The Nightingale Near the House -- Harold Monro

(Poem #1822) The Nightingale Near the House Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn It listens, listens, Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing. That star enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground While all the night you sing. My dreams are flowers to which you are the bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song, then loses it again In the moonlight on the lawn. Now is your voice a marble high and white Then like a mist on fields of paradise Now is a raging fire, then it is like ice Then breaks and it is dawn. -- Harold Monro

Every now and then, I read a poem where all I can think, at the end, is that
the poet *really* should have quit while he was ahead. Today's poem sadly
falls into that category - the first verse is absolutely beautiful, the
second merely okay, and the final two are (despite some nice images) just
plain weak.

So why am I even bothering to run this? Well, as I have observed before, a
good enough segment - indeed, sometimes even a good enough line - can be
worth reading an otherwise mediocre poem for, and I think the first verse of
today's poem definitely qualifies. Indeed, it would have been an excellent
poem in its own right - consider:

   Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn
   It listens, listens, Taller trees beyond
   Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond
   Stares. And you sing, you sing.

Lovely, isn't it? Well, consider that your poem for today, and feel free to
ignore the rest. I certainly did.

martin

[Links]

Wikipedia page:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Monro

We've run a couple of Monro's poems before, including the delightful
"Overheard on a Salmarsh":
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/594.html

Milk for the Cat -- Harold Monro

Guest poem sent in by Anustup Datta

(Poem #727) Milk for the Cat When the tea is brought at five o'clock, And all the neat curtains are drawn with care, The little black cat with bright green eyes Is suddenly purring there. At first she pretends, having nothing to do, She has come in merely to blink by the grate, But, though tea may be late or the milk may be sour, She is never late. And presently her agate eyes Take a soft large milky haze, And her independent casual glance Becomes a stiff, hard gaze. Then she stamps her claws or lifts her ears, Or twists her tail and begins to stir, Till suddenly all her lithe body becomes One breathing, trembling purr. The children eat and wriggle and laugh; The two old ladies stroke their silk: But the cat is grown small and thin with desire, Transformed to a creeping lust for milk. The white saucer like some full moon descends At last from the clouds of the table above; She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows, Transfigured with love. She nestles over the shining rim, Buries her chin in the creamy sea; Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw Is doubled under each bending knee. A long, dim ecstasy holds her life; Her world is an infinite shapeless white, Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop, Then she sinks back into the night, Draws and dips her body to heap Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair, Lies defeated and buried deep Three or four hours unconscious there. -- Harold Monro

A very well-known poem, and probably the most popular piece of work Monro
has produced. The beauty lies in the detail and the empathetic observation.
Not a great deal to say about form here, but this is one of those poems that
you suddenly find yourself smiling about. And if you're a feline-fancier,
you're probably purring by now. It has got that indescribable feeling of
what the Teutons call gemutlichkeit, of which 'cosiness' is a hopelessly
inadequate translation.

The Columbia Encyclopaedia has this to say about Monro -

Harold Monro

  1879?1932, English poet, b. Belgium. In 1911 he founded the Poetry Review
  and the following year established the Poetry Bookshop, which became a
  refuge and intellectual center for poets. His Poetry and Drama (1913), a
  successor to the Poetry Review, was discontinued during World War I, but
  Monro reestablished it as Chapbook (1919?25). Both periodicals had great
  influence on the poetical work of the time. His own work, first published
  in 1906, includes Children of Love (1914) and Elm Angel (1930).

  Works : His Collected Poems (introd. by T. S. Eliot, 1933); J. Grant,
  Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (1967).

Harold Monro was associated with the Georgian Poetry school of antebellum
England, of which the Brittanica says -

Georgian poetry

  A variety of lyrical poetry produced in the early 20th century by an
  assortment of British poets, including Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire
  Belloc, Edmund Charles Blunden, Rupert Brooke, William Henry Davies, Ralph
  Hodgson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson,
  Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro (editor of The Poetry
  Review), Siegfried Sassoon, Sir J.C. Squire, and Edward Thomas. Brooke and
  Sir Edward Marsh, wishing to make new poetry accessible to a wider public,
  with Monro, Drinkwater, and Gibson, planned a series of anthologies. To
  this series they applied the name "Georgian" to suggest the opening of a
  new poetic age with the accession in 1910 of George V.

