Number 191: Another Charles Causley "Timothy Winters"

Timothy Winters

Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

His belly is white, his neck is dark,
And his hair is an exclamation mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
And through his britches the blue winds blow.

When teacher talks he won't hear a word
And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,
He licks the patterns off his plate
And he's not even heard of the Welfare State.

Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street,
He sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor
And they say there aren't boys like him any more.

Old man Winters likes his beer
And his missus ran off with a bombardier.
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
And Timothy's dosed with an aspirin.

The Welfare Worker lies awake
But the law's as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.

At Morning Prayers the Master helves
For children less fortunate than ourselves,
And the loudest response in the room is when
Timothy Winters roars "Amen!"

So come one angel, come on ten:
Timothy Winters says "Amen
Amen amen amen amen."
Timothy Winters, Lord.
Amen!

Hap Notes: I had such a hard time figuring out which Causley poems to use that I just had to make him a two day event. This poem wrings the heart and Causley reading it will add fuel to the fire. Here he is: www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=124

I love how Causley shows us what kind of student Timothy is with the phrase "shoots down dead the arithmetic bird." Each of Causley's descriptive phrases seem so effortless, the rhyme and rhythm so appealing, we forget how brilliantly worded and phrased this poem actually is. Licking "the pattern off the plate" says so much more than just the child is hungry.

The world is full of hungry children and children who are now adults who grew up in poverty and yet, we often find them to be the most generous of heart and spirit and if they are not, who can blame them?

When I was poorer than I am now (and that's saying something) I worked at a small shop which let me use my small electric coffee pot to make my breakfast. There were some homeless people who lived close to the shop, on the street, and once in a while I'd buy a loaf of bread or a bag of day-old donuts and they'd come in and share a meager breakfast with me. I was not on welfare, I was living through the generosity of friends for a place to stay and my small salary. The homeless folks often went to the food shelves just to eat. I'll never forget the day they were given bags of out-dated candy and ran into the shop with them, pouring them out on the counter with delight because they knew I loved candy. They just gave it to me – they had NOTHING and when they got the opportunity to share, they did. I confess I wept openly at this largesse of spirit. Somebody had gotten a brick of "government" cheese and I bought a loaf of bread and we had cheese sandwiches, out-dated candy and coffee. It was one of the best meals of my life.

Am I wrong in thinking that all of us are sick to death of politicians and corporations who seem to be working for their own ends? I think most people have a generosity of spirit that remains untapped because it serves politicians and corporations well to instill fear in us; fear of poverty, fear of other people, fear we will not fit in. Here's a "novel" concept; what if we all worked for the good of all people? What if our elected officials and corporations worked for the public good? Would the world fall apart? Would we then not buy things and want things? Of course not.

I say "novel" concept because it's not a new idea in any way. All of the major religions of the world profess this. I got the idea from Jesus, Mohamed, Krishna, Buddha et al. Oh, yeah, and Immanuel Kant and most of the great philosophers also agree with the idea of the "catagorical imperative" a sort of heady "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

How did the jerks end up running the world? There are more of us than there are of them. Let's cuddle them to death. Let's let the milk of human kindness drown them. Let's tickle them until they give up in giggles. We could do it if we wanted. They aren't really jerks, you know, they are the Timothy Winters of the spirit: rich with cash while their soul (or whatever you want to call it) languishes in poverty.

If Timothy Winters (whom Causley said was based on a real boy) heartily hopes for the ease of those less fortunate than himself, then I'll bet you do too.

Let's not blame anybody for this. It's time consuming and pointless. It's not about punishing the greedy, it's about helping out our neighbors. Start out small, smile at everybody today and pretend they are your dearest pal. It's easy. You may be doing this already. If you are, thank you. This is why the world has hope.

We talked about Causley yesterday: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/number-190-charles-causley-green-man-in.html

Number 190: Charles Causley "Green Man In The Garden"

Green Man in The Garden

Green man in the garden
Staring from the tree,
Why do you look so long and hard
Through the pane at me?


