When you were a tadpole: in praise of verse
When I was a child of around ten, one semi-bored day I came across the light-verse poem “Evolution” in a book on a shelf in my house. Even at the age of ten it amused me and also moved me, and you know what? It still does. And its rhymes are so clever:
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into life again…
Those are just the first two verses of thirteen and a half, some of which still give me a chuckle and some an involuntary chill when I read them. Call me a sap if you wish (or worse), but I still really like the poem.
Here’s the Wiki page of the poem’s author:
Langdon Smith (4 January 1858 – 8 April 1908) was an American journalist and author. His most well-known work is the poem “Evolution”, which begins with the line “When you were a tadpole and I was a fish”. The line later became the title of an essay about this “one-poem poet” written by Martin Gardner.
I tried to find the text of that Gardner essay, but failed, although it’s available at this site if you have the right credentials.
Smith worked as a journalist, much of it as war correspondent and sports writer, for most of his life. The poem was published over a century ago:
The first few stanzas of the poem “Evolution” were written and published in the New York Herald in 1895. It was worked upon for many years and later published in full in the New York Journal sometime before 1906, and posthumously published in illustrated and annotated book form as Evolution : A Fantasy (1909).
Here’s a very sad footnote:
Smith died at his home, 148 Midwood Street, Flatbush, New York on 8 April 1908.
His grief-stricken wife committed suicide on June 10 of the same year after having tried to do so on April 25. Lewis Allen Browne in his preface to Evolution : A Fantasy (1909) wrote:
“Their lives and affections linked as they were, in his poetic fancy at least, since the beginning of time seemed to have created between them in reality a bond too close to survive a parting.”
In my mind there’s a difference between poetry and verse, and although “Evolution” is most definitely verse, it straddles the line into poetry at times. “Verse” usually has a more insistent sing-song-y rhyme and a lighter and often amusing theme, and is more straightforward. That doesn’t mean that it takes no skill to write good verse. Not only that, but major poets sometimes employ the genre.
This site offers the first page of that Gardner essay on Smith’s poem, and in it I see there’s a discussion of T. S. Eliot’s essay on Kipling’s verse (I like much of Kipling, by the way, especially “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”):
In 1941 T. S. Eliot startled the literary world by editing an anthology called A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. Graduate students of English literature, who had been ashamed to admit they could recite whole chunks from “Mandalay,” “Boots,” “Gunga Din,” “Danny Deever,” suddenly found the courage to transfer their copies of Kipling from that dark, inaccessible corner of the bookcase to a shelf where they could be seen by visitors.
In the introduction to his anthology, Eliot proposed useful distinction between “poetry” and “verse.” Verse, he says in effect, has a simple, metrical beat; it expresses clear, unambiguous ideas. Content and form can be grasped completely, or almost completely, on first reading. Poetry differs in degree. Its sound patterns are subtler, less lucid, impossible to understand fully on first reading. The poem’s richness grows with rereadings.
And yet I find that with some verse, including “Evolution,” its richness also “grows with rereadings.”
And of course, Eliot himself wrote not only poetry but also some verse, such as his Old Possum’s Book of Cats that inspired that terrible musical scourge “Cats.” Even Frost sometimes wrote verse and was excellent at it, as well, for example one of my very favorites, “Departmental” – although Frost being Frost, I think it’s deeper than most verse (as is all really good verse, such as “Evolution” and much of Kipling).
Other excellent verse-type works are “The Last Leaf” and “Little Boy Blue” (1888) – the first a tearjerker in its last verse, and the second a tearjerker all the way through. “The Last Leaf” is by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who wrote it in 1830 about a Revolutionary War-era man who lived in his town and had been one of the original Tea Partiers.
In researching this post, I noticed – perhaps for the first time – that “Little Boy Blue” was by Eugene Field, another verse master and the author of “Wynken, Blynken,and Nod.” Like Langdon Smith and Kipling, he was a journalist. Seems to be a pattern.
And while we’re at it, why not?
My dad had memorized “Gunga Din” at some point in his school days and never forgot it. And he’d recite it at the drop of a hat. One time, the movie was on television, and he regaled us with it during the commercial breaks. It’s not the cheeriest of verse, but I love to hear it because it always reminds me of my dad.
