Number 216: James Laughlin "Step On His Head"

Step On His Head

Let's step on daddy's head shout
the children my dear children as
we walk in the country on a sunny

summer day my shadow bobs dark on
the road as we walk and they jump
on its head and my love of them

fills me all full of soft feelings
now I duck with my head so they'll
miss when they jump they screech

with delight and I moan oh you're
hurting you're hurting me stop
they jump all the harder and love

fills the whole road but I see it run
on through the years and I know
how some day they must jump when

it won't be this shadow but really
my head (as I stepped on my own
father's head) it will hurt really

hurt and I wonder if then I will
have love enough will I have love
enough when it's not just a game?

-- James Laughlin

Hap Notes: James Laughlin (1914-1997) casts an enormous shadow of influence over the literature of the 20th (and 21st) century. His remarkable taste and boldness is unequaled today and one can hardly see when it ever will be equaled at all.

Don't know him? Sure you do. You may not know his poetry but you are most certainly familiar with writers that he published and was often the first to publish. Just a short list includes Elizabeth Bishop, Kay Boyle, e.e. cummings, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, Randall Jarrell, Karl Shapiro, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Gregory Corso, Nathanael West and that's just mostly the Americans. He was the first to publish Hesse's Siddhartha in America as well as Dylan Thomas's poetry and his publishing company also handled the works of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Rilke, Valery, Kafka, Cocteau, Neruda, Queneau, Cardenal, Lorca, Pasternak, Paz and Borges. If you are not impressed and you love literature, check your pulse.

Laughlin was heir to the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh although after visiting one of the foundries as a child, with its hot smoke, sparks, fire and noise, he determined he would not be going near the family business. He majored in Latin and Italian at Harvard and while on a sabbatical in Europe he wrote to Ezra Pound whom he visited and ended up attending what Pound called his "Ezuniversity"; hanging around with Pound for about six months. Pound told him to "do something useful" and he left Europe and started New Directions, a publishing house dedicated to the more experimental writers of the era. Laughlin knew the books would probably not make much money. That was not why he started the company. He wanted to give writers he felt were doing interesting work a publisher and, just maybe, some readers. (If this has no impact on you, again, pulse- check it.)

Laughlin recalled how when the names of Pound or T.S. Eliot were mentioned in the classroom at Harvard, his creative-writing professor, poet Robert Hillyer, would actually leave the room. Laughlin's taste was not as conservative, obviously.

The first thing his publishing company, New Directions (founded with a gift of $100,000 from his father,) tackled was an anthology of writers who included William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound (and also Tasilo Ribischka- a pen-name for Laughlin himself and described as "an Austrian now living in Saugus, Mass., where he is a night watchman at a railroad grade crossing; this gives him lots of time to think.")

After the anthology was published, he put copies in the trunk of his car and sold them to book stores a few at a time. New Directions published anthologies consistently until 1991 when they issued their last edition. New Directions also published Fitzgeralds' The Crack Up (where you see that Fitzgerald was every bit as brilliant and insecure as you thought.)

Laughlin knew everybody, was led to other writers by the writers he already knew and his life was a who's who of American letters. He had copious notes he wrote on his life which was published by New Directions called The Way It Wasn't and includes his thoughts on butterfly hunting with Nabokov and camping trips with Kenneth Rexroth. Their catalog is breathtaking: take a gander at this- www.ndpublishing.com/completecatalog.html New Directions' landmark best-sellers, however, were Hesse's Siddhartha and Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind.

If you have been moved by any of these writers you owe Laughlin a good thought.

In today's poem Laughlin talks about the cycle of father to child. Laughlin said of his own father and father's father in reference to New Directions, "Of course, none of this would have possible without the industry of my ancestors, the canny Irishmen who immigrated in 1824 from County Down to Pittsburgh, where they built up what became the fourth largest steel company in the country. I bless them with every breath. "

In today's poem, Laughlin is playing a little "shadow" game with his kids as they step on his shadow's head as they walk along. There is a joyful and a cautionary tone to this poem as the poet knows the shadow game presages a real one that will take place someday.