Your eyes are dark as holly,
Of sycamore your horns,
Your bones are made of elder-branch,
Your teeth are made of thorns.


Your hat is made of ivy-leaf,
Of bark your dancing shoes,
And evergreen and green and green
Your jacket and shirt and trews.


"Leave your house and leave your land
And throw away the key, 

And never look behind," he creaked,
"And come and live with me." 


I bolted up the window,
I bolted up the door,
I drew the blind that I should find
The green man never more. 


But when I softly turned the stair
As I went up to bed,
I saw the green man standing there.
"Sleep well, my friend," he said.

-- Charles Causley

Hap Notes: I was stunned to find out that Causley (1917-2003) has been chiefly known as a "children's" poet because I'd never even considered him as that. He's filled with childlike and charming observations but his poetry has strong adult shadows. His clear-eyed, plain speaking way of writing poetry has enchanted so many that he gets relegated to the "populist" side of poetry which means that academia often leaves him thumbing a ride on the side of the serious road and that's their loss. I'll point out that intellects more towering than my own like John Betjeman, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Dan Gioia defended Causley's work.

Children often have a unique understanding of Causley that adults often fail to grasp. I suppose adults are looking for the sex, violence and grimy grit of urban life in modern poetry. Causley saw WWII, as a soldier and his father slowly died of complications due to poison gas in WWI so Causley had seen true sadness and tragedy. The kind of violence and grit he saw pales the angst of urban life and I don't think he had any need of using it. There is an innocence of spirit in his work which always makes one (okay, me) want to give him a cup of tea and a hug.

He was born in Cornwall (his voice has what they call a "Cornish burr'), had to work to help support his mom and served in WWII. His reaction to the war was to write poetry while he was serving which served as a lesson in writing with some condensed brevity. He was a schoolteacher for some 30 years in Launceton (the town in which he was born) and he cared for his mother who'd had a stroke. He never married (and no, he wasn't gay) and was a somewhat shy and private person who loved folklore (Celtic tales abound in Cornwall) and stories and taught himself much through his incessant reading.

He's won scads of awards, especially later in his life and is much beloved as a writer of the people. He wrote ballads and short poems that are easily understood but haunting. Ah, perfect segue to today's poem.

The Green Man is a mythic figure, often called Jack in the Green. He's associated with growth, the forest, the spring, the wilderness and hence, a wild and natural creature. You've probably seen depictions of him, and indeed, those depictions on churches, buildings and the like are called Green Man. Here is a wonderful and thorough explanation of him and you'll see his lovingness and dark mystery for yourself: /www.endicott-studio.com/gal/galgreen.html

Now, if you were reading this as a child (as I did) wouldn't you see the dark whimsy here? There's a scare in this poem, a sort of reverence, some magic and myth that delights the child who loves a story. Yet there's an adult shadow in all this. He's not the green boy, he's a green man. There's a complexity to this. What does the Green man want of us? Kids feel it, adults need to think on it. This poem is much deeper than it appears at first reading. (Unless you know the Green Man myths already – then you are nodding your head at that last line, knowingly.)

Here's a Saturday bonus poem of Causley's. It's got a sly humor to it.

I Saw a Jolly Hunter

I saw a jolly hunter

With a jolly gun

Walking in the country 

In the jolly sun. 



In the jolly meadow 

Sat a jolly hare.

Saw the jolly hunter. 

Took jolly care.



Hunter jolly eager- 

Sight of jolly prey. 

Forgot gun pointing 

Wrong jolly way.



Jolly hunter jolly head

Over heels gone. 

Jolly old safety catch
Not jolly on. 



Bang went the jolly gun. 

Hunter jolly dead. 

Jolly hare got clean away. 

Jolly good, I said.

-- Charles Causley

Here's a good Causley quote: "If I didn't write poetry, I think I'd explode."

and another:

"I was a great reader, even when I was tiny. I remember reading the newspaper aloud to my father at five and seeing how pleased he was. My mother would borrow grown-up books from the tuppenny library and I'd read them before she took them back. I became very familiar with what would now be called `women's novels'. One author was called Olive Higgins Prouty. She wrote a rather daring novel called Stella Dallas in which, I didn't realise until many years later, the main character was a whore. She seemed a rather nice lady."

You can find more Causley here: www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=122

A Jolly Hunter song:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOWUnmiLPS8

Here's Bugs Bunny dancin': www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQQGSsI87kA&feature=related

Beanstalk Bunny (with Daffy Duck) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nny5KfI_nks&feature=related

And one of my (and many others') favorite cartoons of all time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRnX4quv5W4&feature=related

Number 189: John Donne "The Sun Rising"

The Sun Rising

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

-- John Donne

Hap Notes: John Donne (1572-1631) is the best known and most beloved, I think, of the "Metaphysical" poets. This sun poem is, I believe, is a "conceit"; an extended metaphor which changes one's perception of a thing, in this case the sun and the lovers in bed.

Donne himself lived many lives, he was educated, poor, a lawyer, traveled, had mistresses, was an elected member of Parliament, had a wife with whom he had 12 children and then became an Anglican priest of some note. Several of his published sermons have had a lasting impact on the language; "No man is an Island" and "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls" are both Donne's work from the same "Meditation."
Most people are also familiar with his poem "Death Be Not Proud." Donne and Shakespeare were contemporaries.

Donne's poetry, most of which was circulated among his friends but rarely published, had a big revival in the 20th century when Yeats, Eliot and Empson found his work to be extraordinary for its often abrupt, urgent and intelligent thoughts and word play. I can't say that I can wholeheartedly agree with Empson when he says Donne was interested in space travel, nor can I intelligently refute it, so Empson's essay "John Donne, The Spaceman" always leaves me a bit breathless because Empson and Donne are quite alike (it's purposeful on Empson's part) with wordplay, puzzles and metaphysical arguments disguised as metaphor. It's all very heady stuff.

In this charming poem of love, the poet is talking to the sun, scolding it for waking up the lovers and telling it to go chide and wake up school boys and apprentices, court-huntsmen and ants. Note that this list is full of labor, the poet and his lover are in an elevated state because of their love, no mere workers. In fact, the poet says, the sun is nothing compared to the brightness of his lover's eyes. He can close his eyes and shut out the sun but he could never do that to his lover because he could not stand to be parted from the vision of her.

He goes on to say not only are they not mere laborers who should be awakened by the sun but that they are all the kings and countries of the world, the lovers have made their own universe. So, if the sun, which is so old, needs a rest from waming the world, it need only shine on the lovers and it will be warming the whole universe. The lovers are the center of all things, the sun, with its bright cheer, is only half as happy as the lovers who are everything. Ah, love!

So the sun, once thought to revolve around the earth, then thought to be the center of the universe, is displaced to a satellite around the lovers who are now the center of the universe they have created with their love.

There's a lot more than can be mined in this poem but that should get you started.

Donne is far too big a subject for a Friday, but his wit and word usage is so brilliant and so unlike Shakespeare that it's as if they had been born on different planets. They are two shining points in literature with Donne being a bit less florid and Shakespeare a bit more hot-blooded. Donne has passion tempered with reason, Shakespeare has passion spiced with high drama. Donne wryly reasons, Shakespeare intelligently feels. These are glib explanations, though, I admit.

Here's a good (and famous) Donne quote:

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

and

"Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail."

You can find more Donne here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-donne

Number 188: William Empson "Arachne"

Arachne


Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;
Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;
Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves;

King Spider walks the velvet roof of streams;
Must bird and fish, must god and beast avoid;
Dance, like nine angels, on pinpoint extremes.

His gleaming bubble between void and void,
Tribe membrane, that by mutual tension stands,
Earth's surface film, is at a breath destroyed.

Bubbles gleam brightest with least depth of lands
But two is least can with full tension strain,
Two molecules; one, and the film disbands.

We two suffice. But oh beware whose vain
Hydroptic soap my meagre water saves.
Male spiders must not too early be slain.

-- William Empson

Hap Notes: There is no way to over estimate William Empson's (1906-1984) contributions to poetry as we now know it. I think there are two essential texts for really understanding how to closely read poetry: Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age and Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, and of those two, Empson's is the most crucially important. Empson's brilliant analyses make you smack your forehead with astonishment and scratch your head with puzzlement but above all he teaches you HOW to THINK as you read a poem. Everyone who has seriously read a poem in the last 75 years owes Empson. No kidding. He is a revelation, still.

Hard to believe that the young math whiz (his math professors were quite crestfallen when the young Empson chose English over math at Magdalene College, Cambridge University) eschewed the subject for literature, as his talent for Maths (as they call it in the U.K.) was considerable. His tutor in English was I.A Richards, the man who practically invented English Literature as a discipline for study. The young Empson told Richards about his theories of close reading and Richards said to go ahead and write about it. Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity when he was 24. His ideas spawned the "New Criticism" (which he actually didn't care all that much for) and were nourished by his visits to Robert Graves and Laura Riding (ah ha, now you see the method to my madness, eh?)

Empson had an odd and extraordinary life which I would love to talk about but today's poem is a typically rich mine that takes a bit of excavation. We owe it to Empson to apply his instructions for reading to his own work so his somewhat sensationally strange life will have to wait for another post.

Just a few brief remarks before we start. If you've ever said, "All this explication is useless, it's the "mood" of the poem, the way it makes you feel," Empson would agree with you with one caviat: WHY does it make you feel? What is the poet doing that creates that feeling? What words is he/she using and why and how do they create that mood? If you can't answer that, you aren't thinking about the poem – it only hits the surface of your consciousness like the verse in a Hallmark greeting card. A good poem, he says, should be able to stand up to your scrutiny. If it cannot, it's a piece of cardboard on a stick. His analyses of passages of Shakespeare and John Donne (his personal favorite I think) reveal worlds within worlds in just a few sentences of text. It's breathtaking and enriching.

First off who is Arachne? Possibly you have read Ovid's Metamorphoses, if you have not here are the translated Arachne passages if you are interested; www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorph6.htm The story, in a nutshell, is that Arachne is a weaver of great skill, so great she feels she cannot be compared to anyone, even Athena (Minerva) could not equal her. Athena gets more than a little leaked off about this, the upshot of which is a weaving duel between the two (there' s way more in the story- but I'm encapsulating here). Athena weaves a glorious tapestry with remarkable "warning" scenes in the corners. Arachne weaves a tapestry of great beauty but it depicts the Gods doing the most reprehensible acts; Leda and the Swan, Europa with the Bull, Danae and the shower of gold etc.

This tapestry so offends Athena, as beautiful as it is, that she teaches a little lesson to Arachne about speaking prideful truth to omnipotent power. She rips up Arachne's tapestry, hits her on the head with the weaving tool and turns her into a spider where she is doomed to constantly weave and have her works easily destroyed. Athena says "Vain girl, since you love to weave so very much, why don't you go and spin forever."

Now let me add what Empson said about his poem, the caves of man are thought of as by the sea to escape land predators. "Man lives between the contradictory absolutes of philosophy, the one and the many etc. As King Spider Man walks delicately between two elements avoiding the enemies which live in both. Man must dance etc. Human society is placed in this matter like individual men, the atoms who make up its bubble."

There is a lot of surface tension in this poem. The water cannot make the bubble of the world without the soap and vice versa. The interpersonal relationship in this poem is always hanging by a thread.

As for the nine angels, well, you know the old saw about the futility of arguing about incorporeal angels being able to dance on the head (or point) of a pin, yes? Nine could be a variety of things, the nine different distinct angels, the nine forms of grammar ( the verb, the noun, the adjective, the participle, the conjunction, the article, the pronoun, the preposition and the adverb), the nine fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control.)

