Hyacinths -- Muslih-uh-Din Sa'di

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1882) Hyacinths If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft, And from thy slender store Two loaves alone to thee are left, Sell one, and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed thy Soul. -- Muslih-uh-Din Sa'di

        (alt. Moslih Eddin Saadi)
        from "Gulistan" (The Garden of Roses), 13th century Persian.

Wandering through the Saturday produce and plant market yesterday (one
of the many delights of living in Australia) and wondering yet again how
these people make a living at this - clearly they're in it for the
entertainment and the social contact, judging from the number of times
it's "Oh, take another on the house" - I got into a conversation with
one of the stallholders who was flogging both pentas (a useful thing to
plant in these days of drought) and hyacinths.

So I of course wondered if he knew this primary school verse, which I
proceeded to recite. (Always a somewhat iffy sort of overture with
Australians: they react either with delight or alarm - some sort of
lunatic on our hands?) He didn't; neither did my companion. Can it be
that I never trotted it out for our children when they were young enough
to be receptive to instead of embarrassed by this sort of thing? But it
scored me a couple of free plants. (And reciting Constantine Kavafy's
"Ithaka" had previously got me rather a lot of olives from Greek guy who
hails from Ithaca. Perhaps I should take down my shingle and make a
living as a minstrel.)

Tracking down the provenance of this well-known verse isn't easy. Google
brings up innumerable plant nursery websites but very little in the way
of literary exegesis. It develops that it's from "The Garden of Roses,"
by the 13th century Persian Sufi poet Sa'di. But where does the
translation come from? Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

Mac Robb.
Brisbane, Australia.

Moslih Eddin (Muslih-un-Din) Saadi (Sa'di), Gulistan (Garden of Roses)
 http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/S/Sadi/index.htm
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saadi

Verses Turned... -- John Betjeman

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1834) Verses Turned... Across the wet November night The church is bright with candlelight And waiting Evensong. A single bell with plaintive strokes Pleads louder than the stirring oaks The leafless lanes along. It calls the choirboys from their tea And villagers, the two or three, Damp down the kitchen fire, Let out the cat, and up the lane Go paddling through the gentle rain Of misty Oxfordshire. How warm the many candles shine Of Samuel Dowbiggin's design For this interior neat, These high box pews of Georgian days Which screen us from the public gaze When we make answer meet; How gracefully their shadow falls On bold pilasters down the walls And on the pulpit high. The chandeliers would twinkle gold As pre-Tractarian sermons roll'd Doctrinal, sound and dry. From that west gallery no doubt The viol and serpent tooted out The Tallis tune to Ken, And firmly at the end of prayers The clerk below the pulpit stairs Would thunder out "Amen." But every wand'ring thought will cease Before the noble altarpiece With carven swags array'd, For there in letters all may read The Lord's Commandments, Prayer and Creed, And decently display'd. On country mornings sharp and clear The penitent in faith draw near And kneeling here below Partake the heavenly banquet spread Of sacramental Wine and Bread And Jesus' presence know. And must that plaintive bell in vain Plead loud along the dripping lane? And must the building fall? Not while we love the church and live And of our charity will give Our much, our more, our all. -- John Betjeman

How wonderful now to be into John Betjeman! If we were to work our way
through Philip Larkin's version of the English canon Betjeman of course
ranks high on the roll. Here is another [poem by him; see Poem #1815 for the
previous example -t.], from Betjeman's survey of English country churches.
You don't have to be a staunch Anglican or an Anglican at all to enjoy these
poems. (Possibly these days that is a bit of an oxymoron in any case, but
I'm certainly far from it, either by ancestry or conviction. I am, though,
an anglophone of some few generations' standing and it's my adoptive
culture, so to speak. Doubtless at least some subscribers to the Minstrels
share that view.)

The pieties in Betjeman's lovely little poem about the parish church at
Chislehampton in Oxfordshire (for so it is) are in the long view of these
things a little off the mark. But it contains a potted history of matters
which while now vastly irrelevant at one time issues considerably exercised
the full range of national life in England, from ecclesiastical potentates
to the judicial committee of the Privy Council to ordinary churchgoing
citizens. Readers of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens will be
well attuned to them, quaint though they may now seem.