The love and joy in this poem is a happy running stream that turns into a river that runs into what could be a very dangerous sea. Laughlin knows that it won't be long before childhood delight turns into a young person striking out on their own and possibly striking out at the father a bit, too. It may not even be totally intentional but parents must be ready for it.

This comes with the territory of parenting and the poet hopes he and his offspring will be ready for it with love. He knows it's his love that needs to be the strongest, able to withstand what will come. (I won't tell you what that is- let's just enjoy this poem for now. We'll look at another of Laughlin's somewhat related poems later this year.)

Here's Laughlin reading the poem: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcI8TjNvdPU

Here's a good Laughlin quote: "I don't have any business acumen. I'm not good at deals and can't cope with agents."

and another:

"Do not become a cheap writer. Keep up your standards. It is better to be read by 800 readers and be a good writer than be read by all the world and be Somerset Maugham."

You can find more Laughlin here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-laughlin

Number 215: Emily Bronte "How Still, How Happy"

How Still, How Happy

How still, how happy! Those are words
That once would scarce agree together;
I loved the plashing of the surge -
The changing heaven the breezy weather,

More than smooth seas and cloudless skies
And solemn, soothing, softened airs
That in the forest woke no sighs
And from the green spray shook no tears.

How still, how happy! now I feel
Where silence dwells is sweeter far
Than laughing mirth's most joyous swell
However pure its raptures are.

Come, sit down on this sunny stone:
'Tis wintry light o'er flowerless moors -
But sit - for we are all alone
And clear expand heaven's breathless shores.

I could think in the withered grass
Spring's budding wreaths we might discern;
The violet's eye might shyly flash
And young leaves shoot among the fern.

It is but thought - full many a night
The snow shall clothe those hills afar
And storms shall add a drearier blight
And winds shall wage a wilder war,

Before the lark may herald in
Fresh foliage twined with blossoms fair
And summer days again begin
Their glory - haloed crown to wear.

Yet my heart loves December's smile
As much as July's golden beam;
Then let us sit and watch the while
The blue ice curdling on the stream.

-- Emily Bronte

Hap Notes: I'm always getting the Bronte sisters confused in my own head. Emily Bronte (1818-1848) is the one who wrote Wuthering Heights (wuthering is a Yorkshire word which refers to stormy weather). Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and Anne wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

It has always amazed me that Charlotte is so highly respected and Anne is not. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an extraordinary book-- much more like a Thomas Hardy novel, say Jude the Obscure. Charlotte hated the book so much she refused a second printing after Anne was dead and the book had sold out. Sheesh! Where were we? Oh yes, Emily. Emily was most surely the poet of the trio and while her poetry was not met with much enthusiasm when it was published, it has increased in merit over the years.

I find Emily's poetry charming and graceful, unlike the characters in Wuthering Heights who are singularly selfish. Somebody somewhere must have done a study of what the Bronte sisters thought of men whom they portray as selfish drunken louts, milque-toasty toadies or saints. Mostly the former. I have enjoyed the books but on the whole, I'll take Jane Austen. Oh, wait, this isn't about me- sorry- started musing there. Let's go back to Emily.

I thought since this poem was actually written for the winter that the images would cool us down since the nation has been in such a heat wave. Just the phrase "blue ice curdling on the stream" makes one feel cooler, doesn't it? She brings up a good point, too, that one can imagine most every season no matter what the weather is, if one wants to. The imagination is a very powerful tool. The Bronte sisters and their brother, Branwell, created extensively detailed imaginary worlds as children and wrote lots of stories and poems about them.

The Bronte sisters wrote a book of poetry together with their pen names taken to make them seem to be men (because women were eschewed as writers, etc. etc....you know the drill.) Charlotte was Currer Bell, Emily was Ellis Bell and Anne was Acton Bell and the book was called Poems By Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The poetry was really mostly Emily's and she turned to novel writing to enact her vengeance at her poetic dismissal with a book bound to be made into countless cheesy movies and stand as an archetype as a "romantic hero." (Okay, she didn't do it quite like that. Heathcliff is a very bad romantic, let alone hero. And Emily didn't write from rage, or---maybe she did...)

