Wednesday, August 08, 2001
Long ago, when poetry was in everyday use
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
..
The other day, for reasons unrelated to this column, I was in a little office lunchtime dispute about the origin of the words of "Wild Dogs and Englishmen," finally incontrovertibly establishing its authorship credits as belonging to Noel Coward rather than Rudyard Kipling. In the course of the discussion, such lines as the one about the old Mulmein pagoda, where the Burma girl is a-yearning for the comeback of ye British soldier, and the racist’s confession, about Gunga Din being a better man than he is, were in contention, and Kipling’s name was properly honored ("On the Road to Mandalay" is the first poem’s title.)
That bought forth more license. The authorship of the immortal rugby poem, for instance (ladies, close your eyes for the balance of the paragraph): "The sexual life of the camel is stranger than anyone thinks. In the moonless nights of Nile Valley he tries to ravish the sphinx. But the sphinx’s dah dumdum dah dumdum is filed with the sands of the Nile, which accounts for the hump on the back of the camel, and the sphinx’s mysterious smile." I gave you the entire masterpiece because the author is an uncopyrighted Anon.
The idea of pulling up good poetry that used to get tossed around at a lunch table (or the bars of my youth) took hold. There is a lot of good stuff, I remembered, in an anthology of best loved poems by David D. Eisenhower, and another, by Scholastica.. Not to be found, though, therefore you will get a partial reconstruct from a failing memory..
Let’s start with the lovers, Andrew Marvel and Richard Lovelace ,who knew it and knew how to say it. In To his coy mistress, Marvel rued that had they but world enough and time he would spend a hundred years to praise her eyes and on her forehead gaze, two hundred more to adore each breast, and thirty thousand more for the rest. Lovelace to Althea pledged that stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, and dreamed of lying tangled in her hair, a freedom that the gods who wanton in the air know not. But a cavalier had more than one woman to idolize. To Lucasta, going to the war, he wrote that he could not love her, dear, so much,.loved he not honor more.. Sad Ernest Dowson lamented things not being the same, in "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynara," about the shadow that fell last night between her lips and his. He was desolate, and sick of an old passion, and declared, bowing his head, that he had been faithful to her, in his fashion. Robbie Burns saw his love as a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June, and a melody, that’s sweetly played in tune. . .
The lonely ones saw differently. Emily Dickinson felt that the soul selects its own society, then shuts the door. Edward Arlington Robinson’s rich Richard Cory, though, put a bullet through his head..
Now for the hard life of the pioneers. Robert W. Service had the boys whooping it up one night, in a Malemute saloon, when in walked a miner, reeking of bear, and accused the owner, dangerous Dan McGraw, of being a hound of hell. Both men lost, and the winner was the lady who kissed the dying man and stole his poke, the lady that’s known as Lou. If you want to know more of the bad things done under the midnight sun and share the queer sights seen by the Northern Lights that will make your blood turn cold., turn to "The Cremation of Sam McGee," who escaped the cold by dying of fire.
Some poets loved war Virgil’s ethos was Arma virumque cano - I sing of arms and the men. Kipling glorified the time in India’s sunny clime, where his protagonist served her Majesty the Queen. But there was also e. e. cummings’s conscientious objector Olaf, more brave than me more blond than you, who found that there was some excrement he would not eat.
Countrymen. Edgar Guest claimed that it takes a heap of living to make a house a home.. Robert Frost believed that good fences make good neighbors, and that home is where they have to take you in (the full line, from "Death of a Hired Man," is longer). He wrote the one poem that everyone truly knows and quotes, in snatches: I have promises to keep.. whose woods these are I do not know....miles to go before I sleep. We were the land’s before the land was ours is a misquote, reversal of the correct line. T. S. Eliot knew that April is the cruelest month, and so stated at the start of "Waste Land," which ends with the end, Shantih, Shantih, Shantih, from the Upanishads. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is more fun and has witty rhymes: he does not want to ask what is it, and suggests we make a visit, to the women who walk to and fro, talking of...Michelangelo [quality people, no idle dishing here. Today’s nouveaux would call them dullsville.]