Here's my current favorite and I think Empson would delight in this; nine is a Motzkin number (the number of ways of drawing non-intersecting lines on a circle.) I don't know that Empson knew this since he and Motzkin were contemporaries, but it delights me anyway.

Empson left this poem out of his 1959 recording of his collected works. He said, "It's a boy being afraid of a girl, as usual, but it's boy being too rude to girl. I thought it had a rather nasty feeling, that's why I left it out."

I'll let you play with the poem, now. Empson was a great lover of crossword puzzles and it would not be amiss to say he enjoyed a poem the same way and he would say, why have a puzzle if there is no answer to it? Empson was not above thinking that a poem posits opposites or questions that can be reduced down no further, too. That poetry may be an expression of the irreducible. BUT he'd ask you what in the poem leads you to think that.

I love that "velvet roof of streams" line, too, don't you?

Here's a good Empson quote:

". . . the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get the opportunity."

You can find more Empson here: www.poemhunter.com/william-empson/

Number 187: Laura Riding (Jackson): "Yes and No"

Yes and No

Across a continent imaginary
Because it cannot be discovered now
Upon this fully apprehended planet—
No more applicants considered,
Alas, alas—

Ran an animal unzoological,
Without a fate, without a fact,
Its private history intact
Against the travesty
Of an anatomy.

Not visible not invisible,
Removed by dayless night,
Did it ever fly its ground
Out of fancy into light,
Into space to replace
Its unwritable decease?

Ah, the minutes twinkle in and out
And in and out come and go
One by one, none by none,
What we know, what we don't know.

-- Laura Riding (Jackson)

Hap Notes: I wish I could tell you with absolute certainty that in fifty years or so, Laura Riding's poetry and prose will be studied with as much assiduity as Eliot's or Stevens' or Pound's. But I cannot. I don't know where (as, indeed, few do) all of our poets will be in the constellation of "fame" as time goes by. But it would be a great pity if Riding's work is dismissed or forgotten because she is a revelation, was a muse and had a soaring spirit and lofty intelligence. If you are unfamiliar with her work, I am not surprised. We still take our "serious" poetic cues from male writers, with a few exceptions.

Laura Riding (1901-1991) was born Laura Reichenthal in New York. She went to Cornell, wrote poetry (she said her first real influence was Edwin Arlington Robinson) and got marginally attached to the "Fugitive" poets at Vanderbilt University through Allen Tate, who published her poems in "The Fugitive" literary magazine. Riding was married to historian Louis Gottschalk, an expert on Lafayette and the American Revolution. They met while he was a grad student and she was an undergrad at Cornell. When the marriage ended in divorce in 1925 Riding went to England at the invitation of Robert Graves and his wife.

Now we got trouble. Her poetry was highly lauded in England at the time. She and Graves got "involved" she attempted suicide, Graves left his wife and ran away to Spain with Riding and the whole thing was as sensational as a Madonna tryst with some other superstar as reported in People magazine. But wait, there's more.

Riding and Graves are productive, start up a press, have impressive visitors, go back to England, then back to Spain (I'm compressing here) and end up at the end of their relationship in the U.S. If you've ever read Miranda Seymour's novel, The Summer of '39, you've read a fictional account of what happened when Graves and Riding visited the Schuyler Jacksons which resulted in Jackson divorcing his wife (nervous breakdowns and madness abound). He then marries Riding. It's pretty dramatic stuff, all in all.

Riding was married to Jackson until his death in 1968, her life, as you can see, spanned the century. She completely renounced poetry in 1941, not because she did not love it or love the writing of it but because, I think, she was tired of having it analyzed, dismissed, vaunted or characterized. She was an intelligent and strange creature who had a very powerful personal magnetism.

Jackson, a writer for Time magazine, and Riding (who took his name on all her subsequent work as Laura Riding Jackson) worked for many years on a dictionary, Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, published posthumously in 1997. She continued to write and search for truth in words and meanings throughout her life.

Now, I cannot do justice to Riding in the small space here but I will say that it is a hotly contested literary argument that Graves got most of his ideas for "The White Goddess" from Riding. She is just not easily summed up and critics vary widely on her work and her influence. I would suggest reading her seminal work, The Telling, a prose expansion on her ideas about language and poetry. Also her essay "The Road To, In and Away From Poetry" is helpful.

Riding is a marvel of thought and strikes me as highly original for her time. She was often called a "witch" in her younger days and I think this might be right in the mystic sense of the word.

In today's poem, Riding is telling us something about the life of mankind on this planet, in this universe and the poem, like all man's works however large and bold and grand, are just written in the sand to be swept away by the winds and tides of time. I'll let you make your own further discoveries about this amazing poem.

So much more to say about her. We will do more Riding this year, I think.

Here's a good Riding quote:

"Poetry bears in itself the message that it is the destiny of human beings to speak the meaning of being, but it nurses it in itself as in a sacred apartness, not to be translated into the language of common meanings in its delivery. I was able to achieve in my poems a use of words that paid respect to the poetic motive of difference in word-use and respect at the same time to language as essentially one with itself, not divided into levels of meaning. But the constraints that the poetic techniques of difference impose on word-use limit the speaking-range and the meaning-effectuality of language to a miniature human and linguistic universalness. My kind of seriousness, in my looking to poetry for the rescue of human life from the indignities it was capable of visiting upon itself, led me to an eventual turning away from it as failing my kind of seriousness. "

You can find more Riding here: www.ntu.ac.uk/laura_riding/poems/index.html

And here's her home (shared with Jackson) and the Riding Foundation: www.lauraridingjackson.com/LRJ-Poetry.html

Number 186: Robert Browning "Prospice"

Prospice

Fear death? -- to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall.
Tho' a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so -- one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the friend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest.

-- Robert Browning

Hap Notes: Well, this is Browning's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," written in 1861, fifty years before the birth of Dylan Thomas. Except he is directing himself to meet death/old age as the last great struggle. He charges himself to fight death but he also knows that nobody gets out of that fight alive. The important part, to Browning, is to "Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears/Of pain, darkness and cold."

So he's telling us that the price for life's joys is the struggle one must face, one last time, with the arch forces of death and aging. "Guerdon," if you are unfamiliar with the word (I was) means reward. So he's sort of saying "Chin up, face to the wind, go forward into the battle of life and death." Prospice is Latin for "forward," by the by.

Browning wrote this poem after the death of his wife, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and theirs is one of the truly great love stories of their day. Some say that Robert's influence was not always a good one on her work but this sort of posthumous sifting is frustrating since Elizabeth, in spite of her physical frailty, was pretty much able to hold her own. She wrote possibly the most famous love poem of all time "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" to Browning. She was 38 when he met her (he was a fan of her work). He was 32. After they married she was disinherited by her father (her dad did this to all his children who married- he was more than a bit of a fascist as a dad). She was 43 when she had her first child. She opposed slavery and encouraged the rights of women. Browning was quite drowned in love for her and her poetry. Today's poem's last lines express his fervent hope to be reunited with her, the "soul of his soul," in death.

I'm a great fan of both of the Brownings, although I lean somewhat towards Robert. After struggling through all ten poems of his book-length "The Ring and The Book" one either loves him and admires him or never wants to read another word of him and admires him. Of those two I am the former. But that's not why I chose this poem at this time.

Okay, you'll have to sit through a bit more about Amitabh Bachchan here – just warnin' you. Because he quoted both Browning and Tennyson on his blog a couple of days ago (yes, even my movie stars have to like poetry.) He comes by it naturally since his dad, Harivansh Rai "Bachchan" Shrivastav, is a very famous Hindi poet. So, he's going through one of his father's books and he sees, written in his father's hand, a quote from Browning, "I was ever a fighter, so -- one fight more." It moved him (as it would anyone, I suppose) and reminded me, once more, of my love for this very heartfelt poem. (The Tennyson his dad quoted is in my top ten poems of all time- we'll get to it someday.....) It amuses me that even my love for a Bollywood icon is another thread in the tapestry of the poetry that creates the universe.

