Then "Break, break, break" begins with the famous three word, three beat line. Each line has three primary stresses (with one exception, I think) that are arrayed in all manner of feet: anapest, spondee, iamb.
5/19
Ernest Lawrence Thayer. "Casey at the Bat."
The crowd in this famous poem play a notable role. Only 3 of the 12 stanzas go by without mentioning the "5,000 throats" or their "10,000 eyes." They are described as "the benches, black with people." Now, as I recall the hitting backdrop evolved because batters couldn't pick up the ball from out of the white shirtsleeves--so why in Mudville are the benches black? (I'm working my way to the obvious answer). Are they in preemptive mourning for the great loss? Is it early or late in the season, causing the throng to don their coats? Or, or, is it that Mudville is home to a Negro League team? That would make the poem's themes ("themes") of hope, heroism, and disappointment to be seen in a whole new light.
5/20
Rose Hartwick Thorpe. "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight."
A sentimental semi-ballad that I kind of like. A woman saves her lover by silencing the curfew bell that was meant to signal his execution, and then gets Cromwell to pardon him. It's narrated in ballad fashion 4-3a-4-3a-4-3b-4-3b-4-3c-4-3R(refrain). The meter is consistently trochaic, with a stress/unstress/stress foot (I know it has a name) at the end of every rhyming line. That creates a nice lilting music.
Reading this many popular poems makes me realize that the default forms of "official poetry" (like sonnets, blank verse, enjambment) weren't that common--probably too refined.
5/21
Walt Whitman. "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer."
These two wind up in a lot of anthologies because they're short and fairly conventional. "Captain" isn't all that interesting, and Dead Poet's Society is probably the right level of it. "Astronomer" is marginally more interesting, though the paraphrasable content is kind of obvious. There's a pattern of double images--"the proofs, the figures" "the charts and the diagrams"--set against triple images "add, divide, and measure." I'm reminded of a thought I have while hiking, from time to time. Back when I read a lot of poetry blogs, a formalist compared regular meter to the steady tread of hiking. But it would seem to me that walking a trial is a lot more like free verse. The pace is determined by the terrain, and you have to measure your tread by the ground, extending a stride to leap over a stream, shorten it to gain power, wobble off to the side against a rock, and so on.
5/22
John Greenleaf Whittier. "The Barefoot Boy" and "Maud Muller."
"For of all sad words of tongue and pen,/The saddest are these: 'It might have been'" is not bad. It lopes up to a slow spondee in "sad words" but flows through the rest of that line smoothly. There's then a little metrical indecision slowing up "The saddest are these" creating the requisite pause before the moral.
5/23
Ella Wheeler Whitlock. "Solitude" and "The Winds of Fate."
"'Tis the set of the sails/And not the gales/Which tells us the way to go" is bad. The rhymes are lame, the parallelism bad (are gales supposed to have a 'set' too?) and the moral is not worn in like with Whittier but trite.
5/24
Samuel Woodworth. "The Old Oaken Bucket."
Gardner's remarks are full of cracks into an alternate reality. To wit, "Woodworth's 'The Old Oaken Bucket'... may be the most popular poem ever written by an American." I've never heard of it and nothing about it rings any bells. It's a nostalgic take on how the well water from his boyhood was the sweetest ever tasted.
5/25
William Wordsworth. Four Poems.
Wordsworth, Yeats, Blake, Williams, Shakespeare... There's a lot of serious Williams out there! This anthology ends with a set of the usual suspects, including William wandering lonely through the daffodils, William taking in the view from Westminster Bridge, William too much in the world, and William and his dear girl taking in the nun-like quiet of the night. The important thing about Wordsworth and I think the other poets in this lot who actually show up in anthologies is the presence of a reflective consciousness within but also in addition to the matter of the poem. It's not really there in Woodworth or Whitlock, for two recent examples, whose poems are about what they're about. The clearest example in this set is "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," which is about a host of 10,000 daffodils "[t]ossing their heads in sprightly dance," but is also knowing you'll remember, refashion, and commune with the lyric moment in future tranquility, when they "flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude." The three sonnets all exhibit a similar consciousness about consciousness, even the awareness of the ideological filter of a "getting and spending" world as opposed to the Pagan "creed outworn" that would open up phenomenological wonders.
Wordsworth is easy as easy to reject and Blake is to adopt. His poetness is kind of tarnished by perpetual popularity and his rightward turn. At one time I would have ranked the major Romantics as 1.)Blake 2.)Keats 3.)Coleridge 4)Shelley 5.)Wordsworth 6.)Byron, but now on a given day it might be nearly the opposite: 1)Wordsworth 2)Byron 3)Keats 4)Coleridge 5)Blake 6)Shelley.
That list feels like a weird way to end this two month test, but I'll start with it (not the list itself, but the list-making gesture) when I return for the "what I learned" codicil in a week.