The actual church is indeed a lovely little gem of Georgian (the 18th, not
the 20th century Georges) elegance, with, certainly,

  a.. The "high box pews of Georgian days." Eighteenth century Anglican
churches had box pews in which the congregation sat facing each other
screened from each others' view for the decidedly non-sacramental recitation
of prayers, the hearing of a sermon and the singing of hymns led by a band
in the gallery.
  b.. The Ten Commandments on the wall over the Communion Table (sic, for
certainly that's what it was in the 18th century - no "altars" in those
days). This was the standard decoration if, indeed, the chancel wasn't
entirely blocked off from view so as not to cause anyone erroneously to
infer any "popery" from the unseemly display of the pre-Reformation site of
the altar.
  c.. A lofty pulpit for "pre-Tractarian sermons./Doctrinal, sound and dry."
Well, maybe they were dry, but generations of the faithful seem to have
found them sustaining and indeed Methodism sought to raise the sermon to
even greater prominence.
  d.. Below the pulpit, the desk where "firmly at the end of prayers/The
clerk.[w]ould thunder out 'Amen.' The Prayer Book services of Morning and
Evening Prayer were in some measure a duet between the parson and the clerk,
who took the part of the congregation, in the manner that in pre-Vatican II
Catholic churches there was a duet between the presiding celebrant and the
altar boy.
  e.. And a west gallery for a parish band to lead in "Tallis's tune to Ken"
(ie the non-jurant bishop Thomas Ken's Morning and Evening Hymns - "Glory to
thee who safe has kept/And hast refresh'd me while I slept" and "All praise
to thee my God this night/For all the blessings of the light/". "Praise God
from whom all blessings flow/Praise him all creatures here below." The 19th
century saw the introduction of pipe organs and elegant chancel choirs,
possibly robed in cassock and surplice - somewhat known beyond Anglicanism
by the popular recordings of choirs such as those of Kings College Cambridge
and Westminster Abbey, and also in prosperous evangelical Protestant
denominations of other historical traditions - but 18th century parish
worship was heartily led by a gallery band of trumpets, strings, and other
catch-as-catch-can instruments.

It is, indeed, a considerable anachronism: a parish church whose "living" is
(or till recently was - haven't checked up on the current state of affairs)
in the gift of the local squire. Betjeman rather gilds the lily with 19th
century piety when he suggests sacramental small-c catholicism in such a
place: it is quintessentially of the kind of stoutly Protestant Anglicanism
that Samuel Pepys knew in the 1660s - when he spoke of going to "hear Mr X
preach," assuredly not to "take the sacrament."

An old friend of mine is a Canadian Anglican prelate and a cousin of the
squire of Chislehampton who vastly relishes the quaint family prerogative of
visiting there and dressing up in 18th century rig complete with clerical
bands (alas, not a wig though) to say Morning Prayer or Evensong. Far more
Congregationalist or Presbyterian than Anglican by current sensibilities, to
be sure, but authentically a part of English history.

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia

External links: John Betjeman home page
  [broken link] http://www.johnbetjeman.com/oldhome.htm

The Huron Carol -- St Jean de Brébeuf

Merry Christmas from all of us - and here's a guest poem sent in by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1794) The Huron Carol ’Twas in the moon of wintertime, When all the birds had fled, That mighty Gitchi Manitou Sent angel choirs instead; Before their light the stars grew dim, And wondering hunters heard the hymn: Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, In excelsis gloria. Within a lodge of broken bark The tender babe was found, A ragged robe of rabbit skin Enwrapped His beauty round; But as the hunter braves drew nigh, The angel song rang loud and high: Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, In excelsis gloria. The earliest moon of wintertime Is not so round and fair As was the ring of glory on The helpless Infant there. The chiefs from far before Him knelt With gifts of fox and beaver pelt. Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, In excelsis gloria. O children of the forest free, O sons of Manitou, The holy Child of earth and Heav’n Is born today for you. Come kneel before the radiant Boy, Who brings you beauty, peace and joy. Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, In excelsis gloria. -- St Jean de Brébeuf

      c.1643 (Old Huron); tr. Jesse Edgar Middleton, 1926

The approach of Christmas in hot Australia makes northern hemisphere natives
acutely nostalgic for white Decembers (and not only northern hemisphere
natives: a Tamil Christian friend of mine’s parents retired from Singapore
to Canada instead of India precisely because they love chestnuts roasting on
an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, and all that). So here is
that belovèd chestnut, St. Jean de Brébeuf’s Huron Carol.