If you are in any Women's Studies classes the Bronte sisters are sure to be mentioned. They were very gifted storytellers and keen observers of dialect and life. Their health was compromised by poor sanitary conditions (it was the water, not their housekeeping- which led to typhus. tuberculosis and pneumonia) and both Emily (at 30) and Anne (at 29) died young. Branwell Bronte, their only brother, was a portrait painter. He was said to be dashing and handsome and talented. He had a torrid affair with a married woman, was abandoned by her and became a severe alcoholic ( you gettin' the drift that the Bronte sisters saw some firsthand stuff to use for their characters, here?) He also died at 29.

So Charlotte was left to sort out the stories. She didn't live all that much longer, dying at age 38. But she, alone, escaped to tell.

The masthead picture is a portrait Branwell painted of himself and his three sisters. Don't see him in the painting? He painted himself out. There is an apocryphal story that the Bronte's father wiped him out of the painting with turpentine. The sisters in the painting are, left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte. The painting next to the poem is one Branwell did of Emily.

You can find more Emily Bronte here: academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/poetry.html

Here's some of Anne's work: www.readbookonline.net/books/Bronte/37/

And here's Charlotte: www.readbookonline.net/books/Bronte/24/

Number 214: Ogden Nash "The Centipede"

The Centipede

I objurgate the centipede,
A bug we do not really need.
At sleepy-time he beats a path
Straight to the bedroom or the bath.
You always wallop where he’s not,
Or, if he is, he makes a spot.

-- Ogden Nash

Hap Notes: Here, in spite of the poem's humorous content (well, humorous to us, not centipedes) are some sharp observations about the "creepy crawly" thing we call a House Centipede (or more exactly Scutigera coleoptrata.) Nash is right, they are nocturnal- you won't often see them in the day time. And they like moist areas- if you hate seeing them, run a dehumidifier- they hate dry air. They need moisture to live and will dry out and die if it is not around (so they leave to find a moister area.) I don't think they can swim, though. (The masthead picture is a close-up of one. They are sort of beautiful, I think. Creepy, but beautiful.)

Okay, the "bad" news about centipedes in the house is that they can live to be 3-7 years old. Once you find them- they ain't goin' anywhere. They lay eggs in the spring and can have 60-150 little centipedes although they don't start laying eggs until their third year- they're late bloomers, sexually. (Also, they don't really "have sex". They dance around each other a bit. The male lays down his sperm and the female, if she wants to, surrounds it. They touch antennas for a moment. That's it. That's all they get from the reproductive deal. She doesn't even get dinner out of the deal and then she curls around the eggs to protect them until they hatch.)

"Centipede" means one hundred legs although most house centipedes probably have around 30 legs or 15 pairs (centipedes generally have an odd number of pairs- 7,9,11,13, 15.) All those legs come in handy because they are very fast and can move up to 16 inches per second. That's why "you always wallop where he's not." Each segment of the centipede contains a leg on each side.

They can detach or lose a few legs without being harmed and can grow to be almost 2 inches long. Pretty short by human standards but when you see one in the bathroom they look monstrous. They can withstand a pretty long fall so just brushing them off a counter top probably won't hurt them. It's the exoskeleton that is so brilliantly protective.

The do have a "bite" or "sting" but their jaws are usually too weak to break human skin. Those who have been bitten compare it to a bee sting. My suggestion is to just not pick them up. They squoosh very easily with a wad of bathroom tissue. (Hence Nash's line about leaving a spot.)

Here's the "good" news. The house centipede mainly feeds on bedbugs, spiders, cockroaches, silverfish and ants. They can see but not particularly well and count on their antenna for smell and feel. Also they can eat one bug while holding on to another one. They jump on their prey and use their legs with a process often called "lassoing." I don't believe they have rodeos, though, more's the pity.

