Number 164: Stephen Spender "The Pylons"

The Pylons

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.


-- Stephen Spender

Hap Notes: Stephen Spender (1909-1995) is the poet of the 30s and 40s in England who does not make it out of the decades unscathed. His contemporaries and associates, T.S. Eliot, C.Day Lewis, Lewis MacNiece and his close friend W.H Auden have their fair share of critics but have never been as tossed aside as Spender was/has been. Spender's style is more romantic, idealistic and diffuse, unlike Auden's surgical proficiency at finding the precise word, and Spender's reputation has taken a beating in the last few decades.

This is possibly his most famous poem. Spender has more than a trace of the Romantic in him and he is the bridge, in many ways between eras of poetry and, as such, gets trod upon the way all bridges do, without thanks for their function. Today's poem came to symbolize the era of poets from which he came and Auden, MacNeice. Lewis and Spender were often called the "Pylon Poets" for their use of industrial imagery.

Spender was a politically charged fellow who believed in, and consequently became disillusioned with, Communism. (Breaking off briefly to say, this is always the case with Communism. I have no idea why people are frightened of it; it never works. It's like a vacuum cleaner with no motor- it's a wonderful idea but it doesn't do what it says it will.)

His signature prose work is his autobiography World Within World which is incredibly frank about his sex life (without being lurid) as a bi-sexual, as well as his encounters and friendships with people like Ernest Hemingway, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Neruda, W.B. Yeats, Octavio Paz, Edith Sitwell and more. (At this point one needs to take a breath and be a bit impressed- he met almost everyone that formed the literary century of the 1900s.) He wrote much of the book on Frieda Lawrence's (D.H.'s wife) ranch in New Mexico. If you never read any more of his poetry than just this one, I encourage to read World Within World. It is an unparalleled view of 20th century literature and its facets both from Spender's analysis and its cast of characters.

Spender lived his life like a bridge, also, being in America, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, appointed U.S. Poetry Consultant in the U.S. in 1965 (the first non-American to hold the post), teaching at University College, Oxford and being knighted in 1983 (Sir Stephen Harold Spender.) He passed on with these honors, these remarkable friendships and encounters and he was burnished by the century that seems to have forgotten him as a poet.

The masthead illustrations are regular pylons and "humanoid" pylons which have been recently designed in Iceland to make them more beautiful. They are very Spender-like don't you think?
There are, by the by, more than 88,000 pylons in Great Britain.

Here's a good Spender quote: "Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do."

Here's another, his very astute analysis of Gerard Manley Hopkins and D. H. Lawrence from his book The Struggle of the Modern: "Both Hopkins and Lawrence were religious not just in the ritualistic sense but in the sense of being obsessed with the word — the word made life and truth — with the need to invent a language as direct as religious utterance. Both were poets, but outside the literary fashions of their time. Both felt that among the poets of their time was an absorption in literary manners, fashions and techniques which separated the line of the writing from that of religious truth. Both felt that the modern situation imposed on them the necessity to express truth by means of a different kind of poetic writing from that used in past or present. Both found themselves driven into writing in a way which their contemporaries did not understand or respond to yet was inevitable to each in his pursuit of truth. Here of course there is a difference between Hopkins and Lawrence, because Hopkins in his art was perhaps over-worried, over-conscientious, whereas Lawrence was an instinctive poet who, in his concern for truth, understood little of the problems of poetic form, although he held strong views about them. "

You can find more Spender here: www.poemhunter.com/stephen-spender/

Number 163: E.E. Cummings "Maggie and Molly and Milly and May"