The Huron Carol used to embarrass me mightily when I was 8 and 9 years old
and we were obliged to sing it in school assemblies as Christmas drew nigh.
The symbolism was so obvious, and so patronising; the reference to "Gitchi
Manitou" so bogus -- and certainly in today’s terms it is politically
incorrect. But nobody seems to mind, and I’ve mellowed.

Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary in New France, first stayed among the Huron at
Georgian Bay (in modern Ontario) in 1628 and wrote the original "Jes8s
ahatonhia" in 1643. Verse 1 is as follows:

  Estennialon de tson8e
  Jes8s ahatonhia
  Onnawatewa d' oki
  n'onwandaskwaentak
  Ennonchien skwatrihotat
  n'onwandilonrachatha
  Jes8s ahatonhia, Jes8s ahatonhia.

The Old Huron language, more accurately the Wendat dialect, became extinct,
though it can be reconstructed through 17th century French-Wendat
dictionaries.  The Jesuits’ orthography for Old Huron is essentially a
representation of corresponding French vowel and consonant sounds with the
"8", actually a "u" over an "o", representing the French "u" before a
consonant.

The Iroquois finally dispersed the Huron in 1650 and during the course of
that dispersal massacred Brébeuf and his companions in 1649. (For a literary
reconstruction of the episode, see E.J. Pratt’s 1940 epic poem "Brébeuf and
His Brethren.") The Canadian Martyrs, as they came to be known, were in due
course canonised by the Catholic Church (Feast Day September 26: curiously,
in the USA it is observed as the Feast of the North American Martyrs [sic]
on October 19) and there are numerous "Canadian Martyrs" parishes throughout
Canada.

The 1926 English version of the Huron Carol set out here -- actually more an
interpretation than a translation -- is by Jesse Edgar Middleton (1872-1960),
a Toronto journalist and church musician. Little needs to be said of the
hymn itself in Middleton’s version; strictly speaking it is not a carol at
all, having been written by an author -- two authors -- known to history, but
that is perhaps a minor point of pedantry. Despite its slightly clichéd and
inauthentic aboriginal Canadian terms it is considered something of a
national treasure in Canada; it has been commemorated in postage stamps,
paintings gift books and children's picture books. (I may seem to praise it
with faint damns but I really am now very fond of it, doubtless mostly for
reasons of sentiment.)

It is of course simply the nativity story of St Luke’s Gospel locally
adapted.  Gitchi Manitou is "the Great Spirit", or "the Mighty Lord of All
the World" (cf the several Lake Manitous and Lake Manitoba as well as the
province of of that name). Verse 3, concerning the magi-chieftains, does not
work quite as well as the other verses since, although furs became an
extremely valuable trade item for aboriginal hunters and trappers in New
France and, later, Canada, they lack the scriptural significance of gold
(for a king), incense (for a god) and myrrh (for mortality). Possibly for
this reason the verse is often omitted when the hymn appears in English and
American Christmas collections and hymnals.

A literal English translation of Brébeuf’s hymn has been made by John
Steckley Teondecheron; it is perhaps mostly of scholarly interest:

  Have courage, you who are humans;
  Jesus, he is born

  Behold, the spirit, who had us as prisoners, has fled
  Do not listen to it, as it corrupts the spirits of our minds
  Jesus, he is born

  They are spirits, sky people, coming with a message for us
  They are coming to say, "Be on top of life [Rejoice]"
  Marie, she has just given birth. Rejoice"
  Jesus, he is born

  Three have left for such, those who are elders
  Tichion, a star that has just appeared on the horizon leads them there
  He will seize the path, he who leads them there
  Jesus, he is born

  As they arrived there, where he was born, Jesus
  the star was at the point of stopping, not far past it
  Having found someone for them, he says, "Come here!"
  Jesus, he is born

  Behold, they have arrived there and have seen Jesus,
  They made a name [praised] many times, saying "Hurray, he is good in nature."
  They greased his scalp [greeted him with reverence], saying "Hurray."
  Jesus, he is born

  "We will give to him praise for his name,
  Let us show reverence for him as he comes to be compassionate to us.
  It is providential that you love us and wish, ‘I should adopt them.’"
  Jesus, he is born

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia

Further in Summer than the Birds -- Emily Dickinson

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1761) Further in Summer than the Birds Further in Summer than the Birds Pathetic from the Grass A minor Nation celebrates Its unobtrusive Mass. No Ordinance be seen So gradual the Grace A pensive Custom it becomes Enlarging Loneliness. Antiquest felt at Noon When August burning low Arise this spectral Canticle Repose to typify Remit as yet no Grace No Furrow on the Glow Yet a Druidic Difference Enhances Nature now -- Emily Dickinson

It is a compliment to the Wondering Minstrels when a standard of the canon
has not yet appeared, but so it is and I here remedy the default, provoked
by the recent other Dickinson offerings.

