Snail Trails – Brief poems by Ho Xuan Huong

Posted on February 24, 2025 by briefpoems

Ho Xuan Huong (胡春香; 1772–1822) was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty. The facts of her life are difficult to verify. It seems that she was born in Nghệ An Province and moved to Hanoi while still a child. Her father, Hồ Phi Diễn, died when she was a young girl. While there is some dispute as to her father, her mother, whose given name was Hà, remarried and became a second wife , or concubine, to a fresh husband, albeit a concubine of high rank. There are some indications that Ho Xuan Huong ran a tea shop where she composed, when asked, impromptu poems that were subtle and witty. She probably received an education in the classical literature of her time, as she was adept at using classical Chinese forms.

She is believed to have married twice as her poems refer to two different husbands: Vinh Tuong (a local official) and Tong Coc (a slightly higher level official). She was the second-rank wife of Tong Coc, – in other words, a concubine – a man she refers to as Mister Toad in her funeral elegy. Hers was a marital role that she clearly disdained (like the maid/but without the pay). However, her second marriage did not last long as her husband was executed for bribery just six months after the wedding. It is not known whether or not they had children. After his death, she made her living as a teacher and traveled widely throughout northern Vietnam. An official record of that time describes her as well-known as a talented woman of literature and politics. Little is known about her life, but she is the subject of many popular stories. One such story illustrates her sense of humour; upon falling over, it is said that she threw off her embarrassment, claiming: I stretch my arms to learn the height of the sky; I spread my legs to measure the earth, a typical example of the irreverent frank sexual humour, often consisting of double entendres, for which her poetry is noted.

She spent the last years of her life in a small house near the West Lake in Hanoi.

NÔM AND THE POETRY OF HO XUAN HUONG

Ho Xuan Huong has been called “the Queen of Nôm Poetry” and is considered one of the unique poets of Vietnamese literature. While many of her works have been lost, those poems of hers still in circulation are mainly oral Nôm poems. Rather than use Chinese, the language of the mandarin elite, she chose to write in Nôm, a form of writing system that represented not only Vietnamese speech but also the aphorisms and speech habits of the common people. Nôm assigns Vietnamese phonemes to traditional Chinese characters, but according to John Balaban, other Chinese characters are retained for semantic value, so that Nôm uses about twice as many characters as Chinese. Examples of the poems in Nôm are shown above some of the translations below.

As for her subject matter, most of her poems are written from a female, and what may nowadays be called a feminist, perspective. Writing in a society dominated by men, Ho’s poetry, using deceptively simple images, presents explicit and humorous portrayals of sexual desire, women’s bodies, power relations in a patriarchal society, and the stifling nature of tradition. She writes continually about the corruption of politicians (her second husband was executed for bribery), the decadence of Buddhist monks, the difficulties and degradations of life as a concubine, the inferior status of woman and the desire for love. She also wrote about loneliness and landscape.

However, what accounts for the success and endurance of her poetry is her wicked sense of humour, reflected in a constant use of scurrilous puns or double entendres. Pat Valdata, in her essay Reading Between the Lines: Ho Xuan Huong, the Queen of Nôm Poetry, explains this clearly: The most notable and notorious aspect of Ho Xuan Huong’s work is the sexual innuendo that until recently made her poems too racy for “good girls” to read. Probably her most famous poem is “Jackfruit”:

My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:
my skin is coarse, my meat is thick.
Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick.
Caress me and sap will slicken your hands.

Balaban’s translation above shows on a literal sense the practice of impaling a jackfruit on a stick to ripen it, but it is impossible to read this poem without seeing the clear reference to the sexual act in the final two lines. Many of her poems, including some of the brief poems printed below, indulge in a similar “smutty” innuendo. (Consider, for example, Male Member.) While a modern reader may not be upset by such double-edged humour, many of her readers in the past may have been shocked by her daring to question, in such a defiant and devious way, the norms of a patriarchal society. It is interesting to note that before the 1960’s, although her work was well known in Vietnam, it did not appear on the school curriculum, as it was considered too vulgar by male critics.

TRANSLATING HO XUAN HUONG

The earliest surviving hand-copied volume of the poems of Ho Xuan Huong was commissioned in 1893 by a Frenchman, Antony Landes. The earliest printed collection of her poems was produced in 1909. In 1968 she reached a wider audience when her poetry was translated into French by Maurice Durand. In 1975 some of her poems appeared in a collection of Vietnamese poetry published by Knopf. But it was the publication in 2000 of John Balaban’s book-length translation, Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, that brought her work to the attention of English-speaking readers. Balaban spent ten years translating the forty-nine poems collected in the book. The cover (see right) depicts a bare-breasted woman, hiding her face behind a gong. Introducing her work John Balaban writes that for her erotic attitudes, Hồ Xuân Hương turned to the common wisdom alive in peasant folk poetry and proverbs, and that common people […] could hear in her verse echoes of their folk poetry, proverbs, and village common sense. The book features a “tri-graphic” presentation of English translations alongside both the modern Romanized Vietnamese alphabet and the original nearly extinct ideographic Nôm script, the hand-drawn calligraphy in which Hồ Xuân Hương originally wrote her poems. Some of these are included below.

These translations of Ho Xuan Huong have produced some disputes. The poet Linh Dinh attacked John Balaban in a blog post “Me So Horny” for inaccuracies of scholarship. Linh Dinh wrote that legends, myths, lies and general bullshit abound in Vietnam and he accused Balaban of poor ethnographic practices. He also mocked Balaban’s pronunciation of Vietnamese: When my wife and I heard him perform some Vietnamese poems in North Carolina in 2004, we couldn’t understand, literally, a single word. However, an anonymous contributor to the post dissented: he has literally brought Vietnamese literature to a global stage (do you know how much attention “Spring Essence” has received?) as well as starting a movement to preserve the dying “Nom” script. As well as criticizing the Balaban translations, Linh Dinh also includes his own translations of eight of the poems.

Further translations, this time by Marilyn Chin’s appeared in 2008 issue of Poetry. When I came across Ho Xuan Huong’s lyrics, I immediately recognized the structure of the Chinese quatrain—four-lined and eight-lined poems; seven-character lines; parallelism; reduplication of characters for sonic emphasis or refrain; set internal and external rhyme and tonal patterns. I recognized the well-worn symbols—the ripe fruit and the dumpling representing the woman’s body. Five of her translations appear on the Poetry Foundation site. These produced an immediate backlash from John Balaban’s publisher, Joseph Bednarik of the Copper Canyon Press, who wrote to the editor of Poetry: I don’t see how Chin’s versions add depth or nuance to the work. Frankly, they read like someone noodling around in the margins of someone else’s book. (Poetry, June 2008). Responding in the same issue, Chin accused the publisher of racism and cultural imperialism: Perhaps Bednarik and his press believe that the white male patriarchy must forever colonize the translation of Asian poetry. (Poetry, June 2008). Entering the fray, John Balaban criticized her translations, accusing her, in turn of cultural imperialism, given Vietnam’s troubled ancient and recent history with China. (Poetry, July/August 2008).

The following year, after seeing Marilyn Chin’s translations in the April issue of Poetry, Balaban’s publisher, Joseph Bednarik, wrote to the editor: “I don’t see how Chin’s versions add depth or nuance to the work. Frankly, they read like someone noodling around in the margins of someone else’s book” (Poetry, June 2008). In her response in the same issue, Chin then accused Bednarik of racism and cultural imperialism: “Perhaps Bednarik and his press believe that the white male patriarchy must forever colonize the translation of Asian poetry” (Poetry, June 2008). This response prompted Balaban to write his own letter critical of her translations and accusing her of cultural imperialism as well “[g]iven Vietnam’s troubled ancient and recent history with China” (Poetry, July/August 2008)

As Pat Valdata says, on her post on The Mezzo Cammin site: One can’t help but imagine that Ho Xuan Huong would be delighted to know that her work still inspires heated debate.

Other translators have proved less contentious. Mỹ Ngọc Tô writes: When I discovered her work several years ago, I immediately felt in kinship with the feminine strength, eroticism, wisdom, and serenity of her voice. After reading existing English translations, I wanted to create versions guided by my own understanding of and love for the Vietnamese language.

On The HyperTexts site, which he curates, Michael R Burch provides what he modestly calls a loose translation/interpretation of twelve poems by Ho Xuan Huong. Her verse, he writes, replete with nods, winks, sexual innuendo and a rich eroticism, was shocking to many readers of her day and will probably remain so to some of ours. Huong has been described as “the candid voice of a liberal female in a male-dominated society.” Her output has been called “coy, often bawdy lyrics.” I would add “suggestive to graphic.” More of his own original poetry and more of what he calls “loose translations” of other poets are available on the Michael R. Burch post on this blog.

I have included a variety of translations below without selecting a favourite. Should you wish to discuss these or to select a favourite translator, use the comment box below.

Brief Poems by Ho Xuan Huong

詠屋𧋆

博媄生𫥨分屋𧋆
𣎀𣈜粦𨀎盎𦹵灰
君子固傷辰扑𧞣
吀停𪭟𢭴魯𦟹碎

River Snail

Fate and my parents shaped me like a snail,
day and night wandering marsh weeds that smell foul.
Kind sir, if you want me, open my door.
But please don’t poke up into my tail.

John Balaban

***

Snail

Mother and father gave birth to a snail
Night and day I crawl in smelly weeds
Dear prince, if you love me, unfasten my door
Stop, don’t poke your finger up my tail!

Marylin Chin

***

The Snail

My parents have brought forth a snail,
Night and day among the smelly grass.
If you love me, peel off my shell,
Don’t wiggle my little hole, please.

Linh Dinh

***

The Snail

My parents produced a snail,
Night and day it slithers through slimy grass.
If you love me, remove my shell,
But please don’t jiggle my little hole!

Michael R. Burch

餅㵢

身㛪辰𤽸分㛪𧷺
𠤩浽𠀧沉買渃𡽫
硍湼默油𢬣几揑
𦓡㛪刎𡨹𬌓𢚸𣘈

The Floating Cake

My body is white; my fate, softly rounded,
rising and sinking like mountains in streams.
Whatever way hands may shape me,
at center my heart is red and true.

John Balaban

***

Floating Sweet Dumpling

My body is powdery white and round
I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond
The hand that kneads me is hard and rough
You can’t destroy my true red heart

Marylin Chin

***

Floating Sweet Dumpling

My powdered body is white and round.
Now I bob. Now I sink.
The hand that kneads me may be rough,
But my heart at the center remains untouched.

Michael R. Burch

***

The cake that drifts in water

My body is both white and round
In water I may sink or swim.
The hand that kneads me may be rough—
I still shall keep my true-red heart.

Huynh Sanh Thong

***

Sweet Rice Ball, Afloat

My body is both white and round
Rising, then sinking in these mountain waters
I’ll rip apart despite men’s molding hands
Nonetheless, my heart remains red and pure

Mỹ Ngọc Tô

菓󰊳

身㛪如菓󰊳𨕭𣘃
䏧奴芻仕脢奴𠫅
君子固腰辰㨂𱣳
吀停緍𢱖澦𫥨𢬣

Jackfruit

My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:
my skin is coarse, my meat is thick.

Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick.
Caress me and sap will slicken your hands.

John Balaban

***

The Jackfruit

My body is like a jackfruit on a branch,
With a rugged skin and thick flesh,
But if it pleases you, drive the stake.
Don’t just fondle, or the sap
Will stain your fingers.

Linh Dinh

***

Jackfruit

My body is like a jackfruit swinging on a tree
My skin is rough, my pulp is thick
Dear prince, if you want me pierce me upon your stick
Don’t squeeze, I’ll ooze and stain your hands

Marylin Chin

***

The Breadfruit or Jackfruit

My body’s like a breadfruit ripening on a tree:
My skin coarse, my pulp thick.
My lord, if you want me, pierce me with your stick,
But don’t squeeze or the sap will sully your hands!

Michael R. Burch

***

The Jackfruit

I am like a jackfruit on the tree.
To taste you must plug me quick, while fresh:
the skin rough, the pulp thick, yes,
but oh, I warn you against touching —
the rich juice will gush and stain your hands

Nguyen Ngoc Bich

***

Jackfruit

I swell like a late summer jackfruit.
My skin roughens, the pulp of my body so thick.
I wait to be speared and wanted.
If squeezed, I’ll leave my colour on your hands.

Natalie Linh Bolderston

𨔈花

㐌啐𨔈花沛固𨅹
𨅹𨖲𠤆礒痗昌
梗羅梗俸援𢫈𢪱
葻𠃩葻撑底論漂

Picking Flowers

If you want to pick flowers, you have to hike.
Climbing up, don’t worry about your weary bones.
Pluck the low branches, pull down the high.
Enjoy alike the spent blossoms, the tight bubs.

John Balaban

***

Wasps

Where and why are you wandering, foolish wasps?
Come, your big sister will teach you to compose!
Silly baby wasps suckle from rotting stamens;
Horny ewes butt fences when there’s freedom in the gaps.

Michael R. Burch

***

Wasps

Where are you wandering to, little fools
Come, big sister will teach you how to write verse
Itchy little wasps sucking rotting flowers
Horny baby lambkins butting gaps in the fence

Marylin Chin

***

詠陽物

博媄生𫥨本拯𢤞
最雖空眜𠓇欣畑
頭隊𥶄䏧𤍶䉅𧺃
𨉞㧅備磾𢷀韜顛

Male Member

New born, it wasn’t so vile. But, now, at night,
even blind it flares brighter than any lamp.

Soldierlike, it sports a reddish leather hat,
Musket balls sagging the bag down below.

John Balaban

***

To a Couple of Students Who Were Teasing Her

Where are you going, my dear little greenhorns?
Here, I’ll teach you how to turn a verse or two
Young drones sucking at withered flowers,
Little goats brushing horns against a fence.

Marylin Chin

***

New Year Couplet

On the thirtieth night, we seal the sky and soil against demons,
then unlatch the first morning, let every woman gather spring in her arms.

Natalie Linh Bolderston

***

Screw You!

Screw the rule that makes you share a man!
You slave like maids but without pay.

Michael R. Burch

LINKS

Life and Poetry

John Balaban on the work of Ho Xuan Huong

Wikipedia page on Ho Xuan Huong

Pat Valdata on the work of Ho Xuan Huong

Van Hoa Pham on femininity in the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong

“Me So Horny”: Linh Dinh on translations of Ho Xuan Huong

A brief biography and photo gallery on the My Poetic Side site

Poems

49 poems in the original language with translations by John Balaban

16 poems on the All Poetry site

14 poems on the My Poetic site

12 poems on the Hypertexts site translated by Michael R. Burch

5 poems on Poetry Foundation translated by Marylin Chin

2 poems translated by Natalie Linh Bolderston

2 poems translated by Mỹ Ngọc Tô

The Copper Canyon Press page on Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong

An oil painting
of Hồ Xuân Hương
by Đặng Quý Khoa.

Dead Leaves – Brief poems by Alden Nowlan

Posted on January 13, 2025 by briefpoems

Alden Nowlan (1933–1983) was one of Canada’s leading literary figures, a poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright. He was born in the village of Stanley, Nova Scotia, (adjacent to Mosherville, and close to the small town of Windsor) on January 25th, 1933 in what he often described as the worst years of the Depression. He was the first child of Grace (née Reese) and Freeman Lawrence Nowlan. Freeman was 28 and Grace just 14. Child brides, Alden Nowlan once wrote, weren’t terribly rare in Nova Scotia in those days. He wrote about that pregnancy in his poem It’s Good To Be Here. The family lived in a house without central heating, electricity, telephone or plumbing. He recalled having survived an almost incredibly loveless environment during my childhood and claimed I would have been happier on a desert island because there would have been no one around to torment me. Differences in Freeman’s and Grace’s age, and in their temperaments, led to a breakdown in their marriage shortly after the birth of a second child, a daughter, Harriet. Grace took the children and went to live with her mother in the adjoining village of Mosherville. When her mother died in 1940, Grace, left her children with Freeman who brought in his mother to help look after them. Alden rarely saw Grace after that and, as an adult, would claim that she was dead. He was extremely fond of his doting paternal grandmother, Emma, who encouraged his love of reading; but she died in 1947. He never went beyond grade four in school as his family discouraged education as a waste of time. Aged fourteen, he went to work in the village sawmill and, later, aged sixteen, he discovered the library in the nearby town of Windsor, which enabled him to broaden his keen interest in reading. I wrote (as I read) in secret.…My father would as soon have seen me wear lipstick. At one stage he spent several months in a Dartmouth psychiatric hospital (the same hospital in which Elizabeth Bishop’s mother had lived her final years.) He would eventually find jobs as a pulp-cutter, night watchman and worker for the provincial Department of Highways in Nova Scotia. (One of his books of poetry, The Mysterious Naked Man (1969), includes Two Poems for the Nova Scotia Department of Highways.)