I like the poems you’ve chosen, neo. 😀
My Dad likes to quote: The song, “The frog went a courtin'”, + the poem, “The walrus + the carpenter”, + he likes to sing comedy songs by Gilbert and Sullivan (sp?).
My Mom, God bless her soul, would sing the poem, “Calico Pie” by Edward Lear, to us- when we were 4 and older. She made up a tune for the poem. It was a good song to fall asleep to.
Here are some parts of the poem. Please feel free to edit it, neo, if it’s too long:
Calico Pie,
The little Birds fly
Down to the calico tree,
Their wings were blue,
And they sang “Tilly-loo!”
Till away they flew,
And they never came back to me!
They never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back to me!
Calico Jam,
The little Fish swam
Over the syllabub sea,
He took off his hat
To the Sole and the Sprat,
And the Willeby-wat,
But he never came back to me!
He never came back!
He never came back!
He never came back to me!
Calico Drum,
The Grasshoppers come,
The Butterfly, Beetle, and Bee,
Over the ground,
Around and around,
With a hop and a bound –
But they never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back to me!
Calico Ban,
The little Mice ran,
To be ready in time for tea,
Flippity-flup,
They drank it all up,
And danced in the cup,
But they never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back to me!
(p.s.- I like to change the words to, “But they always came back to me,”. To me, that makes it a happier story.) 🙂
For those who don’t have access to JSTOR, Gardner’s essay can also be found at the (illegal) Russian site that’s stolen almost all the papers found in the digital versions of expensive science and engineering journals.
The essay was published in “The Antioch Review” in 1962. Of course, that’s not a science journal, but the Russian site has apparently stolen JSTOR’s contents regardless of academic discipline.
I thought that this bit, from Gardner’s essay, was interesting:
“… Smith has given evolution a strong religious cast. Did he himself believe in transmigration? It would be interesting to know. The theme of lovers reuniting in successive reincarnations, throughout the earth’s long geological history, was a common one in popular fantasy novels of the late nineteenth century.”
The Russian site: Sci-Hub
Sc-Hub’s URL: sci-hub.se
DOI for Gardner’s essay: doi.org/10.2307/4610445
Internet Archive allows members to “borrow” books electronically for an hour. Becoming a member just means registering your email plus a password. After that you can read Gardner’s essay (and tons more) at:
https://archive.org/details/whenyouweretadpo00gard/page/164/mode/2up
The Internet Archive is a huge resource and not that many know of it.
I like “Gods of the Copybook Headings” but I suspect few read it or understand it.
I also saw “cats” in 1981 when it was brand new and loved it. The theater was quite small and a former TV studio. A few years later, I took six teenagers to see it in the same studio and they loved it. The cats, of course, came in to the audience. The second time I saw it it had become a bit of a children’s show.
Thank you TR, my mother used to sing songs like that to us as well. It reminded me of her.
TR– My grandmother on my mother’s side of the family used to recite Edward Lear’s verse to me– particularly “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “The Jumblies.” I still remember the refrain of “The Jumblies”:
“Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.”
The last of the six stanzas is vintage Lear:
“And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, ‘How tall they’ve grown!’
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore;
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And everyone said, ‘If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.”
Lear’s love of nonsense words extended to pseudonyms: when he was living in San Remo at the end of his life (he died in 1888), he would introduce himself to visitors as either “Mr. Abebika kratoponoko Prizzikalo Kattefello Ablegorabalus Ableborinto phashyph” or “Chakonoton the Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla Polentilla Battledore & Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps.”
Unfortunately, it would be hard for TR’s mother to make up a tune for those!
The poems I was driven to memorize were Poe’s The Raven and The Bells.
The former I kept for many years, the latter, not nearly so long.
“Cats” made T.S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Eliot, a wealthy woman. To her credit she did use some of the funds for literary prizes:
_______________________________
She did, however, welcome the unlikely idea of a stage musical based on a volume of Eliot’s whimsical verses, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” It became the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Cats,” a global hit that brought in huge sums for the Eliot estate.
Valerie Eliot used some of the windfall to set up a literary charity, Old Possum’s Practical Trust. She also funded the T.S. Eliot Prize, an annual award for poetry.
–https://news.yahoo.com/t-eliots-widow-valerie-eliot-dies-86-163116521.html
_______________________________
T.S. Eliot emerged chastened and confused in the ramp-up to WW II and thereafter. His fervor for high literary modernism, and his particularly elitist style, was no longer so certain. He retreated, if one may call it that, to simpler, more accessible forms such as theater and verse.
Don’t get me wrong — Eliot was genuinely attracted to those forms and was successful with them.
My point is that Eliot had been part of the literary vanguard of the 20th century, the mission of which was not only to produce great poetry, but to heal and revitalize Western Civilization.
“Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” was a considerable demotion from the ambitions of “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets.”
Here’s Gunga Din in prose. Place is Aldershot, Brit training ground, ca 1880?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbJyhHl4Wss&t=321s
I’m kind of dense. Some “poetry” seems to be a matter of dueling metaphors. Might go someplace for others, leaves me at the start line.
I’m kind of dense. Some “poetry” seems to be a matter of dueling metaphors. Might go someplace for others, leaves me at the start line.
Richard Aubrey:
Henry Miller (of “Tropic of Cancer” fame) once said “Paint what you like and die happy.” He was an amateur painter and loved to paint. He wouldn’t put up his efforts against Picasso or Klee, but he loved to paint what he painted.
Likewise, I would say, “Read what you like and die happy.”
That’s been my guide. I started reading comic books and science fiction and loved them both. I deeply resented anyone who implied that my tastes were therefore inferior.
I still read comic books and science fiction, as well as more high-falutin’ stuff.
I read what I like and, while I’m not planning to die any time soon, I am happy.
There’s book out of Henry Miller’s paintings:
–“The Paintings of Henry Miller: Paint as You Like and Die Happy”
https://www.amazon.com/Paintings-Henry-Miller-Paint-Happy/dp/0877012768
So, it’s “Paint AS you like and die happy.”
I own this book and it’s quite wonderful. A real inspiration.
Oligonicella- Poe’s The Bells for some reason was one of my favorites as a kid even though (maybe because?) it was so dark. Beginning…
“Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”
It becomes darker and darker, eventually descending into…
“Hear the loud alarum bells—
Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling.
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
Of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!”
Pretty scary stuff for a kid. I think that it was published after Poe’s death.
Sixties New Left folk singer, Phil Ochs, put Poe’s poem to music:
–“Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells sung by Phil Ochs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3FzveBu_34
Quite lovely.
It’s MLB playoff season! In honor of which, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s 1888 classic verse, “Casey at the Bat”:
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought if only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now with Casey at the bat.
But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey’s getting to the bat.
But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despised, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.
Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.
There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile on Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt ’twas Casey at the bat.
Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance gleamed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.
And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one,” the umpire said.
From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted some one on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.
With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew;
But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, “Strike two.”
“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.
The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clinched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.
A wonderful reading of Thayer’s verse by James Earl Jones– recorded in 1998 with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xWtysMlrcA&ab_channel=EdithWade
Jones was born with a stutter; he credited his high school English teacher with helping him overcome it by encouraging him to write poetry and then read it aloud.
Meanwhile, best wishes to all of Neo’s readers cheering their MLB team in the postseason– it’s an accomplishment just to get that far. And now– play ball!
Another of Poe’s poems, Annabel Lee, is among my favorites, as sung by Joan Baez. He wrote very musical verse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcZuZkm8JhA
“Casey at the Bat” was one of the stories the Disney studio animated, in 1946.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWevWN33Rq8
Disney also did a series of American Legends that didn’t include nearly enough episodes. They also were originally shorts for the full-length pictures, although some were made later.
How can we have a thread about verse, if there is no entry from Ogden Nash?
https://www.poemhunter.com/ogden-nash/poems/
This one is a bit more musical.
huxley
Thanks for the advice.
I don’t force myself to read the poems in question in search of enlightenment. I can get that from the pseudo-Hallmark advice on Facebook.
I do it to see if….is this guy putting us on?
There are only so many emotions and viewpoints. Not sure what the total is, but it’s considerably less than the total efforts to show a new and absowonderful way of making it even less clear.
The categorization of poetry into “poetry” and “verse” appears to me an affect of class by writers and consumers of the genre, with “verse”, being more simple, direct and pleasant to the ear, relegated to the “lower” class by those who style themselves as more “intellectual”. I personally like poetry (carried a pocket-sized volume of favorites while traveling over a career for quiet moments) but never studied or dwelled on a poem. Occasionally a feeling or two required reflection or even application, but the metaphorical nature of the art bent toward my enjoyment, not my education. As with everything, individual tastes.
i think I first of this, in the falcon and snowman film
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade
now it was a pyrrhic victory in the Crimean war, the michael curtiz film tried to make some rhyme or reason out of it, a revenge plot for the mutiny that occurred later,
AesopFan–
The Nash poem I remember best is the two-liner “Fleas”–
Adam
Had’em.
And “Kittens”–
The trouble with a kitten is that
It eventually becomes a cat.
I expect T.S. Eliot would disagree about “trouble,” and so do I.
Adding to Aesop’s, here’s a memorable Ogden Nash:
Shake and shake
the Catsup bottle;
First a little,
then a lot’ll.
Truer words. . .
From a 1965 issue of American Heritage (which my family subscribed to, back in the day): an article on “The Verse by the Side of the Road,” i.e. Burma-Shave signs. The product itself (a brushless shaving cream) was developed in the 1920s by a Minneapolis insurance salesman and a chemist friend (not gonna ask how well the chemist friend did in organic chemistry!). It was the insurance man’s son who came up with the idea of advertising Burma-Shave by posting groups of small signs along roadways, with the signs spaced out for a serial effect.
“The essential spirit of the Burma-Shave signs—what made America first notice and later cherish the jaunty little jingles —was of course their lightheartedness. Humor has always been infrequent in advertising, and in the years of the Depression it was so scarce as to be virtually a trace element. . . . One aspect of the signs not evident at first was that several special advantages were concealed in an arrangement of six small messages planted fifty paces apart. At thirty-five miles an hour it took about eighteen seconds to roll through the whole series. This was far more time and attention than a newspaper or magazine advertiser could realistically expect to win from casual viewers. . . . Another advantage lay hidden in the spaced-out signs: they established a controlled reading pace, and even added an element of suspense. The eye could not race ahead and anticipate or spoil the effect, as it could on a printed page. Instead the arrangement, like the bouncing ball in a movie group-singing short, concentrated attention on one sign at a time, building effect for the pay-off line.”
Lots of examples of Burma-Shave signs at the link: https://www.americanheritage.com/verse-side-road
I remember two from my own childhood: “Just remember/When you drive/The angels retire/At sixty-five.”
And “He lit a match/To check gas tank/That’s why they call him/Skinless Frank.”
Hard to remember when 35 mph was a respectable speed for a two-lane road– but we’ve lost something with the pace of today’s superhighways.
What is “Little Boy Blue About”? I’m genuinely asking. I’ve read different interpretations. The subject intrigues me.
what the academy deems worthy,
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-year-i-tore-through-annie-ernaux-e2-80-99s-books/ar-AA12IlvD
Speaking of poetry; the lowest grade I ever received in any class or subject from 1st grade through grad school was a grade of 17 (that’s 17 out of 100).
It was a poetry exam in my senior year of high school.
I am convinced that 10 of those 17 points was given to me because I spelled my name properly on the test paper.
No, I did not petition the school principal to fire the teacher because I had a lousy grade; though today that would have been considered acceptable. After all, the bad grade hurt my feelings.
I am surprised that no mention has been made of the original (and much better) version of the “Winkin and Blinkein and Nod” song as sung and written by the Simon Sisters, Lucy and Carly in the 60’s.
Probably dating myself by remembering them.
Both had lovely voices and I think the dad was the Simon of Simon &. Schuster.
Probably can find that on You Tube.
I was going to recommend the Simon Sisters version (the whole album is wonderful) but David Stori was ahead of me . . . so I’ll say instead that I think the catsup rhyme is from Richard Armour, not Ogden Nash (though Nash noticed the rhyme)
Shake and shake the ketchup bottle
None’ll come, and then a lot’ll
— Richard Armour
(I know quite a bit of Kipling, too.)
Should we take note that The Bee Gees also have a reference to Little Boy Blue? In 1993’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” https://youtu.be/K5XgAqMLR14
I was puzzled as to how a Mother Goose nursery rhyme came to be inserted into a pop ballad about love & loss. Other lyrics make it clear the Gibb family was still grieving the sudden loss of youngest brother Andy, some five years after his death.
It makes sense to me, now. Instead of the nursery rhyme, as I’d supposed, it’s an echo of the Eugene Field poem about a young boy’s unexpected passing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Miguel Cervantes: When my son was young, one night at bedtime I read him “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” We arranged his quilt to represent the topography and I showed him how the cavalry rode in to meet their fate.
Well, the next day I got a call from his first-grade teacher. She was still laughing! That afternoon they had a classroom exercise where each child had to use a number in a sentence: “There are three apples on the table.” “I have five kittens in my basket.” etc. When it was my son’s turn, he jumped to his feet: “Into the Valley of Death rode the 600!” He was prepared to act out the whole thing and had to be persuaded to sit down.
Today he teaches English at a Massachusetts prep school….
Is there a metaphor in this one of Kipling’s “Epitaphs of The War”
Native Water Carrier
M. E. F.
Prometheus brought down fire.
This brought up water.
The gods are jealous
Now as then.
Giving no quarter.
You have to know who Prometheus was and his punishment and why. So…metaphor? Simile? Simple reference?
IrishOtter:
I believe you might be talking about the nursery rhyme “Little Boy Blue,” the one that goes “come blow your horn.” Here’s a link to that. That is NOT the poem I was referring to in the post, which is this poem by Field. I don’t think there’s anything ambiguous about the latter. It’s about the death of a young child.
David Stori; Linda Seebach:
They are different versions of the same song originally by the Simons. The Doobie Brothers’ cover version appeared on the children’s album Lucy Simon co-produced, entitled “In Harmony.” So apparently it had the Simon seal of approval. Personally, I really like the Doobies’ version.
Richard Aubrey said, “You have to know who Prometheus was and his punishment and why. So…metaphor? Simile? Simple reference?”
That’s an interesting question. I wonder whether poetry or verse (your choice of term) about an important person or event in a country’s history has an evocative power that goes beyond simple reference but isn’t a metaphor. For some reason I thought of Henry Newbolt’s 1897 poem, “Drake’s Drum,” which is nominally about the snare drum that Sir Francis Drake took with him when he circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580. When Drake died off the coast of Panama in 1596, he told the crew to return the drum to England, with instructions to beat the drum if the country were ever in trouble, and he would return to lead the defenders. The original drum still exists in protective storage, with a replica on display at Plymouth Museum.
Newbolt’s poem of course references Drake’s role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. It’s written in Devon dialect:
Drake he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.
Drake he was a Devon man, an’ ruled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Rovin’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe,
“Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.”
Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’,
They shall find him, ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago.
Newbolt’s poem was set (in standard English) to music by Charles Villiers Stanford in 1910 as part of a song cycle called Songs of the Fleet.
You can listen to the sung version of “Drake’s Drum” here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcVPwR0JeXA&ab_channel=lynth
As far as the legend of Drake’s drum goes, there have been reports of people in the local area hearing a drumbeat: when the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth in 1620; when Napoleon was brought as a prisoner into Plymouth harbor in 1815; when WWI began in 1914; and during the evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk in 1940. The British Army’s 45th Infantry Division took Drake’s drum as their unit symbol in WWII and painted it on the side of their transport vehicles.
Anyway, whether Drake’s drum is a real physical object, a symbol, or the raw material of legend, a case could be made for any of those. But I hope you can still enjoy the poem and its musical setting.
I’ve never been much on verse, but there is a little one that, 40y after I first encountered it, still manages to put chills down my spine… It’s from a brit mag named Punch, over a century ago:
.
WHO is In Charge of The Clattering Train?
The axles creak,
The couplings strain,
And the pace is hot
and the points are near,
for Sleep has deadened
the driver’s ear,
And the signals flash
through the night in vain,
for Death is
In Charge of the Clattering Train…
.
I just love that one. So wonderfully small yet so intensely graphic.
Those verses, and, of course, the most awesome use of a paraprosdokian, ever, in Verse:
.
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
============================================
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition
.
That one does not affect on the same visceral level — no chills or subliminal nerve response of any kind. It does manage to hit the same thing on an intellectual level, though… And reminds the mind of the abject ephemerality of everything we know of, no matter how permanent we think it to be.
I think Kipling is the first verse/poetry I ever read, I was 8 or 9 at the time. His was the only poetry I really enjoyed then. I guess the poem I loved best, and still do, is “East is East and West is West”. I have come back to read it many times over the years. I boggled when I read that Kipling’s work is racist. That’s when I realized most people don’t know what the hell they are talking about. I believe that poem is a good roadmap for race relations.
I have so enjoyed this entry, Neo, and all the comments following it.
Even the graphics in the video made me pine for images that are
pleasing to the eye and heart. Thank you, one and all.
jd
Dorothy Sayers’ poem, An English War, refers, among other things to, “Drake’s drum beaten through the Strait”
Neo, I disagree somewhat with your use of the term “verse.” I would use the term “light verse” for the kind of work you’re talking about. I use (and it’s not just me) “verse” as a neutral term for any writing with a recognizable formal structure: meter, rhyme, and many other techniques, but in our culture predominantly rhyme and meter. So “verse” applies to Shakespeare’s work as well as Edward Lear’s.
“Poetry,” on the other hand, is less clearly defined. We tend to use it to refer to verse of high quality and at least somewhat serious intent. But it can occur in prose as well. There is a famous definition of poetry, which I think is from Coleridge, and which I can’t remember well enough to quote, but says, in essence, that poetry is writing in which words are chosen very carefully for aesthetic effect. Moby Dick, for instance, is a prose work, but includes passages that many or most readers would acknowledge to be poetry. And there can of course be works in verse which don’t attain the level of poetry, not because they’re light or humorous but because they aren’t very well executed.
In this school of thought you get observations such that “so-and-so wrote many works, in both prose and verse.”
Anyway, Ogden Nash was a sort of genius.
}}} I read what I like and, while I’m not planning to die any time soon
Only a small percentage plan to die, and even fewer of them are successful.
Nevertheless, it keeps on happening.
😀
Gallows humor aside, have a long and prosperous life perusing the ciphers of the page. 😉
Mac: A quick search pulled up this one:
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
BTW, one thing that poetry and verse makes me think of is the Robin Williams film, Dead Poets’ Society.
An excellent film, in my opinion, though it feels a teensy overwrought towards the end.
But that final scene, if feels as though it was the entire purpose of writing the story and making the movie, as though the author had that scene in mind, and wrote the story to Get There… I would put it as one of the best final/climactic scenes in all of cinematic history.
Another such (nothing to do with verse) is the Danny Devito ending speech (stockholder’s meeting) from Other People’s Money
Neo this is why I love your website. You are not only politically and psychological astute, but you also have a cultural sensitivity.
ObloodyHell–that’s not the one I was thinking of. Actually I wonder whether Coleridge said exactly that, as he was rarely succinct.
This caused me to pull out my 50-year-old copy of his Biographia Literaria, which I was pretty sure was the source of my memory, and it didn’t take long for me to find the bit I was remembering, underlined by me in 1972: he says that
“…one, though not a peculiar property of poetry…can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at….”
That’s not exactly a definition of poetry, but it’s part of the reason we can say that some prose can be poetry: “poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem.”
All this is embedded in a long discussion of the nature of poetry, Chapter XIV in the Biographia.
I noticed the rhythm of the Evolution poem, and thought … where else have I heard that? Turns out it is the same as used by Poe in Annabel Lee, and Jack London in the untitled poem in The Iron Heel:
Joy upon joy and gain upon gain
Are the destined rights of my birth,
And I shout the praise of my endless days
To the echoing edge of the earth.
Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die
To the uttermost end of time,
I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss,
In every age and clime—
“The froth of Pride, the tang of Power,
The sweet of Womanhood!
I drain the lees upon my knees,
For oh, the draught is good;
I drink to Life, I drink to Death,
And smack my lips with song,
For when I die, another ‘I’ shall pass the cup along.
“The man you drove from Eden’s grove
Was I, my Lord, was I,
And I shall be there when the earth and the air
Are rent from sea to sky;
For it is my world, my gorgeous world,
The world of my dearest woes,
From the first faint cry of the newborn
To the rack of the woman’s throes.
My Grandmother used to read two stories that were favorite of mine.
1) Peck’s bad boy
2) The Ransom of Red Chief.
Very funny stories. Moral be careful who you kidnap.
By the way: the Gardner quote about Eliot’s distinction between verse and poetry didn’t sound quite right to me, so, since I happen to have a copy of the Eliot collection of Kipling’s verse, I re-read the introduction, and it really doesn’t say exactly what Gardner says. Not that Gardner is totally wrong, but he’s a little off base.
For one thing, it’s clear that in calling the book A Choice of Kipling’s Verse Eliot is not belittling the work but simply distinguishing it from Kipling’s prose. For another, the description referenced by Gardner is more specific than he suggests. The word Eliot is mulling over in that description is “ballad,” which is more than what I would call mere verse but not always rising to poetry. Kipling, he says, is best understood as a ballad-maker.
Eliot does indeed maintain the distinction between poetry and what I would call “mere verse,” with the former being something deeper and richer and not necessarily attained by the latter. But in so doing he is definitely not writing Kipling off as a mere versifier.
I have spent WAY too long on this.
Whatever it is, it should be subject to being deep and rich in prose.
Does putting it into poetry improve that?
“The Ransome of Red Chief” is a favorite of mine.
One funny story by someone one does not expect funny stories from is “X-ing a Paragrab” by Edgard Allen Poe.
Neo, I was happy to see the new-to-me Doobies singing Wynken, Blynken, and Nod – after napping today with one of my less than year old grandsons on a mat on the floor.
But I was a bit disappointed.
It reminded me of verses that I would sing to my own 4 kids as they were young, like this one:
Twilight midnight on the ocean,
Not a streetcar was in sight.
The sun and moon shown brightly
As it rained all day that night.
And in the summer snowstorm,
While the rain just flowed like glass,
A barefoot boy with shoes on,
Stood sitting on the grass.
A longer version was sung by Burl Ives (HT Dr. Demento!), but here’s a different longer version, the second of many parts of the “Ain’t we Crazy” nonsense verses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y3_0E6mDZ8
I’d guess Jabberwocky is one of the more known poems – especially by folks who don’t much like poetry.
Re: Burma Shave
PA+Cat:
Tom Waits did a whole song devoted to Burma Shave. One of his very best. Here’s a verse, from those days, after a guy picks up a gal on that lonesome highway:
______________________________
And with her knees up on the glove compartment
She took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like root beer
And she popped her gum and arched her back
Hell Marysville ain’t nothing but a wide spot in the road
Some nights my heart pounds like thunder
Don’t know why it don’t explode
Cause everyone in this stinking town’s got one foot in the grave
And I’d rather take my chances out in Burma Shave
–Tom Waits, “Burma-Shave”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGeIusN-avE
______________________________
“And with her knees up on the glove compartment
She took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like root beer
And she popped her gum and arched her back”
Rock lyrics don’t get any better.
How very cool this is still going. So….
I had need once to write a Canterbury -ish, Old English -y, sing-song. Hope you enjoy.
The Pretty Maid
The pretty maid went down the lane and spied herself a man-o.
She said to me “Oh, don’t you see and do you think I can-o?”
She left my side and ran to him and asked him if he’d woo her.
He said that I would gladly try, but that he’d rather do her.
She blushed and turned to run away, for he did quite embarrass.
“You’ve made mistake, you boorish rake, for I am quite a fair lass.”
“If that was not the thing you wish, then why make the request-o?
So surely you’re mistaken too, to make so poor a jest-o.”
“For I did not come up to you, ’twas you who did approach me.
And if I tried, your fault you lied, no reason to reproach me.”
His words struck true upon her heart, for she had of her druthers.
She suddenly found modesty, and he did find another.
The girl he found did play around and took him off to bed-o.
And satisfied that she’d not lied, he offered her to wed-o.
Their marriage was the talk of town, for this man was quite wealthy.
She gave him sons, all hearty ones, and daughters hale and healthy.
The first maid saw what she had missed, her fortune now departed.
Her life lived she in misery, died old and brokenhearted.