It is easy to patronise "Emily," as her academic critics invariably rather
astonishingly call her - not "Dickinson"; not even "Miss Dickinson" or
"Emily Dickinson" - does one ever hear of "Twain" or "Whitman"? Nope: they
are always "Mark Twain" and "Walt Whitman"; fair enough, but why is Emily
Dickinson always "Emily"? Well, she had a rather sheltered sequestered small
town Old Maid Yankee existence. And her poems are all in 86 86 Common Metre,
like the 19th century hymns that would have been familiar to her at Sunday
Congregational church meetings. One wonders just how wide her reading could
have been, not to speak of her acquaintance: she might, after all, be simply
an astonishingly sensitive and acute original. Certainly her real life
experience was extremely straitened; she took her reclusiveness very
seriously - her poetry was mostly found after her death sewn up in
"fascicles," as she called them; in 20th century terms she would doubtless
be regarded as a pathological case and have been locked up like Robert
Lowell; and in, say, 4th century terms she would undoubtedly be in the canon
of saints.

But in her poetry - it is most certainly not mere "verse" - she pushes CM to
its outermost limits: she makes me think of William Cowper and John Newton
with their very fine CM hymns a hundred years earlier ("God moves in a
mysterious way/his wonders to perform"; "Glorious things of thee are
spoken/Zion, city of our God"; "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/that
saved a wretch like me"), and Wordsworth's reverie on the disciplining
confines of the sonnet form in "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow
room."

The thing that's so amazing about her poetry is, continuingly, "How did she
know?! How COULD she know?!" A queer old maid Yankee just couldn't have
known about Catholic liturgical and exegetical niceties but yet,
astonishingly, she did. (T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with
backgrounds not wholly dissimilar to hers, went whole hog into small- and
large-C catholicism, respectively, but Emily Dickinson seems to have grasped
everything they did and found that route unnecessary.)

And so the hum of grasshoppers on a hot, dry August afternoon is the
celebration both of insubstantial quiddity and a sacramental rite. The
"Grace" that is imparted to faithful (well, say, to Boston Irish Catholics
in Emily Dickinson's world) in the Mass, some time after the "gradual" (ie
not just slowly-slowly, but also the scriptural tract recited or sung
between the epistle and the gospel) - in the case of the August insect
liturgies isolates and excludes rather than gathering and including. But HOW
did she know all this? An "antiquest"? It's perhaps an antiphon - the
responsory chanted by a monastic choir, but it's also a vain endeavour to
find involvement in nature and obviate loneliness and isolation. A
"canticle"? It's the liturgical term for the biblical hymns chanted in the
monastic office - magnificat, nunc dimitis, benedictus, benedicite and so
on; but again, how did she know? And they typify repose: they represent
rest; but "typology" is the hermeneutical term for supposed Old Testament
anticipations of New Testament fulfilments, such as the rod carried aloft
before the Israelites in the wilderness and the cross of Jesus. And yet
again, how DID she know? But clearly she did, for her closing reference to a
"Druidic difference" means, certainly, that she has considered all these
liturgical resonances before rejecting them as the appropriate metaphor;
nature is certainly sacramental, but the appropriate sacerdotalism is pagan.
And exclusionary.

"Further in summer than the birds," it seems to me, is a companion to, an
amplification of, that splendid other nature poem of hers, "A narrow fellow
in the grass," and its arresting concluding image of feeling "zero at the
bone" comes to mind here - as Wordsworth (to return to the opening of this
little discussion) with his sentimentality about nature most certainly does
not.

Mac Robb.
Brisbane, Australia.

The Chambered Nautilus -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1705) The Chambered Nautilus This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sail the unshadowed main,- The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every chambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed,- Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn; While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:- Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

        (1809-1894)

The current theme of poems known by heart (and often no longer read, much
less memorised) is in its way as much fun as the discovery in Minstrels of
poems hitherto unknown to me, by poets both known and unknown. It was, in
fact, my own modest commentary on Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Song" a few days back
that put me in mind of Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier - the "Fireside Poets" of
mid-nineteenth century New England, whose verses were till recently
mainstays of primary school "readers" and known to everyone who attended
public school in North America. So much so that many of the famous lines
from such poets remain clichés while their sources have faded from the
popular canon.

