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Last Supper

by Elinor Wylie

Now that the shutter of the dusk 
Begins to tremble in its groove, 
I am constrained to strip the husk 
From everything I truly love.  
 
So short a time remains to taste 
The ivory pulp, the seven pips, 
My heart is happy without haste, 
With revelation at its lips.  
 
So calm a beauty shapes the core, 
So grave a blossom frames the stem, 
In this last minute and no more,  
My eyes alone shall eat of them.  
═══════════════════════

Elinor Wylie (1885–1928) emerges as a singular, strange voice even among her literary peers, those American women born in the late 19th century whose work gave a different color to the poetry of their era: Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Babette Deutsch — all of whom we’ve looked at repeatedly here at Poems Ancient and Modern. The tight formal control and the polished, straightforward surfaces of Wylie’s poems place her in the company of those other women, as does her inclination to melancholy.

At the same time, Wylie stands apart. Millay could indulge a clever irony, as in “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed.” Teasdale’s bent was for an almost unbearable intensity of emotion, on display in such poems as “Blue Squills.” Deutsch, more open to happiness, combined imagistic miniatures and intimations of rapture.

And Wylie? As the years go by, my esteem for her steadily rises. We’ve looked at a number of her poems: “A Crowded Trolley Car,” “Wild Peaches,” “Velvet Shoes,” “Prophecy.” She can pull off the miniature, the symbol laden, even a sense of fantasy. But what a poem like “A Crowded Trolley Car” shows is that she also has a capacity for perceiving spiritual reality in the images of this world.

We see that capacity again in Today’s Poem. The title is evocative, of course. We can’t read it without reading into it the Last Supper, with Christ and his apostles in the upper room, which precedes the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the sufferings of Good Friday, and the crucifixion itself. Rather than writing openly about that sequence of events, however, or allowing some other final meal — that of a prisoner before execution, say — to figure allegorically as that more famous supper, Wylie has chosen, in this brief poem, to do something more restrained and subtle.

In three tetrameter quatrains rhymed abab, this is a poem of renunciation and of savoring small but potent things for the last time. The speaker is clearly not Christ, who would not speak of having “to strip the husk / From everything I truly love.” This “Last Supper” is not that Last Supper. Whatever the precise situation may be, this is a human leave-taking, not a divine one. Still, the resonances of association persist. The meal the speaker consumes, the poem describing her senses, consists not of bread and wine, but of an apple: again, an evocative choice, with its echoes of Eden and the Fall.

What the speaker is bidding a long, reluctant farewell to, we cannot say. The poem’s focus stays entirely on the experience of the meal as a lyric moment, not on whatever its literal context is. With the speaker, we as readers enter utterly into that moment, to taste and see, before the thing to be renounced — a love, a way of life, or life itself — is actually renounced.

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The Blind Man and the Elephant

by John Godfrey Saxe

It was six men of Indostan 
To learning much inclined, 
Who went to see the Elephant 
(Though all of them were blind), 
That each by observation 
Might satisfy his mind.
The First approached the Elephant, 
And happening to fall 
Against his broad and sturdy side, 
At once began to bawl: 
“God bless me! — but the Elephant 
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk, 
Cried: “Ho! — what have we here 
So very round and smooth and sharp? 
To me ’t is mighty clear 
This wonder of an Elephant 
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal, 
And happening to take 
The squirming trunk within his hands, 
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out his eager hand, 
And felt about the knee. 
“What most this wondrous beast is like 
Is mighty plain,” quoth he; 
“’T is clear enough the Elephant 
Is very like a tree!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, 
Said: “E’en the blindest man 
Can tell what this resembles most; 
Deny the fact who can, 
This marvel of an Elephant 
Is very like a fan!”
The Sixth no sooner had begun 
About the beast to grope, 
Than, seizing on the swinging tail 
That fell within his scope, 
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan 
Disputed loud and long, 
Each in his own opinion 
Exceeding stiff and strong, 
Though each was partly in the right, 
And all were in the wrong!

Moral:
So, oft in theologic wars 
The disputants, I ween, 
Rail on in utter ignorance 
Of what each other mean, 
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
═══════════════════════

John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1869) was a New England poet and comic wit of the kind much in demand as after-dinner speakers. James Thomas Fields remains the model of such figures in that era (as we mentioned when we ran Fields’s comic poem “The Alarmed Skipper” earlier here at Poems Ancient and Modern). But Saxe was in the same general camp, with such comic verses as “Rhyme of the Rail” and “The Puzzled Census Taker,” together with the charming “King Solomon and the Bees.”

The problem is that Saxe, unlike Fields, also wanted to be a politician, and he chose the wrong side of Northern thought about slavery and the Civil War, which made him unpopular in abolitionist Vermont. Two bad defeats in his runs for governor led to his moving to upstate New York, where he discovered that his politics were still unpopular. (Less so downstate, where he was a featured speaker at an 1866 mass rally in New York City opposing Reconstruction.)

His comic verse, however — appearing in the Knickerbocker magazine and collected in book form by Fields’s Boston publishing firm, Ticknor and Fields — continued to appear. And it’s worth noting, in our own unforgiving and censorious age, that he remained popular in everything but his bad politics. After a string of family deaths, he became a recluse late in life, but the state legislature remembered him enough to have his likeness chiseled in the “poet’s corner” of the Great Western Staircase at the New York State Capitol.

With “The Blind Man and the Elephant,” Saxe introduced Americans to an Indian parable of six experts whose partial views of an elephant produce six different descriptions. In a competent ballad meter, Saxe romps happily through to the obvious conclusion: “Though each was partly in the right, / And all were in the wrong.”

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Sonnet LXXX

by Barnabe Barnes

A blast of wind, a momentary breath,
A wat’ry bubble symbolized with air,
A sun-blown rose, but for a season fair,
A ghostly glance, a skeleton of death;
A morning dew, pearling the grass beneath,
Whose moisture sun’s appearance doth impair;
A lightning glimpse, a muse of thought and care,
A planet’s shot, a shade which followeth,
A voice which vanisheth so soon as heard,
The thriftless heir of time, a rolling wave,
A show, no more in action than regard,
A mass of dust, world’s momentary slave,
Is man, in state of our old Adam made,
Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.
═══════════════════════

If Barnabe Barnes (c. 1571–1609) is mentioned at all these days, it’s probably for his participation in the feud between Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe over the use of Latin prosody in English poetry. His own work is taken as decidedly minor, at best.

And fair enough. His poems rarely soar, rarely reveal that strange power to remain in the mind. But he could produce competent verse, and he could write the occasional poem worth revisiting — as with Today’s Poem, Sonnet 80 in his 1595 A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnetts.

Two years earlier, he had published Parthenophil and Parthenophe, at the center of which were some fairly licentious sonnets. The turn to his 1595 Centurie is announced in the first sonnet:

No more lewd lays of lighter loves I sing,
Nor teach my lustful muse abused to fly
With sparrows’ plumes, and for compassion cry
To mortal beauties which no succor bring.

And he moves through a series of doctrinal themes to arrive at the subject of Sonnet 80 — human mortality. It is nothing but a set of commonplace figures for the brevity of human life, and yet . . . well, and yet, Barnes makes the cascading figures work.

The sonnet is in what would come to be called the Shakespearean form: three quatrains and a concluding couplet of pentameter lines, although its rhyme scheme, abba cddc efef gg, encloses the rhymes of the first two quatrains before shifting to alternating rhyme in the third. Barnes indulges some alliteration, which gives him the pedestrian “ghostly glance” and the excellent “A voice which vanisheth so soon as heard.”

But the structure of the poem is what makes it work. Twelve lines of metaphors, grammatically suspended as predicate nominatives, finally get their subject and verb in line 13 — “Is man.” Wind, a bubble, a rose, a glance, a pearl of dew, a glimpse, a planet’s transit, a shade, a voice, a thought, a thriftless heir, a wave, a show, dust, a slave — all, all are figures for the human: “Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.”

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You, Andrew Marvell

by Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on . . .
═══════════════════════

Archibald MacLeish was always clever. And the heights that cleverness allows, the limits cleverness imposes, might be measured by MacLeish’s work as a poet.

I don’t mean that as scorn. The undeniable fact is that MacLeish (1892–1982) had as successful a career as a 20th-century American man of letters could have. For that matter, “You, Andrew Marvell” is a genuinely successful poem. But it is the poem’s cleverness that catches the reader’s attention.

The cleverness begins with the title of Today’s Poem: “You, Andrew Marvell.” MacLeish expects us to hear the name “Andrew Marvell,” otherwise unmentioned in the poem, and recall Marvell’s 1650s poem “To His Coy Mistress” — specifically the couplet: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”

Marvell was expressing the we-all-must-die motif as Time’s catching up to us, in service of urging a woman to sleep with him. But MacLeish drops the seduction and converts the wingèd chariot into the transit of the sun from east to west, as though, moving across the globe, the sun pulls forward the line that divides day from night. Time is geography, and death is night.

The 1930 poem is nine quatrains (with an extra line break inserted in the final stanza to aid the narrative’s return to the position of the speaker in the opening stanza), in tetrameter verse rhymed abab. And the speaker, lying prone at noon, his back to the sky, feels the sun — along with history, night, and death — move across his back. Ecbatan and Kermanshah are ancient Persian cities. The “edge / Of evening” then moves through Baghdad, Arabia, Palmyra, Lebanon, Crete, and Sicily. Then “Spain goes under and the shore / Of Africa . . .”

And finally “the long light on the sea,” till we reach MacLeish, feeling on his back time’s wingèd chariot in the declining sun, while “The shadow of the night comes on.”

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Don Juan (Canto 1, Stanzas 60–63)

by Lord Byron

60
Her eye (I’m very fond of handsome eyes)
   Was large and dark, suppressing half its fire
Until she spoke, then through its soft disguise
   Flash’d an expression more of pride than ire,
And love than either; and there would arise
   A something in them which was not desire,
But would have been, perhaps, but for the soul
Which struggled through and chasten’d down the whole.

61
Her glossy hair was cluster’d o’er a brow
   Bright with intelligence, and fair, and smooth;
Her eyebrow’s shape was like the aerial bow,
   Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth,
Mounting at times to a transparent glow,
   As if her veins ran lightning; she, in sooth,
Possess’d an air and grace by no means common:
Her stature tall — I hate a dumpy woman.

62
Wedded she was some years, and to a man
   Of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;
And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE
   ’Twere better to have TWO of five-and-twenty,
Especially in countries near the sun:
   And now I think on’t, ‘mi vien in mente,’
Ladies even of the most uneasy virtue
Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty.

63
’Tis a sad thing, I cannot choose but say,
   And all the fault of that indecent sun,
Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay,
   But will keep baking, broiling, burning on,
That howsoever people fast and pray,
   The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone:
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.
═══════════════════════

Stanza 61 of Don Juan begins its description of a Spanish woman with “Her glossy hair was cluster’d o’er a brow / Bright with intelligence, and fair, and smooth,” and it ends with “Possess’d an air and grace by no means common: / Her stature tall” . . . plus the addendum “I hate a dumpy woman.”

Well, what did you expect from Byron (1788–1824)? We’ve looked at five of his verses here at Poems Ancient and Modern: “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” “She Walks in Beauty,” “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos,” and “Stanzas for Music.” And the question of his irony always seems to bubble up, even if it’s only to ask why, in a poem like “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” the ironic wink seems absent. In the 1819 first canto of Don Juan, that wink is almost never absent. It’s Byron at his most Byronic.

Stanza 60’s introduction of Donna Julia (the married woman, in Seville, with whom the young Don Juan will soon become involved) did warn us in its first line, with the parenthetical “(I’m very fond of handsome eyes).” Still, we might forget until the end of Stanza 61 what Byron is up to. And from that point on, through Stanza 63, we get Byron at his cheekiest.

A little comic math, for example: One fifty year-old husband might be exchanged, on strictly arithmetical grounds, for a pair of twenty-five-year-olds. Besides, “mi vien in mente” — “It comes to mind,” in the Italian needed for a licentious thought — “Ladies even of the most uneasy virtue / Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty.”

It’s really the result of the heat in the Latin countries:

. . . all the fault of that indecent sun,
Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay,
But will keep baking, broiling, burning on,
That howsoever people fast and pray,
The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone:
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.

What lets Byron do all this is the stanza form of Don Juan. The ottava rima — eight lines of iambic pentameter, rhymed abababcc — has a long history in Romance-language narrative, both comic and heroic, and Byron knows how to use it for just about any effect he wants. The stanza is long enough, for example, that he can build an elevated argument and then deflate it in the closing couplet. His love for (and brilliance at) two-syllable feminine rhymes — common / woman, plenty / twenty, adultery / sultry; virtue / thirty, too, rhyming on only the stressed syllable — gives him even more space to indulge a sense that nearly everyone is ridiculous, but social institutions are often even more ridiculous than the people within them.

That feminine rhyming is worth dwelling on. In the context of Don Juan, the rhymes reveal their effort. You can hear Byron reach for them, and the strain is the joke. The bending necessary to make “adultery” and “sultry” match enacts the poem’s attitude: Everything can be made to fit, if you do it with a wink.

It’s probably worth mentioning, too, the scandalous Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in Caroline Lamb’s famous formulation. In the narrative, Donna Julia is the twenty-three-year-old bride of the fifty-year-old Don Alfonso, and it is she who leads the affair, seducing the sixteen-year-old Juan. That makes her a recognizable comic type, of course, but when Byron writes, “flesh is frail, and so the soul undone,” he’s speaking from experience. And that’s why, I think, he lets Donna Julia off the hook of much of the poet’s moral condemnation. He’s writing satire, not being a scold, and everyone — himself included — is a little ridiculous.

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Farewell to Juliet

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Juliet, farewell. I would not be forgiven
Even if I forgave. These words must be
The last between us two in Earth or Heaven,
The last and bitterest. You are henceforth free
For ever from my bitter words and me.
You shall not at my hand be further vexed
With either love, reproach or jealousy
(So help me Heaven), in this world or the next.
Our souls are single for all time to come
And for eternity, and this farewell
Is as the trumpet note, the crack of doom,
Which heralds an eternal silence. Hell
Has no more fixed and absolute decree.
And Heaven and Hell may meet, — yet never we.
═══════════════════════

Now, this is one bitter piece of writing.

And to read the sonnet in its place in Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s 1881 collection, The Love Sonnets of Proteus, is to find what looks like an obvious irony. In Part II, opening with the 22nd of the book’s sonnets, Blunt (1840–1922) traces a love affair between the speaker of the poems and a woman addressed as “Juliet.” Their relationship has its ups and downs, as relationships do. But by the time we reach Today’s Poem, the 39th sonnet, things have gone so far off the rails that Blunt writes a final declaration: “Juliet, farewell. I would not be forgiven / Even if I forgave.”

Which makes it curious that Sonnet 40 carries the title “The Same (Continued).” As does Sonnet 41, Sonnet 42, Sonnet 43 . . . down to Sonnet 53. He says in 39 that he’s given her his final goodbye, but it takes him all the way to 53 — that’s fifteen sonnets of goodbyes — to get to the actual end: “Farewell, then. It is finished,” he finally says.

And yet, the irony fades a little, the apparent logorrhea of the departing lover grows less mockable, when we realize there’s a narrative progression in the fifteen sonnets of the Farewell to Juliet. The speaker manages to arrive in the last sonnet where he swore he never would in the first of them: not at forgiveness or equanimity — those would be too far for the bitterness of the break-up — but at least at something resembling understanding. The final words of Part II are: “See, I came to curse, / Yet stay to bless. I know not which is worse.”

Blunt was a remarkable figure. An anti-imperialist agitator, Irish Land League prisoner, breeder of Arabian horses, serial and scandalous adulterer, husband of Byron’s granddaughter. The Love Sonnets of Proteus are probably autobiographical, drawn from his real affairs, and “Juliet” is often identified with Blunt’s early love, “Skittles” — Catherine Walters, a famous courtesan — although that identification is disputed.

Regardless of the poems’ biographical accuracy, the first of the farewell sonnets, the bitterest, still stands as the best of Blunt’s sequence. It’s a Shakespearean sonnet, at least in the sense that it’s fourteen iambic pentameter lines, built of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. But the rhyme scheme is off-kilter: abab bcbc dede bb. And the persistence of that b rhyme is almost unbearable, fittingly for the poem, in its droning insistence: be / free // me / jealousy // decree / we.

The rhetoric of the sonnet makes it almost a legal document, a performative edict: “henceforth free,” “for all time to come,” “for eternity,” “fixed and absolute decree,” all in service of enforcing his determination that from now on, “Heaven and Hell may meet, — yet never we.” We decree not what’s already the case, but what we want to be the case, against the resistance of the man’s own feelings. The legal language is his attempt to impose by fiat a finality his heart won’t supply. He reaches for a “fixed and absolute decree” to last till “the crack of doom” because the ordinary language of goodbye is not strong enough to bind him. He needs a cosmic juridical vocabulary to force an ending. Which is why it takes fourteen more sonnets: The decree fails to bind, because we can’t decree ourselves out of love. He has to issue it again and again: “The Same (Continued),” and “The Same (Continued),” and . . .

Notice, in this same vein, the parenthetical “(So help me Heaven).” This is the language of oath: He is informing Juliet that he will leave her alone, by way of swearing that he will leave her alone. But then there’s that “never we,” the poem’s final words. Don’t they suggest that there is still a “we” he will need fourteen more sonnets to dissolve?

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There Was an Old Woman Tossed in a Blanket

by Anonymous

There was an old woman tossed in a blanket
Seventeen times as high as the moon.
But where she was going no mortal could tell,
For under her arm she carried a broom.

“Old woman, old woman, old woman,” said I,
“Whither, ah whither, ah whither so high?”
“To sweep the cobwebs from the sky,
And I’ll be with you by and by.”
═══════════════════════

For one of our lighter Wednesday offerings, a nice Mother Goose tale of reversed expectations — an 18th-century rhyme (reportedly known by Oliver Goldsmith, who sang it to himself, over and over, to suppress his anxiety at the 1768 opening of one of his plays). We start with hints that the old woman is a witch, going where “no mortal could tell” and carrying a broom under her arm. And we end by learning that she’s only gone to do huswifery on an atmospheric scale. Gone to “sweep the cobwebs from the sky.”

The poem (often sung to the tune “Lilliburlero”) has variants — “basket” for “blanket,” “Seventy” for “Seventeen” — as might be expected with what we’ve called transmitted anonymous verse, in which the text is formed not by an unknown author but by additions, fixes, and sandings-down in re-tellings and re-performings through the years. That lack of a single author probably explains as well the oddity of the rhyme scheme in the poem’s eight four-stress lines: rhymed abcb (on an assonance) in the first quatrain, and a monorhyme dddd in the second quatrain.

It’s all in service of a story about an old housewife who thinks the sky needs a little tidying up. The poem’s logic is what makes it a nursery rhyme, I think. Scale is ignored, as it can be in a child’s imagination. If there are cobwebs on the ceiling, the old lady will sweep them down. If there are cobwebs in the sky, then naturally she might go up there with her broom. So, too, we’re reassured that she’s not a witch, even though she’s doing something fantastical. For that matter, after the potentially disturbing “tossed in a blanket,” we’re told she will return “by and by,” when her work is done — domesticating the frightening.

We’ve previously looked at only two Mother Goose rhymes here at Poems Ancient and Modern: “As I was Going to St. Ives” and “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” One’s a riddle verse and the other a genuine nursery rhyme — whatever the claimed origin in political satire. Indeed, for most of the old rhymes, any socio-political meaning they may have had was already lost by the time they were gathered, around 1780, for a book John Newbery’s firm printed as Mother Goose’s Melody — the English phrase “Mother Goose” suggested by Charles Perrault’s 1697 French fairy-tale collection, Contes de ma Mère l’Oye.

And “There Was an Old Woman Tossed Up in a Blanket” has — for me, at least — a nursery-rhyme feel. It does what nursery rhymes regularly do, refusing the distinction between the ordinary and the fantastic. If houses have cobwebs, then the sky can have cobwebs too, because why shouldn’t it?

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The Unquiet Grave

by Anonymous

“The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.

“I’ll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day.”

The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
“Oh, who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?”

“’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.”

“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.

“’Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that e’re was seen
Is withered to a stalk.

“The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.”
═══════════════════════

What can we do with a love song that tells us kissing a year-dead corpse will probably kill the kisser with some grave-rot disease? Today’s Poem is an anonymous ballad of very uncertain date, ranging from some claims of roots around 1400 to suggestions of a settling of the tradition around 1800. Francis James Child collected it in 1868 and published it in 1886, with a set of variants, as Ballad Number 78 in the third volume of his monumental The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Recorded versions reach from the old Folk Music revival (including Joan Baez) to very recent spooky takes.

The nearby Child ballads — Child #77, “Sweet William’s Ghost,” and Child #79, “The Wife of Usher’s Well” — likewise speak of interactions between the living and the dead. But the central theme of “The Unquiet Grave” remains a wonderful literary irony: a dead woman returning to say that the dead do not return.

What’s more, the ghost has cause to rise up and give that stern lesson, for it’s her lover’s fault she’s uneasy in her grave, unable to pass on, even once the liminal year and a day has passed since her death: “Oh who sits weeping on my grave, / And will not let me sleep?” In “Sweet William’s Ghost” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” the dead return because they have unfinished business in the world. In “The Unquiet Grave,” the dead woman returns because she doesn’t have unfinished business. Her inability to rest in peace is caused by her lover’s inability to accept her death.

Oh, he thinks of his love as heroic and romantic: “I’ll do as much for my true-love / As any young man may.” But it proves selfish and self-indulgent. His mourning is done to her, not for her. “For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips, / And that is all I seek,” he says, and she replies:

You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.

The lover imagines erotic romance beyond death, and the corpse answers him with the facts of decomposition.

So, too, the ballad takes a traditional lovers’ image of a garden and points out that withering occurs in the garden as well:

“’Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that e’re was seen
Is withered to a stalk.”

If a traditional elegy proclaims the lover will preserve the beloved in memory, “The Unquiet Grave” insists that the lover must permit death to do what death does. That makes the ending — “So make yourself content, my love, / Till God calls you away” — something stronger than a pietistic note tacked on to the ballad. “Make yourself content” is a powerful command: a dead woman’s naming for her lover the moral demand of death.

And God is yet another strong fact pointed out by a ghost who is essentially a fact-teller, a conveyor of the hard things that must be known — in this case, a fact necessary to live in a world in which people die.

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Jabberwocky

by Lewis Carroll

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
      Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
      And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
      He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.
═══════════════════════

I count 29 strange words in the 28 lines of “Jabberwocky,” the poem included in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the children’s book Lewis Carroll published at the end of 1871. Actually, that’s just 24 different lines for those 29 words, since the last of the poem’s seven quatrains is a repeat of the first.

And an activity to which a commentator is inevitably drawn — as though some magnet were pulling us off the ice of the poem toward the edge of the rink — is to try to puzzle out what those words mean and where Carroll may have derived them, identifying all the clothes he packed in his portmanteaus. Not that such work can’t be enjoyable, but it’s sitting on a bench while the skaters glide by: a pastime, just not the one we strapped on our skates for. “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are,” as Alice says after she’s read the poem. “However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate.”

My own version of the side-quest is to ask what words have actually entered the language. Bandersnatch, Beamish, Borogove, Brillig, Burbled, Callay, Callooh, Chortled, Frabjous, Frumious, Galumphing, Gimble, Gyre, Jabberwock, Jubjub, Manxome, Mimsy, Mome, Outgrabe, Rath, Slithy, Snicker-snack, Tove, Tulgey, Tumtum, Uffish, Vorpal, Wabe, Whiffling: Which of these could you use in ordinary speech without a strong sense, for you and the listener, that you’re referencing Carroll?

I mean, you could say, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” or “Callooh! Callay!” And it might be familiar — but familiar in a way that is obviously quoting something, probably ironically. Leaving aside the existing words that Carroll repurposed (Gyre, Rath, maybe Beamish), the ones that have wandered into usage without that self-consciousness are, I think, Burbled, Chortled, Galumphing, and possibly Snicker-snack.

But, as I say, these are side-quests, when what lies before us is the main quest — in which a beamish boy takes up his vorpal sword, avoids the deadly Jubjub and frumious Bandersnatch, and slices up, snicker-snack, the monstrous Jabberwock. Then back he comes, galumphing home to his father with its head. Callooh! Callay!

Here’s a thought, however: Maybe, in some strange way, the poem is the book in which it appears. Carroll’s work is called Through the Looking-Glass, and the poem . . . well, look at its placement in the text:

There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, “— for it’s all in some language I don’t know,” she said to herself.

It was like this. [A stanza of reversed text then appears; Carroll wanted the whole poem, but the publisher told him it would be too expensive.]

She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And, if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.”

So, we have a looking-glass book in a Looking-Glass book, which ought to mean something — perhaps that the obvious parody of the quest tale in “Jabberwocky” can remind us that one way to read Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is as a strange and dreamy quest. That’s suggested, too, by “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” the acrostic poem with which the narrative ends.

And suggested as well by the conversation with Humpty Dumpty:

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.”

“Brillig means four o’clock in the afternoon,” Humpty Dumpty tells her, “the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.” And with his learnedly silly explications — “Who’s been repeating all that hard stuff to you?” he asks Alice — we’re warned off the side-quest. And back to the poem’s absurdity, parodic flavor, and bounce.

By rights, “Jabberwocky” ought to be one of our Whimsical Wednesday poems. But it’s just too big, too firmly lodged in ordinary readers’ awareness of English poetry — too whimsical, even — to take as just a typical Wednesday work. So it’s here at Poems Ancient and Modern on a Monday, our first day back from our annual vacation, to welcome our readers once again.

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The Bell

by Sally Thomas

Today is here. Tomorrow’s there.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Time’s a line that points to where
We go. The last tram rings its bell.
Where tracks run into grass, descend.
Let’s start walking past the end.

Yesterday lies where it fell
When our mothers called us in.
Water’s greening down the well.
Droning houseflies live in sin.
Our dogs broke loose and ran away.
Nothing that we love can stay.

Time’s a line that points to where
We’re going. Can you read the map?
Cicada songs abrade the air
All afternoon. You need a nap?
Pull down your hat to shade your eyes
And try to think of lullabies.

We go — the last tram rings its bell —
Along the blinding boulevard.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Tomorrow’s sunning in the yard.
Poplars waver in the dust.
Summers fly where summers must.

Where tracks run into grass, descend.
Run barefoot through the shivering green.
Where are we? Don’t you know? Pretend
That we were born here. Hills, unseen,
Stand tall and blue behind a cloud.
Late cicadas cry aloud.

Let’s start walking past the end
Of everything we ever knew.
Let evening take us by the hand.
Shadows, like the hills, are blue.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Somewhere the last tram rings its bell.
═══════════════════════

Poems Ancient and Modern is going on vacation — our annual break from our daily newsletter of a poem, commentary, and a piece of classic art. Sally Thomas has been running from reading to reading, masterclass to masterclass, the whole summer, and I’ve got to move out of the Black Hills for another year in a visiting chair at the University of Colorado. We’ll be back on August 24 — and in the interim, as we’ve now reached over 9,500 subscribers, won’t you upgrade to a paid subscription?

To tide you over, Today’s Poem is a selection from Sally Thomas’s new book, Among the Living — the tour de force of a trenta-sei, from our Poems Ancient and Modern co-founder. And don’t forget our Index of Poems — a sortable list, with links, of every poem we’ve analyzed — in case you need a fix while we’re gone. As of today, that’s 653 entries.

A “trenta-sei” is a poetic form established by the American poet and translator John Ciardi (1916–1986). Taking its title from the Italian word for the number 36, the form consists of six six-line stanzas, rhymed ababcc. Each of the later lines in the first stanza becomes the first line of a later stanza: Line 2 is thus also line 7, line 3 is also line 13, etc. An example, from 1986, is Ciardi’s “A Trenta-Sei of the Pleasure We Take in the Early Death of Keats.”

What Ciardi had in mind, no doubt, is the Italian form known as the sestina. Another poetic form with six six-line stanzas (plus a concluding three-line envoi), the sestina is a difficult and tight form, with the last word of each stanza repeating as the end word of the first line of the next stanza — all while the words at the end of the first stanza’s first five lines appear in a regular pattern at the ends of other lines in the other stanzas.

It’s difficult to import into English (here’s Ezra Pound’s attempt, and here’s Elizabeth Bishop’s). An what Ciardi has done with his trenta-sei form is ease the burden on the English poet — while keeping enough of the repetition that gives this kind of poetry its strange power. Its strange sense of song, for that matter.

In “The Bell,” Sally Thomas (b. 1964), looks at the trenta-sei form and sees, in its claim of unity in disjointedness, the dreamlike quality that song sometimes has.

“Let’s start walking past the end,” Sally writes, and as often in her poetry, a sense of passing time bites into the poet’s otherwise cheerful view of the world.

That’s something the reader might have guessed from the other poems of hers we’ve offered in this newsletter: “Swans,” “Twelfth Night,” “Hawks in Holy Week,” “Reunion.” But in “The Bell,” the impulse is particularly striking: “Shadows, like the hills, are blue. / Yesterday lies where it fell. / Somewhere the last tram rings its bell.”

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The Thrush

by Edward Thomas

When Winter’s ahead, 
What can you read in November 
That you read in April 
When Winter’s dead? 
 
I hear the thrush, and I see 
Him alone at the end of the lane 
Near the bare poplar’s tip, 
Singing continuously. 
 
Is it more that you know 
Than that, even as in April, 
So in November, 
Winter is gone that must go? 
 
Or is all your lore 
Not to call November November, 
And April April, 
And Winter Winter — no more? 
 
But I know the months all, 
And their sweet names, April, 
May and June and October, 
As you call and call 
 
I must remember 
What died into April 
And consider what will be born 
Of a fair November; 
 
And April I love for what 
It was born of, and November 
For what it will die in, 
What they are and what they are not, 
 
While you love what is kind, 
What you can sing in 
And love and forget in 
All that’s ahead and behind.
═══════════════════════

Birds of a species converse from tree to tree for the perpetuation of their kind. In literature, too, birds of a species may converse, though their impulses are imaginative, not biological. For the Romantic John Keats (1795–1821) the thrush with its trilling song figures as an emblem of negative capability. Though we haven’t (yet) written about it here, Thomas Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” responds in a more subdued key, assenting to the existence of the large Keatsian vision of oppositions mysteriously held together, but denying that the human mind can partake of that transcendence. For Hardy’s speaker, joy exists — but only beyond his mortal reach.

Today’s Poem by Edward Thomas (1878–1917) adds its voice to this exchange of literary birdsongs. Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras toward the end of World War I, wrote his entire body of poetry between 1914 and 1917, in the shadow of the war in which he died. His poems, though, deal frequently with what Wordsworth called “spots of time,” outside the margins of that war: the sunlit quiet of a country railway station, for example, or the primordial darkness of a combe, or a stand of nettles, or the habits of birds, whose songs he noted obsessively in his journals.

Here, Thomas’s thrush, singing sublimely, answers both Keats’s and Hardy’s thrushes, in its blithe disregard for the kind of “knowing” that is bound by time and human language. Keats inhabits his thrush, in “What the Thrush Said,” to make it speak its own wisdom; Hardy’s human speaker, by contrast, talks about his thrush, from the distance of the “coppice gate” where he leans listening to the thrush in the branches over his head. But Thomas’s speaker addresses his thrush directly, to ask it what it “can . . . read” in the turn of the seasons, and ultimately, whether or not its wordless knowledge is greater than his own.

Keats, the Romantic, writing in 1818, fuses his own sensibility to that of the bird, and by extension, to the inspiring life-force indwelling all the natural world. Hardy, composing his own poem at the turn of the next century, rejects the notion of any pipeline between himself and immanent divinity. Whatever sensibility that divinity embodies, it belongs to the bird, not to him. Edward Thomas, however, interrogates both these stances. Does the thrush, outside time and language, know more than he does? Or does he, from his own vantage point in time and language, knowing the names of the months and possessed of memory, holding past, present, and future in his mind, know something of value that the thrush can’t know?

The poem’s speaker records his interrogations in quatrains, rhymed until the end in the first and last lines, abca. The poem’s overall metrical template calls for trimeter; within this template, however, a fair amount of variation is possible and often occurs. The opening stanza, for example, can be read as largely dimeter, with only the second line in trimeter:

When Win- | ter’s ahead
What can [or What can] | you read | in Novem(ber)
That you read | in Ap(ril) (though this line could also be read as trochaic trimeter)
When Win- | ter’s dead?

Likewise, the second line in stanza 4 might be read as tetrameter, consisting of a trochee, an iamb, a dactyl, and an iamb — “ Not to | call No- | vember No- | vember” — four feet, though with the repetition of only one of those kinds of feet. Alternatively, it might be read as trimeter, beginning and ending with anapests (albeit with one unaccounted-for unstressed syllable, like an extra toe): “Not to call | Novem- | ber Novem(ber).”

However your ear scans things, taking its cues from those lines whose metrical patterns are less ambiguous, the poem as a whole is characterized by a fluidity that we might say recalls Hopkins and his sprung rhythm, except that Thomas died before he could have read Hopkins. But that fluidity does seem of a piece with both the thrush’s liquid song and the speaker’s ambivalence about what it means, and particularly what it should tell him about himself.

For him, after all, the months have names, and those names are “sweet.” Time has meaning. To hear a thrush sing in April is to anticipate its song in winter. To hear it in November is to remember that spring will come again. For the human listener, the year, like his own life, has a beginning and an end. The one perpetually signals the other, joy resonating with grief, grief resonating with joy. All the while, the bird — outside those resonances, outside the significance with which those resonances invest the speaker’s existence, outside the grief but perhaps also outside the particular, articulable human joy — sings on in sublime ignorance of time.

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Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels

by Dana Gioia

Let us sing to our city a new song,
A song that remembers its name and its founders —
Los Pobladores, the forgotten forty-four,
Who built their pueblo beside a small river.

They named the river for the Queen of the Angels, 
Nuestra Senora Reina de los Angeles.
Poor, they were forced to the margins of empire,
Dark, dispossessed, not one couple pure.

Let us praise the marriages and matings that created us.
Desire, swifter than democracy merging the races —
Spanish, Aztec, African, and Anglo —
Forbidden matches made holy by children.

I praise myself, a mutt of mestizo and mezzogiorno,
The seed of exiles and violent men,
Disfigured by the burdens they shouldered to survive.
Broken or bent, their boast was their suffering.

I praise my ancestors, the unkillable poor,
The few who escaped disease or despair —
The restless, the hungry, the stubborn, the scarred.
Let us praise the dignity of their destitution.

Let us praise their mother, Nuestra Senora,
The lost guardian, who watches them still 
From murals and medals, statues, tattoos.
She has not abandoned her divided pueblo.

She has been homeless with a hungry child,
A refugee fleeing a brutal warlord.
A mother, she held her murdered son.
Her crown is jeweled with seven sorrows.

Pray for the city that lost its name.
Pray for the people too humble for progress.
Pray for the flesh that pays for profit.
Pray for the angels kept from their queen.

Pray in the hour of our death each day
In the southern sun of our desecrated city.
Pray for us, mother of the mixed and misbegotten,
Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.
═══════════════════════

“Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels” opens “beside a small river.” It closes “beside our dry river.” And every element of that pairing reveals just how in control Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is, in this poem from his 2023 collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Think, for example, of the historical changes of Los Angeles the poem traces. After calling for a “new song . . . that remembers,” the poem begins with the first townspeople — “Los Pobladores,” the 44 original settlers from New Spain who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781. And it ends with a call to Our Lady, “mother of the mixed and misbegotten” — asking the Blessed Virgin to pray for us in our now “desecrated city . . . Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.” While “desecrated” names exactly what the city has become in its forgetfulness, it echoes such words as “desiccated,” speaking to the physical and moral dryness of modern Los Angeles.

Even that “new song” of the first line does inordinate work. The poem is a psalm, Gioia says in his title, and the opening call echoes the many passages demanding joyful noise before the Lord. One obvious reference is Psalm 40:3: “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”

But I hear something apocalyptic in Gioia’s verses, and I think what he may have had in mind, apart from the psalmic title, is Revelation 5:9: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”

A hint this might be so is that the accentual-tetrameter poem, in the second of its quatrains, moves immediately to that biblical “kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” — “not one couple pure” among Los Pobladores:

Let us praise the marriages and matings that created us.
Desire, swifter than democracy merging the races —
Spanish, Aztec, African, and Anglo —
Forbidden matches made holy by children.

After two stanzas about his own mixed heritage (the inflation of “I praise myself” deflated by calling himself “a mutt”), the poet uses his ancestors to segue back to the poem’s central theme of the poor, the grinding degradation of poverty matched only by the power of the poor to withstand it. “Let us praise the dignity of their destitution,” Gioia writes in a Franciscan tenderness.

And that thought pulls him back to the Blessed Virgin. Her name was erased when the city shortened itself, diminished itself, to “Los Angeles” from Nuestra Senora Reina de los Angeles. And the “Let us praise” lines culminate in praise for that erased Lady, the “lost guardian” who “watches them still / From murals and medals, statues, tattoos.”

Gioia has been building a Mariology — a personal devotion, a poetic treasury of tropes and images — since at least the 2001 opera libretto, Nosferatu, in which the great moment of rescue from the vampire is signaled with a frightened girl’s recitation of the Salve, Regina prayer.

And that all comes together in “Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels”: the democratizing of sacred images into murals and tattoos, the attempt to use race to move beyond racial obsession into a theology of the poor, and the personal history of his own family finely tuned to a historical sense of the city in which he grew up.

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Wishes to His (Supposed) Mistress

by Richard Crashaw

Who e’er she be
That not impossible she
That shall command my heart and me;

Wher e’er she lie,
Lock’d up from mortal eye
In shady leaves of destiny;

Till that ripe birth
Of studied fate stand forth
And teach her fair steps to our earth;

Till that divine
Idea take a shrine
Of crystal flesh, through which to shine;

Meet you her, my wishes,
Bespeak her to my blisses,
And be ye call’d my absent kisses.

I wish her beauty
That owes not all his duty
To gaudy tire, or glist’ring shoe-ty.

Something more than
Taffeta or tissue can,
Or rampant feather, or rich fan.

More than the spoil
Of shop, or silkworm’s toil,
Or a bought blush, or a set smile.

A face that’s best
By its own beauty drest,
And can alone command the rest.

A face made up
Out of no other shop
Than what nature’s white hand sets ope.

A cheek where youth,
And blood, with pen of truth
Write, what the reader sweetly ru’th.

A cheek where grows
More than a morning rose,
Which to no box his being owes.

Lips, where all day
A lover’s kiss may play,
Yet carry nothing thence away.

Looks that oppress
Their richest tires, but dress
And clothe their simplest nakedness.

Eyes, that displaces
The neighbour diamond, and outfaces
That sunshine, by their own sweet graces.

Tresses, that wear
Jewels but to declare
How much themselves more precious are.

Whose native ray
Can tame the wanton day
Of gems, that in their bright shades play.

Each ruby there,
Or pearl that dare appear,
Be its own blush, be its own tear.

A well-tam’d heart,
For whose more noble smart
Love may be long choosing a dart.

Eyes, that bestow
Full quivers on Love’s bow,
Yet pay less arrows than they owe.

Smiles, that can warm
The blood, yet teach a charm,
That chastity shall take no harm.

Blushes, that bin
The burnish of no sin,
Nor flames of aught too hot within.

Joys, that confess
Virtue their mistress,
And have no other head to dress.

Fears, fond and flight
As the coy bride’s when night
First does the longing lover right.

Tears, quickly fled,
And vain, as those are shed
For a dying maidenhead.

Days, that need borrow
No part of their good morrow
From a forespent night of sorrow.

Days, that in spite
Of darkness, by the light
Of a clear mind are day all night.

Nights, sweet as they,
Made short by lovers’ play,
Yet long by th’ absence of the day.

Life, that dares send
A challenge to his end,
And when it comes say, “Welcome friend.”

Sidneian showers
Of sweet discourse, whose powers
Can crown old Winter’s head with flowers.

Soft silken hours,
Open suns, shady bowers,
’Bove all, nothing within that lours.

Whate’er delight
Can make Day’s forehead bright,
Or give down to the wings of Night.

In her whole frame
Have nature all the name,
Art and ornament the shame.

Her flattery,
Picture and poesy,
Her counsel her own virtue be.

I wish, her store
Of worth may leave her poor
Of wishes, and I wish—no more.

Now if time knows
That her whose radiant brows
Weave them a garland of my vows,

Her whose just bays
My future hopes can raise,
A trophy to her present praise;

Her that dares be
What these lines wish to see:
I seek no further, it is she.

’Tis she, and here,
Lo, I unclothe and clear
My wishes’ cloudy character.

May she enjoy it,
Whose merit dare apply it,
But modesty dares still deny it.

Such worth as this is
Shall fix my flying wishes,
And determine them to kisses.

Let her full glory,
My fancies, fly before ye;
Be ye my fictions; but her story.
═══════════════════════

Midway through Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, published in 1952, Mildred Lathbury, the protagonist and narrator, is having an uncomfortable dinner. Her companion is Everard Bone, an anthropologist with whom Mildred’s married neighbor Helena Napier has been in love, but who has evinced an interest of a sort in Mildred herself.

Although Everard has invited Mildred to dine with him, and although he has repelled Helena’s advances, thus far Helena is really the only thing he and Mildred have in common. Inevitably, and not for the first time, they discuss Helena’s pursuit of Everard, who tells Mildred stiffly that even had she not been married, Helena is not at all the sort of person he would want for a wife. Mildred responds, “What would she be like, that Not Impossible She?”

Pym’s novels turn on literary quotations and allusions, drawing on the fund of Our Greater English Poets: Keats and Milton, but also Walter Savage Landor, Edward Young and his Night Thoughts, the Middle English lyric, and the hymns of William Cowper. To read Some Tame Gazelle or Excellent Women is to read, secondhand, what Pym herself read for her degree in English literature at Oxford in the early 1930s. In this instance, at dinner with Mildred and Everard, it is to read Richard Crashaw (1613–1649).

Readers here last met Richard Crashaw in his epigrammatic mode — though as our friend Robert Miola remarked at the time, Crashaw was not “a poet known for concision and discipline, but traditionally known for prodigality, emotionalism, and excess.” We generally think of those descriptors as they apply to his considerable body of religious verse; Crashaw is Baroque in terms of his era, but “baroque” is also an apt word for his devotional sensibility, which tended toward such subjects as the “Flaming Heart” of St. Teresa of Avila and the Virgin Mary’s tears. Having read those poems, as well as the Divine Epigrams, a reader embarking upon Today’s Poem, Crashaw’s “Wishes to his (Supposed) Mistress,” might be forgiven for thinking at the outset that this “mistress” will turn out to be, in fact, the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Not so! Instead, the poem — in rhymed triplets consisting of one dimeter line, one trimeter, and one tetrameter — develops the profile of a marginally more flesh-and-blood dream-girl, beautiful and virtuous in her nature as in her countenance, clothed in a modesty that is but the outer garment of her inmost being, composed of nothing false or artificial, an entire package that attracts — but not so much as to imperil anyone’s chastity. “Her that dares be / What these lines wish to see: / I seek no further, it is she.” In the poem’s concluding stanza, the speaker acknowledges that he’s simply been constructing a whole fantasy woman out of tercets, as one does. But who knows? His fantasy might — stranger things have happened — correspond with some actual woman’s biography. “Be ye my fictions; but her story.”

It is with this poem in mind, then, that Mildred inquires of Everard, “What would she be like, that Not Impossible She?” Everard — who perhaps, being an anthropologist, has not read his Crashaw — replies, “Oh, a sensible sort of person.” Against the backdrop of Crashaw’s rapturous and extensive (though chaste!) imaginings, Oh, a sensible sort of person becomes not merely a reply, but a punchline. It is so very much not what Crashaw would say, so very much not Baroque. But then, it’s also a commentary on the possibilities of love in Pym’s distinctly un-Baroque fictional universe, with its hermeneutic of disappointment. Though Mildred allows herself to think Everard “perhaps just a little splendid,” that’s as far as it goes for spinsters and anthropologists in post-war London, where no man, apparently, dares dream the not-impossible dream of Richard Crashaw.

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The Toys

by Coventry Patmore

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I will be sorry for their childishness.”
═══════════════════════

On the surface, “The Toys,” a poem by Coventry Patmore (1823–1896), looks straightforward enough. The argument of the poem is simply this:

• A father spanks and sends to bed a disobedient young son.

• Checking later, he finds the boy asleep, exhausted from his tears.

• He’s moved to his own tears by the careful bedside arrangement of all the boy’s favorite little treasures.

• That night the weeping father prays that God will look upon us — “of what toys / We made our joys” — and say “I will be sorry for their childishness.”

Given that idea, any of a hundred competent Victorians could have written the poem, and Patmore was plenty competent. So why is the poem so irregular? Why is the poem so odd? We have what looks like haphazard rhyming and a line length that wobbles from six feet to two feet without warning. Consider just the first sentence:

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

We have an aabccb rhyme scheme (accepting disobey’d / dead as a slant rhyme), in a set of mostly iambic lines that run 5-5-5-3-3-5. (That fifth line is tricky, I think intended as trimeter, but I find myself reading it aloud with four stresses: with hàrd wòrds and ùn-kìss’d.) All to arrive at that heart-rending absolute clause of the pentameter last line: “His Mother, who was patient, being dead.”

Though printed as a single block, the poem is probably clearest when taken apart into its four sentences. And within those sentences, we can start to notice the shorter lines doing thematic work. In this first sentence, the father’s calm pentameters break into shorter lines — less regular in both meter and grammar — with his anger: I struck him, and dismiss’d / With hard words and unkiss’d.

And so in the third sentence, when the father peeks in on the child and sees the toys set on the bedside table: And I, with moan, / Kissing away his tears, left others of my own — a couplet yoking a two-foot and a six-foot line. Note, though, that in both of the poem’s hexameters, there’s a strong pause in the middle — Kissing away his tears, | left others of my own, and And two French copper coins, | ranged there with careful art — suggesting they may be better read as 3+3 lines rather than as 6-foot.

That reading would give us an iambic pentameter poem with trimeter lines interspersed for effect. Except that And I, with moan and We made our joys are both dimeter, and He had put, within his reach is tetrameter. In a small compass, Patmore seems to be anticipating rhymed vers libre — letting the rhyme determine the line length, and then using that varying length to match the emotion of the moment in the narrative.

We get something similar in his poem “Departure”:

Never, my Love, repent
Of how, that July afternoon,
You went,
With sudden, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten’d eye,
Upon your journey of so many days
With not one kiss, or a good-bye?

And perhaps it’s worth considering that “The Toys” and “Departure,” along with the similar “If I Were Dead” and “A Farewell,” gesture toward the 1862 death of his wife Emily. Two years later, he converted to Catholicism.

Patmore was never as well known as the likes of Tennyson, and his association with the Pre-Raphaelites was always a little unlikely, leaving him to fade from general memory with some speed. He also wasn’t helped by the fact that his best-known book in his lifetime, The Angel in the House (1854), came to seem to the contemptuous Edwardians a mockable example of straining Victorian moralism.

It’s time, I think, for another look.

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Sonnet 116

by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
═══════════════════════

Reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), in order, one after another, as I have been doing lately, it’s easier than you might think — though it feels blasphemous — to begin to ask yourself why, exactly, these poems needed to exist. What urgency, precisely, is driving them? Aside from the inescapable fact of their technical achievement, the perfect working out of lines of English in iambic pentameter and the structural organization of four quatrains and a couplet — aside from the fact that they’re so paradigmatic that this entire variation on the sonnet form, first devised by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), bears not Surrey’s name but Shakespeare’s, as another word for English — what is it about these sonnets that makes them that worth reading, in order, one after another?

Why, when the poet has written one sonnet about the responsibility of a beautiful young man to procreate and thus perpetuate his beauty, does he need sixteen more to hammer home the same idea? And after seventeen sonnets on that specific theme, why — far from having exhausted it, apparently — does he continue developing the same theme, proposing verse as another mode by which beauty may be perpetuated, reminding the same beautiful person of the encroachment of time that renders some means of perpetuation desirable, bemoaning the waste of said fleeting time spent apart, and so on? Looked at this way, the first 126, at least, of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets might be described as about the same thing (admittedly in a relational arc) over and over. Why?

To look at the sonnets this way, as Helen Vendler has suggested, is to regard them as — to appropriate and repurpose Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s phrase — “all dead paper.” It’s to read them as nothing but a collective artifact of words, all reducible to the same basic, eventually predictable message, delivered in an echo chamber. But this is not at all what they are. Just as Barrett Browning’s letters seem, to her hand, “alive and quivering” with all they wish to communicate, so these sonnets, too, are “alive” in some ineffable way that becomes apparent the longer we live with them.

And we live best with them not as we live with inanimate objets d’art, but as our closest way of living with the mind of a person, who more than four hundred years ago took up his pen to write to another person: not simply to declaim to that person, in a series of soliloquies, but to converse with him. Human beings, after all, are made to engage with each other. The urgency that drives these sonnets is, on its deepest level, the urgency of the desire for connection — even when connection looks like argument.

As Vendler has pointed out, in Sonnet 116 we can read the other side of the conversation in the words on the page, rather as we can read, in The Habit of Being, Caroline Gordon’s pronouncements about the writing of fiction in Flannery O’Connor’s letters answering her. This sonnet, in Vendler’s observation, “exhibits a strange proliferation of negatives . . . the normal sign of a rebuttal.” It’s not the case, after all, that the speaker of Sonnet 116 awakened one morning and decided, out of the clear blue sky, that what the world needed was another definition of true love, which he then proceeded, perhaps before the mirror, to deliver. Vendler continues,

If we read Sonnet 116 not as a serene definition of love but rather as a rebuttal to the embedded anterior discourse of another . . . — we hear, “inside the sonnet,” the anterior discourse that is being rebutted. The faithless young man, we might deduce, has said something like the following:

You would like the marriage of minds to have the same permanence as the marriage of bodies; but even the church admits impediments that are invoked to annul the marriage of bodies, and there are impediments to a lifelong marriage of minds, too. After all, things alter; and when love finds alteration, it
alters in consequence; and things are removed; and love removes itself when it sees the removals. I did love you once, but now that is ended.

Suddenly a reason materializes for the sonnet’s argument. Suddenly it is an argument, not merely an essay on a by-now well-trodden subject. Suddenly it’s possessed of the urgency of conflict between two people, at least one of whom — the speaker here — desires a resolution, not an ending. Yet he won’t concede his own convictions. “Let me | not to | the mar | riage of | true minds,” the opening line reads, if we scan it as absolutely regular iambic pentameter. Vendler notes the way that this strict scansion shifts the emphasis clearly to the second syllable of the first foot: me.

The implication, then, is of someone’s making a rejoinder: You may say X, but let ME say Y. Of course, other scansions hold up just as well and may add their own layers of meaning. We might alternatively, for example, read the first and last feet as spondees, anchoring the line at both ends with parallel double weights. We might also cast the second foot as a trochee, with the stress falling on not, making the line scan something like this: “Let me | not to | the mar |riage of | true minds.” This might be closer to the way many of us would read or recite the line aloud, closer to the way an actor would deliver it. Neither scansion cancels the import of the other. Either way, the insistence is there, animated by our awareness that the speaker means to counter another person’s assertion.

This metrical flexibility — or perhaps we could call it a sort of cognitive flexibility integrated with the meter — continues throughout the poem. Like line 1, line 2 can scan as fluidly perfect iambic pentameter: “Admit | imped | iments; | love is | not love.” As mechanical as that scansion might feel, and as much as it more or less erases the evocative, impeding caesura imposed by the semicolon after impediments, it does force the reader to consider the assertive import of the tiny verb is, in a way that another scansion might not.

We’re tempted, naturally, to stress love twice. And as in line 1, we’re not wrong to hear the line scanned alternatively, with more weight on both the caesura and the word that follows. We might more naturally speak the line thus: “Admit | imped | iments; [hard stop on the semicolon] | love is | not love.” We might even read both of those last two feet as spondees, especially if we’ve already heard the closing foot of the previous line as spondaic, our pattern-craving mind reaching for a parallel weight of syllables.

If we crave more pattern, the next lines deliver it via the paired reiterations of “alters/alteration” and “remover/remove,” words that seem to click together like magnets when you turn their opposite poles toward each other. Repetition creates emphasis, as we all know, but here it does something else as well. These repetitions constitute elements in the “negative,” one of that pattern of negatives asserting what love is not; both repetitions, “alters” to “alteration,” “remover” to “remove,” are just the sort of bendy-twisty alteration thing that true love isn’t. O no! It isn’t that at all.

From quatrain to quatrain, as Vendler has also noted, the sonnet delivers small voltas as it moves toward the ultimate, resolving assertion of its final couplet. The second quatrain repudiates the negative of the first. Love isn’t these things that it isn’t; no, no, what it is is this, this ensuing small catalog of increasingly beautiful images. Whatever it isn’t, love is the “ever-fixèd mark” and more than that, the implicitly “fixèd” star that not only observes tempests but guides a ship, a “wand’ring bark,” through them. Even more, love not only is both the mark and the star, but also, sonically, via the map of both internal and end-rhymes in the quatrain, it’s knit up with the ship, the very thing it guides, in a unity. Love is, as well, that unity.

Yet again, in the turn from the second quatrain to the third, the negative returns, now to posit love emphatically — “Love’s not” — as an antithesis to “time’s fool,” a foot we might once more, possibly, hear as a spondee, its two accented syllables following the stressed not to bear the full weight of that negation. In this final efef quatrain, too, the f-rhyme of “come / doom” would have been in most of England, even in the 16th century, as much a slant rhyme as it sounds to us today, so that the quatrain’s closing line, turning to negate the love-is-not negation that precedes it, gains additional emphasis in not agreeing precisely with its rhyming partner.

And of all the lines in the poem, that line — line 12 — refuses to scan as regular iambic pentameter. My ear hears it as two iambs, a dactyl, and two more iambs: “But bears | it out | even to |the edge | of doom.” There’s something forceful, as in a force generated, in the friction of those two stressed syllables juxtaposed in the second and third feet, that charges that line with an emotional intensity for which doom is really the only possible destination.

The only thing left to say at this point is that if this thing the speaker says is love isn’t love, then he’s never said anything, and love doesn’t exist at all. So the poem washes up on the one inevitable shore, compounded of conviction, hope, and despair — and why? Because someone else either is listening or is not, either is convinced or is not, either turns again to restore the desired connection, or else walks away. The tacit presence of that someone haunts every line of this sonnet, freighting its every syllable with urgency: the desire to be understood, the desire to trust in an enduring welcome, the desire to be right about what that welcome means, and the fraught risk of making the argument.

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Upon Julia’s Clothes

by Robert Herrick

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!
═══════════════════════

Herrick. Robert Herrick (1591–1674). I’m not sure why we keep coming back to him, here at Poems Ancient and Modern. In the poetry anthologies of our youth, he was presented mostly as an aside — a delightful one, yes, but his inclusion in schoolbooks was solely because of that delight. A minor figure one might read and smile at, nod, and move along.

Which leaves a little under-explained why we keep choosing poems of his for this newsletter. Sally Thomas has looked at “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” and “Corinna’s Going A-Maying,” while I’ve written of “Delight in Disorder,” “To Keep a True Lent,” and “A Thanksgiving to God, for his House.” Given his two sides — the carpe-diem, Cavalier-tribe poet who wrote poems as sensual as any in the language, and the clergyman poet who wrote orthodox Christian verse — we’ve also regularly mentioned “The Argument of his Book,” a poem in which he insists that his apparent dichotomy is resolved by its single origin in love of God and God’s creation.

The answer to our Herrick infatuation — if answer there be, apart from happenstance — is that he is excellent at meter, good at word choice, and a master of epigrammatic phrasing. Today’s Poem is one of those commonly anthologized delights in older poetry books. (I suspect a prudery in recent years suppressed it for a while or reprinted it only with the nervous acknowledgment that its eroticism could be “problematic,” but the tide seems to have turned against that kind of harm-worried anthologizing.)

And, in truth, there’s not much to say about the poem that hasn’t already been said. The surprising nonce usage of “liquefaction.” The eroticism that never actually mentions a part of Julia’s body (“brave vibration” is about as close as the poem gets). The nudity enhanced by the silk that covers it. The regular iambic meter in the pair of tetrameter tercets, nicely violated by “glittering” in the final line. (That line could be, and probably was, read as regular: O hòw / that glìt- / t’ring tàk- / eth mè, but I actually find myself reading it aloud as a reversal into a falling rhythm, Ò how that / glìt-ter-ing / tàk-eth / mè.)

If something must be added to the surface gloss, consider this idea: that the poem runs on an implied fishing metaphor. The “flows” and “liquefaction” of the first stanza give us the water, into which the speaker “casts” — only to find that he, the fisherman, not she, the fish, is the one taken.

Or just delight with us in Herrick, once again.

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My Dearest Dust

by Lady Catherine Dyer

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowzy patience leave to stay
One hower longer: so that we might either
Sate up, or gone to bedd together?
But since thy finisht labor hath possest
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly: and thy widdowe bride
Shall soone repose her by thy slumbring side.
Whose business, now, is only to prepare
My nightly dress, and call to prayre:
Mine eyes wax heavy and ye day growes old.
The dew falls thick, my beloved growes cold.
Draw, draw ye closed curtaynes: and make room:
My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.
═══════════════════════

Sally Thomas writes:

Our readers who also read The Sonneteer (and if you don’t, why don’t you?) will surely recall the surprising ride of Katie Hartsock’s “Every Time You Mentioned Trochees, the Zoom Transcript Thought You Meant Turkeys.” Katie is the author of two poetry collections, both from Able Muse Press: Wolf Trees, which appeared in 2023 and won the Philip H. McGrath Poetry Prize, and the 2016 Bed of Impatiens. A beautiful new limited-edition letterpress chapbook, Love-Gifts To Be Delivered Via Subterranean Rivers, is just out from Aureole Press. An associate professor of English at Oakland University, she’s had work in the Kenyon Review, New Verse Review, and many other journals. Hers is a capacious, engaging voice, wearing its erudition lightly, and we welcome her as today’s guest contributor to Poems Ancient and Modern. [Kate Abrahams (who took the photographs accompanying this essay) asks that our readers consider a small donation to St. Denys Church, Colmworth, Bedfordshire, home of the Dyer monument.]

Katie Hartsock writes:

The elegy that Lady Catherine Dyer (1585–1654) wrote for her husband arrests readers with its first three words: “My dearest dust,” combining an intimate superlative with biblical mortality. Its consonance is a near-equation between two words that begin with “d” and end in “st.” And so we dive into a poem about a wife who longs to reunite with her husband in bed—even if it’s a deathbed.

The couplets highlight themes of love or loss or both, rhymed line-pairs lying next to each other as lovers lie, paired and separate at once. All she might have asked for, from his too “hasty” day of death, was one more hour, so that they could have stayed up to talk or gone to bed, together.

The poem proceeds in mostly regular iambic pentameter, with some lovely substitutions. But her husband’s absence is also made present through some stark departures from the meter. The refused fifth foot in the tetrameter line 6, “Thy wear - |y limbs | with ear - |ly rest,” reiterates the poet’s insistence that her husband’s death was too “early,” and the four-foot line 10 describes her central occupations and obligations (her “business”) now he’s gone — My night - | ly dress, | and call | to prayre.” Again the missing fifth foot emphasizes that something is missing in her nightly routine.

Rhyming with the hypercatalexis of line 3, which plays with the sense of one hour “longer,” the catalexis of line 4 — “Sate up |, or gone | to bedd | to - geth - |er?”— gives an absent final stress, a lush pause, as if the question cannot bear to metrically complete itself.

Poets have always connected sleep and death, from Hesiod’s Theogony to Bob Dylan’s “Workingman Blues #2”: “Sleep is like a temporary death.” But Lady Catherine’s blurring of earthly and eternal rest is especially rich as she overlays the marriage bed onto the tomb. She begins to fall asleep in line 11, with the first two spondees mimetic of drooping eyelids, and the fifth foot spondee echoing a sense of finality: “Mine eyes | wax heav | y and | ye day | growes old.” Here she juxtaposes her living body with her dead husband’s, “cold,” before the last lines:

Draw, draw | ye clos | ed curt | aynes: and | make room: |
My dear, | my dear | est dust; | I come, | I come. |

She climbs into their bed, full of life and death at once, and commands, “make room.” These are lovers reunited in an uncanny bed, balanced between this world and the next. I am completely enamored with how weird her grief lets her poem become; there’s something fearless and reckless — ringing of impropriety and yet a sincere piety, too — in her address, remarkably flirtatious for an elegy (and like a volta, except this 14-line poem is not exactly a sonnet; it’s the second part of a 30-line poem, though often anthologized on its own).

Sir William died in 1621, at the age of 37, after having seven children with Lady Catherine, who was only two years his junior and who would outlive him by 33 years, never remarrying. In 1641 Lady Catherine erected a monument (recently partially restored) at the church of St. Denys in Colmworth, Bedfordshire, with the whole poem embossed above their prostate effigies.

It’s fascinating to imagine Lady Catherine seeing the monument unveiled, from facing her own effigy to reading her poem of twenty years’ longing for her husband, with 13 more years to go until death would them rejoin. The poem’s intimacy and the statues’ recumbency, as if propped up for pillow-talk, bring us close to their bedroom-tomb without inviting us in.

When I teach this poem, I find myself in the wonderful and ridiculous position of using the Oxford English Dictionary online to look at possible meanings of “come.” Up on the projector screen, definition 22 out of 35: “intransitive. slang. To experience sexual orgasm.” When I show them the historical references in Lady Catherine’s lifetime, many students still disbelieve there could really be a sex joke this private made so public. But the cultural association with this poem’s last words (which come, remember, twice) cannot be ignored — especially in their death-bedroom context, where a popular Elizabethan euphemism for orgasm was “to die”), as Lady Catherine Dyer (die-er) would have known.

Lady Catherine’s elegy continues to recreate its incompleteness. In the current state of the monument, time and damp air have eroded most last words in the memorial’s lines of “My dearest dust.” And with this denial of the final rhymes, we could think of the monument’s disintegration as a continued decoupling and de-coupleting. Or, we might imagine the blurred words, which almost look as if a hand had wiped them away, as sealing Catherine and William’s reunion, ignited by “not marble nor the gilded monuments,” but a realm beyond outliving.

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The Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten

by Oliver Herford

Wake! for the Golden Cat has put to flight
The Mouse of Darkness with his Paw of Light:
Which means, in Plain and simple every-day
Unoriental Speech — The Dawn is bright.

They say the Early Bird the Worm shall taste.
Then rise, O Kitten! Wherefore, sleeping, waste
The Fruits of Virtue? Quick! the Early Bird
Will soon be on the Flutter — O make haste!

The Early Bird has gone, and with him ta’en
The Early Worm — Alas! the Moral’s plain,
O Senseless Worm! Thus, thus we are repaid
For Early Rising — I shall doze again. . . .

I sometimes think the Pussy-Willows grey
Are Angel Kittens who have lost their way,
And every Bulrush on the river bank
A Cat-Tail from some lovely Cat astray. . . .

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep.
The Lion is my cousin; I don’t know
Who Jamshýd is — nor shall it break my sleep. . . .

Then to the Well of Wisdom I — and lo!
With my own Paw I wrought to make it flow,
And This was all the Harvest that I reaped:
We come like Kittens and like Cats we go. . . .

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
The Backyard Fence and heard great Argument
About it, and About, yet evermore
Came out with Fewer Fur than in I went.

Ah, me! if you and I could but conspire
To grasp this Sorry Scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Enfold it nearer to our Heart’s Desire? . . .

And fear not lest Existence shut the Door
On You and Me, to open it no more.
The Cream of Life from out your Bowl shall pour
Nine times — ere it lie broken on the Floor.
═══════════════════════

Retelling Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the voice of a cat — now there’s a clever comic idea. Maybe not worth the 35 stanzas that Oliver Herford gave it in 1904, when he published “The Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten,” but worth at least the selection of nine stanzas we offer today for one of our Whimsical Wednesdays here at Poems Ancient and Modern: “Wake! for the Golden Cat has put to flight / The Mouse of Darkness with his Paw of Light.”

Oliver Herford (1860–1935) is a much forgotten figure, in a way that should remind us how hard it is for humorists to live past their death. Mark Twain managed it. Maybe Ogden Nash and some others. But the vast majority of funny people die when they die, their humorous work gone to dust.

Still, in his prime, Herford was one of America’s best-known jokesters, combining poetry, illustration, caricature, and his signature little epigrams in a way that made him a favorite of editors from Life magazine to Harper’s Weekly, the Ladies’ Home Journal to The Century.

Born in England, the son of a distinguished Unitarian minister, he lived in America — Chicago and then Boston — while a child. After graduating from Antioch College, he studied art at the Slade School in London and the Académie Julian in Paris before settling permanently in New York. “A man’s silence is wonderful to listen to” is one of his better-known quips. Or “Many are called but few get up” and “Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you.”

What also needs remembering is the popularity of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published in 1859 and revised several times over the next twenty years. The poem’s skeptical worldview, its whiff of orientalism, and the drive of its implied narrative made the book irresistible, as it grew from a slow beginning to become a perennial favorite among readers.

For that matter, FitzGerald’s fellow poets found something fascinating in the fast-moving pentameter quatrains, rhymed aaba. (T.E. Eliot’s juvenilia, for example, is filled with ironic gestures toward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát and snarky parodic uses of that Rubáiyát stanza.)

The relation of FitzGerald’s translation to the Persian (and Sufi) original of Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) remains much disputed. So, for that matter, does the question of how much of the surviving poetry of Omar Khayyam was actually written by Omar Khayyam. But little of that bears on the English poem, which is actually more popular in English than the Rubáiyát ever was in Persian. FitzGerald managed to create a translation, more or less, that has a life of its own.

And that’s what Herford was playing with in 1904 with his “Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten.” Some of the stanzas are straightforward parodies of passages in FitzGerald:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
The Backyard Fence and heard great Argument
About it, and About, yet evermore
Came out with Fewer Fur than in I went.

But others are quite fine applications:

I sometimes think the Pussy-Willows grey
Are Angel Kittens who have lost their way,
And every Bulrush on the river bank
A Cat-Tail from some lovely Cat astray.

The poem’s joke is a good one, the execution competent, the reading experience fun. What else do we want from light verse?

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Sonnet 66: The Heart of the Night

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

From child to youth; from youth to arduous man; 
From lethargy to fever of the heart; 
From faithful life to dream-dower’d days apart; 
From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;— 
Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran 
Till now. Alas, the soul!—how soon must she 
Accept her primal immortality,— 
The flesh resume its dust whence it began? 
 
O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life! 
O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late, 
Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath: 
That when the peace is garner’d in from strife, 
The work retriev’d, the will regenerate, 
This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death! 
═══════════════════════

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), brother to Christina Rossetti and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, repaired to 16 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, in West London, after the death, in 1862, from a laudanum overdose, of his wife and artist’s model, Elizabeth Siddal. There he began to collect wombats and other exotic pets, to host gatherings of the Brotherhood — who had initially entertained, at least briefly, the vision of all dwelling together in unity at 16 Cheyne Walk — and to extend and amend his introspective sonnet sequence, The House of Life, begun in 1847, when he was only 19.

First published as a collection in 1869, with a final, revised edition appearing in 1881, The House of Life figures as the arc of Rossetti’s life as a poet, a trajectory that begins in a belief in erotic love as a sacrament in itself, but ultimately — in a “dark night of the soul,” analogous to the mystical and epiphanic experience depicted in the verses of St. John of the Cross — acknowledges the failure of Swinburnian sensualism, in its rejection of Victorian codes of sexual morality, as a mode of higher truth.

You might think that this arc represented a chronology: the convictions of youth superseded by the inescapable wisdom won by age and hard experience. Yet as Today’s Poem demonstrates, that’s not precisely the case. Though “The Heart of the Night” appears late in the order of the sequence, as he had finalized it in the year before his death, the poem actually dates from as early as 1848, the same year as Rossetti’s prescient stand-alone poem, “Autumn Song.” Already, in his earliest surviving work on this poem, as in “Autumn Song, the 20-year-old Rossetti had begun to contemplate his own mortality and the insufficiency of flesh alone to answer this most inescapable reality. If anything, the poem in its earlier draft, with its “mouldering days” and its vision of life as a move “from doubt to dread,” feels more bitterly that “in the midst of life we are in death.”

The Petrarchan sonnet revived and revised by the poet for the final edition of his cycle, still asserts, in the first abba quatrain of its octave, that life runs between cyclical poles of experience, from youth to adulthood, from “lethargy to “fever of the heart.” A shift still occurs in the second quatrain, rhymed acca, as the speaker turns to the soul’s reluctance to “accept her primal immortality” and lay down the familiar flesh in death.

Yet from the beginning, the older Rossetti, more reflective as he revises, allows for a greater sense of life to enter the poem: life as something other than a doom from its very outset. The “weary man” of the opening of the 1848 version has become “arduous,” as though after all there might have been something worth striving for, even at the cost to his own energies. At least, in this revision, the energies exist. The “days” of the envisioned life are now “dream-dower’d” instead of simply “mouldering.” In line 4, “trust” as a new starting point pushes “doubt” to a secondary position. Dread, now, is absent, even at the “brink of ban.”

As in the earlier draft, the sestet’s response, rhymed defdef is a prayer. And again, the shifts between the 1848 revision and 1881’s final version are interesting and revelatory. In the “Lord of” formulations in the sestet’s first two lines, “peace” replaces “will” in line 9 — “O Lord of work and will” becomes “O Lord of work and peace” — while “will,” bumped out of that initial spot, replaces “love” in line 10. The “awful Lord of love” is now the “awful Lord of will,” who will “yet renew this soul with duteous breath.” Again in line 13, it is not “love” that is “regenerate,” in the poem’s vision of ultimate renewal, but “the will.”

If the octave feels gentler and more hopeful than before — or at least less despairing and dread-ridden — the sestet emphasizes a new sternness, a steeling of the will rather than a dependence on love, again understood as erotic and physical, to renew itself and redeem the soul. The Lord of all things — “work and peace,” of “life,” of “the will” — is also, and ultimately the “Lord of death.” Yet the soul, accepting “her primal immortality” and renewed in will, may hope and desire — with the desire no longer of eros but of agape — to look ultimately upon that face.

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Vivien’s Song

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,
Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.

The little rift within the lover’s lute
Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all.

It is not worth the keeping: let it go:
But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.
And trust me not at all or all in all.
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Now here’s a curious thing — a puzzle about how to take quoted speech in narrative verse. One of English poetry’s great declarations of unconditional romantic love comes from the mouth of an inhuman fairy: a lying seductress, a vicious schemer.

But then, perhaps that’s exactly who would know best the commitment absolute love requires, as she works to bring the wizard Merlin under her control. And so, in Idylls of the King — poetic retellings of twelve Arthurian stories, published between 1859 and 1885 — Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) gives the lyric to the character Vivien.

Vivien is the Lady of the Lake. Sort of. Her name varies in the many old Arthurian accounts: Nimue (or Nimuë). Ninianne. Viviane. Vivien, in Tennyson’s narrative (and even that is a change from an earlier version he published under the title “Nimuë; or, the True and the False.”)

The Arthurian tradition never clearly distinguishes the woman who seduces Merlin from the Excalibur-delivering Lady of the Lake, and Tennyson resolves the possible confusion by making them distinct figures. His Vivien is a magic temptress, an agent of King Mark sent to sow discord at Camelot. His Lady of the Lake is a misty angelic character, giving Arthur his sword and raising the fallen Lancelot.

Although written mostly in blank verse, Idylls of the King has some rhymed passages, typically semi-independent songs sung by characters along the way. We saw something similar when we looked at “Tears, Idle Tears,” which first appeared as a lyric performed by one of Ida’s companions in The Princess (Tennyson’s poetic 1847 tale of young noblewomen who go off to a school to be apart from men). And as with “Tears, Idle Tears,” readers and anthology editors almost universally chose to free “Vivien’s Song” from its dramatic Arthurian context. Which is, in its way, an answer to our opening puzzle of what to do with quoted speech in narrative verse.

Within the context of “Merlin and Vivien” (placed by Tennyson as the sixth story in the final arrangement of his Arthurian cycle), the tricksy Vivien sings “like the tenderest-hearted maid / That ever bided tryst at village stile,” claiming to have learned the song from Sir Lancelot. And “trust me not at all or all in all,” that song demands, even while the singer is one of the least trustworthy characters in Idylls of the King.

The song consists of four iambic-pentameter tercets, rhymed aab, with the b-rhyme “all” repeated as the final word of each stanza — reflecting the absolutism that the woman demands. The density of repeated words is remarkable: “Love . . . Love . . . Love . . . Love” in the first line alone. “Faith . . . unfaith . . . Unfaith.” “Music mute” to rhyme with the twice-used “lute.”

Tennyson’s “rift within the lute” would go on to become a commonplace phrase: a tiny crack that “by and by . . . ever widening” will ruin the instrument — used as shorthand for the idea that even the smallest disagreement can grow to destroy a relationship.

As it happens, Merlin suspects (rightly) that Vivien wants him to give her a paralyzing spell so she can use it on him. But the suspicion must be set aside: “It is not worth the keeping: let it go,” the temptress sings. And quite seductively, in the mode of true love: “answer, darling, answer, no.” Too bad she’s a bad guy.

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