Washing Day

 

from Washing Day

The Muses have turned gossips; they have lost

The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,

Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,

In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on,

Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,

Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire

By little whimpering boy, with rueful face --

Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day.

...

Then would I sit me down, and ponder much

Why washings were; sometimes, through hollow hole

Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft

The floating bubbles; little dreaming then

To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball

Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach

The sports of children and the toils of men.

Earth, air, and sky, the ocean hath its bubbles,

And verse is one of them--this most of all.

 

-Anna Laetitia Barbauld

 

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, essayist, literary critic, and a pioneering author of children's books. She was from a Dissenting family in the Midlands. 

 

The measure doesn't seem at all 'slip-shod' to me, but quite a solid blank verse. You can decide if you think she's 'prattling on'--I might say yes, but in a very amusing and ironic way. I've only quoted a quarter of the poem--the very beginning and the very end. You can find the entire poem here. The Montgolfier brothers were pioneers of flight by hot-air balloon.

 

I came on this because I recently finished reading Daisy Hay's Dinner With Joseph Johnson, which came out in 2022. Very good! Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) was an important left-wing publisher, also from a Dissenting background, who, in addition to first publishing Barbauld, was also the publisher of Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandfather), William Cowper, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson published early Wordsworth and Coleridge, and was William Blake's primary employer. (Though Blake published a lot of his own books himself.) Johnson was famous for his weekly dinners--Benjamin Franklin would show up, until the American Revolution got under way, and Franklin left England--and when Johnson was imprisoned for selling books the government didn't like in 1799, he continued the dinners in prison.

 

I don't think I'd ever heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld before, but part of the poem was quoted in the book--"Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day." and I decided I had to find the rest of it.

 

 

 

The Long Voyage (#poetry)

The Long Voyage

Not that the pines were darker there,

nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,

nor swifts more swift in summer air;

  it was my own country,

 

having its thuderclap of spring,

its long midsummer ripening,

its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,

  almost like any country,

 

yet being mine; its face, its speech,

its hills bent low within my reach,

its river birch and upland beech

  were mine, of my own country.

 

Now the dark waters at the bow

fold back, like earth against the plow;

foam brightens like the dogwood now

  at home, in my own country.

 

-Malcolm Cowley

 

One last bit of Malcolm Cowley and then maybe I'm done for now. Cowley's own country where he grew up was rural western Pennsylvania; his first book of poems was titled Blue Juniata for the left bank tributary of the Susquehanna.

 

This poem together with three others by Cowley first appeared in Poetry magazine of October 1938, along with others by Kenneth Fearing, Stephen Spender, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1938, Cowley was living on the east coast, in Connecticut.

Death in Fancy Dress

"Blackmail on a tremendous scale? I see. A dirty business."

The Spider is running a blackmail ring right across England. Jewels are being replaced with paste and victims are committing suicide. The newest target seems to be Hilary Feltham, a young girl with a mind of her own, living with her stepparents at Feltham Abbey. Philpotts of the Home Office needs somebody unofficial on site, and Tony Keith, a lawyer and a World War I veteran has a family connection to the place. Could he just?

Of course he can. He brings along his friend Jeremy Freyne who intends to marry Hilary, even though she's already got two other fiancés in the offing, one of whom is Philpott's official man on site, Arthur Dennis.

It's the other fiancé, Hilary's distant cousin Ralph Feltham, who's murdered on the night of a fancy dress ball.

Was it one of those suitors did the job? Or was someone associated with The Spider's gang?

The solution surprised me, which is always a good thing, but on the whole the setup both took too long and was confusing. It was a hundred pages in (out of a novel of 220 pages) before we got on to events, and even then I had to make a chart of the family relations. I don't know Anthony Gilbert (a pen name for Lucy Malleson) all that well, but is this one of the more highly regarded ones? It did get a British Crime Classics Library reprint. But her more famous detective Arthur Crook came later (and from what I've read, seems better.)

This edition also had two short stories featuring Inspector Field of London. I enjoyed those more than the novel itself.

Vintage Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Performer (Dancer)