"The Chambered Nautilus" is doubtless one such - "Build thee more stately
mansions O my soul" is sometimes thought a quotation from holy writ, Milton
or Shakespeare. Not so, of course. Oliver Wendell Holmes is perhaps mostly
remembered nowadays as the father and namesake of the eminent puisne justice
of the US Supreme Court ("Well, if he was 'junior' there must have been a
'senior,' right?"). It was once the other way around and Holmes Senior, who
was a professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard Medical School, was
known even more widely for his poetry, originally published in The Atlantic
Monthly, of which he was a founder and which he named, than for his eminence
as a physician and medical educator.

Perhaps as much as its old-fashioned quality of their verse it's the old
fashioned liberalism of their opinions that has caused the Fireside Poets'
eclipse, particularly among those who might seem their modern constituency.
Holmes was a proponent of science as the discreditor of the Calvinistic
orthodoxy of his Puritan forbears and, well... we used to think the Scopes
Monkey Trial was the ludicrous last gasp of fundamentalism in modern life
but look where we are these days.

The nautilus is a cephalopod of the Indian and Pacific oceans; it adds a new
chamber to its spiral shell each year and annually moves into a more stately
mansion. (The Greeks thought it could erect a membrane and sail - the
reference in lines 3-5.) And whereas the Calvinism of traditional
Congregationalism and Presbyterianism propounded ideas such as
predestination, original depravity and original grace, Holmes hopefully saw
the shellfish's shell-building as a metaphor for man's ability to seek and
find ever higher attainment.

Remember too that it was published in 1858, and it can't be a coincidence
that this was a year after the infamous Dred Scott decision of the American
Supreme Court which confirmed the legitimacy of slavery in the South and
ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional - thus bringing the issue to
even greater national attention and strengthening the resolve of high-minded
Yankee abolitionists.

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia

[thomas adds] I've only just noticed that I forgot to credit Mac Robb with
the submission of and commentary to Poem #1700, "The Pilgrim" by John
Bunyan. Many thanks to Mac and to all the other submitters of the guest
poems we've run on the Minstrels mailing list. -t.

The Fiddle and the Drum -- Joni Mitchell

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1676) The Fiddle and the Drum And so once again My dear Johnny my dear friend And so once again you are fightin' us all And when I ask you why You raise your sticks and cry, and I fall Oh, my friend How did you come To trade the fiddle for the drum You say I have turned Like the enemies you've earned But I can remember All the good things you are And so I ask you please Can I help you find the peace and the star Oh, my friend What time is this To trade the handshake for the fist And so once again Oh, America my friend And so once again You are fighting us all And when we ask you why You raise your sticks and cry and we fall Oh, my friend How did you come To trade the fiddle for the drum You say we have turned Like the enemies you've earned But we can remember All the good things you are And so we ask you please Can we help you find the peace and the star Oh my friend We have all come To fear the beating of your drum -- Joni Mitchell

The posting of Ogden Nash's "Custard the Dragon" took me back for the first
time in many years to the grade 3 classroom at Queen Elizabeth II public
school in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where I first heard that delightful
doggerel. And that recollection in turn sent me searching in the Minstrels
archive for songs by that famous alumna of my school, Joni Mitchell (Joan
Anderson, as she was in Saskatoon).

"Both Sides Now," I discover, was posted on 5 November 2004 and is Poem
#1556 in the archive but other songs from "Clouds" (1969) haven't yet made
it. "The Fiddle and the Drum" jumps out as being, alas, again very timely.

Joni Mitchell arrived on the American -- and international -- music scene at
the height of the Vietnam war; this song takes us back to that
politics-charged era and the mutual perplexity of those who were pro- and
anti-war. (That War in particular, at least.) Then as now hawks perceived
both domestic and foreign opposition as betrayal: criticism was met with
belligerance; foreign friends of America found it a tricky business
affirming their continuing admiration for the fiddle while tactfully
disdaining the drum.

