Forever -- Charles S Calverley

(Poem #255) Forever "Forever": 'tis a single word! Our rude forefathers deemed it two: Can you imagine so absurd A view? "Forever"! What abysms of woe The word reveals, what frenzy, what Despair! "For ever" (printed so) Did not. It looks, ah me! how trite and tame! It fails to sadden or appal Or solace--it is not the same At all. O thou to whom it first occurred To solder the disjoined, and dower The native language with a word Of power: We bless thee! Whether far or near Thy dwelling, whether dark or fair Thy kingly brow, is neither here Nor there. But in men's hearts shall be thy throne, While the great pulse of England beats. Thou coiner of a word unknown To Keats! And nevermore must printer do As men did long ago; but run "For" into "ever," bidding two Be one. "Forever"! passion-fraught, it throws O'er the dim page a gloom, a glamour: It's sweet, it's strange; and I suppose It's grammar. "Forever"! 'Tis a single word! And yet our fathers deemed it two: Nor am I confident they erred; Are you? -- Charles S Calverley

Calverley has written a number of marvellously irreverent poems, just
old-fashioned enough to be charming, and full of little asides to the reader
and comments on the poem. He does overdo it at times, but when it works, as
in today's poem, the effect is truly delightful.

The penultimate verse, incidentally, is a lovely example of bathos (the
descent from the sublime to the ridiculous), another technique Calverley
uses very effectively.

Biography

  (1831 - 1884) English poet, humorist, parodist, and translator; his
  promising career as a lawyer was cut short by a severe head injury which,
  however, did not impair his mental faculties.

     -- Poets' Corner

  Charles Stuart Calverley, born on December 22, 1831, at Martley,
  Worcestershire, was educated at Marlborough College, Harrow, Oxford, and
  Cambridge, and was elected a fellow of Christ's College and appointed a
  lecturer in Classics in 1857. His Verses and Translations (1862), and
  later translations of Theocritus and Virgil, stem from his academic
  research. In 1863 he married his cousin Ellen and began to study law at
  the Inner Temple. Shortly after being called to the Bar in 1865, Calverley
  had a skating accident that was to put an end to his career. He continued
  to write light verse, publishing poems in journals, and then collecting
  them in Fly Leaves in 1872. He lived on, sickly, until his death from
  Bright's disease in 1884, and was survived by his wife and two children.
  His Literary Remains came out posthumously in 1865.

     -- Representative Poetry Online
     <http://www.utlink.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/CALVER.HTML>

The North Ship -- Philip Larkin

Another of those magical mystery poems...

(Poem #254) The North Ship I saw three ships go sailing by, Over the sea, the lifting sea, And the wind rose in the morning sky, And one was rigged for a long journey. The first ship turned towards the west, Over the sea, the running sea, And by the wind was all possessed And carried to a rich country. The second ship turned towards the east, Over the sea, the quaking sea, And the wind hunted it like a beast To anchor in captivity. The third ship drove towards the north, Over the sea, the darkening sea, But no breath of wind came forth, And the decks shone frostily. The northern sky rose high and black Over the proud unfruitful sea, East and west the ships came back Happily or unhappily: But the third went wide and far Into an unforgiving sea Under a fire-spilling star, And it was rigged for a long journey. -- Philip Larkin

One of those poems with which I'd be quite irritated, if it weren't done very
well indeed. Fortunately, it is, so I'm not :-).

thomas.

[Biography]

Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985): English poet, novelist, and critic, a leading
figure of The Movement, a term coined to describe a group of British poets that
coalesced during the 1950s, about the same time as the rise of the 'Angry Young
Men'. The Movement poets addressed everyday British life in a plain,
straightforward language and often in traditional forms.  They first attracted
attention with the publication of the anthology New Lines, edited by Robert
Conquest; among the contributors were Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie
and Thom Gunn.

Larkin was born in Coventry. He attended St. John's College, Oxford, during
World War II, where he met Kingsley Amis. After graduating he became a
librarian, first in the library of an urban district council in Shropshire,
later in university libraries in Leicester and Belfast. From 1955 until his
death he was the librarian of the Brynmor Jones library at the University of
Hull, which he built up from a staff of 11 to one of over 100.