In March 1952, at the age of nineteen, he left Nova Scotia, having sent a phoney resume (in which he gave himself a high school education and one year of newspaper experience) to a newspaper in Hartland, New Brunswick, a town sixty miles upriver from Fredericton. This became his home for the next eleven years. He worked as a journalist for the Hartland newspaper, the Observer. For a brief time, while living there, he managed a country and western band, George Shaw and the Green Valley Ranch Boys. (The main problem with the band was keeping them sober enough to play, he once asserted, they were good too.) While working in Hartland, he met Claudine Meehan (née Orser) a Linotype operator at the Observer and her young son, Johnnie. They married in 1963 and Nowlan adopted her son. That marriage proved durable and inspirational throughout the rest of his life. His efforts to get his poems published put him in touch with Fred Cogswell, a poet who edited the University of New Brunswick’s literary journal, The Fiddlehead and who regularly published his poems. In 1958 Cogswell published Nowlan’s first collection, The Rose and the Puritan. After the publication of three chapbooks, he had two collections published by Toronto presses: Under the Ice (1961) and The Things Which Are (1962).

In the summer of 1963 he, Claudine, and Johnnie moved to Saint John, where Alden Nowlan had found a job as a reporter for the Telegraph-Journal . He was soon promoted to the position of provincial editor and then night news editor. Although continuing to work in journalism, his lifestyle in Saint John was different. I’ve avoided meetings of all kinds the way I avoid poison ivy ever since I got out of Hartland, where I had more than enough meetings to last a lifetime. In 1966, Nowlan was diagnosed with a cancer of the thyroid. After three surgeries and radiation treatment, his health began to improve. The surgery removed his thyroid and other glands and left him with scars that he grew a distinctive beard to hide. Subsequently a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to pursue full-time writing and even travel with his family to England and Ireland. His next collection, Bread, Wine and Salt (1967) published by Toronto publisher Clarke, Irwin, won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry.

While he was in hospital he lobbied to be considered for the University of New Brunswick’s new writer-in-residence position which he was offered in 1968. He and his family moved to Fredericton after the university provided him with a small house in the west edge of the campus on Windsor Street. (He called it Windsor Castle, and today this simple building is now officially called the Alden Nowlan House.) Although he continued to write for the Telegraph-Journal and assorted magazines, his reliance on journalism for his income ended. Supported by his now-regular publisher, Clarke, Irwin, he produced further poetry collections: The Mysterious Naked Man (1969) and Between Tears and Laughter (1971). He also produced a book of short fiction, Miracle at Indian River (1968) and Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien (1973), a semi-autobiographical novel. He collaborated with theatre director Walter Learning on a play Frankenstein (1974) which would be followed in succeeding years by other plays for stage and for radio. He also indulged a humorous predilection when he co-founded The Flat Earth Society of Canada and claimed that a friend of his, Jim Stewart, was a a descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the rightful heir to the British Throne. After his first term as writer-in-residence expired in 1971 the university, with the assistance of the provincial government, continued to renew the post and awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 1973 Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia awarded him an honorary degree. In 1977 his collection Smoked Glass was published and in 1982 another collection I Might Not Tell Everybody This proved equally successful.

However, although his years in Fredericton were very productive, he was beset by personal struggles with what he called Nancy Whiskey, Colonel Booze and our brother Al Cohol. His excessive weight, his smoking, and his night-time drinking had for years depressed his breathing, making sleep fitful. One night, at home, on June 11th 1983, he collapsed in the shower that he sometimes took to relieve his breathing difficulties. An ambulance was summoned and, putting on old and tattered clothes, he walked unaided to the ambulance. However he slipped into a coma and the re-routed blood vessels in his neck made it difficult to revive him. He remained in a coma until he died of severe emphysema on 27 June at the age of fifty.

His funeral was held in the tiny Edwin Jacob chapel at the University of New Brunswick. Afterwards, in the Forest Hill Cemetery, there was a graveside service complete with bagpipers, his friend Jim Stewart’s flute (played and then broken so the instrument would not sound another note), and friends and family sharing a cup of Irish whiskey before burying him shovelful by shovelful until the grave was filled. The bottle of whiskey, with some drink still included, was thrown into the grave. His tombstone, in the Forest Hill Cemetery, has these words carved at the base:

REST LIGHTLY ON HIM O EARTH
HE LOVED YOU SO

THE POETRY OF ALDEN NOWLAN

Robert Bly, writing two decades after Alden Nowlan’s death, called him the greatest Canadian poet of the twentieth century. While I may not necessarily concur, evaluation being an evolving aspiration, I can see the rationale behind such a statement. Although he has often being dismissed or categorizedas a regional writer, a poet of the rural Maritimes, I tend to agree with W. J. Keith who argues he is just as clearly one of those authors who, like such distinguished predecessors as Thomas Hardy or Robert Frost or Emily Bronte or William Faulkner, transcend the limits of their regionalism to become writers of national and even international significance. He may have been too prolific, too expansive and too autobiographical but he managed to transcend a variety of influences from Robert Lowell to Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to forge his own conversational and anecdotal style that makes reading him, even in bulk, an enjoyable adventure. He once claimed that if truck drivers read poetry, mine will be the poetry they’ll read. While such a statement might suggest his work was simplified or unsophisticated, that would be to misread his often amazing mastery of tone, register and loose poetic forms. While he could often be sentimental, he had a wonderful ability to undercut that sentimentality with irony and humorous self-deprecation. Even in the brief poems included below, that humorous ingenuity is evident.

While I haven’t seen it noted elsewhere, I see a very loose similarity with the work of American writer Raymond Carver. While Carver is famed for the quality of his short stories (I have no wish, here, to consider the role of his editor, Gordon Lish) he was also a poet. And his poetry, like that of Alden Nowlan, dealt with the marginalized in his community as well as describing his own struggles with illness. What Edna Longley said of Carver’s poetry could also be applied to some of the poems of Alden Nowlan: all his writing tends toward dramatic monologue, present-tense soliloquy that wears the past like a hairshirt. While Nowlan’s fiction is not nearly as polished as that of Carver, it is eminently readable. He may be the lesser short-story writer but he is, in my view, the better poet. In any event, the comparison is one worth pursuing.

Brief Poems by Alden Nowlan

Refuge at Eight

Darkness, the smell of earth, the smell of apples,
the cellar swallowed me, I dread I died,
saw both blind parents mad with guilt and sorrow,
my ghost sardonic. Finally I cried.

***

Background

Where I come from, the kick of love
recalls the laughter in the throats
of boys who knocked the privy down
before the teacher could get out.

***

The Homecoming

They’d never been so long apart before.
So they weren’t sure of what to say. He said,
I guess there’s not much news, the kids are well.
She nodded. Shyly, they went up to bed.

***

April in New Brunswick

Spring is distrusted here, for it deceives—
snow melts upon the land, uncovering
last fall’s dead leaves.

****

The Old People

“Next summer if I live….” they say,
the old people, not with dismay,
for they might add: “I’ll come again
tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain.”

***

Strange Flowers

These flowers are beautiful enough.
Soft-eyed and moist
on their wiry bush.

But I don’t know their name…
and some bushes burn!

Sheepish, I stand
at the fence and look.

***

The Chopper

His axe blade nearing
the red pine’s heart,

the chopper strikes harder,
doesn’t hear or see

the hysterical squirrel
on the topmost limb

running nowhere and back
faster and faster.

***

Three Choices

Having been flogged with belts, not short of bleeding,
badgered by books and flayed by tongues like nettles,
I had three choices: madness, death or verse,
each of which asks more questions than it settles.

***

The Masks Of Love

I come in from a walk
With you
And they ask me
If it is raining.

I didn’t notice
But I’ll have to give them
The right answer
Or they’ll think I’m crazy.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

My wife bursts into the room
where I’m writing well
of my love for her

and because now
the poem is lost

I silently curse her.

***

The Bhikku

I ask for nothing
……..he tells me, except
…………….to be freed from
all desire.
……..No wonder
…………….his voice shakes:
even Lucifer’s
……..desire was less
…………….insatiable than that.

***

Apology

I talk too much
but the manner
of your listening
calls the words
out of me.
You say almost
nothing. Yet
there would be
only silence
if you were not here.

***

The Married Man’s Poem

Five years married
and he has never once
wished he dared kill her,
…………………………..which means
they’re happy enough.
But it isn’t love.

***

Plea

Knock so I’ll know
you’re smiling.
Do not climb the stairs
until you hear me laugh.
Friend, it is night
In my soul.
…………….I hear
a fingernail
scraping glass.

***

Unfinished Poem

Bring me black slippers.
The corpse would dance.

***

He has five senses
plus desire.

He is separate
and alone.

He knows about time
and takes up space.|

One day he will die.

He answers to my name.

LINKS

Biography

New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia entry on Alden Nowlan

The My New Brunswick entry on Alden Nowlan

Canadian Encyclopedia entry on Alden Nowlan

If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden Nowlan by Patrick Toner (Goose Lane Editions, 2000) on the Internet Archive

One Heart, One Way: Alden Nowlan, A Writer’s Life by Greg Cook (Pottersfield Press, 2003) on the Internet Archive

A memoir of Alden Nowlan by Greg Cook

Thomas R. Smith on Alden Nowlan and poverty

Wikipedia entry on Alden Nolan

Poems

The Mysterious Naked Man (1969) on the Internet Archive

Between Tears and Laughter (1971) on the Internet Archive

What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (1993) on the internet Archive

7 poems on the All Poetry site

7 poems on the Poem Hunter site

5 poems on the My Poetic Side site

Fiction

Miracle at Indian River (1968) on the Internet Archive

Will Ye Let the Mummers In (1984) on the Internet Archive

The Wanton Troopers: A Novel (1988) on the Internet Archive

Interviews

An interview by Corinne Shriver Wasilewski for the Fiddlehead Magazine

David Adams Richards on interviewing Alden Nolan

Kevin Courrier interviews Alden Nowlan (1982)

Video

Alden Nowlan discusses and reads his poems

New Brunswick Greats on Alden Nowlan

Critique

Poet’s Progress: The Development of Alden Nowlan’s Poetry by Michael Brian Oliver

The Poetry of Alden Nowlan: a Critical Reassessment by W. J. Keith

Michael Dennis Reviews Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan

Bibliography

Selected bibliography of works by Alden Nowlan

Mustard and Vinegar – Brief Poems by Thomas Bastard

Posted on November 24, 2024 by briefpoems

Rev. Thomas Bastard (1566 -1618) was an Elizabethan poet and clergyman renowned for his English-language epigrams. He was born in Blandford, Dorchester and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he was made a perpetual fellow in 1588. In 1590 he earned a B.A. but in 1591 his fellowship was retracted on charges of libel, after he was accused of authoring the anonymous tract An Admonition to the City of Oxford, which noted the sexual misdeeds of well-known members of the community. Although he disavowed authorship of the tract, the expulsion stood.

According to Anthony à Wood, Bastard, being much guilty of the vices belonging to poets and given to libelling, was in a manner forced to leave his fellowship in 1591. So that for the present being put to his shifts, he was not long after made chaplain to Thomas, earl of Suffolk, lord treasurer of England. Despite his difficulties with Oxford University, he received an M. A. in 1606. In his sermons he expressed his appreciation to the lord treasurer and his wife who enabled him to became vicar of Beer Regis and rector of Amour or Hamer, in his native county. It appears that he had a wife whom he married in 1594 at St Marys, Bere Regis and went on to have a small family. It was not a happy marriage as he accused his wife of being no help-meet. It also seems that he was married three times.

He published his Chrestoleros: Seven bookes of epigrames written by T. B. in 1598. A critic of the day was not impressed by this collection of over three hundred poems: I send you the epigrams which I often told you of. The author is Bastard, who has the name of a very lively wit, but it does not lie this way; for in these epigrams, he botches up his verse with variations, and his conceits so run upon his poverty that his wit is rather to be pitied than commended. In 1615 he published 2 prose collections: Five Sermons and Twelve Sermons.

His latter years were unhappy as he succumbed to mental illness and bankruptcy and ended his days in a debtors’ prison. This poet and preacher being towards his latter end crazed, and thereupon brought into debt, was at length committed to the prison in Allhallows parish, in Dorchester, where, dying very obscurely and in a mean condition, was buried in the churchyard belonging to that parish on 19 April 1618, leaving behind him many memorials of his wit and drollery. He was fifty-two years old.

THE EPIGRAMS OF THOMAS BASTARD

Let me be clear. Although epigrams in Elizabethan times could be fascinating – consider the Latin epigrams of Thomas Campion and the Welsh poet, John Owen – they could also be as practised as those of Sir John Harington and as polished as those of Sir Walter Raleigh and as witty as those of George Turberville. Sometimes, however they were merely serviceable, as in the work of Sir John Davies. The work of Thomas Bastard belongs to this latter category. The quality of the epigrams is not of the first order and rarely of the second order. I tend to agree with Grossart: there be nothing great or brilliant or touched of genius in these Epigrams. They were not meant to be so. … the book is nevertheless worthy of revival as an example of our earlier literature in this department. … the title Chrestoleros (formed from the Greek word for useful, good of its kind, serviceable and another Greek word for silly talk, nonsense…) defines the self-elected limits of its author.

Others, particularly his contemporaries, have a more benign view. The antiquary Anthony à Wood (1632-1635) was full of praise: He was a most excellent epigrammatist, and being always ready to versify upon any subject, did not let nothing material escape his fancy, as his compositions running through several hands in MS shew. A later antiquary Thomas Park (1759–1834) endorsed the praise of Wood: Many of them contain much shrewd satire, and fully serve to justify Wood’s commendation of the author’s ingenuity. There is certainly ingenuity and wit in many of the epigrams, but they lack polish, rhythmic consistency and – even though many are couplets, triplets or quatrains – they lack concision. However they offer an interesting insight into the scope and range of the Elizabethan epigram.

I have taken some limited liberties with the text and modernised the spelling.

Brief Poems by Thomas Bastard

Me thinks some curious reader, I hear say,
What epigrams in english? tis not fit.
My book is plain, and would have if it may,
An english reader but a latin wit.

***

Zulus now stinks, cold, wan and withered,
How shall one know when Zulus is dead?

***

Caluus has hair neither on head or brow,
Yet he thanks God for wit he has enow,
The wit may stand although the hair do fall
’Tis true, but Caluus had no wit at all!

***

They who read Horace, Virgil and the rest
Of ancient poets, all new wits detest;
And say O times, what happy wits were then;
I say, O fools, rather what happy men.

***

Monsters of men are many now a day,
Which still like Vultures on the dead do prey,
And as the Phoenix does in wonder wise,
So they, but out of others ashes rise.

***

Thy beard is long: better it would thee fit,
To have a shorter beard and longer wit.

***

Reader if Heywood livéd now again
Whom time of life had not of praise bereaved,
If he would write, I could express his vain,
Thus he would write, or else I am deceived.

***

Seuerus calls me idle, I confess;
But who can work upon my idleness.

***

Reader I grant I do not keep the laws
Of rhyming in my verse: but I have cause:
I turn the pleasure of the end sometimes
Lest he that likes them should not call them rhymes.

***

Here lies Dick Pinner, O ungentle death,
Why didst thou rob Dick Pinner of his breath?
For living, he by scraping of a pin
Made better dust than thou hast made of him.

bastard poems

Had I my wish contented I should be
Though neither rich nor better than you see.
For ’tis not wealth nor honour that I crave,
But a short life, reader, and a long grave.

***

Septimius does excellent for dainty cheer,
His diet is old mutton and new beer,
And sugared mustard and sweet vinegar.

***

Neighbours I marvel much to see your strife,
Since ye are so well matched, so like of life,
A most vile husband, a most wicked wife.

***

Content feeds not one glory, nor one pelf,
Content can be contented with herself.