The song, like many of Joni Mitchell's (and of her co-nationals Ian Tyson,
Gordon Lightfood and kd lang) is not unmistakably in any one contemporary
genre -- it is neither folk nor rock nor country-and-western. Perhaps
actually it's a little old fashioned and hearkens back to the roots of
country-and-western music in the Scottish and Scotch-Irish secular folk
music and Protestant hymnody of both Appalachia and rural Canada. Think of
the Scotch-Gaelic Ceilidh, the plangent part-sung hymn sung by Donald
Sutherland's congregation in the movie "Cold Mountain" and the Scotch-Gaelic
Christmas carol "Child in the manger" popularised on the hit parade some
years ago by Cat Stevens to the words of the Eleanor Farjeon's
Congregationalist hymn "Morning has broken."

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia

Elegy to a Calf (Lamento pastorello) -- Sarah Binks

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1560) Elegy to a Calf (Lamento pastorello) Oh calf, that gambolled by my door Who made me rich who now am poor, That licked my hand with milk bespread, Oh calf, calf, art dead, art dead? Oh calf, I sit and languish, calf, With somber face, I cannot laugh, Can I forget thy playful bunts? Oh calf, calf, that loved me once? With mildewed optics, deathlike, still, My nights are damp, my days are chill, I weep again with doleful sniff, Oh calf, calf, so dead, so stiff. -- Sarah Binks

        (actually Paul Hiebert, 1892-1987)

I see that Minstrels is back up and running again after a long hiatus so the
long-noted deficiency, viz., the lack of Sarah Binks, the Sweet Songstress
of Saskatchewan, I now remedy. Indeed, the Minstrels have lately featured
Joni Mitchell, née Joan Anderson of Saskatoon (and indeed my local Borders
here in Brisbane, Australia, is touting a CD by kd lang titled "Hymns of the
49th" -- ie parallel), so prairie poesy is perhaps again waxing great in the
counsels of the just.

The late Paul Hiebert, a professor of chemistry at the University of
Manitoba, was a staunch Mennonite and his published writings include a
certain number of devotional Christian tracts which, in latter-day devoutly
secular Canada haven't reach a very wide audience. His gentle teasing in
"Sarah Binks" (1947) of the Great Plains inclination to literary effusion,
on the other hand, was well known and vastly appreciated west of the Great
Lakes; and when Peter Gzowski began a series of conversations with Professor
Hiebert on national radio the Wheat Pool Medal, the maritime imagery of
Wascana Lake and the disputatious footnotes regarding "Miss Iguana
Binks-Barkingwell of St. Olaf's-Down-the-Drain, Hants, Hurts, Harts,
England, who claims to be a distant kinswoman of Sarah Binks" came to
national prominence in Canada.

Prairie folk have a not wholly undeserved reputation for being somewhat
po-faced and humourless: when I taught undergraduate English at the
University of Regina I quickly learned not to make facetious remarks about
people from small prairie towns to school teachers upgrading their
qualifications at summer school -- not till I had established my bona fides
as a prairie farmer myself. But (as my international literary friends
observe) they do write prodigiously -- it must be the long, cold winters --
and among a huge quantity of tares there is, be it said, a substantial
amount of wheat.

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia

[Links]

Bad poems on the Minstrels:
Poem #343, The Tay Bridge Disaster  -- William McGonagall
Poem #399, The Indian Serenade  -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poem #948, Grand Rapids Cricket Club -- Julia A. Moore

and elsewhere:
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bad/index.html

When I was fair and young, and favour graced me -- Queen Elizabeth I

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1514) When I was fair and young, and favour graced me When I was fair and young, and favour graced me, Of many I was sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all, and answered them therefore, 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.' How many weeping eyes I made to pine with woe; How many sighing hearts I have no skill to show. Yet I the prouder grew, and answered them therefore, 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.' Then spake fair Venus' son, that proud victorious boy, And said, "Fine dame, since that you be so coy I will so pluck your plumes that you shall say no more 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.'" When he had spake these words, such charge grew in my breast That neither night nor day since that, I could take any rest. Then lo, I did repent that I had said before, 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.' -- Queen Elizabeth I

A poem to supply the lack of Qs among the poets in the archive.