As poet Larkin made his debut with the collection The North Ship in 1945,
written with short lines and carefully worked-out rhyme schemes. The sad songs
showed the influence of Yeats. It was followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A
Girl In Winter (1947). Among Larkin's major works are The Less Deceived (1955)
and The Whitsun Weddings (1964), whose title-poem describing the poet's journey
by train from Hull to London is his best-known work. Larkin uses the tones and
rhythms of ordinary speech, and focuses on the urban landscape of the industrial
north. High Windows (1974) includes two substantial poems about ageing, illness
and death, 'The Old Fools' and 'The Building'. In these works Larkin explores
the mood of post-war England and its reduced expectations. However, his common
sense, scepticism and cool approach of drab suburbia and welfare state sponsored
lives provoked accusations of emotional cowardice. The urge to self-limitation
appears to have carried Larkin to the point of not writing much poetry and
keeping his deeper feelings out of the poems he did write.

Although he had a number of affairs, Larkin feared marriage and family, and
never married, but he managed to maintain three long relationships. In 1974 he
bought a house in Hull, which he shared with his companion Monica Jones. Shortly
after refusing the Laureateship when his friend John Betjeman died, Larkin
underwent surgery for cancer of the oesophagus, and died within a year on
December 2, 1985. In spite of his wish that his papers be destroyed, some of his
manuscripts were saved, but his voluminous diaries were burnt. In 1993 Andrew
Morton published a controversial biography of the poet, and revealed the Nazi
sympathies and misogynism of Larkin's father and the poet's casual racism and
other political incorrect attitudes.

There's another Larkin biography accompanying I Remember, I Remember, at poem #73

[Links]

Previous Larkins to have featured on the Minstrels include
I Remember, I Remember: poem #73
Days: poem #100
Water: poem #178

Both Martin and I like reading about voyages, quests and the eternal sea. So
it's no surprise that the Minstrels archive includes lots of poems on these
themes; some of the nicer ones include
Sea Fever: poem #27
Earendil was a mariner: poem #93
The Viking Terror: poem #109
and the Harp Song of the Dane Women: poem #143

[Quotable Quote]

'Deprivation is to me what daffodils are to Wordsworth.'  -- Philip Larkin.

A Man Feared... (The Black Riders LVI) -- Stephen Crane

(Poem #253) A Man Feared... (The Black Riders LVI) A man feared that he might find an assassin; Another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other. -- Stephen Crane

Today's poem, it would seem, scarce deserves the name - it lacks most of
those qualities that one associates with the explicitly poetic. And yet, it
is one of my favourite verses from The Black Riders - in its beautifully
self-contained ambiguity it seems to embody McLeish's injunction that "a
poem should not mean, but be".

Links:

For a more general discussion of Crane's poetry, including a biography, see
poem #196

McLeish's poem, Ars Poetica, can be found at poem #188

And the complete text of The Black Riders (which you are strongly urged to
read, in that this poem deserves to be read in its larger context) is
available at the Poets' Corner,
<[broken link] http://geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/crane02.html>.

m.

The Midnightmouse -- Christian Morgenstern

(Poem #252) The Midnightmouse It midnights, not a moon is out. No star lives in the heavenhouse. Runs twelve times through the heavenhouse The Midnightmouse. She pipes upon her little jaws. The hellhorse from his nightmare roars... Runs quietly, her allotted course. The Midnightmouse. Her Lord, the Spirit great and white, Has gone abroad on such a night. She keeps watch in his heaven; all's right. The Midnightmouse. -- Christian Morgenstern

translated by W. D. Snodgrass and Lore Segal.

This is Morgenstern at his best. Surreal, hypnotic, eerie - this poem seems to
breathe darkness and night, a velvet curtain drawn over the senses. In its own
haunting way, it's both weirdly grotesque and shimmeringly beautiful. Shivers
down my spine.

thomas.

PS. I especially like the wordplay - the use of 'midnights' as a verb, the pun
on 'nightmare', the artificial compounds... they all contribute to the dreamy
effect.