***

Sextus, upon a spleen, did rashly swear,
That no new fashion he would ever wear,
He was forsworn for see what did ensue,
He wore the old, till the old was the new.

***

Age is deformed, youth unkind,
We scorn their bodies, they our mind.

***

Faustina has a spot upon her face,
Mixed with sweet beauty making for her grace,
By what sweet influence it was begot,
I know not, but it is a spotless spot.

***

How dearly does the simple husband buy
His wife’s defect of will when she doth die?
Better in death by will to let her give,
Than let her have her will while she doth live.

***

Martial in Rome full thirty years had spent,
Then went he home, was not that banishment?

LINKS

POEMS

Full text of The Poems English and Latin of the Rev. Thomas Bastard: M.A. edited by ‎Alexander Balloch Grosart

Chrestoleros, Seven bookes of epigrames written by T.B. (1598)

19 poems on the Poetry Foundation site

4 poems on the Earful of Cider site

BIOGRAPHY

Thomas Bastard – Penny’s poetry pages Wiki

Thomas Bastard – Wikipedia page

Ragwort – Brief poems by Frances Cornford

Posted on November 13, 2024 by briefpoems

Frances Cornford (30 March 1886 – 19 August 1960) an English poet, was a member of the famous Darwin-Wedgewood family. She was born in Cambridge, the only child of botanist Sir Francis Darwin and his second wife, Ellen Wordsworth Crofts. Frances Darwin was a granddaughter of the British naturalist Charles Darwin. She spent her formative years in Cambridge where she was educated privately, almost exclusively at her home, and grew up among a wide social network of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Her mother died when she was seventeen; she and her father moved for a short time to London, but soon returned to Cambridge where Frances spent most of the rest of her life. As her father had a similar Christian name – Francis – she came to be called “FCD”, the C referring to Crofts, her mother’s maiden name. After her marriage, in 1909, to the classicist and fellow poet Francis Cornford, a fellow of Trinity College and afterwards Laurence professor of ancient philosophy at Cambridge, she became known as “FCC”. They had five children together – two girls and three boys.

She was twenty-eight when World War 1 broke out in August of 1914. She was a friend of the English poet Rupert Brooke and, when he went to war in 1914, they continued to correspond. A letter written to her from the Front reads: I have to report that your sleeping-bag was heavily shelled & demolished by fire in Antwerp last week. Awfly sorry. We all pay our little bit, these days. After his death from blood-poisoning in 1915 she wrote the brief elegy included below. Another interesting poem, Féri Bekassy was written when she received news of the death of her friend Ferenc Békássy, a Hungarian scholar and poet who had entered Cambridge in 1911, and later left England and his Cambridge friends to join the Austro-Hungarian army. He was killed in action four days after arriving at the Eastern Front on June 22, 1915.

Frances Darwin started writing poetry at sixteen. Her first collection, The Holtbury Idyll appeared in 1908 and included a short piece about the sight of a fat woman walking in a field, viewed from a train. The poem, To A Fat Lady Seen from the Train, (see below) became her most anthologized and most controversial poem. A second collection Poems was published in 1910. One of her early books was a ‘morality’ play, Death and the Princess (1912). Further poetry collections included Spring Morning (1915), Autumn Midnight (1923), and Different Days (1928). Mountains and Molehills (1935) was illustrated with woodcuts by her cousin, the artist Gwen Raverat. In 1944 she collaborated with Esther Polianowsky Salaman to translate Poems from the Russian. Travelling Home (1948), was to be her last original collection. In 1954 her Collected Poems was the official choice of the Poetry Book Society. By that stage her reputation had grown sufficiently for her to be seen as a distinguished minor poet of the Georgian period. In 1959 she was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in recognition of her life’s work. On a Calm Shore, with prints by her son Christopher, was published in 1960 and was Frances Cornford’s last book of poetry. She wrote the preface shortly before her death, but did not live to see its release.

Frances Cornford died of heart failure at her home, 10 Millington Road, Cambridge, on 19 August 1960. She was 74 years old. She was predeceased by her son, John Cornford (1915–1936), a poet and Communist who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. She was also predeceased by her husband, Francis, who was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium on 6 January 1943. She was buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, formerly known as the burial ground for the parish of St Giles and St Peter’s. This is where many of the academics and non-conformists of Cambridge ended up during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Her father, Sir Francis Darwin, shares the grave. (Her mother Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, née Crofts, is buried in St. Andrews Church’s churchyard in Girton, Cambridgeshire.) The gravestone (see right) was designed by the famous English sculptor and stone-mason, Eric Gill. This memorial was designed and made after the death of Francis Darwin. The inscription for Frances Cornford was added after Gill’s death.

TO A FAT LADY SEEN FROM THE TRAIN

Frances Cornford’s To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train was published in 1908 in her first collection, The Holtbury Idyll. Here is the short text:

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?

As Frank Hudson explains: no one considers Cornford an Imagist, and this poem was written and published before other pioneering Imagist train poems like Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” or Sandburg’s “Limited.” But in its straightforward immediate language, specific color imagery, compression, and avoidance of sentimental emotional language, it follows the intent of those later free-verse Imagist poems. As well as being her most-popular and most anthologized poem, it is also her most controversial suffering accusations of cruelty and insensitivity, what might be called “fat-shaming” today. It has also been called offensive and moralising.

Frank Hudson also explains the controversy: This short poem in the tricky triolet form is as catchy as a nursery rhyme and is fairly well known in Cornford’s native Great Britain. Besides that earworm quality, the poem is weird in its shocking and concise frankness of observation, even more so when one considers it was published in 1910, pre-Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. It seems to have raised a little ruckus in its time too, as A. E. Housman and G. K. Chesterton both wrote parodies of it.

This is the Housman parody entitled O Why Do You Walk:

O why do you walk through the fields in boots,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody shoots,
Why do you walk through the fields in boots,
When the grass is soft as the breast of coots
And shivering-sweet to the touch?

Commenting on this parody Terese Coe writes: The Cornford triolet has a mean-spiritedness that puts me off. She sees the woman from a passing train and immediately knows the “fat white woman” is unloved. That’s asking too much of my suspension of disbelief .. There’s a simple answer to Cornford’s question. The poor woman wore gloves to prevent a nettle rash, possibly an allergic rash. (She was no doubt a precursor of Michael Jackson.)

Chesterton, who was famously fat, seemed upset by the line O fat white woman whom nobody loves and entitled his response The Fat Lady Answers, sometimes entitled The Fat White Woman Speaks:-

Why do you rush through the field in trains,
Guessing so much and so much.
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves as such?

And how the devil can you be so sure?
Guessing so much and so much.
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?

My own view is that the satire and the parody is weakened by the second stanza which I see as redundant.

Interestingly, the first lines of this poem were spoken by a character in Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Murder is Easy which, in time, led to a recipe for a White Lady or Dame Blanche (which is a Belgian ice cream sundae) based on the poem and on the novel, by the food writer Taryn Nicole.

THE POETRY OF FRANCES CORNFORD

Ragwort, the title of the first poem below and the illustration on this site, is a common wildflower abundant in waste land, road sides and farming land. It is, with its yellow flowers and long stems, like “emperors who stand in state”. However, it is often unwanted by landowners because of its toxic effect for cattle and horses, and because it is often considered a weed. Consequently it can be considered an apt metaphor for the poetry of Frances Cornford. For some her poetry exemplifies the best tendencies of the Georgian poets; for others, it exemplifies the worse.

That contradiction continues to manifest itself in responses to her poetry. Catherine Tufariello likes In France, whereas someone on Twitter (X) has called stanza two the worst stanza ever written. She certainly has her supporters. Here is the note on her from the 1950 edition of Louis Untermeyer’s anthology Modern British Poetry: Her first volume, Poems (1910), though unaffected, showed little trace of individuality. With Spring Morning (1915) a much more distinct personality expressed itself. Hers is a firmly realized, clean-edged verse, with a clarity of utterance which is also found in the more suggestive Autumn Midnight (1923). Her later verse in Different Days (1928) is no less spontaneous than the simple “A Wasted Day,” the acute and onomatopoetic “The Watch,” and the delightfully mocking triolet “To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train.” It is, however, more measured; gravity has been added without the loss of charm. Whether grave or mocking Mrs. Cornford’s tone maintains a quiet distinction. In the introduction to Cornford’s Selected Poems, Jane Dowson is aware of the contradictions. She notes that readers may miss the depths of Cornford’s poetry as they take the simplicity at face value and miss the undertow, for nearly all of Cornford’s work is infused with a sense of the impermanence of all human relationships.

My own view is that she is at her best in her shorter poems. One of these brief poems, All Souls’ Night, was a favourite of the late Philip Larkin and his intimate friend, Maeve Brennan. This poem suggests that a dead lover will appear to a still-faithful partner on that November date. Maeve, many years after Larkin’s death, would re-read the poem annually on that night. It was also recited at her funeral. The poem, On Rupert Brooke, has a brilliant concluding line. Another poem, He Says Goodbye in November, masterfully balances short and long lines.

Although limited by the constraints of her time and of her social network, Frances Cornford managed to write many poems that deserve a wider audience. I hope you enjoy this brief selection.

Brief Poems by Frances Cornford

The Ragwort

The thistles on the sandy flats
Are courtiers with crimson hats ;
The ragworts, growing up so straight,
Are emperors who stand in state,
And march about, so proud and bold,
In crowns of fairy-story gold.

***

On Rupert Brooke

A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

***

Parting in Wartime

How long ago Hector took off his plume,
Not wanting that his little son should cry,
Then kissed his sad Andromache goodbye –
And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

***

A Recollection

My father’s friend came once to tea.
He laughed and talked. He spoke to me.
But in another week they said
That friendly pink-faced man was dead.

‘ How sad . .’ they said, ‘the best of men . .’
So I said too, ‘How sad ‘; but then
Deep in my heart I thought with pride,
‘I know a person who has died.’

***

Dawn

So begins the day,
Solid, chill, and gray,
But my heart will wake
Happy for your sake;
No more tossed and wild,
Singing like a child,
Quiet as a flower
In this first gray hour.

So my heart will wake
Happy, for your sake.

***

After the Examination

When someone’s happy in a house there shows
A chink of honey-coloured light beneath the bedroom door,
Where once a thunder-purple gloom oozed out across the floor;
And even the stairs smell like an early rose.

***

The Visit

There is a bed-time sadness in this place
That seemed ahead so promising and sweet,
Almost like music calling us from home;

But now the staircase does not need our feet,
The drawer is ignorant of my brush and comb
The mirror quite indifferent to your face.

***

The New-Born Baby’s Song

When I was twenty inches long,
I could not hear the thrush’s song;
The radiance of the morning skies
Was most displeasing to my eyes.

For loving looks, caressing words,
I cared no more than sun or birds;
But I could bite my mother’s breast,
And that made up for all the rest.

All Souls’ Night

My love came back to me
Under the November tree
Shelterless and dim.
He put his hand upon my shoulder,
He did not think me strange or older,
Nor I him.

***

He Says Goodbye in November

You say you know that nature never grieves:
I also see the acquiescent leaves
Fall down and rot
As down the derelict statue runs the rain;
But you believe that spring will come again
And I do not.

***

November Landscape

The lawns, the light, the shrouded trees are grey,
The lake in trance repeats the moveless day;
Yet, like a royal ghostly barge, moves on
In proud insulted thought, a single swan.

***

Late Home

The winds are out in the abysm of night;
The blown trees stoop.
But man invented fire and candle-light,
And man invented soup.

(Illustration to Late Home by Christopher Cornford,
son of Frances Cornford.)

***

On a Young Face at the Opera

Soon they must fade those cheek-bones petal-rounded
And that unwritten forehead, hyacinth-hair surrounded,
Soon says rage ruthless ever-ticking year,
And soon the silver music of Der Rosenkavelier.

LINKS

Poems

The complete text of Collected Poems

The complete text of Spring Morning

Poems from the Russian

17 poems on the Textopian site

15 poems on the Poem Hunter site

12 poems on the All Poetry site

10 poems on the Poetry Nook site

3 poems on the My Poetic Side site

Frank Hudson on To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train

Biography

The University of Cambridge biography

The Wikipedia page on Frances Cornford

Moonlight – Brief poems by Edward Storer

Posted on August 21, 2024 by briefpoems

Edward Storer (1880–1944) was an English writer, translator, and poet who was born in Alnwick, a market town in Northumberland, on 25 July 1880 to Frances Anne Egan and James John Robson Storer. Initially he studied law and qualified as a solicitor. In 1907 he was on the Roll of the Law Society of England and Wales. However, he practised law only for two years as his main interest in poetry soon dominated his time.

Storer was closely aligned to the poets who were later to form what was called the Imagist movement. T. E. Hulme proved to be an animating presence. In 1908 he had gathered around him a group of poets who met to discuss literary matters. They called themselves the Poets’ Club. This later evolved into a new unnamed society which had its first meeting on the 25th March 1909 in the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho. Among the members, along with Hulme and Irish poet Joseph Campbell was Edward Storer whose first collection Inclinations had appeared in 1907. They met on a regular basis on Thursday evenings to discuss how best to reinvigorate poetry, through verse libre, Japanese tanka and haiku. As F. S. Flint explained: Hulme was the ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage…. There was also a lot of talk and practice among us, Storer leading it chiefly, of what we called the Image. Storer had already written, in an essay appended to his poetry collection, Mirrors of Illusion (Sisley, 1908): There is no absolute virtue in iambic pentameters as such … however well done they may be. There is no immediate virtue in rhythm even. These things are merely means to an end. Judged by themselves, they are monstrosities of childish virtuosity and needless iteration. Such ideas were later to be echoed by Hulme and Ezra Pound who, at the age of 24 had recently arrived in London and joined the Thursday group which later evolved into what became known as Imagiste poets.

While he was in London he contributed as a reviewer, critic and poet to many literary magazines. However, his conflicting relation with Ezra Pound contributed to making him soon forgotten. From 1914 he was one of the principal contributors to The Egoist writing brief articles on modern poetry, painting and sculpture. In a 1916 article on free verse he noted that every man’s free verse is different. During this time, he translated many Greek poems (see below). Poems & Fragments of Sappho, first appeared in The Egoist in 1915 and was later published as The Poems of Sappho, (The Clerk’s Private Press, 1917). The Egoist Press also published The Windflowers of Asklepiades and Poems of Poseidippos,in 1920.

In 1916 Edward Storer moved to Italy. He lived in Rome from where he founded and edited Atys, a literary magazine associated with Italian painters and poets of the Futurist movement. During his time in Italy he translated Luigi Pirandello’s plays (Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV ) and also wrote critical essays on the Italian dramatist. He translated many Italian writers and poets introducing them to an English speaking audience. He studied contemporary theatre and began writing dramas himself.

In 1941 he returned to London after the outbreak of the war. He worked with the BBC, broadcasting in Italian, until his death in Weybridge (London) on February 11th, 1944 at the age of 63.

THE POETRY OF EDWARD STORER

Edward Storer was one of the first promoters and theorists of what has come to be known as Imagism. In the anthology by Peter Jones – Imagist Poetry (Penguin, 2001) – he is the first poet included under the rubric, Pre-Imagism Imagists. His poetry was based on the value of the image to which language had to be adapted in conciseness and vividness through the use of simple and universally comprehensible symbols. His conception of poetry was expressed in an essay included in Mirrors of Illusion. With an essay, (Sisley, 1908). He described poetry as essentially a nostalgia for the infinité. F. S. Flint, in a review of Mirrors of Illusion wrote with Storer the soul of poetry is … verse cut up and phrased according to the flow of the emotion and exercise of the sixth sense … we have a poet who has fought his way out of convention, and formed for himself a poetique” Like H.D. and Richard Aldington, he looked at ancient Greek poetry and mythology with admiration and consistently merged a classical flavour along with modernity in his poetry: epigrammatic poetry was a perfect synthesis of the two features. During his time in London, he translated Greek poets, including Sappho, Asklepiades and Poseidippos. (Some of these translations are included below.)

His poetry is largely forgotten today, but his brief poems, in my estimation, repay rereading and reflect the best, if limited, effects of the Imagist movement of his time. His versions of Sappho are as effective as more celebrated translators. You are welcome to comment below.

Brief Poems by Edward Storer

ORIGINAL POEMS

Street Magic

One night I saw a theatre,
Faint with foamy sweet,
And crinkled loveliness
Warm in the street’s cold side.

***

Beautiful Despair

I look at the moon,
And the frail silver of the climbing stars;
I look, dear, at you,
And I cast my verses away.

***

Image

Forsaken lovers,
Burning to a chaste white moon,
Upon strange pyres of loneliness and drought.

***

In Hospital

Since tonight I must die
why do they keep the window open,
so that the April air
flows in from the mountains,
and why do they place by my bed
this vase of spring violets ?

***

Broken Image

Like the tide
when it falls back
leaving upon the shore
delicate seaweeds and
watery fantasies dead,
so in the heart
love when it goes …

TRANSLATIONS OF SAPPHO

The moon has set and the Pleiades
Have gone.
It is midnight; the hours pass; and I
Sleep alone.

More translations of this poem appear on the Sappho Moon and Pleiades post.

***

The Cups of Gold

Come, O Kyprian goddess, come with
Delicate rare fingers, mix the
Radiant nectar in the cups of
Gold.

***

Who is this country girl with
Clumsy ankles and rough dresses that
Draws you towards her?

***

I loved you once, Atthis, long ago.

***

Love shakes my soul.
So do the oak-trees on the mountain
Shake in the wind.

***

Sleep in the bosom of
Your tender friend.

***

I am full of longing and desire.

***

Purple Earth

As the shepherd’s naked feet trample the hyacinths
Upon the mountain-side until they stain the earth.

***

Sleep

Through apple boughs the sighing winds go softly and
From the tremulous leaves sleep seems to drip.

***

Leda

They say that long ago Leda
Found near the irises
A hidden egg.

***

The Nightingale

Spring’s messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale.

***

As the apple ripening on the bough, the furthermost
Bough of all the tree, is never noticed by the gatherers,
Or, being out of reach, is never plucked at all.

***

Repose

I lay my limbs upon a delicate couch.

***

More translations of Sappho appear on the Sappho Fragments post

TRANSLATIONS OF POSEIDIPPOS

To Philanion

Do not think I am deceived by these persuasive tears, Philanion. I understand. You love no one better than me when we are together, but if another has you, you tell him you love him best.

***

Desire and the Cicala

Love wishing to silence the cicala of the Muses in the acanthus bush set fire to its wings.
My mind intent upon books cares for nothing else, and spurns the suggestions of the god.

***

The Figure of an Athlete

Once for a wager I ate a Meonian ox, for my own country Thasos did not offer me good fare.
I am Theagenes. Having eaten, I asked for more.
Wherefore, I stand in this fashion with outstretched hand.

***

Poseidippos was an Alexandrine and an epigrammatist of the same school as Asklepiades, with whose epigrams his own have sometimes been confounded. He was writing about 250 B.C., as we know from his epigram on Arsinoe, the sister and queen of Ptolemy, who died 247. (Edward Storer)

TRANSLATONS OF ASKLEPIADES

The Crown of Spring

Sweet for the thirsty in summer is snow to drink; sweet for sailors after winter’s storms to see the crown of spring, but sweeter still when beneath one cloak two lovers lie, giving their thanks to Kypris.

***

To Niko

The famous Niko promised to visit me to-night, and swore it by holy Demeter. She has not come, and the watch has gone by.
Did she mean to be faithless?
Slaves, put out the lamp!

***

To a Maiden not to be Won

You grudge your maidenhood, and why? You will not find the lover of your choice in Hades, girl.
For the living only are the Kyprian’s joys; in Akheron, maiden, we shall sleep bones and dust.

***

At the Porch

It is winter and the night is long. The Pleiades have travelled half their span, and I am passing by this door all wet with the rain.
Suffering from her treachery, I long for her.
O Kypris, it is not love you have sent me; it is some cruel shaft tipped with flame.

***

To the Hetaira Hermione

When I was caressing Hermione the hetaira, she wore a many-coloured girdle on which was written, O Paphia, in letters of gold: “Love me for ever, but do not be unhappy if another possess me.”

***

To a Youth

If you grew wings and in your hand were bow and arrows, we should not call Eros son of the Kyprian, but you, my boy.

***

Arkheades

Formerly Arkheades was warmed in my embrace, but now not even in mockery does he turn to me in my wretchedness.
Honeyed love is not always sweet: but the god is often kindlier to those whom once he has tortured.

***

Asklepiades wrote his epigrams about the end of the fourth century B.C. and the beginning of the third. He was a contemporary and master of Theokritos, and, like the Sicilian, an islander by birth; Samos his native place. In the Crown of Meleager Asklepiades’ emblem is the windflower, the wild anemone which, according to the myth, sprang to life in the island of Cyprus from the tears shed by Aphrodite over the death of Adonis. Both Asklepiades and Poseidippos belong to the Alexandrine school, and probably lived most of their lives in the city of the Ptolemies. (Edward Storer)

***

This is the first time that either Asklepiades or Poseidippos has been collected in English. (Edward Storer)

LINKS

Biographical information on Edward Storer

The theory and development of imagism by E. Fryska

Snapshots of Reality – An Introduction to Imagism by Abel Debritto

Translations of Sappho by Edward Storer

The poems of Poseidippos translated by Edward Storer

The Windflowers of Asklepiades translated by Edward Storer

Waving or Drowning – Brief Poems by Stevie Smith

Posted on August 13, 2024 by briefpoems

Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971) was born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, the second daughter of Charles Ward Smith, a man with a taste for drink and wanderlust and Ethel Rahel, a frail romantic. When she was three she moved with her family to 1 Avondale Road in the London suburb of Palmers Green and then lived in that same house the rest of her life. She was called “Peggy” within her family, but acquired the name “Stevie” as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donoghue. While very young, her father, a shipping agent, left the family to join the North Sea Patrol. After that, she rarely saw him. He appeared very briefly on shore leave and often sent the odd brief postcard (one read – Off to Valparaiso, Love Daddy). Although he and Ethel never divorced, Charles rarely contacted his family and never provided them any financial support. When her mother became ill, her aunt Madge Spear (whom Smith called “The Lion Aunt”) came to live with them, and raised Stevie and her elder sister Molly in what she called a house of female habitation. When she was five, Stevie developed tuberculous peritonitis and was sent to a sanatorium near Broadstairs in Kent, where she remained for three years. She claimed that her preoccupation with death began when she was seven, at a time when she was upset at being apart from her mother. Her mother died in February 1919 when Stevie was 16. The estranged husband, Charles, showed up at his wife’s funeral, displaying uncharacteristic grief; the following year he remarried. That his second wife called him “Tootles” brought forth this comment from Stevie Smith, if he can inspire someone to call him Tootles, there must be things about him I don’t see. She never reconciled with her father and found she was just too busy to attend his funeral 30 years later.

After high school, Stevie Smith attended North London Collegiate School for Girls. She was an average student; she received a prize for literature in high school but no scholarship for a university education. Her sister, Molly, graduated from the university and became a teacher, while Stevie took a six-month secretarial course in London. In 1923, she began work as a secretary with the magazine publisher George Newnes and went on to be the private secretary to publishers Sir Nevill Pearson and Sir Frank Newnes. During quiet periods in her often boring job, she began writing poems. However, it would be eleven years before she had anything published, and it would be a novel, not poetry. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, or Work It Out for Yourself (J. Cape, 1936) drew heavily on her own life experience, examining the unrest in England during World War I. Written initially over a six week period, it was typed on yellow office paper, hence the title. Her first poetry collection, A Good Time Was Had By All (J. Cape, 1937), contained, as well as her poems, the rough sketches or doodles, which became characteristic of her work. The title took on a life of its own and became a common catch phrase in Britain. A second novel, Over the Frontier (J. Cape, 1938) was dismissed by Smith as a failure. A third and final novel, one she felt was her best, The Holiday (Chapman and Hall, 1949) describes a series of hopeless relationships.

The coming of World War II in 1939 had a profound effect on her. She saw war and aggression as immature male games, but instead of withdrawing into a safe protective shell during those years, she became an air-raid warden and fire watcher in London. After working all day in the office, she went home to have dinner with her aunt, then returned to the city to report on fires from the intense German bombing which was a regular occurrence at the time. It was dangerous, exhausting work, but she persisted. Inflation, caused by the war, forced her to supplement her regular salary by reviewing books. She also tried to obtain a position with the BBC despite her employer’s discouragement. He claimed she didn’t speak clearly and had a lisp, although he probably didn’t wish to lose a valuable employee who would be hard to replace at that time.

She retired from her job in publishing in 1953, following a nervous breakdown, which manifested itself in an attack on her employer with a pair of scissors, after which she attempted suicide by slashing her wrists at her desk. Subsequently she gave poetry readings and numerous radio broadcasts and recordings for the BBC that proved extremely popular. The BBC produced her radio play, A Turn Outside, in 1959, and she frequently appeared on the broadcasting station. The early 1960s were dominated by health problems, an operation on her knee and removal of a benign breast tumor. But she also began to achieve the critical acclaim she craved. Her Selected Poems (Longmans, 1962) and inclusion, alongside Geoffrey Hill and Edwin Brock, in Penguin Modern Poets 8 (Penguin, 1966) brought her to a wider audience.

She was prolific as a poet and published nine volumes of poems in her lifetime (three more were released posthumously). Her most successful collection was Not Waving but Drowning (Deutsch, 1957) which Poetry reviewer David Wright called the best collection of new poems to appear in 1957. He went on to state that as one of the most original women poets now writing. [Stevie Smith] seems to have missed most of the public accolades bestowed by critics and anthologists. One reason may be that not only does she belong to no ‘school’—whether real or invented as they usually are—but her work is so completely different from anyone else’s that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries.” The title poem to that collection became her best known poem (see below.) She was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1966 and won the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1969. Queen Elizabeth II personally made the formal presentation of the award; during a private audience, she met with the poet for 20 minutes. In a typically eccentric gesture, Stevie Smith bought a hat for the occasion at a rummage sale at her church.

Her aunt Margaret, with whom she had lived in the house of female habitation since 1906, died in March 1968, at the age of 96. Stevie Smith would neither move nor renovate the house on Avondale Road. She continued to live, alone, in the Victorian relic that she called her fortress and her cave. In April 1970, she fell, cracked three ribs and injured her knee. The following November she went to stay with her sister Molly, who had had a stroke in 1969, in Devonshire. By early January 1970, she was seriously ill, suffering from an inoperative malignant brain tumour. In Stevie: A Personal Memoir, her friend and executor James MacGibbon describes how, visiting her in Ashburton Hospital, with her speech incoherent but her mind unimpaired, she showed him the typescript of the poem, on which she had made a ring round the word ‘death’ indicating that she wanted to die without delay, after which an understanding doctor sedated her more and more heavily as she slipped quietly away from life. Before the end, however, her head wrapped in a startling pink turban, she was reported to have amazed visitors by performing that final poem Come Death from her hospital bed.

I feel ill. What can the matter be?
I’d ask God to have pity on me,
But I turn to the one I know, and say:
Come, Death, and carry me away.

Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god
Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know,
Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp
Come Death. Do not be slow.

Stevie Smith died of a brain tumour on 7 March 1971. She was 68.

NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING

Some poets are best known for just one poem rather than a lifetime’s work. I discuss this in my post on Laura Gilpin and her poem, The Two-Headed Calf, which has a viral status on-line. Were Stevie Smith’s poem, Not Waving but Drowning, to appear today, it would also be a viral sensation. As it is, the poem was published in 1957, as part of a collection of the same title. The most famous of Smith’s poems, it gives an account of a drowned man, whose distant movements in the water had been mistaken for waving. She wrote the poem in 1953, during a period of deep depression when she felt too low for words. Although she was quite well-known at the time and had recently performed her poems on BBC programmes, she was having trouble finding anyone to publish her new work. On top of that, she felt imprisoned by the secretarial job she had held for twenty years. Only a few months after writing Not Waving but Drowning, she slashed her wrists in her office. Consequently, her famous poem sounds like a cry for help. The poem was accompanied by one of Smith’s drawings, as was common in her work (shown to the right of the text below). In the 1990’s, the BBC’s book program, The Bookworm, conducted a poll of over 12,000 viewers and listeners to discover the nation’s favourite poems and then published the results in a book entitled The Nation’s Favourite Poems. Not Waving but Drowning came in 4th, ahead of Wordsworth and Keats.

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

It is not difficult to apprehend why the poem has achieved such an iconic status. Although superficially simple in form – comprising three stanzas, all quatrains, rhyming ABCB – and off-hand and demotic in language – “poor chap”, “larking”, “now he’s dead” – it weaves from one perspective to another as it moves from the voice of the drowning man to that of the poet and finally to a melange of both voices. It also has a metaphorical depth that Stevie Smith was well aware of when she introduced the poem on the Poet’s Speak site: I read about a man getting drowned. His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea, but really he was drowning. This often happens in swimming baths or at the seaside. And then I thought that, in a way, it is true of life too. Yet a lot of people pretend, out of bravery really, that they are very jolly and ordinary sort of chaps, But, really, they do not feel at all at home in the world or able to make friends easily. So then they joke a lot and laugh and people think they’re quite all right and jolly nice too. But sometimes the brave defence breaks down and then, like the poor man in this poem, they are lost.

On a simple reading, the poem is about a man who drowns because his movements are mistaken for friendly waving by people back on shore. Viewed less literally, however, the poem speaks, as Stevie Smith acknowledges, of the pain of those who are misunderstood and, from a mental perspective, lost. Clive James recognised this when he suggested that Smith attempted to write the poem so that the diction appeared ignorant of poetic convention, yet was carefully crafted to appear more simple than it was. He describes the relationship between the poet and the speaker thus: her poems, if they were pills to cure Melancholy, did not work for [Smith]. The best of them, however, worked like charms for everyone else.

The image that Stevie Smith composed for the poem (shown to the right of the text above) reinforces the universality of the metaphoric theme. It depicts a silent girl from the waist up, neither drowning or waving, with her wet hair hanging over a face exhibiting a mysterious smile. This image is not of a man waving or drowning. While some have suggested that the “drowning man” is Smith herself (she was noted for using androgyny in her writings) there are problems with reading the poem as a cry for help, due to its humorous tone. Yet Stevie Smith Smith often felt disappointed for her poem’s tone being misunderstood (despite its popularity during the decade before her death), and despaired over Punch’s assessing her Not Waving but Drowning as a funny piece since she intended it as a most touching sad text. Furthermore, when the poem was reprinted in Stevie Smith’s Selected Poems (1962) no drawing was included. That same image was also used to illustrate another poem, The Frozen Lake, one in which a speaker describes his love for a witch beneath the frozen lake with contains Excalibur.

The poem has been set to music numerous times, has been cited or recited in many rock songs, has been the inspiration to stories and was included in the Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. It was even used as the title to a 2012 drama film directed by Devyn Waitt. Its iconic status continues to grow.

THE POETRY OF STEVIE SMITH

Most poets can, like restaurants and movies, be judged on a 1 to 10 scale with 1 being awful and 10 being outstanding. The gamut can run from William McGonagall to William Butler Yeats. Bur there are poets who cannot be so easily appraised. Emily Dickinson, for example, creates the terms by which she is to be assessed and these terms do not fall into any conventional numeric scale. The same might be said of Raymond Carver and, in England, of Stevie Smith.

She exists in a poetic universe far from the great tradition of English literature, one in which she participates almost like a parody of the conventional poet. Were the classical English comedy troupe of her era known as Monty Python to have had a woman as a cast member and were that woman to be called, for the sake of comedy, “The Poet”, Stevie Smith might fit the bill. This is not to disparage either her or her poetry, but to acknowledge how much she fits into a peculiarly English strain of eccentricity. And “eccentricity” is the word that is most commonly applied both to her poetry and to her poetic persona. As James MacGibbon, Stevie Smith’s executor, puts in, in his Preface to Stevie Smith: a Selection (Faber and Faber, 1983) Many of her admirers are still inclined to regard her as an eccentric writer of light verse with a wry, even sick sense of the absurd… Although the editor of that selection, Hermione Lee, argues that she tended to be thought of as a minor eccentric, a funny oddity, not as the great original poet that she is, it is possible to counter that she is both an original poet (I leave greatness for others to judge) and an eccentric oddity without diminishing the genuine appeal of her work. It is true that she sometimes bristled at being called eccentric despite, at times, playing to the crowd. And it is also true that she prided herself on a practicality, such as that revealed in her simple couplet All Things Pass

All things pass
Love and mankind is grass.

Her poems, including many of her brief poems presented below, reflect her ability to move almost seamlessly from the sensible to the nonsensical (In the Night) from the solemn to the sarcastic (The Past) from the classical to the contemporary (On the Death of a German Philosopher) from the proverbial French to the colloquial English (Ceux qui luttent) from the French to the Franglais (Le Paquebot) from the faux-naïf to the farcical (Wretched Woman) and from the distant past to the painful present (Old Ghosts). Her tendency to wander or “wobble”, as one of her most astute critics, Seamus Heaney, put it, from the profound to the pathetic revealed a fundamental flaw in her poetry. For him, despite his admiration for some of her poems, the eccentricity was too prominent leading to a retreat from resonance, as if the spirit of A.A. Milne successfully vied with the spirit of Emily Dickinson. He understood and appreciated her concerns: death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the innocent, the trusting. Coming from a rural Irish background he appreciated the nature of her Englishness, finding in her a disenchanted gentility. But he was disturbed by her manner of recitation, viewing her warbling during readings as a combination of Gretel and the witch and a cross between an embarrassed party-piece by a child… and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso. Yet he acknowledged that Stevie Smith’s own performance of her verse prompted him to revise Auden’s definition of poetry as memorable speech to memorable voice. Cleverly, and ingeniously, he compared her to two Lears: the old King come to knowledge and gentleness through suffering, and the old comic poet Edward veering off into nonsense, acknowledging both the plaintive misanthropy and the comic absurdity. You can sense both his admiration and his frustration in the following comment: her vision [is] almost tragic . . . Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the somber recognitions, the wounded joie de vivre, the marooned spirit we sense they were destined to express.

He may be right. She was probably far too prolific, tossing off poems as if she was tossing pancakes in the kitchen. Many of these poems are the equivalent of the “higher form of doodling” she practiced in her drawings (see the next section below). However, particularly in the shorter poems, she managed to combine her eccentricity with wit, brio, sarcasm and sheer exuberance. They repay rereading.

THE DRAWINGS OF STEVIE SMITH

Throughout her long career, beginning with her first volume of poetry, A Good Time Was Had By All, (1937) she included drawings alongside her poems. Every collection she published during her lifetime contained her drawings. That interest in illustrations goes back to her childhood where one of her constant delights was to draw. Throughout her life she enjoyed drawing, although she had few illusions about her abilities: I am not a trained drawer, you know. It’s rather more like the higher doodling, or perhaps just doodling without the higher. The relationship between the poems and the drawings was neither consistent nor specific. She doodled constantly on myriad scraps of paper and, if she liked the outcome, she saved the doodles in a box. When she had enough poems for a collection, she would go through the box to find drawings to attach to the poems. At times the drawings became the inspiration for the poems rather than the reverse: When I look through a pile of the drawings, I often am inspired to write more poems.

There are times when poem and illustration compliment each other. The poem Ceux qui luttent and the drawing which accompanies it (see right) are a case in point. The poem begins with a French proverb which translates as Those who struggle are those who live. The pomposity of the French phrase is deflated by the colloquial English of the second line: And down here they luttent a very great deal indeed. There are bilingual rhymes and a bilingual pun. The drawing shows a butcher outside his shop struggling while surrounded by people who luttent a very great deal. Life’s struggle is depicted as such normal activities as shopping and staring out windows. When she read the poem in her radio play A Turn Outside (BBC, 1959) she described how her drawing complimented the poem: It is a half-French, half-English verse, a macaronic poem. In the background are the busy shops on a Saturday afternoon in a poor quarter. People look out of the poor-lodging-house windows above the shops. Down below are the shopping crowds. A little child looks over his shoulder at a butcher with a large knife standing in front of his frozen carcases. As is typical of many of Stevie Smith’s poems and drawings, what is potentially grim is treated in a jocular manner.

There are times when the relationship between the poem and the drawings are far from complimentary. Commenting on the poem All Things Pass and the drawing that accompanies it (see left) Mark Storey, in The Critical Quarterly, had this to say: Above the text a couple – apparently middle-aged and bourgeois – embrace on a chaise longue, in a room with patterned wallpaper and frilly curtains. The Biblical portentousness is thereby channelled into something rather startlingly mundane, a reminder of the banality of truth, or the truthfulness of the banal. Similarly, in the poem, This Englishwoman, the drawing depicts a woman, with a parasol, who is far from refined, thereby adding to the joke. And, alongside the poem Croft about a man in a loft, there is a drawing (see poem and drawing below) of a woman sitting alone. Stevie Smith described this miniature poem as a self-portrait which reinforces the idea of fluidity which characterises much of her poetry.

Most of these drawings were omitted from posthumous editions of her work until Faber and Faber published The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (2015) which contained over 500 works from her 35-year career. The editor, Will May, had this to say of the illustrations he included: Like her poetry, her drawings have eclectic starting points. Some are inspired by the epigrammatic underlines of Goya or the sketches of Georg Grosz, while others skirt closer to Edward Lear. While a few appear to be illustrations to the poems they accompany, many were added to her poems at proof stage or substituted for an apparently unrelated doodle, deliberately unsettling how we might understand a poem’s speaker, tone or addressee. They are as likely to put us on our guard as provide relief. Mostly the images, some of which are included below, are of people, albeit from a somewhat skewed perspective.

These drawings have brought forth mixed reactions. Philip Larkin, who pronounced her work almost unclassifiable said they have an amateurishness reminiscent of Lear, Waugh and Thurber without much compensating felicity. Christopher Ricks found them too cute. Paul Bailey loathed them stating they underline the lapses into coyness, and when they are printed alongside the really good poems they simply seem an irrelevance. I take a more positive view. They may not be artistically adroit. They may be, as Stevie Smith herself called them, higher doodling. But they are also, like the poetry, funny, fragile, and fundamentally weird or eccentric, like the poems, like the poet.

Brief Poems (with drawings) by Stevie Smith

Alfred the Great

Honour and magnify this man of men
Who keeps a wife and seven children on £2 10
Paid weekly in an envelope
And yet he never has abandoned hope.

***

From the Greek

To many men strange fates are given
Beyond remission or recall
But the worst fate of all (tra la)
‘s to have no fate at all (tra la).

***

Beware the Man

Beware the man whose mouth is small
For he’ll give nothing and take all.

***

On the Death of a German Philosopher

He Wrote The I and the It
He wrote The It and the Me
He died at Marienbad
And now we are all at sea.

***

From the Country Lunatic Asylum

The people say that spiritism is a joke and a swizz,
The Church that it is dangerous – not half it is.

***

This Englishwoman

This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.

***

Human Affection

Mother, I love you so.
Said the child, I love you more than I know.
She laid her head on her mother’s arm,
And the love between them kept them warm.

***

Croft

Aloft,
In the loft,
Sits Croft;
He is soft.

***

If I Lie Down

If I lie down on my bed I must be here,
But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.

***

Dear Female Heart

Dear Female Heart I am sorry for you,
You must suffice, that is all that you can do.
But if you like, in common with the rest of the human race,
You may also look most absurd with a miserable face.

***

Mother

I have a happy nature,
But Mother is always sad,
I enjoy every moment of my life,
– Mother has been had.

***

Here Lies…

Here lies a poet who would not write
His soul runs screaming through the night,
‘Oh give me paper, give me pen,
And I will very soon begin.’

Poor Soul, keep silent. In Death’s clime
There’s no pen, paper, notion—and no Time.

***

Autumn

He told his life story to Mrs. Courtly
Who was a widow. ‘Let us get married shortly’,
He said. ‘I am no longer passionate,
But we can have some conversation before it is too late.’

***

The Fool

A couple of women is one too many,
Oh, how I wish I could do without any!

***

She Said

She said as she tumbled the baby in:
There, little baby, go sink or swim,
I brought you into the world, what more should I do?
Do you expect me always to be responsible for you?

***

My Heart was Full

My heart was full of softening showers,
I used to swing like this for hours,
I did not care for war or death,
I was glad to draw my breath.

***

To An American Publisher

You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one.
You liked it so much that’s the reason? Read it again then.

***

Quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime,
il faut aimer ce que l’on a—

Cold as no love, and wild with all negation—
Oh Death in Life, the lack of animation.

***

The Reason

My life is vile
I hate it so
I’ll wait awhile
And then I’ll go.

Why wait at all?
Hope springs alive,
Good may befall
I may yet thrive.

It is because I can’t make up my mind
If God is good, impotent or unkind.

***

All Things Pass

All things pass
Love and mankind is grass.

***

Ceux qui luttent

Ceux qui luttent ce sont ceux qui vivent.
And down here they luttent a very great deal indeed.
But if life be the desideratum, why grieve, ils vivent.

***

Rencontres Funestes

I fear the ladies and gentlemen under the trees,
Could any of them make an affectionate partner and not tease? –
Oh, the affectionate sensitive mind is not easy to please.

***

Wretched Woman

Wretched woman that thou art
How thou piercest to my heart
With thy misery and graft
And thy lack of household craft.

***

The Poets Are Silent

There’s no new spirit abroad,
As I looked, I saw;
And I saw that it is to the poets’ merit
To be silent about the war.

***

She Said

She said as she tumbled the baby in:
There, little baby, go sink or swim,
I brought you into the world, what more should I do?
Do you expect me always to be responsible for you?

***

Le Paquebot

C’est la, la, la,
Le Paquebot a moi,
Dites-moi Goodbye,
Parce-que je go far.

***

Lightly Bound

You beastly child, I wish you had miscarried,
You beastly husband, I wish I had never married.
You hear the north wind riding fast past the window?
He calls me. Do you suppose I shall stay when I can go so easily?

***

Old Ghosts

“By one half as much power as the Roman Centurion.”
De Quincey

I can call up old ghosts, and they will come,
But my art limps, – I cannot send them home.

***

Be Off

I’m sorry to say my dear wife is a dreamer,
And as she dreams she gets paler and leaner.
“Then be off to your Dream, with his fly-away hat,
I’ll stay with the girls who are happy and fat.”

***

The Past

People who are always praising the past
And especially the time of faith as best
Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages
And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.

***

In the Night

I longed for companionship rather,
But my companions I always wished farther.
And now in the desolate night
I think only of the people I should like to bite.

***

ANIMULA, VAGULA, BLANDULA,

The Emperor Hadrian to his soul

Little soul so sleek and smiling
Flesh’s guest and friend also
Where departing will you wander
Growing paler now and languid
And not joking as you used to?

More translations of Hadrian’s deathbed poem.

LINKS

Biographical Links

The Encyclopedia.com page on Stevie Smith

The Wikipedia page on Stevie Smith

The Sheila Variations page on Stevie Smith

The Poetry Foundation page on Stevie Smith

The Sublime Silliness of Stevie Smith by Matt Reimann

Poems

41 poems on the Poem Hunter site

40 poems on the All Poetry site

36 poems on the Voetica site

30 poems on the My Poetic Side site

22 poems on the Poetry Foundation site

10 poems on the Interesting Literature site

3 poems (with recordings) on the Poetry Archive site

Drawings

Unpublished Stevie Smith: not waving but drawing

Stevie Smith: Brilliant Poet, Charming Doodler

The Relevance of Stevie Smith’s Drawings

Not Waving but Drowning

Stevie Smith discusses and recites the poem

The Poetry Foundation page on the poem

The Wikipedia page on the poem

The Encyclopaedia.com page on the poem

An essay on the Kwikweb site

The LitCharts page on the poem

The Owlcation page on the poem

Huck Gutman’s essay on the poem

Brett Milam’s essay on the poem

Thistles – Brief poems by William Soutar

Posted on July 7, 2024 by briefpoems

William Soutar (28 April 1898 – 15 October 1943) was born on South Inch Terrace in Perth, a seaport on the Firth of Tay on the east coast of Scotland. He was the son of John Soutar, a master joiner whose work was highly commended, and his wife, Margaret Smith, the daughter of a Perth police sergeant. His parents attended the United Original Secession Church, the Auld Lichts; William wrote of being brought up with the services of grace and family worship. He was educated at Southern District School, Perth where he shone as a sportsman and gained a reputation as a rebel by leading a school strike. Later he attended Perth Academy where he again excelled both in the classroom and on the sports field. His literary skills were also developing at this time and the school magazine, The Young Barbarian, published some of his youthful poems. At the start of 1917 he joined the royal navy and spent the next two years with the North Atlantic Fleet on convoy or escort duties, serving both in the Atlantic and in the North Sea. It was while he was at sea that he contracted the illness, caused by a form of food poisoning, that was to determine the shape of his subsequent life. By the time he was demobilized in November 1918, he was suffering from what would be diagnosed in 1924 as ankylosing spondylitis, a form of chronic inflammatory arthritis.

In April 1919 he entered Edinburgh University with a view to studying medicine but became disenchanted as he found the specimens gruesome and the work one continual stew. So he enrolled instead for the honours course in English, saying in a diary entry in October: Career really begun. His overweening interest in poetry to the almost complete exclusion of the novel, coupled with the effects of his illness, meant that he scraped through, to use his own words, with a third class honours. During his time at Edinburgh he sent some of his poetry to Hugh MacDiarmid who described him as being in the top fifty contemporary Scottish poets. His first collection, Gleanings by an Undergraduate (1923), appeared at his father’s expense, as did several others. His family adopted an orphaned cousin of his, seven-year-old Evelyn, in 1927, and this became a spur to him to write poetry for children.

In 1923 and 1924, Soutar had X-rays and consultations with Professor John Fraser, who diagnosed a form of spondylitis. The germ from food-poisoning had infected his spine and specialist treatment had come too late. His illness, which initially only affected his legs and feet, began to creep into his back and the subsequent course of treatment put an end to his plan to go to teacher training college. A desire to be a journalist or a teacher was beyond his capability. Realising that the illness would be permanent, Soutar recorded that suddenly I halted in the dusk beside the pillars of West St. George’s, Edinburgh, and stood for a moment bareheaded, saying over to myself, “Now I can be a poet.”

From 1924 onwards he lived with his parents in a new house in Wilson Street, Perth, which had been built to the family’s own specifications. He named it Inglelowe. In May 1930 he underwent an operation that was unsuccessful. When William became completely bedridden in 1930, John Soutar extended the downstairs bedroom with a large bay-window, so that he could see as much of the garden and Craigie Hill beyond as was possible from his bed. His parents made the invalid’s life as comfortable as possible and he was always smartly dressed with clean shirt and bow-tie. A constant stream of daily visitors amused, informed or bored Soutar; hundreds of people came each year, among them many of the major figures of the Scottish Renaissance. He kept a record of these visits, along with his own ideas, dreams and political beliefs in the numerous diaries he filled while bed bound. He used a variety of small books known as the Collins Handy Diary series, which he filled with his microscopic yet finely legible hand writing. During the last four months of his life – from the fifth of July 1943 to the fourteenth of October 1943, the day before he died – he wrote a separate diary which he entitled The Diary of a Dying Man. It was found under his pillow, after his death. A selection from his diaries and journals was edited by Alexander Scott and published posthumously, to great acclaim, as Diaries of a Dying Man (1954).

He had contracted tuberculosis in 1929 and never recovered from this. His “bairn-rhymes” in Scots, Seeds in the Wind (1933), are beast fables that express a mature insight into the life of things viewed through the lens of childhood. In Poems in Scots (1935) he developed the ballad style toward the objective expression of individual lyricism. During his last 10 years his principal output in Scots consisted of “whigmaleeries,” humorous poems full of comic exaggeration, interweaving the fantastic and the familiar. He was fond of miniatures, publishing Riddles in Scots (1937), while as a poet in English he was at his best in the pointed epigrams of Brief Words (1935). Soutar published ten slim volumes of poetry, and an eleventh, The Expectant Silence, which he had prepared for the press, appeared in 1944. His Collected Poems, edited by Hugh MacDiarmid, was published in 1948, but it was far from complete, omitting all the poems printed in the previously published collections and a considerable number from his diaries and notebooks. A new selection Poems of William Soutar, edited by W. R. Aitken and published in 1988, draws on the totality of his verse.

He died on 15th October, 1943, sometime between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. At two o’clock he asked his mother for a glass of water and, then, as the night was cold, insisted that she go to bed. At four o’clock, when his father looked in on him, he was dead. He was 45 years old. Two days before his death, he wrote in his diary: one is threatened from all around, by night and by day; whichever way one may turn the net is closing and cannot be evaded. His grave is located in the Jeanfield and Wellshill Cemetery in Perth. The family headstone is located on the boundary wall of the Jeanfield section on the brow of a small hill, adjacent to a line of trees.

THE POETRY OF WILLIAM SOUTAR

William Soutar labelled some of his shorter poems “Brief Words”. Among these are what he called American Cinquains, of which he wrote over one hundred. He also wrote some cinquains in the Scots dialect, as can be seen below. Adelaide Crapsey may be said to have invented, if that is the right word, the cinquain form. In her collection Verse (1915) she included 28 cinquains. The five unrhymed lines of the cinquain follow strict accentual-syllabic requirements and rely heavily on the iambic foot. The lines consist of two, four, six, eight, and two syllables (or accents), respectively. Like Adelaide Crapsey, he did not always keep to a rigid two-four-six-eight-two syllable pattern within the five-line format but his cinquains did cover a wide variety of topics, as can be seen below. In fact he took up this form with such enthusiasm that he became an even more prolific practitioner than its originator, had been.

William Soutar also borrowed the “doublet form’ from Adelaide Crapsey. The doublet is a 2 line poem which incorporates the title into the poem. These small poems fit the English language a little better than the syllabic parameters of Asian forms. The couplet (rhyme scheme aa) is written with 10 syllables per line or less.

Soutar wrote more and more poems in the Scots dialect in his later years. He was more confident writing in that dialect: English is not natural to me, and I use it “consciously” even in conversation. He published three books of Scots verse: Seeds in the Wind (1933) Poems in Scots (1935) and Riddles in Scots (1937). He also prepared for publication a selection of what he called “whigmaleeries” – poems that reflect what he called a “whim, fantastical notion.” Thirty-six of these were included in his posthumous Collected Poems edited by Hugh MacDiarmid (1948).

Brief Poems by William Soutar

AMERICAN CINQUAINS

PREFACE TO POEMS

Happy,
For a moment,
I held the butterfly;
And bring to you — only the dust
Of wings.

***

THE BRIDGE

The bridge
Lifts up its brow
Like a half-shrunken skull
Within whose sockets darkly moves
The stream.

***

GULLS IN THE SNOW

Like gulls
Which curve in snow
Toward an unseen coast,
Our lives through falling moments lift
And pass.

***

THE CHILDREN

Apples
Serenely shine
Among the darkening leaves
As children in our consciousness
Of death.

***

HEALING MOMENT

What mind
Is not made whole
By earthy loveliness
Which troubles its Bethesda pool
Of blood.

***

BEYOND LEGEND

What surge
Is in our blood;
And in our flesh what loam:
Tides from Atlantis and the dust
Of Ur.

***

POECILE ATRICAPILLUS

Winking
The wanderer
Wonders over my work
As I split oak and he in song
Marks time.

***

THE DIARIST

This man,
In solitude
Whispering to himself,
May yet desire that all the world
Should hear.

***

EPITAPH

He shunned
The warning bells
Of adventurous ships
To gather driftwood on the verge
Of life.

DOUBLETS

DREAMS

How often like a woman with her clothes
A dream by its concealment can expose.

***

THE SHORELESS SEA

Above the darkeness and earth’s wandering hull
A frail moon hovers like a lonely gull.

***

IMPROVISO

Upon my five-wired fence the blackbirds sit
Making a live and lyric stave of it.

***

COURAGE

Man’s courage gleams, from a greater misery,
As a white gull against a darkening sky.

***

DETOUR

There is no doubt which is faith’s devious way
As darkness is a turning to the day.

***

EPITAPH FOR A DISABLED EX-SERVICEMAN

In peace and war he suffer’d overmuch:
War stole away his strength and peace his crutch.

***

THE IMPOSTER

It is not pity but our pride which stands
Blessing the destitute with empty hands.

POEMS IN SCOTS

THE THISTLE

Blaw, wind, blaw
The thistle’s head awa:
For ilka head ye whup in the air
The yird will lift a hunner, or mair,
Doun in the lair o’ yon sheuch be the schaw.

ilka = each; whup = instant; yird = earth; sheuch = furrow; schaw = a little wood.

***

FLEURS FRAE THE ROCK

Fleurs frae the rock:
Sae cannie fa’ the shoo’rs;
Sae straucht the shock o’ the sun-smert;
O life the hert is yours
An ye brak the hert.

cannie = gentle + skilful; fa’ = to come by; shoo’rs = showers; straucht = straight; sun-smert = sharp sun; hert = heart.

***

THE QUIET COMES IN

Whan the rage is by
The bluid grows still:
Whan the tears are dry
The bairn sleeps weel.

Whan the roch winds low’r
Sangsters begin:
Whan the sang is owre
The quiet comes in.

roch = rough

***

BALM

Teeny Dot o’ Madderty
Was streekit in her kist
Wi’ a pickle aipple-ringie
Preen’d on hir breest.

It aye had been her comfort
At preachin and at prayer;
And she wudna be in want on’t
Awa up there.

streekit = laid out; kist = coffin; pickle = small; aipple-ringie = a flower; preen’d = pinned.

***

BED-TIME

Cuddle-doun, my bairnie;
The dargie day is düne;
Yon’s a siller sternie
Ablow the siller müne;

Like a wabster body
Hingin on a threed,
Far abüne my laddie
And his wee creepie-bed.

dargie day = work day; siller = silver; sternie = star; ablow = below; wabster = weaver, spider; abüne = above; creepie-bed = child’s bed.

***

OPEN THE DOOR

Open the door for the auld year
It is the pairtin-time:
Open the door for the new year
And lat the bairn win hame.

Bundle your winter’d joy and grief
On the back o’ the year that’s düne:
Open your hert for the new life
And lat the bairn come in.

***

A STAB IN MY OWN BACK

Wull Soutar w’ the muse was thrang
And monie bairns she bore him;
But he lay dwinin for sae lang
That they were deid afore him.

thrang = busy; bairns = children; dwinin = declining; deid = dead.

LINKS

Poems and Diaries

Poems in Scot and English (edited by W. R. Aitken)

Poems of William Soutar: a new selection (edited by W. R. Aitken)

My Ain Toun by William Soutar

40 poems by William Soutar on the All Poetry site

17 poems by William Soutar on the Scottish Poetry Library site

16 poems by William Soutar on the PoemHunter site

12 poems by William Soutar on the MyPoeticSide site

Some brief poems by William Soutar

Three Cinquians by William Soutar

Diaries of a Dying Man

Biography

The William Soutar web site

The Wikipedia page on William Soutar

The Scottish Poetry Library page on William Soutar

Audio-visual

The Garden Beyond – A dramatised enactment of William Soutar’s life.

William Soutar Cinquains

A Brief Introduction to Perth Poet William Soutar 1898-1943

William Soutar’s House – Doors Open Day

Dian Elvin remembers visiting the Perth poet William Soutar before he died in 1943

Ajay Close talks about William Soutar

Memories of the Soutar family

Essays

The Soutar House by Ajay Close (Sunday Herald, 2007)

William Soutar: The poetic genius written out of Scottish history by Ajay Close (The Scotsman, 2018)

My Hungry Hound – An essay in the Diary Review

Soutar and MacDiarmid: Exploring the scenic route to Scots poetry (by Alan Riach)

William Soutar and Edwin Muir (an essay by Alan Riach)

Higgledy-piggledy – The Art of the Double Dactyl

Posted on June 10, 2024 by briefpoems

Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, an anthology devoted to a novel form of poetry, edited by Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, with illustrations by Milton Glaser, was first published by Atheneum in 1967. The originator of this new brief genre was Anthony Hecht as the introduction explains, even offering a precise date – November 3, 1951 – and a precise place – the American Academy in Rome. Hecht had become friends with the classical scholar Paul Pascal and Pascal’s wife, Naomi. The three shared lunch on this November afternoon (antipasto, followed by lasagna, saltimbocca alla romana, insalata mista, and a bottle of good Frascati), and discussed poetry. By the end of the afternoon we had hammered out the nature and details of the form. Neither of us could have foreseen, in those early days, the success and celebrity that would attend upon us many years later when the Double Dactyl made its first public appearance in the June, 1966 issue of Esquire.

The joint editors explain the form in their introduction to Jiggery-Pokery: The form itself is composed of two quatrains, of which the last line of the first rhymes with the last line of the second. All the lines except the rhyming ones, which are truncated, are composed of two dactylic feet. The first line of the poem must be a double dactylic nonsense line, like “Higgledy-piggledy,” or “Pocketa-pocketa”. The second line must be a double dactylic name. And then, preferably in the second stanza, there must be at least one double dactylic line which is one word long. (Foreign languages may be employed.) But, and the beauty of the form consists chiefly in this, once such a double dactylic word has successfully been employed in this verse form, it may never be used again.

John Hollander, in his book Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse (Yale University Press, 1981), put the requirements in verse:

Starting with nonsense words
(“Higgledy-piggledy”),
Then comes a name
(Making line number two);

Somewhere along in the
Terminal quatrain, a
Didaktyliaios*
Word, and we’re through

*Greek for “composed of two dactyls”

While Hecht and Hollander argued, in the introduction to Jiggery-Pokery, that any six-syllable word (a double-dactylic word), once used in one double dactyl, can never be used in a different one, and believed that, thereby, the form had a built-in obsolescence, time has proved them mistaken. Wikipedia maintains that only hardcore double-dactyl purists still hold to this requirement. Robert Schechter has provided an abundant word list of polysyllabic double dactyl words and many practitioners of the form have used neologisms and foreign terms. And this ridiculous form continues to inspire traditional poets, such as John Fuller who has compiled a complete collection entitled Double Dactyls (Shoestring Press, 2017), and self-published poet, Dean Blehert, who has made more than two dozen of his double dactyls available online.

Among relatively younger poets Alex Steelsmith and Chris O’Carroll continue to pursue the art of the double dactyl as their work appears regularly in Light and Snakeskin. Alex Steelsmith has been a regular contributor to Light’s Poems of the Week: I’m attracted to double dactyls partly because they provide a form that their co-inventor John Hollander described as ‘dismally difficult.’ In my early efforts, I had my hands full simply meeting all the requirements and making any sense at all. As I began to feel more at ease writing them, I made it my goal to add an ’extra‘ little challenge—some bonus joke, play on words, or double entendre—to their other requirements. His attraction to a concluding pun in his double dactyls is often both intriguing and irritating in equal measure, much like Shakespeare’s attraction to woeful puns. Chris O’Carroll has also devoted much of his comic talents to the double dactyl. One complete section of his recent collection Abracadabratude (Kelsay Books, 2021) is all double dactyls. The skill with which he approaches the form is evident below.

FIFTY YEARS ON

Cover semicentennial copy Fifty years after Atheneum published Jiggery-Pokery, Waywiser published Jiggery-Pokery Semicentennial (2018), a new compendium edited by Dan Groves and Greg Williamson. Dedicated to the memories of Hecht and Hollander, and with an introduction by Willard Spiegelman, it comes complete with a cover by the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser who designed the cover for and also illustrated the original Hecht-Hollander volume. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who also contributed to Hecht and Hollander’s anthology, makes a further appearance in this selection. Also included, among others, are Annie Finch, Andrew Hudgins, A.M. Juster, X.J. Kennedy, Charles Martin, J.D. McClatchy and Brad Leithauser whose double dactyl, entitled “Double Ductile” adorns the cover and is reprinted below.

Double Dactyls by Anthony Hecht

PARADISE LOST BOOK 5
AN EPITOME

Higgledy-piggledy
Archangel Rafael,
Speaking of Satan’s re-
Bellion from God:

“Chap was decidedly
Turgiversational,
Given to lewdness and
Rodomontade.”

***

FROM THE GROVE PRESS

Higgledy-piggledy
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wroth at Bostonian,
Cowardly hints,

Wrote an unprintable
Epithalamion
Based on a volume of
Japanese prints.

***

FIRMNESS

Higgledy-piggledy
Mme. de Maintenon
Shouted, “Up yours!” when ap-
Proached for the rent,

And, in her anger, pro-
Ceeded to demonstrate,
Iconographically,
Just what she meant.

****

THE RUSSIAN SOUL

Higgledy-piggledy
Rodya Raskalnikov
Belted two dames with a
Broad-bladed ax.

“I am the wictim(*) of
“Misericordia,
“Beaten,” said he,”By re-
“Legion and sax.”

Author’s Note: (*) Dialectologists will no doubt be offended by this, as no Russian-speaker would ever so distort the voiced labial fricative, “V;” however, it must be remembered that the dialect here spoken is Standard Middle Hollywood Central European.

***

HANDICAP

Higgledy-piggledy
Judas Iscariot,
Cloven of palate, of
Voice insecure,

Mumbler and lisper, was
Hypocoristically
Known to his buddies as
“Jude, the Obscure.”

***

These double dactyls first appeared in Jiggery-Pokery (Atheneum, 1967).

Double Dactyls by John Hollander

HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS

Higgledy-piggledy,
Benjamin Harrison,
Twenty-third President,
Was, and, as such,

Served between Clevelands, and
Save for this trivial
Idiosyncrasy,
Didn’t do much.

***

TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING

Higgledy-piggledy,
President Jefferson
Gave up the ghost on the
Fourth of July.

So did John Adams, which
Shows that such patriots
Propagandistically
Know how to die.

***

NO FOUNDATION

Higgledy-piggledy
John Simon Guggenheim,
Honored wherever the
Muses collect,

Save in the studies (like
Mine) which have suffered his
Unjustifiable,
Shocking neglect.

***

THE RUSSIAN SOUL #2

Higgledy-piggledy,
Anna Karenina
Went off her feed and just
Couldn’t relax.

Then, quite ignoring the
Unsuitability,
Threw in the sponge and was
Scraped off the tracks.

***

PARENTS’ FAULT

Higgledy-piggledy,
Ditters von Dittersdorf
Hoped that his symphonies
Really would please;

Caconomasia
Ruined him, though, with a
Name that resembled some
Nervous disease.

***

These double dactyls first appeared in Jiggery-Pokery (Atheneum, 1967).

Double Dactyls by Christopher Wallace-Crabbe

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

Higgledy-piggledy
Homo Neanderthal
Coming from crowded caves
Unto the scene

Viewed all the countryside
Anthropomorphically—
Rather surrealist,
That must have been.

***

YIN AND YANG

Higgledy-piggledy
Herbert of Cherbury
Had a kid brother who
Took to the cloth

They were (to speak of them
UnMetaphysically)
One a dark butterfly,
One a bright moth.

***

IMPRESSIONISM

Fiddlesky diddlesky
Vladimir Nabokov
Pared his perceptions down
Beautifully fine,

Firmly insisting on
UnDostoevskian
Flickers of color and
Tremors of line.

***

ANGUISH

Higgledy-piggledy
Christopher Wallace-Crabbe
Tripped over dactyls on
Tentative toes

O, how he hankered for
Hendecasyllables,
Double sestinas or
Senecan prose!

***

THE UR-GUGGENHEIM

Higgledy-piggledy
Pico Mirandola
In the Academy
Works with a will,

With what a verve he gets
Neoplatonical
Since a philanthropist’s
Footing the bill!

***

These double dactyls first appeared in Jiggery-Pokery (Atheneum, 1967).

Double Dactyls By James Merrill

ABOVE ALL THAT?

Higgledy-piggledly
Mary of Magdela
Said to the dolorous
Mother of God:

“Parthenogenesis
I for one left to the
Simple amoeba or
Gasteropod.”

***

NEO-CLASSIC

Higgledy-piggledy
Jacqueline Kennedy,
Went back to Hydra and
Found it a mess —

Neon lights, discotheques …
“Landlord, what’s happening?”
“Avθρωτηοτήκαμε
Go home, U.S.”

Editors’ Note: *or, roughly, “We have become human beings!”

***

These double dactyls first appeared in Jiggery-Pokery (Atheneum, 1967).

Double Dactyls by Paul Pascal

VALE

Pocketa pocketa
Bard of ill omen, I
Hereby renounce the
Poetical life.

I’ve been forgetting my
Altertumswissenschaft
Losing my sleep and neg-
Lecting my wife.

***

TACT

“Patty cake, patty cake,
Marcus Antonius,
What do you think of the
African queen?”

“Gubernatorial
Duties require my
Presence in Egypt. Ya
Know what I mean?”