Harivansh Bachchan, by the way, wrote a wonderful poem "Madhushala" (The Tavern) which is a deeply drawn metaphor on poetry, life and love that I am not qualified to talk about. This does not stop me from singing it (yes, it's been set to music, poetry's easier to understand cousin) and if you hear Amit-ji singing it you will too– warning you ahead of time that it's infectious: www.youtube.com/watch?v=19sMzT5Iln0&feature=related

Here's an English translation of the poem- I don't know how good it is, my Hindi is limited to "no," "potato," "come here," "darling," "everything," "tea" and "wrong format," so I'm incapable of knowing it is a good one although the poem's metaphor comes through loud and clear: allpoetry.com/poem/8586937-Madhushala__The_Tavern__-by-Harivansh_Rai_Bachchan

Back to Browning. Here's where we have talked about him before:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/number-102-robert-browning-how-they.html

The masthead contains Thomas B. Read's portraits of the Brownings.

Number 185: Eve Merriam "How To Eat A Poem"

How to Eat a Poem

Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice
that may run down your chin
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

-- Eve Merriam

Hap Notes: I'm always kind of stunned about how many people are unaware of Eve Merriam (1916-1992). In addition to her charming verses, many written for children, she wrote some of the most caustic and remarkable social commentaries of our time and much of it is still very relevant.

For example, her musical "The Club" portrays men in a private club making disparaging and derogatory comments about women – and all the men were played by women. It was highly controversial at the time (1976) and it brought up riveting differences of how women were thought of and shocking contrasts between men and women. We'd do well to re-stage that today.

Then there's her seminal "Inner City Mother Goose" which dealt with poverty, housing issues and life in the hard edges of the city. Here's an example:

Hickory Dickory Dock 

The Crowd ran up the block. 

A cop struck one, 
A rock got thrown; 

Hickory Dickory riot.


"Inner City Mother Goose" was published in 1969 and while many of the rhymes seem tame compared to the harshest of contemporary rappers, at the time the book was banned just about everywhere. Merriam reasoned that the original Mother Goose had social content so why not update it? The book had an introduction written by poet Nikki Giovanni. It's revelatory still.

Merriam wrote dozens of poems every bit as charming as today's poem in several wonderful books, too. I don't mean to say she was a hell-bent revolutionary. She was a quiet, educated one who bridled at social injustice. Her daughter said that Merriam sent Harvey Milk his first campaign contribution when he ran for Supervisor in San Francisco in 1973. Every time I read her work or about her I just want to give her a big hug.

Merriam had a life long love affair with poetry that started when she was 8 or 9 years old. She went to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. She held jobs in radio and was an editor for Glamor magazine. Her first book of poems, Family Circle, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1946.

Throughout her life, though, her main interest was just getting kids to read poetry, read it aloud, write it, enjoy it. She felt this kind of literacy would make for a better world. How can you disagree with this?

Sorry this post is so late. Sorting through my books today I found Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle (Which Merriam's poem starts) It's pretty beat up, full of coffee cup rings, suntan lotion stains, odd pink fingerprints from some kind of candy... I gotta get a new copy- I've had this one (warped cover and curled pages- what the hell did I do, swim with it? No- I used it as a life raft.) for 40 years at least. I started drifting away in it and the next thing I knew the morning had flown away. I'd planned on a completely different poem. We've got time – we'll do it tomorrow.

By the way, don't take today's poem too lightly. Merriam is saying something rather deep about reading, letting yourself go without judgment, the sounds and feel of the words. You gotta take a bite, it might be messy. That's good. Poetry is not dry, it's full of juice.

Here's a good Merriam quote:
"I find it difficult to sit still when I hear poetry or read it out loud. I feel a tingling feeling all over, particularly in the tips of my fingers and in my toes, and it just seems to go right from my mouth all the way through my body. It's like a shot of adrenalin or oxygen when I hear rhymes and word play,"

and another:
"Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it."

You can find more Merriam here: www.poemhunter.com/eve-merriam/