Maggie and Molly and Milly and May

Maggie and Molly and Milly and May

went down to the beach (to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sang so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thing which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and may came home with a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone. For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea -- e.e. cummings Hap Notes: As I said before, Cummings didn't really intend to always have his name written in lower case, so I sort of mix it up in the blog for variety. Sometimes, out of respect, I use the upper case. I have to admit after reading his work everywhere else, where the lower case is used, the upper case looks a bit odd. We'll get over it. Here's a pleasant thing to think of on a Sunday: a day at the beach. Often we run into creatures in our everyday lives that tell us something if we are willing to listen. All the girls at the beach saw things that startled or entranced them. You may not be on the beach today but there's a spider in the corner ready to teach you something. Maybe there's a bluejay in a tree ready to show you a solution to a problem. There's a really cool rock on the ground by your driveway. Maybe your dog would like to take a walk- couldn't hurt, right? Yesterday I saw a perfect spiderweb that had gone up between the trash can and the recycling bin. Trash day is every Tuesday and I never forget that so the web was spun over three days. It was intricate, dew-laden and gorgeous. And I felt so bad that the web would be disturbed by Monday evening. I was already spinning a sorrowful tale as the spider was maybe telling me, the webs we make are often going to come apart. Just make the web and worry about Tuesday when Tuesday comes. (maybe- it could be saying something else. And if you say, well, it's just a stupid spider web and it means nothing, you're right. The world around you will tell you nothing. Nothing is a huge subject- I'm not brave enough to tackle that one yet. Nothing, ironically, is full of something. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll, If you can see nothing, you've got better eyes than I have.) All you can ever really see is yourself. Which takes us back to the poem. Here's where we've talked about Cummings before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-122-ee-cummings-chansons.html

Number 162: W.S. Merwin "Thanks"

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

-- W.S. Merwin

Hap Notes: I thought this poem would be good for the "rapture" day, a religious day predicted by some guy who can read neither Hebrew, nor Aramaic, nor Greek, nor Latin and yet professes to "interpret" the Bible. I think we are all weary of people who think they know the mind of God. What we DO know from every religion and almost every philosopher and poet over the last three thousand years is that we should be kind and decent to each other. Apparently we think this is just a suggestion and not an imperative. Maybe we need a little time for it to sink in, say, another couple thousand years (if we last that long.)

Merwin has a lot of stuff going on in this, perhaps his most well-known, poem. There is the surface of the constant way we use the words "thank-you" with no grace. There is the way it's an almost automatic response, a protocol nicety like saying hello. And then there is the deeper thought that regardless of the circumstances, life with all its troubles and shames is still something for which to give thanks.

I actually experienced the rapture today. Two children, apropos of nothing, walked up to me in the grocery store and hugged me. The meanest, loudest dog in the neighborhood trotted up to me happily and let me pet him. I saw two richly red cardinals on the black roof of my neighbor's house. The guy who checked out my groceries said I had beautiful eyes. I had just enough money for groceries. The coffee I made this morning tasted wonderful. My favorite jeans fit a bit looser. I found a huge, black, strange looking beetle in the kitchen and I picked him up to move him and he calmly hugged my thumb until I laid him on the grass outside.

All this happened in about an hour. That's what they mean by the rapture, isn't it? That life has its beauty every minute and loving things happen randomly and we should pass that on? The universe loves us all. It doesn't need you to believe that for it to be true, but it might help if you did.

So I am saying thank you.

Here's where we talked about Merwin before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/02/number-81-ws-merwin-small-woman-on.html

Number 161: Vachel Lindsay "Factory Windows" and a few more

Factory Windows

Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
Somebody's always heaving cinders,
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

Factory windows are always broken.
Other windows are let alone.
No one throws through the chapel-window
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone.

Factory windows are always broken.
Something or other is going wrong.
Something is rotten--I think, in Denmark.
End of factory-window song.
-- Vachel Lindsay

Buddha

Would that by Hindu magic we became
Dark monks of jeweled India long ago,
Sitting at Prince Siddhartha's feet to know
The foolishness of gold and love and station,
The gospel of the Great Renunciation,
The ragged cloak, the staff, the rain and sun,
The beggar's life, with far Nirvana gleaming:
Lord, make us Buddhas, dreaming.

-- Vachel Lindsay

The Moon's The North Wind's Cookie

The Moon's the North Wind's cookie.
He bites it, day by day,
Until there's but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.

The South Wind is a baker.
He kneads clouds in his den,
And bakes a crisp new moon that . . . greedy
North . . . Wind . . . eats . . . again!

-- Vachel Lindsay

Lincoln

Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all,
That which is gendered in the wilderness
From lonely prairies and God's tenderness.
Imperial soul, star of a weedy stream,
Born where the ghosts of buffaloes still dream,
Whose spirit hoof-beats storm above his grave,
Above that breast of earth and prairie-fire —
Fire that freed the slave.

-- Vachel Lindsay

Hap Notes: Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an event – he didn't just read his poetry aloud, he growled, bellowed, whispered, contorted, huffed, snarled and sang his way through his poetry as he read it. There was/is nobody like him. At least, nobody we would consider sane (not that THAT means anything.)

Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, in a house which formerly belonged to Abe Lincoln's sister-in-law and at the time Lincoln had been a frequent visitor there. I daresay, though, there aren't many folks with a family history in Springfield who don't have similar stories of their brushes with the Lincoln legacy and, in Lindsay's case, it was somewhat influential to his thinking.

His dad was a doctor and it was hoped that Vachel would carry on in his dad's profession. He tried to go to medical school but his heart wasn't in it. After three years at Hiram College in Ohio, he transferred to the Art Institute in Chicago thinking to become an artist. He also studied at the New York School of Art. He illustrated some of his poems and the writing and reciting of his poems became his passion.

Now when I say passion, I mean it. He was a vivid character who was prepared to suffer and die for his art and he meant it. He started off trading his poetry pamphlets for food and shelter, tramped across the country several times to do this and was the bane of his parents' lives for his eccentric and "arty" ways. He was not just the black sheep of his family, he was a whole black farm. He was both highly animated, a fevered speaker, and prone to great depression and...well, we won't go down that road again because you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. (Get sick, get well, hang around a ink well....sorry...had a Dylan moment there.)

His animated poetry readings were popular, striking and bizarre. Here's one of him reading his rhythmic and still controversial poem "The Congo." : www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3lY8qmiLy4

There's no way for me to do justice to Lindsay's life here. He read for president Wilson and the cabinet, he was incredibly famous for his readings, he was respected by no less than William Butler Yeats and Harriet Monroe featured him prominently in Poetry magazine alongside fellow Midwesterners Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. Teddy Roosevelt called him "Crazier than a bed bug." He had visions, he had flashes of extreme brilliance, he could be belligerent and darkly depressed. He carried a torch for Sarah Teasdale.

He had, no surprise, money problems and as the novelty of his jazzed up, hip-hoppy readings wore off, he found himself trying to forward his "singing" poetry and flailing a bit creatively. When he drank that bottle of Lysol in 1931, he crawled up the stairs of his house to the bedroom in pain and said to his young wife, "They tried to get me – I got them first."

In the selection of poems today, the factory windows poem is saying something about labor in this country, cute as the words are- its intent is serious. I've always loved that moon/cookie poem. And would that we could all rouse the Lincoln in us, eh? Lindsay's poetic output is extraordinary and varied from light verses to seriously deranged and brilliant ("Kallyope Yell" is awe striking.) You're never gonna understand it all-- just read it for the rhythms, the sounds, the vibrancy and color of the words. Once you enter into the brain of Lindsay, you will never be the same again.

He was prescient about movies and wrote one of the first books of cinematic criticism. He said the "new millennia" (the year 2000) would be ushered in by the movies.

Here's a good Lindsay quote.
About his tramping around the country: "It was a life and death struggle, nothing less. I was entirely prepared to die for my work, if necessary, by the side of the road, and was almost at the point of it at times. . . . [My parents] were certainly at this time intensely hostile to everything I did, said, wrote, thought, or drew. Things were in a state where it was infinitely easier to beg from door to door than to go home, or even die by the ditch on the highway."

You can find more Lindsay here: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1021

Here's an amazing added treat, some students doing "The Congo"- it's awesome and the words are printed on the screen for you to see their explosive content. Lindsay would be beaming: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxOwHaorwko&feature=related

Number 160: Sara Teasdale "There Will Come Soft Rains"

There Will Come Soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

-- Sara Teasdale

Hap Notes: The Byron yesterday reminded me of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and that put me in mind of another poem used in the book; this one by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933). In Bradbury's story (titled after this poem) a fully automated house adjusts the temperature and the lights, makes the dinner, clears away the uneaten food and reads this poem aloud to the home's owners after dinner. Trouble is, the former occupants are gone. There's a depth of understanding in that story about the machinery we all use – it does not have the capacity to care about us, just for us if it is programmed properly. In fact, everything in the world goes on without us. One would think this would instill a sense of wanting to care for one another more whole-heartedly. One would think, anyway.

Teasdale was born in St. Louis. She was a sickly child, born late to her parents (her mom was 40 and her dad was 45 when she was born. Her closest sibling in age was 17 years older than she) and she was not even sent to school until she was older than ten years old. She was mostly surrounded by adults all through her childhood and she had, as you can well imagine, a vivid imaginary life, as most lonely children often do.