There are more than 8,000 species of centipedes and there are fossil records of them dating back 430 million years. Only 3,000 of the species has actually been studied, however.

Centipedes are actually not insects, by the by. They are chilopoda and are more related to shrimp. lobsters and crabs.

If all this is creeping you out a bit I will answer a question which might help you: why do insects run toward you instead of away from you when you encounter them on the floor? Because you aren't thinking of this from the insect point of view.

Insects (and other creeping crawling things) are looking for a dark place to hide. (I have often noted with some snotty human amusement that insects will hide on the black tiles of the black and white tiles on the floor in my bathroom). So you are huge- they see you in the same way you would see something that was approximately 750 times taller than you are –you are like a skyscraper to them. They head for the darkness- the crevice under your feet. When you move- they're freaked- go to the dark! So they find the closest dark place which is often UNDER you. They aren't charging you- they're trying to hide from the giant slowly-moving skyscraper thing making all the vibrations. They don't connect "under you" with you. (Also, wouldn't it be smarter to "ride" the moving thing than be exposed to it?)

So centipedes may not be a bug we "really need," as Nash says but really, they do eliminate a lot of so-called pests we do not like. It's 'Morton's Fork'- a choice between two things equally unpleasant.

Here is where we have talked about Nash before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-27-ogden-nash-everybody-tells-me.html

Number 213: Charles Causley "Eden Rock"

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden
 Rock:

My father, twenty-five, in the same suit

Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack

Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress

Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,

Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.

Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight

From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw

Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out

The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.

My mother shades her eyes and looks my way

Over the drifted stream. My father spins

A stone along the water. Leisurely,


They beckon to me from the other bank.

I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is!

Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'

I had not thought that it would be like this.

-- Charles Causley

Hap Notes: This is one of Causley's most famous and moving poems. Here he is reading it aloud- his reading adds to the simple mysterious beauty of the words: www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=127

I have a couple of notes for the poem. H.P. Sauce, a note for us Americans, is a brown sauce somewhat like a steak sauce but it has tamarind in it and now comes in a variety of blends. It's a very popular condiment in the U.K. First invented in the late 1800s, it was used in a restaurant in the Houses of Parliament and inventor of the sauce Frederick Garton says that's why he eventually named it "H. P." Causley's mother is using the bottle to hold milk for the picnic. She's stoppered the bottle with a bit of twisted paper.

Genuine Irish Tweed is capitalized because it is authentic hand-woven tweed of pure wool made in Donegal. Other tweeds are not allowed to use this designation.

Isn't this dream like image in the poem a very child-like and lovely thing? It's particularly moving since Causley lost his father when he was only 8 or 9 and he's hearkening back to a time when his parents were (and now are) together and happy. The poet seems a boy, rather than a man in this poem even though we know it is a full grown man writing it. It's very stirring with the sky whitening with a sort of divine light.

Causley died in 2003 and I most fervently wish that this is the vision that met him as he passed on. His gravestone (pictured in the masthead) says simply "Poet" and that he was. The rocks in the masthead picture are Dartmoor and you have to hear him read the poem to know why I whimsically used it.

Here is where we have talked about Causley before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/number-190-charles-causley-green-man-in.html

and here:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/number-191-another-charles-causley.html

Number 212: Josephine Miles "The Doctor Who Sits At The Bedside Of A Rat"

The Doctor Who Sits at the Bedside of a Rat

The doctor who sits at the bedside of a rat
Obtains real answers–a paw twitch,
An ear tremor, a gain or loss of weight,
No problem as to which
Is temper and which is true.
What a rat feels, he will do.

Concomitantly then, the doctor who sits
At the bedside of a rat
Asks real questions, as befits
The place, like where did that potassium go, not what
Do you think of Willie Mays or the weather?
So rat and doctor may converse together.

