Presidents’ Day poetry
[NOTE: Today is Presidents’ Day, and this is a repeat of a previous post.]
I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.
Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.
We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large bank of memorized doggerel to draw on.
One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?
And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:
Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.
I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.
And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.
I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:
If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”
The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.
Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.
Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Yeah, but nobody ever has anything to say about William Howard Taft!
Watch this movie “The Better Angels” to celebrate Lincoln with visual and auditory poetry: https://youtu.be/2RQVFCJJMIk
I now understand the problems with New Yorkers a little better…
I had to memorize “Oh Captain, My Captain”, 11th grade I think (maybe Senior YR – it was a Looooog Time ago). Then, the Teacher (student Teacher actually), had us analyze it. Early intro to Lincoln. I like it.
George Washington was a gentleman,
A soldier and a scholar;
He crossed the Delaware with a boat,
The Potomac, with a dollar.
The British faced him full of joy,
And departed full of sorrow;
George Washington was a gentleman.
His birthday is tomorrow.
When approached by fellow patriots,
And asked for his opinion,
He spoke in accents clear and bold,
And, probably, Virginian.
His winter home at Valley Froge
Was underheated, rather.
He possessed a sturdy Roman nose,
And became his country’s father.
His army was a hungry horde,
Ill-armed, worse-clad Colonials;
He was our leading President,
And discouraged ceremonials.
His portrait on our postage stamps,
It does him less than justice;
He was much respected by his wife,
The former Mrs. Custis.
He routed George’s scarlet coats;
(Though oft by Congress hindered)
When they fortified the leeward side,
He slashed them from the windward.
He built and launched our Ship of State,
He brought it safe to harbor;
He wore no beard upon his chin,
Thanks to his faithful barber.
George Washington was a gentleman,
His birthday is tomorrow.
He filled his country’s friends with joy,
His country’s foes, with sorrow.
And so my dears, his grateful land
In robes of glory clad him.
George Washington was a gentleman.
I’m glad his parents had him.
~Ogden Nash
Way back when, we got the internet and the web, and other newer technologies came out. One that caught my attention was the availability of free literature in electronic format. The University of Virginia had one such depository and I downloaded some hopefully interesting content.
There was a biography on Ben Franklin. I looked that the preface and a little bit of Chap. 1. It was the most abysmal hagiography I’d ever seen. Completely unreadable IMO. Limited and sparse factual detail buried in blather.
“Oh Captain, My Captain” is certainly a much better poem than the one I am about to share, but it does recall this sort of doggerel:
LINES ON A SICK GYPSY
There we leave her, there we leave her,
Far from where her swarthy kindred roam,
In the scarlet fever, scarlet fever,
Scarlet fever convalescant home.
[cited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, eds., An Introduction to Poetry]
Here’s a surreal dream poem about George Washington. I’ve always loved this poem.
________________________________
George Washington
Wearing a green silk dress
I drove to California with a giraffe who looked like George
Washington.
The roads were long
and covered with ivory boxes.
We stopped at a filling station for gas and found that the next
hundred miles of road would be dangerous.
I left notes for you in every ivory box we passed.
The gold clasps did not open
properly.
I wrote letters to you
and fastened them with gold clasps.
But my green dress wore out long before I reached California.
The giraffe abandoned me at the first zoo.
I kept calling INFORMATION and asking for George Washington,
but his phone service had been shut off
in Washington. New York. LA. and
Palm Beach.
“We can connect you with the new president,” said the operator.
“It won’t do any good,” I answered.
“I must reach George Washington. No one else will do.”
So I left more notes for you in the ivory boxes.
I kept saying, “Let me know where you are.”
I travelled all the roads in the country.
I left notes everywhere.
I sent you letters with gold catches unclasped.
I telephoned every place I could think of.
My giraffe left me after finding a zoo.
My green silk dress wore out,
I have no clothes.
Please tell me
what I am doing–riding over the same dangerous 100 miles
everyday,
leaving letters in ivory boxes.
They all bear your name.
Please tell me what I’m doing?
Why?
Sometimes I do remember reading in the paper over 200 years ago
that you died–I must know
you’re dead
by now.
Please tell me what I’m doing,
George Washington.
Please tell me what I’m doing,
–for my own good.
–Diane Wakoski, “The George Washington Poems” (1967)
Neo, FYI:
in trying to go to the next post on Margret Brennan, I am now receiving an error message as:
This site can’t provide a secure connection
thenewneo.com uses an unsupported protocol.
ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH
Unsupported protocol
The client and server don’t support a common SSL protocol version or cipher suite.
I had a different error a little while ago about too many redirects to get to your site.
Then a few minutes later it worked again.
??????
R2L:
Yes, I’ve been on the phone with the host and they supposedly corrected that problem. But they said it would take up to 2 hours for the correction to be fully functional. So hopefully the problem will go away by about 12:30 AM Eastern time.
It’s frustrating to keep having these glitches. I keep thinking if it continues I should change hosts, but that’s a big undertaking, and there’s no guarantee there won’t still be problems now and then.
I’ve also been having a new problem on my phone, having to refresh the blog before new comments will show. I hope that other people aren’t having that happen, too. It’s new for me.
My sister recited Whitman’s “Oh Captain, My Captain” at a Memorial Day ceremony that was held on the lawn in front of the town hall. When she was in 8th grade?
The town hall was named for the family that paid for the construction of the building. That family’s first ancestor in the town was a Revolutionary War hero, who was mentioned in David McCullough’s 1776. A family member was my Sunday School teacher in 4th grade. Another family member recently did some work on a friend’s 300 year old house. Like Faulkner says, the past isn’t past.
@ Gringo > “Like Faulkner says, the past isn’t past.”
But we must learn to be unburdened by what has been.
Whatever.
I never memorized “Oh Captain” but did appreciate its melancholic irony.
I DID memorize “Nancy Hanks” in 7th grade and rather liked it, since she died before he became famous and I could picture her, if she came back as a ghost and could speak, wanting to know.
Now, I believe that those who have passed beyond the veil are perfectly well aware of what’s going on down here, and some of them are appalled.
Washington and Lincoln for sure.
“Surreal” is the right description for Wakoski’s poem, but it kinda grows on ya.
I do wonder about the giraffe.
Ogden Nash is my favorite poet.
(Doggerel is a sure-fire hook.)
Most likely from much-too-early exposure
(and I still have my first book).
neo
That has been terrible for me. Seems it was sdferr who brought it up a day or two ago—which is when is also started for me. Even clicking on Recent Comment in that section wouldn’t go to the comment…just to the top of post. Then scrolling down to last comment I would still have to do a refresh to get the recent comment.
Not as bad this morning but still issues…