I suppose, in many ways, Teasdale is the epitome of the "poetess." She was frail and her poems are little wisps of longing and praises to beauty. One has to read all of her books to see her almost inevitable fate. Some of her poems are, as the Brits say, a bit "twee." Some are more like treacle. These overly-sweet poems (often, love poems, unsurprisingly) often take the sting out of her other verses. Like today's poem, which is a fairly biting commentary. So I'm gonna stand up for her a bit. (Breaking off briefly to say that she won the Pulitzer Prize, the Columbia University Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America Prize and was extremely popular in her day so much of her work's fragility has to do with the passage of time, here.)

Life in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in America, was marked by distances. Teasdale lived in the last bastion of civilization (St. Louis) until one got to San Francisco. Life was slow and most communication was done by mail. She wanted out of that. After Teasdale was published, she met the poet Vachel Lindsay who carried a torch for her throughout most of his life (and she for him.)

Teasdale did not marry Lindsay, she married a wealthy importer. She, as my grandma (from Teasdale's part of the country) used to say, "knew which side her bread was buttered on." Lindsay did not feel he could support the fragile Teasdale and he probably could not have. Her husband, Ernst Filsinger was a fan of her poetry when they met. I have no idea what kind of marriage they had – he was gone a lot on business, she was well-provided for, but she yearned. They lived in New York on the Upper West Side, she was well known, it would seem to be ideal. Teasdale, at that time, pretty well figured out that loneliness had nothing to do with where you were living.

Teasdale left Filsinger and filed for divorce in 1929. He didn't even know she was unhappy and was totally perplexed by this. She and Vachel Lindsay remained friends (she had other suitors but Lindsay was a special case) and he was married with a family and lived pretty close to her in New York.

Lindsay committed suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol in 1931. Teasdale over-dosed on sleeping pills in 1933. There's a story in all this but it would take a couple of walls to tell it ("if these walls could talk.")

One of the key things to remember about Teasdale is how intensely lonely she was. She enjoyed her solitude, got her greatest ecstasies from it, but was often saddened by it. Her poem today shows us a little of her own lonliness.

Here's another glimpse of Teasdale:

Thoughts

When I am all alone

Envy me most,

Then my thoughts flutter round me

In a glimmering host;

Some dressed in silver,

Some dressed in white,

Each like a taper

Blossoming light;

Most of them merry,

Some of them grave,

Each of them lithe

As willows that wave;

Some bearing violets,

Some bearing bay,

One with a burning rose

Hidden away—

When I am all alone

Envy me then,

For I have better friends

Than women and men.



All of Teasdale's books are available at no charge on Project Gutenberg (God bless them):
www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/t#a223

Number 159: George Gordon, Lord Byron "So We'll Go No More A'Roving"

So, We'll Go No More a Roving

So, we'll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a roving

By the light of the moon.

-- Lord Byron (George Gordon)

Hap Notes: Byron is on my mind since I just finished slogging through a BBC made-for-television program on him. It amazed me how the writer and director could take the colorful, strange, productive and bizarre life of Byron and turn it into two hours of good costumes and boring dialog. If one knew nothing about Byron, one would suspect, from the program, that he was some sort of moody sex fiend and his character had all the sparkle of Bill Sykes (from Oliver Twist.)

Yes, it's certainly documented that he was moody, insolent, disrespectful and sexually charged (i.e. he slept with anything that moved) and he is hardly what one rears their children to become. But he wrote 17 volumes full of poetry, much of it brilliant, the majority of it good and one wonders from all the bio-pics how the guy had time to do that and continue in unabated debauchery.

Did you know that during that fateful summer that Byron stayed with the Shelleys, he also wrote a story that became the basis for a horror genre, like Mary Shelly's Frankenstein? His story, published as a post script to his poem Mazeppa, inspired the first book about vampires. It's interesting to think that during that rainy summer in 1816 at Lake Geneva, the core of two classic book characters were developed. Many think the pale, moody, aristocratic vampire is much like Byron himself.

Byron stood up for the oppressed. Back when the Luddites were breaking the looming frames in England they were being punished for their crime with death. One of the speeches Byron gave at the House of Lords was against this cruel punishment and a defense of the workers. He's a national hero in Greece because he brought money and celebrity to their cause of freedom from oppression by the Turks. He spoke out in the House of Lords for religious freedom. And he knew how to write and he wrote obsessively and diligently.

Sure, he was charming and seductive figure. Yeah, he had an appetite for sex and romance. But he was also educated, intelligent and brilliant. He was vain and had a weight problem due to his appetite for all things and his club-foot which made exercise difficult- he was always on some kind of diet and was a vegetarian who would go on meat binges and then purge. He was a very very complex creature.

In today's poem, originally sent in a letter that Byron wrote after carnival while living in Italy, we see a young man's first glimpse of party fatigue which he extrapolates to something beyond just feeling a bit over-tired after attending a few too many soirees. Again, this could be a sea shanty save for a few extraordinary lines likening the sword to a soul. Note that the soul/sword is not outworn, just the containers that hold them. The melancholy in this poem is palpable.

Ray Bradbury has a chapter in The Martian Chronicles, "And the Moon Be Still As Bright," named for the poem.

The poem has been made into song with many incarnations. Here's Joan Baez singing it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_G21s49L-A

Byron died in Greece and it is said that his heart is buried there. Because of his "wicked ways" Byron was not given a plaque in "Poet's Corner" in Westminster Abbey until 1969 even though such luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy and three former Prime Ministers (Asquith, Balfour and George) had earlier campaigned for it.

Here's where we talked about Byron before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-9-george-gordon-lord-byron.html

P.S. I recently read a review of a bio of Lord Byron in a London paper where the reviewer asked if anybody even read his poetry and called it "high romantic tosh." Which, I suppose has a point. I confess I'm relieved to see that Brits are as stupid and illiterate as Americans are about poetry. Americans may finally have the edge in poetry. It should be obvious that the reason Byron's life holds any interest for us at all (there were plenty of other rich, debauched, weirdos in his time) is BECAUSE of the poetry, eh?

Number 158: Rose Hartwick Thorpe "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight"

Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight

Slowly England's sun was setting o'er the hilltops far away,
Filling all the land with beauty at the close of one sad day;
And its last rays kissed the forehead of a man and maiden fair --
He with steps so slow and weary; she with sunny, floating hair;
He with bowed head, sad and thoughtful, she, with lips all cold and white,
Struggling to keep back the murmur, "Curfew must not ring tonight!"

"Sexton," Bessie's white lips faltered, pointing to the prison old,
With its walls tall and gloomy, moss-grown walls dark, damp and cold --
"I've a lover in the prison, doomed this very night to die
At the ringing of the curfew, and no earthly help is nigh.
Cromwell will not come till sunset;" and her lips grew strangely white,
As she spoke in husky whispers, "Curfew must not ring tonight!"

"Bessie," calmly spoke the sexton (every word pierced her young heart
Like a gleaming death-winged arrow, like a deadly poisoned dart),
"Long, long years I've rung the curfew from that gloomy, shadowed tower;
Every evening, just at sunset, it has tolled the twilight hour.
I have done my duty ever, tried to do it just and right:
Now I'm old, I will not miss it. Curfew bell must ring tonight!"

Wild her eyes and pale her features, stern and white her thoughtful brow,
As within her secret bosom, Bessie made a solemn vow.
She had listened while the judges read, without a tear or sigh,
"At the ringing of the curfew, Basil Underwood must die."
And her breath came fast and faster, and her eyes grew large and bright;
One low murmur, faintly spoken. "Curfew must not ring tonight!"

She with quick step bounded forward, sprang within the old church-door,
Left the old man coming slowly, paths he'd trod so oft before.
Not one moment paused the maiden, But with eye and cheek aglow,
Staggered up the gloomy tower, where the bell swung to and fro;
As she climbed the slimy ladder, on which fell no ray of light,
Upward still, her pale lips saying, "Curfew shall not ring tonight!"

She has reached the topmost ladder, o'er her hangs the great dark bell;
Awful is the gloom beneath her, like the pathway down to hell.
See! the ponderous tongue is swinging; 'tis the hour of curfew now,
And the sight has chilled her bosom, stopped her breath, and paled her brow.
Shall she let it ring? No, never! Her eyes flash with sudden light,
As she springs, and grasps it firmly: "Curfew shall not ring tonight!"

Out she swung -- far out. The city seemed a speck of light below --
There twixt heaven and earth suspended, as the bell swung to and fro.
And the sexton at the bell-rope, old and deaf, heard not the bell,
Sadly thought that twilight curfew rang young Basil's funeral knell.
Still the maiden, clinging firmly, quivering lip and fair face white,
Stilled her frightened heart's wild throbbing: "Curfew shall not ring tonight!"

It was o'er, the bell ceased swaying; and the maiden stepped once more
Firmly on the damp old ladder, where, for hundred years before,
Human foot had not been planted. The brave deed that she had done
Should be told long ages after. As the rays of setting sun
Light the sky with golden beauty, aged sires, with heads of white,
Tell the children why the curfew did not ring that one sad night.

O'er the distant hills comes Cromwell. Bessie sees him; and her brow,
Lately white with sickening horror, has no anxious traces now.
At his feet she tells her story, shows her hands, all bruised and torn;
And her sweet young face, still haggard, with the anguish it had worn,
Touched his heart with sudden pity, lit his eyes with misty light.
"Go! your lover lives," said Cromwell. "Curfew shall not ring tonight!"

Wide they flung the massive portals, led the prisoner forth to die,
All his bright young life before him. Neath the darkening English sky,
Bessie came, with flying footsteps, eyes aglow with lovelight sweet;
Kneeling on the turf beside him, laid his pardon at his feet.
In his brave, strong arms he clasped her, kissed the face upturned and white,
Whispered, "Darling, you have saved me, curfew will not ring tonight."

-- Rose Hartwick Thorpe

Hap Notes: Ah, you may see this poem as a bit over-the-top and obscure but it was one of the most popular poems of the 19th century. It was a favorite of Queen Victoria. Rose Hartwick Thorpe ( 1850-1939), born in Mishawaka, Indiana, wrote it when she was 16 years old. (That accounts for much of it, eh?)

I must confess that the reason I have known the poem for so long by heart is because I first read it when I was 15 in Fables For Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated by humorous essayist and cartoonist James Thurber, of whom I was a devoted fan. Other poems (also known by heart as a youth) illustrated by Thurber include Excelsior by Longfellow, Barbara Frietchie by Whittier, Lochinvar by Scott and Locksley Hall by Tennyson. His amusing drawings were statements about the poems in their own right. It's one of two books I own proudly as a first edition (the other one is Fatal Interview by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Both were gifts and I love them even though I spilled candle wax on the cover of the Millay during power outage when I was reading. So typical of my whimsical ineptness.)

Thorpe was in high school in Michigan when she read a tale of a young woman stopping the ringing of the curfew bell by holding it by the clapper and dulling the sound, "The Legend of Chertsey Church". Her poem was first published in the Detroit Commercial Advertiser. It became a national (and worldwide English-speaking) hit and was subsequently made into three silent films. This poem was taught in the public schools for decades and it's another of the poems many people of my mother's generation knew by heart.

A few points: curfew rings at sunset. You probably understand this but just in case- young Bessie is trying to save her lover, Basil Underwood, from an execution which is sentenced to be done at curfew. Cromwell will possibly pardon him but he won't arrive until after curfew. Bessie climbs up the old steeple, jumped onto the clapper of the huge bell and gets banged up inside the big metal thing, dulling the sound so that curfew does not ring, Cromwell shows up, Basil gets out and Bessie gets her man. Now, come on- give it up for Bessie, here. This was a weird thing to do. And it worked!

Thorpe also wrote a poem called "The War-Cry At San Jacinto, Texas" that instilled forever that phrase uttered at that battle into the hearts of Americans; "Remember the Alamo!"

Thorpe moved to San Diego and was a founding member of the San Diego Woman's Club. She contributed to literary journals there and while her poetic output was large, our knowledge of it is scant. She sort of started at the top. You can buy a book of Thorpe's poetry now, thanks to Amazon but I cannot guarantee they will be any better than this poem.

Don't toss this poem aside without reading it with some high drama in your voice. Many a lass and lad entertained their relatives after dinner with a "dramatic" recitation of this poem after dinner in the 20s, 30s and 40s.

You won't find much on Thorpe to read now but here is the Alamo Poem: womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/pindx/blp_aindex_thorpe_rose_hartwick.htm