***

These double dactyls first appeared in Jiggery-Pokery (Atheneum, 1967).

Double Dactyls by John Fuller

Pat-a-cake Pat-a-cake, John-Fuller
Engelbert Humperdinck
Didn’t sing pop songs or
Pump Heavy Metal.

Though such a fact may seem
Contra-indicative,
He wrote an opera:
Hänsel und Gretel.

***

Oompa-pah, oompa-pah,
Sergei Prokofiev
Battered the keyboard
To ivory bits.

What do we think of such
Irregularity?
Musically speaking, it
Sounds like the Blitz.

***

Obladih-obladah,
Theodore Roosevelt
Thought of himself as a
Hunter with flair.

Fame is so fickle and
Unsatisfactory:
Now he is known as a
Nursery bear.

***

Hippety-hoppy, T.
W. Harrison
Called himself “Tony” like
“Thom” and like “Ted.”

Surely a must when mid-
Twentieth-century
Poets disliked seeming
Much too well-bred?

***

These double dactyls appear in John Fuller’s Double Dactyls

Double Dactyls by Alex Steelsmith

Wailing unfailingly, alex
Robert A. Zimmerman
filled up the airways from
Cork to Carmel,

sounding to some like his
nasopharyngeal
airways were frequently
filled up as well.

First published in Snakeskin Poetry

***

Poodily doodily,
Arthur F. Schopenhauer
named his dog Atman—a
touch of arcane

hypocoristical
anthropomorphism;
Atman, unselfishly,
didn’t complain.

First published in Light

***

Apparel and A Parallel

“[A] Women’s Soccer League game with a crowd of nearly 33,000 suffered a delayed kickoff…
because the teams had matching socks.”
—AP

Soccery, sockery,
fans in the stadium
wanted a contest, but
there was a catch;

though the two rivals were
hypercompetitive,
no one expected so
perfect a match.

First published in Light

***

Rock Star

“The John F. Kennedy Museum on Cape Cod is showcasing a rocking chair…
favored by the late president.”
—AP News

Rockabye, rockabye,
Kennedy’s rocking chair
went on exhibit and
visitors flocked.

Even incredulous
neoconservatives
had to acknowledge that
Kennedy rocked.

First published in Light (Poems of the week)

***

Rhinocerescue

“First IVF rhino pregnancy could save northern white rhinos from the brink of extinction.”
—USA Today

Higgledy-pigmenty,
Ceratotherium
isn’t, despite how we
label it, white.

Though the white rhino is
hardly albino, its
genecological
outlook is bright.

First published in Light

***

A Huge Suckcess

“The ‘world’s largest’ vacuum to suck climate pollution out of the air just opened… a technology designed to…strip out the carbon using chemicals [and] transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed… [in a] sequestration process.”
—CNN

Merrily, merrily,
modern technology
comes to the rescue like
never before,

thanks to a supersized
carbon-sequestering
vacuum that nature will
never abhor.

First published in Light (May, 2024)

Double Dactyls by Dean Blehert

Tippeca Nippeca, dean
William H. Harrison
(“H” is for Henry) was
Born to be bold,

Won bloody battles, was
President briefly, then
Unpresidentially
Died of a cold.

***

Huffity Puffity,
Theodore Roosevelt
Labored to breathe through his
Tight-chested wheeze;

Prayed that a vigorous
Rough-riding life would prove
Anti-asthmatical;
Photo-ed, said “CHEESE!”

Author’s Note: Teddy suffered from Asthma and fought back, leading a vigorous, out-doorsy life. He has a big toothy smile in most of his photos, unusual at the time, when public figures usually made serious faces at cameras.

***

Howshouldee Bowshouldee,
John, Earl of Rochester,
Worn out with wenching, just
Had to unwind,

Polished his verses un-
Til they reflected him,
Epigrammatically
Skewering mankind.

***

Plunkity Monkity,
Lead-Guitar Harrison
Yearning for sacredness,
Eastward did roam,

Dodging the clutch of fans
Beatlemaniacal,
Knowing deep down that there’s
No place like Om.

***

Dean Blehert’s compilation of his own double dactyls.

A selection of tailgaters by Dean Blehert is available on the Briefpoems Tailgater page.

Double Dactyls by Chris O’Carroll

Follywood-sprawlywood, chris
Francis Ford Coppola
Found gangster epics a
Lucrative line,

Then came to grief with his
Neo-Conradian
Vietnam acid trip.
Now he makes wine.

First published in Snakeskin Poetry

***

Bellyful-tellyful,
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Dines in a realm beyond
Chop and two veg,

Craves novel challenges
Gastrointestinal —
Roadkill, placenta, and
Bits of the hedge.

First published in The Spectator

***

Riyadh Reformer

Dynasty-phantasy,
Saudi Arabia
Frowns on corruption, we
Now come to learn.

This ain’t your grandfather’s
Kleptotheocracy.
This Prince has money and
Cousins to burn.

First published in Light (Poems of the week)

***

Monticello Updates the Exhibits

Liberty-flibberty,
Hemings and Jefferson
Made an arrangement in
Black, white, and gray.

Master/slave congress proved
Philoprogenitive.
Also consensual?
Harder to say.

First published in Light (Poems of the week)

***

WINGING IT

Albatross, ovenbird,
John Keats’s nightingale,
Skylark, a sparrow in
Nemerov’s zoo,

Ornithological
Poetry murmurates,
Raven to darkling thrush,
Swan to cuckoo.

First published in Asses of Parnassus

***

UNFROZEN

Scientists have discovered a worm that managed to stretch its short life expectancy — by tens of thousands of years. A tiny roundworm was revived after it was frozen in Siberian permafrost 46,000 years ago, when Neanderthals still walked the Earth. The worm, a previously unknown species of nematode, survived after entering a dormant state known as cryptobiosis, during which the animal doesn’t eat and lacks a metabolism.

-National Public Radio

Permafrost-worm-a-frost,
Stone Age life bears the cost;
Nematodes chill, put lost
Vitals on hold,

Cryptobiotically
Saving themselves to be
Thawed at twice 23
Thousand years old.

First published in Snakeskin Poetry. (June, 2024)

Assorted Double Dactyls

Double Ductile

Wittily whiskery
Anthony Hollander(™)
Fifty some years ago per-
fected a form—

Seriocomically
Polysyllabical—
Which quite unlikelily
Took us by storm.

Brad Leithauser

***

Von Hofmannsthal

Higgledy-Piggledy
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Wrote hushed libretti for
Noisy Herr Strauss,

Radiant fables that
Incomprehensibly
Lifted the spirit and
Brought down the house.

J. D. McClatchy

***

Higgledy-piggledy
Ludwig van Beethoven
bored by requests for some
music to hum,

finally answered with
oversimplicity,
“Here’s my Fifth Symphony:
duh-duh-duh DUM!”

E. William Seaman

***

Emily Dickinson

Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickenson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.

Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.

Wendy Cope

***

Emily Dickinson

Yellow rose, yellow rose,
Emily Dickinson
lived in seclusion, was
never a wife;

wrote of her garden most
anthropocentrically,
talking with God, Satan,
Death, all her life.

Robin Helweg-Larsen

First published in Asses of Parnassus

***

Rome/New Rome

Bippetty boppetty
Gracchus (Tiberius)
Tried to reform Rome and
Ended up dead.

Same with his brother; and
Coincidentally
JFK, RFK,
Pumped full of lead.

Robin Helweg-Larsen

First published in Asses of Parnassus

***

Implausible Deniability

Blustery, flustery,
President Tweetybird
thinks his election went
fine, on the whole.

Counterintelligence
isn’t his enemy.
Now we have learned that it’s
simply his goal.

Susan McLean

First published in Light (Poems of the week)

***

Higgledy piggledy,
Bacon, lord Chancellor.
Negligent, fell for the
Paltrier vice.

Bribery toppled him,
Bronchopneumonia
Finished him, testing some
Poultry on ice.

Ian Lancashire

Chuffity-puffity
Anna Karennina
Suffered unduly from
Chauvinist males

Setting her up as an
Author-itarian
Warning to ladies who
Go off the rails.

Peter Womack

***

The Godfather

Bippety Boppety
Francis Ford Coppola
Bucked crazy Paramount
Shooting Part I:

Held out for Marlon, who
Characteristically
Clobbered the Moguls and
Answered to none.

Terese Coe

***

Engelbert Humperdinck
Doesn’t deserve his own
Verse in this contest but
He has a name

Perfectly suited to
Double-dactylity.
Therefore I grant him this
Moment of fame.

Robert Schechter

***

Higgledy piggledy,
Ludwig van Beethoven,
if he could glimpse what our
world has become,

likely would find a new
applicability
for his immortal phrase:
dum dum dum DUM!

Robert Schechter

***

Jiggery Pokery!
Hechtus Antonius
Made a ridiculous
Fistful of rules

Raising two fingers to
Metrical specialists –
Ultraconventional
Farcical fools!

Ann Drysdale

***

It’s been a blast

Agedly sagedly
David F Attenborough
said we were doomed
with a very sad face.

We dragged our knuckles round
uncomprehendingly,
wrapped him in plastic
and launched him to space.

Nina Parmenter

***

Sharp Tongue

Lexicon, liaison,
Antidogmatical
Anna Grammatical
Held off the horde.

Even fanatical
Men of virility
Met with futility—
Words were her sword.

A. M. Juster

First published in Light (Winter, 2017)

More brief poems by A. M. Juster are available on the Around the Scuttlebutt page.

Hoofitty-toofitty
Frederick Austerlitz
gave the appearance of
dancing on air,

Thinking his name to be
sesquipedalian,
hurriedly changed it to
plain Fred Astaire.

Andy Jackson

First published by Otwituarist

***

Bordery bardery,
Romeo Montague,
Star-crossed romantic? Well,
So it was seen.

Shocking, today, that he’d
Unproblematically
Have an affair with a
Girl of thirteen.

Joe Williams

First published by Otwituarist

***

Code-breaker, mode-breaker,
Baroness Trumpington,
Socialite peeress who
Gave not a hoot.

Youtube went wild when the
Octogenerian
Gave her now famous two-
Fingered salute.

Sian Lang

First published by Otwituarist

***

‘Nana-boots ‘nana-boots
Sir Billy Connolly
Starts as a welder then
Takes to the boards

Rollicking bollicking
Leotardistical
Ribald performances
Loved by the hordes.

Alice Meynell

First published by Otwituarist

***

higgeldos-piggeldos
writer, thucydides
hints that the spartans might
kinda just suck

thus in the future they’re
quite unimpressively
archeologically
boring as f-ck!

Bella Rudd

***

Loamily-Pomily
Ted Hughes and Sylvia
Found that love’s heaven could
Turn into hell.

Ted went philandering
Mythopoetically;
Sylvia crumpled. Things
Didn’t end well.

George Simmers

***

Wonderful thunderful
Ludwig van Beethoven
How you thrilled Alex with
Quartet and Fugue!

So it was sad when a
Psycholobotomy
Made you no longer his
Musical droog.

George Simmers

These two poems by George Simmers were first published in Snakeskin Poetry

***

Lyrically-miracly
Gilbert and Sullivan
two for the price of one
packed the Savoy;

bubbling with tunes and rhymes
phantasmagorical,
glorious plotting that’s
stuff to enjoy.

D.A. Prince

First published in Snakeskin Poetry

***

Donald Dabble Dactyl #1

Piggledy-Wiggledy
Ronald McDonald
cursed Donald Trump,
his least favorite clown:

“Why should I try to be
funny as Donald? He
gets all the laughs
claiming upside is down!”

Michael R. Burch

More brief poems by Michael R. Burch are available on the Pearls page.

LINKS

Jiggery-pokery : a compendium of double dactyls (On the Internet Archive site).

Jiggery-Pokery Semicentenennial: The Waywiser Press page with excerpts.

Double Dactyls selected by Alex Chaffee with an extensive set of links to double dactyl sites.

Over three dozen double dactyls on Robin Pemantle’s Higgledy Piggledy Data Base.

Cody Walker on the double dactyl (with examples) in the Kenyon Review.

D. A. Prince reviews John Fuller’s collection of thirty-eight Double Dactyls.

A festival of double dactyls on the Snakeskin Poetry site (Issue 277; October 2020.)

The Wikipedia page on the double dactyl.

Dean Blehert’s compilation of his own double dactyls.

Robert Schechter’s word list of double dactyl six-syllable words.

Otwituarist posts double dactyls regularly on its Twitter (X) site.

Otwituarist collects its double dactyls on a WordPress site.

Bella Rudd posts double dactyls regularly on her Twitter (X) site.

doubledactyls-copy

Sounding Snow – Brief Poems by Laura Gilpin

Posted on May 6, 2024 by briefpoems

Laura Gilpin (October 10, 1950–February 15, 2007) was an American poet, nurse, and advocate for hospital reform. Born in Wisconsin, she was the daughter of Robert Crafton Gilpin and Bertha Burghard. She grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and later attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, and Columbia University, where she was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree. For some time she lived in New York City where she worked for the Teachers and Writers Collaborative and where she co-ordinated the poetry programme of the Henry Street Settlement. She also taught creative writing at the New York Public Library before becoming a registered nurse.

In 1976, Laura Gilpin was awarded the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets for her first book of poetry, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Doubleday, 1976). The judge was William Stafford who selected her collection from among 1,600 submissions and commented: The control pace, cumulative effect, frequent rockets of surprise in The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe make it a very appealing and admirable book. I like the sense of being accompanied page after page by the worthy company of an author who can have the audacity to rely on lines that are just right …

She was awarded a Writer’s Grant in 1981 from the National Endowment for the Arts. That same year she became a registered nurse having attained a Bachelor of Science in nursing from New York University. Her nursing career included paediatric nursing at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and adult oncology at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. In 1985, Laura Gilpin was invited to be a staff nurse on the original Planetree unit which has been described as a pioneering organization dedicated to humanizing patient care in hospitals. ( The name Planetree came from the type of tree under which Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, sat and taught; their goal is to reconnect with his holistic approach that addresses the patient’s body, mind, and spirit.) Laura Gilpin continued working with Planetree for more than twenty years, helping over one hundred hospitals to improve health care. She was eventually promoted to Planetree’s Director of Member Services and then Director of the Planetree Affiliate Network. She was joint editor, along with Susan Frampton and Patrick Charmel of the book Putting Patients First: Designing and Practicing Patient-Centered Care (Jossey-Bass, 2003) In 2004 Putting Patients First was named as Hamilton Book of the Year by the American College of Health Care Executives.

During the course of her nursing career, she continued to work on her poetry. She received a sabbatical in 2004 from Planetree to work on her second collection The Weight of a Soul (Sallie Randolph, 2008), which she completed shortly before her death. Acknowledging, in the foreword, the imminence of her death after a diagnosis of inoperable brain tumours, she wrote: Poetry has always been my persistent passion, my voice, my means of communication … Unfortunately death has become an unexpected deadline. At fifty-six, I have been diagnosed with two glioblastomas (brain tumors) which have restricted my ability to continue work. All my years as a poet and as a nurse are now woven together into becoming a patient. My images and metaphors from poetry, integrated into all I have learned as a nurse, are drawing me into the deepest role of being a patient. Since publishing my first book, The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, I have spent the last thirty years working on poems for my second book, The Weight of a Soul. Many of the poems I have included here bring together my own perspective as well as my experience as a nurse listening to patients faced with illness and death. I hope my years of poetry have provided enough insight.

Five and a half months after a diagnosis of multiple glioblastomas was made in September 2006, Laura Gilpin, 56 years old, died on Thursday, February 15, 2007, at her home in Fairhope, Alabama.

THE TWO-HEADED CALF

Some poems go viral. After Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War” went viral. Similarly, after mass shootings and other tragedies in 2016, a poem called “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith went, as she put it “legit viral on Twitter.” Even earlier, in July 2013, a lengthy prose poem by Patricia Lockwood called The Rape Joke was posted by the current events website The Awl and quickly became a viral sensation as it was shared over 30,000 times on Facebook and retweeted over 2,400 times on Twitter. In its own quiet way, one poem by Laura Gilpin called The Two-Headed Calf has gone viral. On my own Tumblr site – Poem-Today – which has posted a poem a day since 2015, this poem has had far more interactions than any other poem I have posted, and that includes both the Patricia Lockwood poem and the Maggie Smith poem. It continues to appear regularly on internet sites as do images of art work inspired by the poem. Online, the poem has become the subject of webcomics, fan art and memes due to its emotional impact. Many have had tattoos inspired by the poem done on their bodies, responding to the text and to the image projected. The poem is brief and worth quoting in full.

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

It is not hard to understand why this short poem has gained such resonance and attracted so many readers. The poem is imaginative, intelligent, intricately paced and intriguing. Like the brief poems below, it conveys so much in such a short space. An interesting, detailed analysis of the poem from Dr Oliver Tearle is available on the Interesting Literature site. The success of this poem has, however, tended to take the focus away from the other poems of Laura Gilpin. She is far from being a “one-hit wonder.”

THE POETRY OF LAURA GILPIN

Early reviewers of The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe recognized the talent on display. Writing in the Chicago Review – Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 1978) – Thomas A. Stumpf had this to say: Gilpin’s poems are most interesting for their modesty, their refusal to tell us too much or to speak too stridently. Though it violates all kinds of critical shibboleths to say this, the volume introduces us to a personality which we are convinced is Gilpin’s own, and which is subtle and unpredictable enough to be fascinating, to make us turn the page and want to read more, never really sated with what we have. It is a personality blessedly free from poses … The economy, one might even say severity, of imagery in the volume allows Gilpin to exercise the subtle modulations of tone which are her true strength. It also allows her to concentrate on a narrative or on a dramatic situation without interference from verbal fireworks or the extravagant emotions they beget. And, writing in the American Poetry Review – Vol. 8, No. 1 (January/February 1979) – Michael Heffernan commented: Laura Gilpin’s The Hocus Pocus of the Universe is … held together by a mysterious natural power, in this case a first rate poetic gift. Laura Gilpin’s kind of poetry is often referred to as deceptively simple, but there is nothing deceptive about poems that are as plain-spoken and almost invariably on-the-mark as these are … A dissenting view was proposed by Suzanne Juhasz in a review in the Library Journal – 101, 22 (1976) – where she claimed Laura Gilpin attempts the precision of phrasing, vocabulary, tone, and rhythm that invests William Carlos Williams’s poetry with infinite resonance, but that she lacks an awareness of the complexity involved in such a gesture. But this is, I think, to misread the impulse behind the poems. Instead of seeking or embracing complexity, her poems embrace the simplicity of a low-key demotic far removed from the resonance and the rhetoric of William Carlos Williams. These are not simple poems, but they are written in a quasi-simple style. And they. have their own infinite resonance, one based on conjunctions and disjunctions as can be seen clearly in the brief poems selected below.

In the thirty years between the publication of her first and the publication of her second (posthumous) collection, Laura Gilpin continued to write poems in the same style and with the same subject matter – family, love, illness, death. The fact that this final volume (which contains most of the earlier poems and is, thereby, a collected poems) has not received the same recognition as the first collection is not a refection on its value as poetry. There are some wonderful poems here – in particular the title poem, The Weight of a Soul – but the book has no ambition to redefine the terms set by the first volume. There are more love poems, but mediated through a wry consciousness. Dinosaurs is one of the most unusual love poems I have read. They are at their best when they continue to be written in a relaxed, ambling style. Attempts at formality, as in an extremely cumbersome villanelle – Villanelle: Elegy for my Father – fail to cohere. What comes through most clearly in the best of these poems is a voice that is compassionate, concerned and clearly focused and one worthy of greater attention.

SAMUEL BECKETT AND LAURA GILPIN

An unlikely alliance. And yet. Samuel Beckett is used for an epigraph to The Weight of a Soul: All poetry is prayer. But the full quotation is abridged, All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer. No less than Beckett, Laura Gilpin was not interested in paradigms of prosody. For her the poetry is in the clarity and the simplicity of the statement. While her innate optimism may run counter to Beckett’s innate pessimism, she recognizes, as does the dour yet witty Irishman, that poetry is prayer without the consolation of religious certainty. And there is more. A well-known quotation from Waiting for Godot reads They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. Many of Laura Gilpin’s poems, early and late, take place astride a grave or concern themselves with those, mainly relatives and friends, who have gone into night once more. In part IV of Life After Death, the poem begins by asserting simply

The things I know:
how the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them

Then the poem goes on to contemplate a dead tree inhabited by young rabbits inculcating the concluding message that could, without the simple underpinning, be considered too pat:

So that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

Like Beckett, there is a constant awareness of the grave. And, like Beckett, there is an absence of morbidity or sentimentality. A late poem, The Moment, begins with a couple having an argument followed by make-up sex. While making love, the poet is momentarily interrupted by an ambulance passing by her apartment- the scream of the siren/the red light spattering/against our skin. For a moment, the moment of the title and the moment of recognition, she contemplates the world of the dying. Then the moment passes, love resumes and life begins again. Even when it came to her own impending death, as in the concluding poem, Death 2006, there is a simple acceptance, unsentimental and unafraid.

Another Beckett quotation, this one from Endgame, is apt. The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. Aware of how everything ends in death, Laura Gilpin’s poems continue to explore life. To reiterate that Beckett epigraph, All poetry is prayer. And, in a life devoted to concerns wider than the circumscribed world of poetry, she continued to exemplify a form of prayer that deserves a wider audience.

Brief Poems by Laura Gilpin

My Grandmother’s Eighty-sixth Birthday

The cake at my grandmother’s birthday party
was chocolate with white icing which is her
favourite.

Although she could not blow out all the
candles, she said her wish had already
come true.

***

An Afternoon of Painting

And the artist, carrying
his watercolor, walks
home in the rain.

***

The Tomb of the Unborn Soldier

It is a way of life for these women
who go each day to the cemeteries
carrying flowers and who return
empty-handed.

***

The Whole of It

I am as resilient as a robin’s egg
falling out of the nest
twenty feet above ground.

My one salvation
is the little boy across the street
who collects odds and ends.

***

Night Song

And when she
woke suddenly
in the empty room
crying mother, mother,

the moon, watching
at a distance, rose
over her bed
and stayed there
until she was
asleep.

***

Snow

Each flake of snow
so separate
so distinct

yet in the morning
the hillside is a
solid field of white.

***

Differences

Of the six kernels of corn I planted,
only four sprouted, and of these four,
only two survived, and of these two,
one is taller.

***

Laws of Physics

(Corollary to Coulomb’s Law)

If body (1) of mass (m 1) and charge (q 1)
is attracted to body (2) of mass (m 2) and charge (q 2)
and if body (2) is repelled by body (1)
and attracted to body (3),

which of them will have a date on Saturday night?

***

Seeing a Dog in the Rain

It is raining and there is a dog lying
in the gutter and the gutter is filling
with water because the sewer is clogged.

If the dog were alive he would be drowning
but as it is, the water is simply stroking
his fur.

***

Death

Time stops.
At last it is quiet enough
for me to go to sleep.

Time starts again,
I go on sleeping.

LINKS

The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe on the Internet Archive Site

The Weight of a Soul on the Internet Archive Site

Putting Patients First on the Internet Archive Site

The Wikipedia page on Laura Gilpin

The Laura Gilpin page (with links to six poems) on the Best Poems site

A Summary and Analysis of Laura Gilpin’s Two-Headed Calf

Website of the Planetree Organization

Maya C. Popa on the life and poetry of Laura Gilpin.

Laura Gilpin obituary

Laura Gilpin gravestone in the Colony Cemetery in Fairhope, Alabama

Mountain Dreams – Brief Poems by Francis Harvey

Posted on April 23, 2024 by briefpoems

Francis Harvey (13 April 1925 – 7 November 2014) was an Irish poet born in Belmore Street, Enniskillen in 1925. His Catholic mother eloped with his Protestant father Hamilton Harvey, who died when the young Frank Harvey was only six. His mother was from Ballyshannon in Donegal and she moved back there. Frank stayed on and completed his secondary education in Enniskillen. He went to University College, Dublin, where he studied medicine for a year. As his family needed him to be working, he went into the bank, which took him around Ireland, but mostly he was stationed in Donegal.

His first poem, about potato-digging, was published when he was 16, in the Weekly Independent. Subsequently he published several short stories and had a number of his plays produced on stage and radio. His prize-winning play, Farewell to Every White Cascade, was broadcast on RTÉ in the 1960s and thereafter on the BBC and numerous radio stations around the world. He describes his introduction to writing: What made a writer of me really was I became a member of the library in the town I was born, in Enniskillen, the Carnegie Library, and I discovered Dickens and I discovered Thackeray. I discovered D.H. Lawrence and umpteen others. I began to read.

In the mid-1970s he left fiction and playwriting behind him and concentrated on poetry. His first collection, In the Light on the Stones, was published by Gallery Press in 1978. The following year he took early retirement from the Bank of Ireland where he was an assistant manager. Gallery Press also published his next collection, The Rainmakers (1988) while Dedalus published his four subsequent collections, The Boa Island Janus (1996), Making Space (2001) , Collected Poems (2007) and Donegal Haiku (2013).

His poem, Heron, won the 1989 Guardian and World Wildlife Fund poetry competition when Ted Hughes was judge. His work has also featured in publications such as The Spectator and The Irish Times. In the 1970s he won The Irish Times/Yeats Summer School prize. In 1990 he won a Peterloo Poets Prize and was a prizewinner in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition.

Francis Harvey died on 7th November 2014 at the age of 89.

DONEGAL HAIKU

Irish haiku, as I argue in my Dangerous Pavements post, with some assistance from Anatoly Kudryavitsky, editor of Shamrock Haiku Journal, is a distinctive form of haiku. While some poets, such as Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, have used the form fitfully, others, such as Paul Muldoon, have, in a ludic, almost ludicrous fashion, moulded it to their own playful applications. And then there is the sense of place. Many of the practitioners have composed haiku sequences devoted to particularly Irish locales: these include Michael Hartnett with his Inchicore Haiku, (Raven Arts Press, 1985); Pat Boran with his Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (Dedalus Press, 2015); and, of course, Francis Harvey. In his case this involves a heightened awareness of the flora and fauna of his native Donegal. There are, as can be seen in the poems below, sheep, dogs, cuckoos, blackbirds, crows, butterflies, flowers, mountains, strands, lakes and Mount Errigal, all as peculiarly Irish and as peculiarly local as the wind and the rain mentioned in the concluding haiku below.

Donegal Haiku is a collection of 122 haikus opening and closing with a single haiku on single pages while the rest of the book features three haikus arranged on each of sixty page spreads. The cover, designed and photographed by Francis Harvey’s daughter, Esther, depicts Mount Errigal in Donegal with an upturned image of Mount Fuji in Japan reflected in the water. (See image right.) The congruence between the Irish landscape and the Japanese form is explicitly acknowledged in the first haiku below.

Fellow Donegal poet Moya Cannon, in her introduction to his Collected Poems, describes Harvey as a “Bashō-like figure”. But there are distinct differences. While Bashō travelled widely and wrote of his travels, Harvey remained rooted to Donegal and its landscape. I love the landscape of Donegal …landscape does something for me. It turns me on…I’m more at home in the middle of a bog than I would be in the middle of a city … And I love looking at the shape of the land and the contours, sometimes the lovely sensuous contours that land has, like a human body …. a haunch or a breast …. I love that, and I like the roughnesses in the landscape in Donegal too … I need roughness, I need wildness. While there is some humour in Bashō’s work, the type of mordant humour found in the haiku of Francis Harvey reminds me more of the work of Kobayashi Issa. And there are, to the best of my knowledge, no frogs, Bashō-like or otherwise, in his poetry. Moya Canon is on surer ground when she compares his poems, rightly in my opinion, with the work of Scottish poet Norman MacCaig and Welsh poet R. S. Thomas.

IRISH POETS ON FRANCIS HARVEY

Brendan Kennelly: There is throughout a concern for craft and conciseness. The poems are, on the whole, lucid and warmhearted. There is an admirable variety of technique and theme. Above all there is the sense that the poet is content to explore his own world in all its limitation and potential. It is this note of quiet, unruffled integrity that makes the poetry of Francis Harvey such a pleasant reading experience.

Eamon Grennan: The poems of Francis Harvey lodge us deep inside a rural (south Donegal) landscape, the overlapping emotional and physical maps of which Harvey knows with startling, at times corrosive, intimacy. In the rinsed light of his minute observations a world is brought to vivid life, animated by compassion, understanding, and a tough grace of observation.

Moya Cannon: Francis Harvey has done for Donegal and, by extension, for the west of Ireland, what Norman McCaig (sic) did for Scotland and what R. S. Thomas did for Wales. He has accorded the landscapes of South Donegal and the people who have lived in them a dignity which has been stripped away as much, almost, by tourism as by earlier forms of invasion. This he has achieved with a naturalist’s passion for precision and with an utter lack of sentimentality …. Francis Harvey’s work combines the passion for precision of a naturalist and the yearning for grace of a poet, except for the fact that a passion for precision, for naming, is also part of the bedrock of poetry. In [his] poems there is a vivid sense of how we are all moving, “free but tethered, through time’s inexorable weathers.”

Nessa O’Mahony: The poetry book that I got greatest pleasure from in 2007 was the Collected Poems of Francis Harvey. Harvey is the ultimate landscape artist of Irish poetry; to read his poetry is to get a sense of a man growing up and becoming assimilated into nature, in particular the nature of West Donegal where he lives. The poems are full of precise, loving but utterly unsentimental description of this harsh country in which one manages to survive rather than thrive. Harvey has an uncanny ability to empathise with his subjects and to show that innate beauty and misery are intertwined in the solitary lives he depicts.

Brief Poems by Francis Harvey

Sleeping, I think of
Errigal and Mount Fuji,
The shape of my dreams.

***

A butterfly sways
on a pink dunghill flower.
The beauty of roots.

***

Who prays at the graves
of the unbaptised children?
A sheep on its knees.

***

Something on my mind
and on the mountain I climb.
The weight of two clouds.

***

Not a breath of wind.
The vanity of clouds
in the lake’s mirror.

***

Woodhill. The cuckoo
calls and, more than the wind,
is holding its breath.

***

What did he taste when
he kissed the island girl’s lips?
The sweetness of salt.

***

Tell me who waits for
the lightening to strike more than
once in the same place.

***

Not a breath of wind.
The vanity of clouds
in the lake’s mirror.

***

The bluebells blossom.
A blackbird sings in the grove.
Swallows and poems.

***

You planted a tree.
I wrote a poem. What more
could anyone do?

***

Myself and two crows
by a frozen lake, silent.
Who will break the ice?

***

Myself and my dog
skirt a mountain to avoid
a man and his dog.

***

I watched him that day
take his last walk on the strand.
The tide was ebbing.

***

He was so obsessed
with death he began sending
mass cards to himself.

***

Five crows in a tree.
The wind ruffles their feathers.
The leaves of my book.

***

Snow on the mountain.
Crowsfeet and your first white hair.
The end of autumn.

***

The wind and the rain.
The wind and the rain again
and again. Ireland.

***

These brief poems are from Donegal Haiku published by Dedalus Press (2013). The cover design (and the colour image used on this page) are by the daughter of Francis Harvey, Esther.

LINKS

The Dedalus Press page for Donegal Haiku

The Dedalus Press page for Collected Poems

Kathleen McCracken reviews The Boa Island Janus (Dedalus Press, 1996) for The Poetry Ireland Review

Macdara Woods reviews Making Space: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2001) for The Poetry Ireland Review

Hugh McFadden reviews Collected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2001) for Books Ireland

Tom Hubbard reviews Collected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2007) for The Poetry Ireland Review

Donna L. Potts reviews Donegal Haiku (Dedalus Press, 2013) for New Hibernia Review

This Landscape’s Fierce Embrace: The Poetry of Francis Harvey, Edited by Donna L. Potts

An article on Francis Harvey in The Irish Times

A radio documentary commissioned by RTÉ lyric fm’s The Lyric Feature (first broadcast in 2014)

Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary on Francis Harvey

The cover design of Donegal Haiku , published by Dedalus Press (2013), and the colour image used on this page, are both by the daughter of Francis Harvey, Esther.

	Adam on Sounding Snow – Brief Po…
	How to Write Vulgar… on Nipples – 50 ways to wri…
	Michael Burch on Pearls – Brief Poems by…
	World of Dew — Issa… on Dewdrops – Brief poems b…
	Tanka Tuesday – NaPo… on Slates – One-line poems…