Queen Elizabeth wrote this poem in the mid-1580s when she was in her 50s.
Her life-long love, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester remarried after 18
years' widowhood -- contrary to the 1998 Shekhar Kapur film "Elizabeth,"
Dudley was not banished in disgrace and well into middle age Elizabeth's
obvious, though certainly unconsummated, love for him continued to occasion
adverse comment in her own and foreign courts. This was a time when royal
marriages were dynastic and pragmatic; erotic love was not a proper basis
for them. And one final dalliance with the prospect of marriage, this time
with the much younger Duc d'Alençon, the brother of the king of France, had
come to naught. The poem can be interpreted as a commentary on the Queen's
sad realisation that opportunities for fulfilling her passionate nature in
marriage were now past. Or perhaps more generally the sadness and loss
involved in acquiring painful wisdom.

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia

To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us -- Ben Jonson

Another guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1494) To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us To draw no envy, SHAKESPEARE, on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; While I confess thy writings to be such, As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much. 'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; For seeliest ignorance on these may light, Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; Or crafty malice might pretend this praise, And think to ruin where it seemed to raise. These are, as some infamous bawd or whore Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more ? But thou art proof against them, and, indeed, Above the ill fortune of them, or the need. I therefore will begin: Soul of the age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage! My SHAKESPEARE rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read, and praise to give. That I not mix thee so my brain excuses, I mean with great, but disproportioned Muses: For if I thought my judgment were of years, I should commit thee surely with thy peers, And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, From thence to honour thee, I would not seek For names: but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles to us, Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, To life again, to hear thy buskin tread And shake a stage: or when thy socks were on, Leave thee alone for the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time! And all the Muses still were in their prime, When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm! Nature herself was proud of his designs, And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit. The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; But antiquated and deserted lie, As they were not of Nature's family. Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. For though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion: and, that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same, And himself with it, that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn; For a good poet's made, as well as born. And such wert thou! Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well torned and true filed lines; In each of which he seems to shake a lance, As brandisht at the eyes of ignorance. Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Eliza, and our James! But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere Advanced, and made a constellation there! Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night, And despairs day, but for thy volume's light. -- Ben Jonson

I appear to have ignited a conflagration of swansongs.

One more famous Elizabethan swan: the "Swan of Avon," a sobriquet for
Shakespeare which originates with Ben Jonson (1572-1637) in this poem.
It is rather more lengthy than the usual Minstrels poem-a-day fare but
it repays a bit of attention.

It is the epigraph to the first folio edition of Shakespeare's works,
1623. Jonson was the mentor of the poets who styled themselves the "sons
of Ben" and whom we know as the Cavalier poets. He was appointed Poet
Laureate by James I; the position involved considerable prestige and
brought a substantial honorarium - a significant departure from
Shakespeare's anonymous commercial preoccupations. His celebration of
Shakespeare's genius had much to do with the Swan's posthumous
veneration and survival through the ensuing Cromwellian Commonwealth
when the theatre was suppressed. Grim Puritans in England and America
continued to regard Shakespeare and the English Bible as their
literature and we probably should thank Ben Jonson for Shakespeare's
survival in the canon through those trying times for the frivolous arts.

The Silver Swan -- Orlando Gibbons

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1491) The Silver Swan The silver swan, who living had no note, When death approach'd, unlock'd her silent throat; Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more. Farewell, all joys; O Death, come close mine eyes; More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise. -- Orlando Gibbons

I searched the archives and noticed that Orlando Gibbons's "The Silver
Swan" hasn't yet appeared.

First published in The first Set of Madrigals and Motets of 5. Parts,
1612, "The Silver Swan" -- whence the cliché "swan song;" and so pithy
it could be a graffito -- is often credited to "Anonymous," but the
Norton Anthology considers that Gibbons (1583-1625) wrote the words as
well as the music. He was one of the last of the madrigalists and may
have been "mourning the demise of his art," as Norton has it. But beyond
being the leading composer of his generation he was also a pioneer of
one of the greatest periods of chamber and sacred choral music under
James I and Charles I, in which English composers continued to be
pre-eminent in Europe. Perhaps Gibbons wasn't talking about madrigals in
particular so much as the Renaissance musical tradition which flourished
under Elizabeth I, more broadly the Elizabethan efflorescence of the
arts and letters in general, and more broadly still, the religious and
political stability that Elizabeth maintained and the Stuarts
squandered. By 1612 Shakespeare and his contemporaries were gone or soon
to be so; the King James Bible had just been published in a vain attempt
to resolve the religious tensions among people of various reforming and
conserving tendencies; and Henry IV of France's quip that James was the
wisest fool in Christendom had already become famous.

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia