Arrears blogging: November 11 -- (The Lack Of) Arms and the Man

The Daily Reading Guide uses the old-style and more graceful term of "Armistice Day" to describe November 11, and, in the war-to-end-wars-has-ended style that people might still have had in 1930, does not flinch from giving us Whitman, who didn’t flinch either:

On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
The crush’d head I dress (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away),
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly).

That’s “The Wound-Dresser,” my favorite of today’s poems. To me it’s powerful because Whitman doesn’t change his super-heavy incantory sound to tell you This Is Important. You read a bunch of Whitman poems, and you watch him hit some long foul balls going for the home run, (“Of physiology from top to toe I sing”); and then it’s kind of arresting when you realize he’s connected. The occasion rises to Whitman, you could say:

I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
And the yellow-blue countenance see.
I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

I like the attendant here;. even in our tragic, poetic moments, prose follows us, holding the tray and pail.

Arrears blogging: May 30: Deep Ship

Back when they were putting the Harvard Classics together Longfellow was classed with the poets, but I think he should be classed (instead? no, also!) with the pop artists -- like Capras or Goffin/King, guys who know how to put the hay down where the goats can get at it. While artists like these have cooler contemporaries (Whitman, Sturges, Holland/Dozier/Holland), there's still something pleasurable about them.

Today Longfellow is building a ship. The ship stands for the Union. We know this because he tells us, twice:

"Choose the timbers with greatest care;
Of all that is unsound beware;
For only what is sound and strong
To this vessel shall belong.
Cedar of Maine and Georgia pine
Here together shall combine.
A goodly frame, and a goodly fame,
And the UNION be her name!

All caps in the original; Longfellow's not one of these guys who's going to wait around for you to get it. But if a ship bearing symbolic freight isn't enough for you, maybe you'd like some...romance:

For the day that gives her to the sea
Shall give my daughter unto thee!’

Well, handing over the daughter doesn't seem that romantic to us, but she doesn't seem to mind:

Like a beauteous barge was she,
Still at rest on the sandy beach,
Just beyond the billow’s reach;
But he
Was the restless, seething, stormy sea!

I'm not much at courtin', but I never thought to compare a girl to a barge before. Have any readers tried that? I would be interested to know the result.

Note also that Longfellow changes the length of his lines and his rhyme scheme -- this is what I mean by saying he's a pop artist, a lesser talent would be more monotonous. Another nice detail, much later, when the boy/ocean-girl/boat metaphor is reintroduced, is the admission that sermons are boring:

The worthy pastor...
Spake, with accents mild and clear,
Words of warning, words of cheer,
But tedious to the bridegroom’s ear.

The ship then, at the end, turns around and becomes a metaphor for the nation again. And yet the bride and groom seem to come from the same New England town; you'd want one of them to be from Alabama or something. But who am I to say? All of this ship-of-state stuff, and the New England-ness of it, reminds me of this Donald Hall poem (after Horace) that my dad once gave me:

Ship of state, hightide rising
carries you off again, far
from land. When you packed
black traffic

to Virginia's shore, whole
cloth expanded under blue
heaven. New England's
enlightened

gentry constituted you
of stout pine and steam-bent oak
for the seasonal
hurricane

but not to withstand the rage
that your cargo turns on you
as you divagate
uncaptained

on the greedy fitful winds
of your final century.
I beg you to sink
abruptly.

December 12: How They Brought The Good News From Grinch To Aix

Ruffian, another horse ridden to death like the ones in the poem. I found her death more shocking than Barbaro's, maybe because I'm more callous than I was in 1975.

This will have to be quick, as I have lots of homework this weekend. (I think it was Lawrence Kasdan who said that being a writer means you have homework for the rest of your life.)

So, first of all, I always hated this poem, which I had to read as a child -- a sixth-grader, maybe. One of the reasons for my conviction, which I have developed over the course of the year, that literature should not be taught at all to minors is that they are bound to have a bad attitude towards anything that is associated with school -- especially stuff that adults think kids should like, like this poem, which is filled with horses and derring-do. Except you never get to the horses and derring-do because, by the end of line two, you're already have four proper nouns thrown at you that you've never heard of before (or since): Ghent, Aix, Joris, and Dirck. The mind swims. Through the window, the school parking lot begins to look interesting.

Also the meter, whatever it is -- I should be better at prosody than I am -- sounds little-kid like; or, when you're of school-age, baby-like I think it's the same as the "Grinch Who Stole Christmas". Let's see:

I SPRANG to the STIRrup, and JORis, and HE;
I GALloped, Dirck GALloped, we GALloped all THREE;

All the WHOS down in WHOville liked CHRISTmas a LOT
But the GRINCH, who lived NORTH of WHOville, did NOT

Browning seems to clip that first foot but they're pretty similar. Here's the part that really made me think of Seuss -- a town called "Boom":

’Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near
Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;
At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;
At Düffeld, ’twas morning as plain as could be

Was it the star-bellied Sneetches that came out to see, at the town of Boom? Only Little Cat A knows for sure.

Maybe this poem would be more controversial if it were made clearer that two horses died, and one was almost ridden to death, in the making of it:

And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets’ rim.

That's pretty good; and sort of a typical complex Browning moment -- good news purchased at the cost of proud horses. Unfortunately most readers will have long since checked out.

UPDATE: Bob Going emails me the following:

Pundit:

I have recently picked up a one-volume collection of Robert Browning's extremely-small-type complete works, out of respect for my dear mother, who after her first date with Dad wrote him opining that while Dad's favorite, Stephen Vincent Benet, was very good, Browning was better.

Having previously read a volume of Benet's short stories, I can now conclude that my mother, at least at 22, was nuts. It also appears that Browning never had an un-versed thought. The sheer volume of his poetry is staggering. Much of it I find just impossible to get into, as it is extremely common for him to assume that the reader knows everything about every little crevice and personality of every age in Italy. His versed plays I can mostly see as a somewhat pleasant evening of experimental theater, and his work as a whole is well-crafted, but very, very little of it do I find interesting.

Maybe because most of it is just too long. Duke Machete farts, Rabbi Ben Ezra ponders the meaning of it for 22 stanzas, that sort of thing. Oddly, it is his version of the Pied Piper story, written for a friend's child, that holds up the best. Tells the story without embellishment, in language that children and lesser beings, like 21st century guys with seven years of higher education, can understand.

I haven't completely given up yet, but I do not expect to come across anything like The Devil and Daniel Webster.

December 5: Teen angel

Writing poetry is a lot harder than it used to be; which doesn't stop everyone from writing poetry, but it does stop everyone from reading it. The four very sad poems by Christina Rossetti provide a clue as to why. Three of them are on the same subject -- how sad Death is. Or, more precisely, how sad it's going to be for you when I am dead:

WHEN I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

Yeah, yeah, she's saying don't be sad, but the "thou"s and the "wilt"s and the simple-dying-fall of the last two lines give her away. My dad directed that his funeral service end with Dixieland music, and it got a laugh. That's a valediction forbidding mourning, but this is someone saying "I couldn't have another piece of pie" while holding our their plate for more.

This you'll-be-sad-when-I'm-gone is kind of an adolescent emotion. Which is to say that we're stuck with it all our lives. The reason life imitates high school is that we have the same emotional response to everything that we did in high school, we've just learned to manage it better. (Or not.) Plus we're distracted from concentrating on the overwhelming richness of our emotional lives by mortgages and bad knees.

How does this relate to poetry's decline as a cultural force? Because pop music and episodes of hourlong television are better delivery systems for this kind of emotion. Not that poetry is obsolete -- it's still fun to ride horses (I am told), and there are still people here and there who believe in the Bill of Rights. But all three things aren't as ubiquitous as they used to be.

I might add that this poem, about a murder-suicide of a British couple in the face of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, shows the romantic side of imperialism in an interesting way.

November 19: Old-fashioned workmanship

The Excalibur in Vegas. It was not of this that Tennyson wrote: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/And God fulfils Himself in many ways,/ As here, where the town's loosest slots reside."

Tennyson can't be fashionable. As discussed, he is superfruity and Victorian. And it is impossible to read today's poem, "Morte d'Arthur", and not think in parts of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":

In those old days, one summer noon, an arm
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Holding the sword...

Which, as we know, is no basis for allocating political power. And yet I admire the poem. It has narrative drive -- enough so that you find yourself yelling at the character of Sir Bedivere, whom the mortally wounded Arthur tells to deep-six Excalibur. He can't do it -- it's too bright and shiny -- so he lies when he reports back to Arthur, proving that Cover Your Ass belongs in the very realm of myth (it occurs to me that Adam and Eve provide literal proof of this as well):

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:
“I heard the ripple washing in the reeds
And the wild water lapping on the crag.”

Come on, Sir B. just told the boss what he wanted to hear -- is he really bold? Plus Arthur can tell in an instant that he's lying. So then Arthur sends him to destroy the sword again, again he can't do it, and he comes back and tells him the exact same lie! I realize, for poetical purposes, that the refrain-ness of repeating the same answer lends a certain Mythic Greatness to the poem. But it would never happen that way in real life.

But here's the passage that finally made me like the poem for good. Bedivere has finally ditched the sword, and now must carry the dying Arthur to the lake so he can make his ferry:

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking as he walk’d,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.
He heard the deep behind him, and a cry
Before. His own thought drove him, like a goad.
Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon.

First of all, "Clothed with his breath" is a great phrase. But mostly, as I sat on my patio reading, the craft in this passage -- and I don't even know anything about poetic craft -- jumped out at me. The phrases don't end at the lines because he has to keep moving -- although he get one sentence for the long shot ("Larger than human"), and a state-of-mind status report ("His own thought drove him, like a goad.") And look at the sound pattern -- not just the alliteration, but "barren" and "bare" in consecutive lines, or how "goad" echoes "drove" -- "drove" drives "goad," almost. The craft is conspicuous -- it would pretty much have to be, for me to pick up on it -- but it doesn't seem ostentatious.

It's still Victorian and superfruity and, though easy to admire, hard to love. It's sort of like the way you admire the Victorian lords and ladies for being able to endure those clothes and those long afternoons in those antimacassar-filled rooms without running away screaming and dunking their head into a sink full of absinthe. Good on them for not doing that. But we'd probably have to.

September 17: Outmoded skills

The great 60s instrumental, "Whittier Boulevard," by Thee Midniters, can be found here.

When I worked in advertising, ever so many years ago -- well, here's how long ago it was: we had type guys. Every afternoon around 4 or 5 or so, the reps from the type houses would come to get orders from the art directors -- "SMOOTH SMOKING GOODNESS!" in 72-point Baskerville or whatever, and the next morning, or later that night, the type would come back in smooth sheets. (Yes, we did cigarette ads. But I was too junior for that account.) It was a great business, and the type guys had season tickets to everything, which meant that once in a great while the seats would trickle down to me and my officemates -- usually a game that no one wanted to go to (Knicks v. Clippers, e.g.)

And then, almost instantly, that business ceased to exist.

So it is with the popular versifier like John Greenleaf Whittier. Once a titan of American letters, turning to his verse now is to have an experience that's beyond Quaint, or perhaps beneath it:

BLESSINGS on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy,—
I was once a barefoot boy!

It goes on. It actually has a nice image at the end, where Whitter looks forward sadly to the boy being shod for work, as a horse is. (And this poem, though corny, is sad.) But reading these poems is like watching someone work as a blacksmith; it seems so distant from our own time. (And come to think of it, schoolchildren are often exposed to Colonial Williamsburg-like blacksmiths and this kind of verse.)

Where did the appetite for this kind of rhyming go? Don't say "hip-hop" -- people do love the rhymes, but it hardly seems the same audience as the Whittier-consumers, even controlling for changing notions of appropriateness, and besides, there's still a few decades between the collapse of this kind of pop-verse and Grandmaster Flash. Maybe all the talent was snapped up by the greeting card industry. Or maybe it was radio -- a versifier could make a lot more cash writing songs to be sung by, I don't know, Vaughn Monroe.

My own theory is that the cartel controlling supplies of words like "thy" and "fain" suddenly went belly-up.

September 10: The Old School Tie

Who wants to take the high part? And then we can sing my wicked a capella arrangement of "Clocks" by Coldplay!

These poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.), are nice enough, but hardly the stuff that makes you want to shout "fire" in a crowded theater or anything. It made me wonder if they would have gotten into the Harvard Classics if OWH (Sr.) hadn't himself been such an eminent Bostonian; if he had had the exact same career, including his important work in medicine, in Philadelphia, would his occasional poems (this one's about how you can't help laughing at old people) be in this volume alongside Whitman and Browning?

It can't be helped, I guess; that's part of the whole Harvard branding, especially in 1908 -- that whole kind of proper Bostonian vibe. It makes you wonder if Emerson is over-represented too, but Emerson is an Important American Blowhard; and how many Americans were regarded (in 1908) as worthy of induction into the Classics? Especially when you rule out fiction, as the HC does; there goes Twain, Hawthorne, etc. They might have also put in Emily Dickinson, but she's a wo- wo- woman, so no sale.

August 6: A compleat Victorian world-view

I know, steampunk's more Edwardian, like in this piece, but what the hell.

One of the glories of not being an English major is avoiding Tennyson. The Victorian superfruitiness of "Locksley Hall" would wipe a permanent smirk on the face of any collegian who has to read this:

And I said, “My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.”

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light,
As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.

And she turn’d—her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs—
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes—

Saying, “I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong;”
Saying, “Dost thou love me, cousin?” weeping, “I have loved thee long.”

Cousins in love? Check. Heaving bosoms? Check? Pallid cheeks? Check. "Dost"? "Thou"? Check and double-check. It will be no surprise when I reveal that this love goes horribly astray, because of meddling parents, causing our choleric narrator to spew a pint of bitter.

Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father’s threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!

Is it well to wish thee happy? having known me—to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be: thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

Oh, Amy, thou hast been served! Note also that even Victorians thought that Victorian parents were out of control.

In fact this poem couldn't be more Victorian, even though it was apparently written during the reign of her predecessor (William IV, if you're scoring at home). We got your faith in, and suspicion of, the Future:

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Progress:

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

Except for women:

Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain—
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match’d with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine—

And, of course, the savages, from whom we get our tea:

Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!

In fairness we probably shouldn't blame Tennyson for the views of his characters, unless there's other evidence, which I, as a non English major, wouldn't know. And here I've practically quoted the whole poem, because it's very catchy, which I think I wouldn't have appreciated in college. Tennyson is very good at all the poetical skills no one gives a shit about anymore (though I don't know where he's getting "gray" from as a description of barbarian).

Now, to our steam-powered Zeppelins!

May 12: My dislike of poetry moves me to verse

I do not like these poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I don't like them because they start like this:

THE BLESSÈD Damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven:
Her blue grave eyes were deeper much
Than a deep water, even.

She's bless-ed (I can't figure out how to do the accents), she leans out from Heaven, and "Heaven" rhymes with "even." It's like listening to a crooner from the late 40s, like Vaughn Monroe, and realizing they had to invent rock'n'roll.

The only one I didn't mind was this one, which I am excerpting in full:

BEAUTY like hers is genius. Not the call
Of Homer’s or of Dante’s heart sublime,—
Not Michael’s hand furrowing the zones of time,—
Is more with compassed mysteries musical;
Nay, not in Spring’s or Summer’s sweet footfall
More gathered gifts exuberant Life bequeathes
Than doth this sovereign face, whose love-spell breathes
Even from its shadowed contour on the wall.
As many men are poets in their youth,
But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong
Even through all change the indomitable song;
So in like wise the envenomed years, whose tooth
Rends shallower grace with ruin void of ruth,
Upon this beauty’s power shall wreak no wrong.

Just because I like the idea of beauty, physical beauty, as a kind of creative genius equalling to the best of poets (and far better business, I might add). And, because living in L.A. one becomes much more cynical about the business of beautiful women, and because I couldn't think of anything else to write, I came up with this travesty. Because I'm in a hurry, I don't apologize for errors of scansion or torturings of grammar. Indeed, I think it makes my verse more rich:

Beauty like hers is genius. It takes pains --
The surgeon's silicone, the salon's dye,
The trainer's sweat, and every tool whereby
She turns all heads in preschool dropoff lanes.
Her husband's ex, a gossipy mom explains,
Was the woman who brought him his first script
Which starred this wife. (Remember? Her space suit, ripped?
And how she wore those glasses to show brains?)

As many men are horndogs in their youth,
But tamp it down to taste responsibility,
And discover depths in their connubial she;
Her husband, like a sophomore, without ruth
Will ditch this trophy wife if she gets gray
Hence her pains with art and science Time to stay.

Shit, I just realized I used a different rhyme scheme in the sestet. Don't you hate it when that happens? Too late now.

PS -- I also apologize for the weird formatting, which I can't figure out how to fix.

May 7: Too easy

Two Browning poems today, one of which ("My Last Duchess") had already been assigned, not just in 10th grade, but also five weeks ago. 50 volumes of the richness of our Western Civilization and they assign they same thing twice. (And it's Browning.) Could it be that I'm taking this Daily Reading Guide more seriously than the low-level functionary who compiled it back in 1910 -- a guy who probably didn't even own more than two detachable collars?

Maybe if you were a little more diligent about your compiling, young Throckmorton, you'd have one of these for every day of the week!

Anyways, that leaves "The Bishop Orders His Tomb At St. Praxed's Church, Rome, 15--", and, as I have occasionally found, I am a little tongue-tied. I find the great works of literature hard to talk about, because what can I say that Internet crib notes can't say better?

I will say this: I can't decide whether it's supposed to be satire or not, or rather, how satirical it's supposed to be. The story, if you will, of the poem, is that one of these vainglorious Italian (of course! I think an Englishman is supposed to think) bishops tries to get his sons to order the nice marble for his tomb. Honestly it strikes me as a little leaden:

Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black—
’Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me.

Get it? It couldn't be less like what Jesus was getting at! And he has kids too -- a nominal celibate! It's about time the 16th century got what's coming to it.

But maybe it just seems heavy-handed because I live in a satire-saturated environment, therefore I've built up too much of a resistance to it. Maybe it was a super-brave move (although is Victorian England known for its reverence of the Papists? I don't know.)
But maybe the brave part is Browning's willingness to write in the voice of douchebags (cf. "My Last Duchess"). In The Voices Of Douchebags, actually, would be a great title for a book of poems.

I should note, also, that the poem is fatally crippled by the fact that the rival of bishop who narrates the poem is named "Gandolf." How unfortunate for Browning! At least one of the bishop's kids isn't named "Frodo."

Apr 19: Concord Recessional

Inspired by Emerson's "Concord Hymn," which is today's reading.

The stone they raised still stands to-day
Where embattled farmers fought the foe;
Interactive, I'm sure, is the display
To which the field-tripped children go.

'Gainst empire, then, the farmers fought.
But for it, now, our mission creeps.
The liberty their blood had bought
Goes down the stream which seaward sweeps.

Apr 15: Conveniently numbered reactions to today's reading

1. Why have they been keeping Whitman from us until now? I've had to read Berkeley twice. And even today it has to have a Lincoln hook (You may remember that Lincoln decided to get out of the house and take in a play on this date in 1865.)

Is it because he's too fruity? Explain Wordsworth, then. But maybe all Englishmen were considered fruity. Admittedly, "O Captain, My Captain" is pretty fruity. It reads like something one would write for the newspapers ("Where on the deck my Captain lies/Fallen cold and dead."). (Digression: maybe what the newspapers need today is more folks writing poetry in them, like Don Marquis. I mean, if it's going to be increasingly fusty to read newspapers, why not go balls-out fusty?) But even so, Whitman so self-identifies as an American that you'd think the DRG compliers would just have thrown him in before now out of civic duty.

2. I greatly enjoyed "When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd" and wondered why it was even assigned to me in eighth grade or whenever it was. (Eleventh grade, maybe?) Why is any literature assigned to teenagers? We don't let them drink; how are they supposed to enjoy one without the other?

This actually seems like a dangerous poem to give to adolescents, for "Don't Fear The Reaper"-type reasons:

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

3. The advantage of this poem being assigned to adolescents, in our web age, is that you can find out what it's about quite easily, from Cliffs Notes online:

The poet’s realization of immortality through the emotional conflict of personal loss is the principal theme of this great poem, which is a symbolistic dramatization of the poet’s grief and his ultimate reconciliation with the truths of life and death.

That's a good principal them. If it is the principal theme, that is. SparkNotes begs to differ:

Unlike the pastoral elegies of old, which use a temporary rift with nature to comment on modernity, this one shows a profound and permanent disconnection between the human and natural worlds.

Simmer down, you two! Take it outside!

4. I am not critic enough myself (partly because I'm lazy, but only partly) to weigh in on the poem as a whole. The only thing I note is that, about halfway through, Whitman tells us that he hasn't even started yet:

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Then, in section 14 -- the homestretch -- he seems to outsource the song to the bird (that's the pro-death song I referred to earlier); and, even after that, he sees stuff, but he doesn't sing:

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the débris and débris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

You might say that Whitman's mourning is so powerful that he can't bring himself to sing of it -- or to portray himself as singing of it, rather. He must recede into the background and let other singers and scenes do it for him.

5. The final thing is that Whitman has one of those styles that seems like a child could do it, and yet he pulls it off in a manner that's complete Cliff Notes-proof:

Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song...

I can hear three effects right away -- 1) a rule of three in the opening lines. But 2) the third line is longer and, since it's a conjunction, it kind of makes you stop a second at "the tallying song of my soul," which is just slightly different from the incantation that goes before it (it has more stresses, maybe), to provide a break. And 3), the clause "yet varying ever-altering song," is hard to say (the hidden "v" in "ever"), which slows you down -- the song is altering before your eyes.

Well, I certainly went on longer than I thought. But seriously, publishers, consder my suggestion for the light verse in the papers. And more guys like Bill Gallo.

Apr 1: Browning out

So April is the cruelest month, everyone says -- even on Sports Talk radio. When you input "April is the cruelest month" into Google News, you get this as a hit (it's a preview of a roller derby matchup). The difference between making art in Eliot's time and making art now is that back then you would have no idea that your work would eventually be used in the context of roller derby, and nowadays that's what you're shooting for.

Eliot, good Harvard man though he is, is not our reading today. It's the poem that "April is the cruelest month" replaced:

O, TO be in England
Now that April’s there,

Which is by Browning. As I think of the compilers of the Harvard Classics as mouth-frothing Anglophiles, I can only imagine how close this poem must be to their heart:

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

I can't even read this kind of poetry anymore -- the kind that has "bowers" in it. This poem, in fact, doesn't have bowers, but it could. It's funny that this poem is in this selection, as is Pippa's Song ("God's in his heaven/All's right with the world!"), and it finishes with the masterfully creepy "Last Duchess" (which I remember studying in high school):

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.

No bowers anywhere here. As I reread it again (yes, sticklers, you can reread again if your readings > 3), I'm struck by something, which is that a friend of ours (the Mrs. and me) was just over here , complaining about how his girlfriend's personality is too agreeable -- he can't be a uniquely awesome boyfriend, because she takes everything in stride. And here it is in poetry:

She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad.
Too easily impressed: she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one!

I personally think the Duke character in this poem is just a little too fusty for me to really love it, but the exclamation point -- the stamping of his tiny Ducal foot -- I really like a lot.

Mar 24: The rules for hot fictional characters.

Today is William Morris's Defense of Guenevere, which seems like more of a subject for an essay than terza rima, but there you go. It is her self-defense -- against getting busted for sleeping with Launcelot, apparently (the poem doesn't tell us).

The first thing I thought of was that the Arthurian mumbo-jumbo used to be beloved of the highbrows (Malory's in the HC as well), but now it has migrated to geeks and Spinal Tap and such. So it's hard not to hear "Stone'enge" when you read this -- almost the exact opposite of what William Morris must have intended.

About the poem I won't say too much. I like terza rima as a form, because it keeps the momentum up, but I don't like it when it cuts away or has a long flashback, because I find it hard to keep everything straight. I think it's because of all the stanza breaks; I'm a little ashamed to confess that I'm that easily confused, but it's so. So when Guenevere goes into a long thing about Launcelot and some guy named Mellyagraunce, which actually seems like it should be the name of a town -- well, I started to scan down to see where we'd come back into present time.

Her defense? I think it's here:

While I was dizzied thus, old thoughts would crowd

“Belonging to the time ere I was bought
By Arthur’s great name and his little love;
Must I give up for ever then, I thought,

“That which I deemed would ever round me move,
Glorifying all things; for a little word,
Scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove

“Stone-cold for ever? Pray you, does the Lord
Will that all folks should be quite happy and good?

Basically, she needed a little fun in her life. They say Guenevere is Welsh, but I'm suspecting she's French. Oh, the second part of her defense is that she's hot:

....say no rash word
Against me, being so beautiful; my eyes
Wept all away to gray, may bring some sword

“To drown you in your blood; see my breast rise
Like waves of purple sea, as here I stand;
And how my arms are moved in wonderful wise,

“Yea also at my full heart’s strong command,
See through my long throat how the words go up
In ripples to my mouth; how in my hand

“The shadow lies like wine within a cup
Of marvellously color’d gold; yea now
This little wind is rising, look you up,

“And wonder how the light is falling so
Within my moving tresses: will you dare
When you have looked a little on my brow,

“To say this thing is vile? or will you care
For any plausible lies of cunning woof,
Where you can see my face with no lie there

“For ever? am I not a gracious proof?—

Well, it's not much of defense, but, like they say, a hot girl who defends herself has a hot girl for a client.

Mar 6: Flow

Well, it has been a stressful day, for one reason and another, and it's nice to have a Classic to de-bummify things here at close. Now it's time to relax and enter another, more placid world. What do I pluck from the shelves tonight?

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

D'oh!

I don't have hardly anything to say about "The Raven," except to note that Poe has great flow:

You ever witness rapport like this before?
It's cause y'all kiss the floor, say this my lord
It's the chosen one, with the golden tongue
Flow for the old and young when i'm holdin one

Sorry, that's Rakim. Here's Poe:

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -

You get the idea. And now, like Poe's narrator himself, I desire oblivion.