Finally aging and Death. Prufrock knew that he was growing old, and would wear his trousers rolled, and that he would put on white flannels and walk in the sand, on the beach, where he’d hear mermaids singing, each to each. Aaah...
Poets tend to die young, though, in wars. Prophetic Alan Seeger had a rendezvous with death, at some disputed barricade, when spring came back with rustling shades and apple blossoms filled the air. But he had his (here a slow iambic drumbeat refrain), when spring brought back blue days and fair. Aaah...Rupert Brooke asks that, if he should die, to think only this of him, that there’s some corner of a foreign land that is forever England. John McCrae speaks of the poppies that grow, between the crosses, row by row, in Flanders field. Joyce Kilmer becries the death of Rupert Brooks in alien land, across a troubled sea, little knowing that his own body, "so fair and young," would share the same WWI fate.
But let’s not get maudlin and be brash, with the help of Ogden Nash, who kept his women barefoot in the winter and pregnant in the summer. He himself celebrated the seasons by being alternately nudist and Buddhist. .A little talcum was always walcum, in case of heat rash, of course, and candy was dandy but liquor was quicquor.
As for William Schwenk Gilbert. I tend to get heavy-handed with snatches of his wit. No catlike thread here, for stealing upon our prey. To explain decline in crime during the summer, I’d reference the suggestion that the enterprising burglar, who has finished burgling and drops the life of crime, loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling and something something something country chime. Sir Joseph Potter, who polished the big brass door so faithfully that now he is the ruler of the Queen’s Navee, was mentioned occasionally, during discussions of office promotions.
. .
Let’s not close with carping, poetry is about life and dreams. Accentuate the positive. Some day we can discuss why Moon River, a poor poem of images strung together by Johnny Mercer, turned to music by Henry Mancini for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the songwriter’s 1961 Oscar winner sung by Andy Williams and nearly every other balladeer, is such a powerful dream maker. We’ll also do William Shakespeare, another image-maker of note.
..
The other day, for reasons unrelated to this column, I was in a little office lunchtime dispute about the origin of the words of "Wild Dogs and Englishmen," finally incontrovertibly establishing its authorship credits as belonging to Noel Coward rather than Rudyard Kipling. In the course of the discussion, such lines as the one about the old Mulmein pagoda, where the Burma girl is a-yearning for the comeback of ye British soldier, and the racist’s confession, about Gunga Din being a better man than he is, were in contention, and Kipling’s name was properly honored ("On the Road to Mandalay" is the first poem’s title.)
That bought forth more license. The authorship of the immortal rugby poem, for instance (ladies, close your eyes for the balance of the paragraph): "The sexual life of the camel is stranger than anyone thinks. In the moonless nights of Nile Valley he tries to ravish the sphinx. But the sphinx’s dah dumdum dah dumdum is filed with the sands of the Nile, which accounts for the hump on the back of the camel, and the sphinx’s mysterious smile." I gave you the entire masterpiece because the author is an uncopyrighted Anon.
The idea of pulling up good poetry that used to get tossed around at a lunch table (or the bars of my youth) took hold. There is a lot of good stuff, I remembered, in an anthology of best loved poems by David D. Eisenhower, and another, by Scholastica.. Not to be found, though, therefore you will get a partial reconstruct from a failing memory..
Let’s start with the lovers, Andrew Marvel and Richard Lovelace ,who knew it and knew how to say it. In To his coy mistress, Marvel rued that had they but world enough and time he would spend a hundred years to praise her eyes and on her forehead gaze, two hundred more to adore each breast, and thirty thousand more for the rest. Lovelace to Althea pledged that stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, and dreamed of lying tangled in her hair, a freedom that the gods who wanton in the air know not. But a cavalier had more than one woman to idolize. To Lucasta, going to the war, he wrote that he could not love her, dear, so much,.loved he not honor more.. Sad Ernest Dowson lamented things not being the same, in "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynara," about the shadow that fell last night between her lips and his. He was desolate, and sick of an old passion, and declared, bowing his head, that he had been faithful to her, in his fashion. Robbie Burns saw his love as a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June, and a melody, that’s sweetly played in tune. . .
The lonely ones saw differently. Emily Dickinson felt that the soul selects its own society, then shuts the door. Edward Arlington Robinson’s rich Richard Cory, though, put a bullet through his head..
Now for the hard life of the pioneers. Robert W. Service had the boys whooping it up one night, in a Malemute saloon, when in walked a miner, reeking of bear, and accused the owner, dangerous Dan McGraw, of being a hound of hell. Both men lost, and the winner was the lady who kissed the dying man and stole his poke, the lady that’s known as Lou. If you want to know more of the bad things done under the midnight sun and share the queer sights seen by the Northern Lights that will make your blood turn cold., turn to "The Cremation of Sam McGee," who escaped the cold by dying of fire.
Some poets loved war Virgil’s ethos was Arma virumque cano - I sing of arms and the men. Kipling glorified the time in India’s sunny clime, where his protagonist served her Majesty the Queen. But there was also e. e. cummings’s conscientious objector Olaf, more brave than me more blond than you, who found that there was some excrement he would not eat.
Countrymen. Edgar Guest claimed that it takes a heap of living to make a house a home.. Robert Frost believed that good fences make good neighbors, and that home is where they have to take you in (the full line, from "Death of a Hired Man," is longer). He wrote the one poem that everyone truly knows and quotes, in snatches: I have promises to keep.. whose woods these are I do not know....miles to go before I sleep. We were the land’s before the land was ours is a misquote, reversal of the correct line. T. S. Eliot knew that April is the cruelest month, and so stated at the start of "Waste Land," which ends with the end, Shantih, Shantih, Shantih, from the Upanishads. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is more fun and has witty rhymes: he does not want to ask what is it, and suggests we make a visit, to the women who walk to and fro, talking of...Michelangelo [quality people, no idle dishing here. Today’s nouveaux would call them dullsville.]
Finally aging and Death. Prufrock knew that he was growing old, and would wear his trousers rolled, and that he would put on white flannels and walk in the sand, on the beach, where he’d hear mermaids singing, each to each. Aaah...
Poets tend to die young, though, in wars. Prophetic Alan Seeger had a rendezvous with death, at some disputed barricade, when spring came back with rustling shades and apple blossoms filled the air. But he had his (here a slow iambic drumbeat refrain), when spring brought back blue days and fair. Aaah...Rupert Brooke asks that, if he should die, to think only this of him, that there’s some corner of a foreign land that is forever England. John McCrae speaks of the poppies that grow, between the crosses, row by row, in Flanders field. Joyce Kilmer becries the death of Rupert Brooks in alien land, across a troubled sea, little knowing that his own body, "so fair and young," would share the same WWI fate.
But let’s not get maudlin and be brash, with the help of Ogden Nash, who kept his women barefoot in the winter and pregnant in the summer. He himself celebrated the seasons by being alternately nudist and Buddhist. .A little talcum was always walcum, in case of heat rash, of course, and candy was dandy but liquor was quicquor.
As for William Schwenk Gilbert. I tend to get heavy-handed with snatches of his wit. No catlike thread here, for stealing upon our prey. To explain decline in crime during the summer, I’d reference the suggestion that the enterprising burglar, who has finished burgling and drops the life of crime, loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling and something something something country chime. Sir Joseph Potter, who polished the big brass door so faithfully that now he is the ruler of the Queen’s Navee, was mentioned occasionally, during discussions of office promotions.
. .
Let’s not close with carping, poetry is about life and dreams. Accentuate the positive. Some day we can discuss why Moon River, a poor poem of images strung together by Johnny Mercer, turned to music by Henry Mancini for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the songwriter’s 1961 Oscar winner sung by Andy Williams and nearly every other balladeer, is such a powerful dream maker. We’ll also do William Shakespeare, another image-maker of note.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:18 AM 