  Five volumes of Georgian Poetry, edited by Marsh, were published between
  1912 and 1922. The real gifts of Brooke, Davies, de la Mare, Blunden, and
  Hodgson should not be overlooked, but, taken as a whole, much of the
  Georgians' work was lifeless. It took inspiration from the countryside and
  nature, and in the hands of less gifted poets, the resulting poetry was
  diluted and middlebrow conventional verse of late Romantic character.
  "Georgian" came to be a pejorative term, used in a sense not intended by
  its progenitors: rooted in its period and looking backward rather than
  forward.

Regards,
Anustup

Links:

We've run one previous poem by Monro: poem #594

Overheard on a Salmarsh -- Harold Monro

An irresistible follow up to yesterday's poem...

(Poem #594) Overheard on a Salmarsh Nymph, nymph, what are your beads? Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them? Give them me. No. Give them me. Give them me. No. Then I will howl all night in the reeds, Lie in the mud and howl for them. Goblin, why do you love them so? They are better than stars or water, Better than voices of winds that sing, Better than any man's fair daughter, Your green glass beads on a silver ring. Hush, I stole them out of the moon. Give me your beads, I want them. No. I will howl in the deep lagoon For your green glass beads, I love them so. Give them me. Give them. No. -- Harold Monro

Today's delightfully whimsical poem calls for little explanation - I just
like the image of a goblin and a nymph squabbling over a handful of green
glass beads. This is a genre of poetry that I loved as a child, both for its
playfulness and for the unexpected directions it would take my imagination,
and age has done little to diminish its appeal. And 'Overheard on a
Salmarsh' is an excellent example of the genre - simple, but startlingly
evocative; indeed I was surprised at how few words it took to conjure up a
detailed mental picture (doubtless straight out of an illustration to a book
of fairy tales, but then, that was probably precisely the intended effect).

The language too is that perfect mixture of the fairy-tale and the poetic
that reaches out to children without in any way condescending to them. And
this is truly a poem to be read aloud - try it and see how the rhymes, the
metre, the interspersed voices all come together in an utterly captivating
narrative.

Note:

I believe Salmarsh to be a corruption of saltmarsh (a sea-flooded marsh),
but can't confirm this. Can anyone shed some light on the issue?

Biography:

Harold Monro

  The publisher of the various anthologies of Georgian Poetry, Harold Monro,
  was born in Brussels in 1879. He describes himself as "author, publisher,
  editor and book-seller." Monro founded The Poetry Bookshop in London in
  1912, a unique establishment having as its object a practical relation
  between poetry and the public, and keeping in stock nothing but poetry,
  the drama, and books connected with these subjects. His quarterly Poetry
  and Drama (discontinued during the war and revived in 1919 as The Monthly
  Chapbook), was in a sense the organ of the younger men; and his shop, in
  which he has lived for the last seven years except while he was in the
  army, became a genuine literary center.

  Of Monro's books, the two most important are Strange Meetings (1917) and
  Children of Love (1919). "The Nightingale Near the House," one of the
  loveliest of his poems, is also one of his latest and has not yet appeared
  in any of his volumes.

        -- http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/poems/harold_monro.html

On Georgian Poetry:

  a variety of lyrical poetry produced in the early 20th century by an
  assortment of British poets, including Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire
  Belloc, Edmund Charles Blunden, Rupert Brooke, William Henry Davies, Ralph
  Hodgson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson,
  Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro (editor of The Poetry
  Review), Siegfried Sassoon, Sir J.C. Squire, and Edward Thomas.

  Brooke and Sir Edward Marsh, wishing to make new poetry accessible to a
  wider public, with Monro, Drinkwater, and Gibson, planned a series of
  anthologies. To this series they applied the name "Georgian" to suggest
  the opening of a new poetic age with the accession in 1910 of George V.
  Five volumes of Georgian Poetry, edited by Marsh, were published between
  1912 and 1922. (See Marsh, Sir Edward Howard.)

  The real gifts of Brooke, Davies, de la Mare, Blunden, and Hodgson should
  not be overlooked, but, taken as a whole, much of the Georgians' work was
  lifeless. It took inspiration from the countryside and nature, and in the
  hands of less gifted poets, the resulting poetry was diluted and
  middlebrow conventional verse of late Romantic character. "Georgian" came
  to be a pejorative term, used in a sense not intended by its progenitors:
  rooted in its period and looking backward rather than forward.

        -- EB

[Which is sad - at their best, poets like Flecker, Brooke and indeed Monro
were anything but lifeless. I have personally found considerable enjoyment
in leafing through collections of Georgian poetry. -m.]

Links:

Some poems similar in theme or mood: poem #252, poem #312.
and, of course, yesterday's poem #593.

We've run several other poems by Georgian poets - see the index at
[broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet.html

-martin