-- Josephine Miles

Hap Notes: Oddly enough, Josephine Miles (1911-1985), a fairly restrained and highly intellectual professor at U.C. Berkeley, was an influential force with the poets of the burgeoning "Beat" movement. She was excited by their use of language and showed Ginsberg's Howl to poet Richard Eberhart, who consequently wrote an article about it for the New York Times.

Miles was born with some health problems and she suffered from arthritis from an early age. She had to be educated at home by tutors but eventually went to UCLA and then U.C. Berkeley for her doctorate, where she taught for her entire career. She was the first woman to get tenure in the English department at Berkeley. It wasn't easy for her. Students recollect that Miles was often carried into the classroom due to her disabilities. She worked tirelessly helping students in the evenings. Miles wrote books on the writing of poetry, analyzing vocabulary and styles in addition to publishing more than a half dozen books of her own poetry. She was a gentlewoman and a scholar, to change a phrase a bit.

Miles was a mentor to Jack Spicer (happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/number-180-jack-spicer-any-fool-can-get.html) and was very good friends with drama and movie critic Pauline Kael. In spite of being a proponent of Beat poetry, Miles remains a singular voice unattached to any school. Her students also included A.R. Ammons, William Stafford, Robin Blaser and Diane Wakoski. (We've already done poems by both Stafford and Wakoski, too.)

Kenneth Rexroth (happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-126-kenneth-rexroth-gic-to-har.html) called her poetry "small, very neat holes cut in the paper," which I believe he meant as a criticism but the statement has some merit as to Miles' precision with language. Randall Jarrell said her work was "full of the conversational elegance of understatement, Of a carefully awkward and mannered charm. Everything is just a little off; is, always, the precisely unexpected."

Miles won scads of awards and fellowships and grants. Her work is always surprising-- from within a short, coolish, dry statement, a strange thing will emerge, an unpredictable outcome, an ending that is not an end.

In today's poem she starts out a little odd, although, a rat as a patient is the way patients often feel – that they are nothing more than laboratory animals. But a laboratory animal just yields physical results. The doctor cannot talk of Willie Mays (oh, tell me you know who that is, please) or of the weather or of the latest books or movies because rats do not function like that (and even if they did, he would not have the necessary language to ask.)

In point of fact, Miles may be saying that while doctors do have the necessary language to talk to the patient, it is all just patter while they check the "animal's" vital statistics. Because that's what doctors do- they are checking for symptoms, anomalies, health statistics. They are not there to make snappy patter. Now, why would this matter to a person?

The word concomitant is cleverly used here- it is often used in the medical profession to describe secondary symptoms that occur with a main symptom. We would do well to remember that Miles had a good deal of interaction with doctors in her life-long frail and disabled state. The poem also exhibits her wry sense of humor.

Here's a good Josephine Miles quote: "I like the idea of speech – not images, not ideals, not music, but people talking – as the material from which poetry is made."

You can find more Miles here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/josephine-miles

Here is an excellent transcript of an interview with Miles after she retired from teaching: www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/josephine-miles/poetry-teaching-and-scholarship--oral-history-transcript--and-related-materi-hci/1-poetry-teaching-and-scholarship--oral-history-transcript--and-related-materi-hci.shtml

Number 211: Shel Silverstein "Ice Cream Stop"

Ice Cream Stop

The circus train made an ice cream stop
At the fifty-two flavor ice cream stand.
The animals all got off the train
And walked right up to the ice cream man.
“I’ll take Vanilla,” yelled the gorilla.
“I’ll take Chocolate,” shouted the ocelot.
“I’ll take Strawberry,” chirped the canary.
“Rocky Road,” croaked the toad
“Lemon and Lime,” growled the lion.
Said the ice cream man, “Til I see a dime,
You’ll get no ice cream of mine.”
Then the animals snarled and screeched and growled
And whinnied and whimpered and hooted and howled
And gobbled up the whole ice cream stand,
All fifty-two flavors
(fifty-three with the ice cream man).

-- Shel Silverstein

Hap Notes: Yay! It's Saturday. And everybody likes ice cream, yes? I love the way Silverstein gets rhymes for each animal. Always nice to take a little break after a long poem by Shelley, eh?

Here is a bit of Saturday ice cream fun.

Here's an 80s ad for ice cream cone cereal. Do you remember this cereal?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DVCKuBntEQ

Then we have Tootsie Roll Ice Cream bars... another thing I never knew about...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEqP01w8bzo

Have you ever heard of spaghetti ice cream? I honestly thought this was a joke but it's not:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY66CyTUvMo&feature=related

No ice cream mention would be complete without the Buckwheat Boys- I believe Baskin and Robbins used this for an ad:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC_gkcplz_4&feature=related

And the Buckwheat Boys cultural contribution to the internet-- the infamous Peanut Butter Jelly Time:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8MDNFaGfT4

Here's a short explanation about these cultural blips:

knowyourmeme.com/memes/peanut-butter-jelly-time

Number 210: Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Cloud"

The Cloud

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning my pilot sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest,
As still as a brooding dove.

That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till calm the rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hap Notes: Today, in 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams were on the small schooner "Don Juan" (named by Byron but Shelley called it "Ariel") when it capsized in a squall and they were drowned. There is speculation about why the ship went down but, in the end, the results are the same, the poet was dead at 29 years old.

In today's poem, Shelley speaks as the cloud and exhibits his very sound knowledge of the way weather works. He was always interested in science and was well read about it and infinitely curious. This is pretty much how weather works from the evaporation to air to cloud to rain to evaporation again. The clouds don't really make the dew but it is certainly a composition of the cloud. A cenotaph is a monument erected to the dead. The "woof" he is talking about is the texture, as in weaving; the woof and warp (sometimes called the woof and weft- store that tidbit for future poetry reading.) He's even technically correct about this as the woof is the horizontal threads, the warp the vertical.

So in spite of the genies in the purple deep and the swarm of golden bees and the girdles (which is a word often used in poetry and does not mean that Lycra thing that holds in one's stomach, think of it like a big sash that encircles the waist) of pearl, Shelley's got some accuracy here.

The internal rhyming of every other line is both deft and awesome even if "breathe" and "beneath" is stretching it a little. It's a good effort. I loved this poem when I was a kid and I still find it charming.

Here are a few Shelley tidbits you may not know. First, he was tall- 5'11" and slender and walked with a bit of a stooped posture. His thick hair was prematurely greyed in places (some call it "grizzled.") It is said that his eyes were "stag like"- large and fixed on you when he talked. His voice was said to be high pitched (by the by, did you know that Abraham Lincoln's voice was also said to be high pitched with a distinctive Kentucky-Indiana twang?) Bysshe is an alteration of the surname "Bush" (that's right, as in George) and is pronounced "bish."

Shelley was enormously generous, kind and enthusiastic. Byron said, on Shelley's death, " You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was without exception the best and least selfish man I ever knew." (I think he's referring to the fact that Shelley was looked on as a wild-eyed revolutionary in England. Everyone, to a man, who knew Shelley thought he was generous.)

As Shelley's body was cremated on the beach, his heart would not burn. It remained in the ashes (some speculate it was his liver, others that his heart had calcified, making it harder to burn, from his many illnesses which may have stemmed from heart trouble.)

His heart was given to his wife, Mary. A year after she died, the Shelley family opened her box desk (a lap desk) and found a notebook she had shared with Percy, locks from her children's hair, some of Shelley's ashes and a copy of his poem "Adonais" wrapped around his heart. "Adonais" was the poem Shelley had written as an elegy to Keats, who died in 1821, a year before Shelley drowned.

It's my personal opinion, but, I think this poem sums up Shelley almost perfectly. He really was a cloud spirit: stormy, beneficent, complex, serene, egalitarian (rain falls on both the rich and poor) and deeply beautiful, sentimental (everyone has memories of the rain and snow) and mysterious.

Here's where we've talked about Shelley before:

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-48-percy-bysshe-shelley.html

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/02/numbers-59-and-60-keat-shelley-hunt.html