[Biography]

The Web has zillions of sites devoted to Morgenstern, but strangely enough, they
all seem to be in German (funny, that. I wander why.). Here's the best I could
do; the parts in square brackets are words I didn't know:

Christian Morgenstern was born in 1871 in Munich, to Carl and Charlotte (nee
Schertel) Morgenstern . He studied philosophy and art history at Jura and
Breslauer University; while there, he published (with some friends) a book of
criticism titled 'German Spirit'.

In 1893 Morgenstern was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

In 1894 he moved to Berlin, where he became the culture and literary critic for
the New German [something] and the Artbook. Over the next few years, he became a
prominent figure in the literary establishment, with the publication of works
like 'Youth', 'Free [something]', 'The Company' and especially 'In a Dream
Castle: a New Style of Humorous Fantasy' (a work which presaged the idea of the
theatre of the grotesque. Around this time, he met August Strindberg and Henrik
Ibsen, who influenced his thinking substantially; so much so, in fact, that he
moved to Switzerland and started writing satires and parodies of the Berlin art
movement.

In 1903 he formed a theatre company with Bruno Cassirer (1872-1941), and put
many of his dramatic ideas into practice. The next few years were very creative
ones, as he produced '[something] Songs' and 'Melancholy', more satires, and
several pieces exploring the grotesque.

Morgenstern died in 1914.

So there you have it. Incidentally, the one sentence of English I found after
going through several hundred sites was this: "Poet and mystic, Morgenstern
united a ripe and perfected sense for and formal power in language with a
brilliant playfulness. "

[Minstrels Links]

There seems to be a hint of Robert Browning's Pippa Passe in the last stanza;
see for yourself at poem #133

And as usual, you can read all our previous poems at
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/

No! -- Thomas Hood

One demisemikilopoem and counting...

(Poem #251) No! No sun--no moon! No morn--no noon! No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day-- No sky--no earthly view-- No distance looking blue-- No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"-- No end to any Row-- No indications where the Crescents go-- No top to any steeple-- No recognitions of familiar people-- No courtesies for showing 'em-- No knowing 'em! No traveling at all--no locomotion-- No inkling of the way--no notion-- "No go" by land or ocean-- No mail--no post-- No news from any foreign coast-- No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility-- No company--no nobility-- No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member-- No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds-- November! -- Thomas Hood

My first introduction to Hood was the rather weak and sentimental poem "I
remember, I remember"[1], a poem of the sort that children's anthologists
love to include, but which put me off Hood for quite a while. And that was
truly a shame, for it was in no way representative of his work, which
includes several noteworthy poems - including today's little gem.

Unlike most of Hood's work, No! is not strongly metred - the rhythm is
discernible but irregular, the poem relying more on the end rhymes than the
metrical pattern for punctuation. This gives the poem a nice rambling feel,
and makes the last line work all the better - relying on wordplay to wrap up
a poem is slightly risky, but when it works it is nicely satisfying[2].

As an aside, Hood had a penchant for puns - the biography notes that 'He was
famous for his punning, which appears at times to be almost a reflex action,
serving as a defense against painful emotion' - his most famous line
probably being the one at the end of 'Faithless Sally Brown'; "They went and
told the sexton, and The sexton toll'd the bell."

[1] Unlikely to be run on Minstrels, but you can look it up at
<[broken link] http://geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/hood01.html#1>

[2] for another nice example, see 'With a Book', poem #148

- m.

Biography and Assessment:

 b. May 23, 1799, London
 d. May 3, 1845, London

  English poet whose humanitarian verses, such as "The Song of the Shirt,"
  served as models for a whole school of social-protest poets, not only in
  Britain and the U.S. but in Germany and Russia, where he was widely
  translated. He also is notable as a writer of comic verse, having
  originated several durable forms for that genre.

  The son of a bookseller, Hood was apprenticed to an engraver as a young
  boy. In 1815 he was sent to Dundee for his health's sake (his lifelong
  illness is thought to have been rheumatic heart disease). On his return to
  London in 1817 he resumed work as an engraver and then became a "sort of
  sub-editor" of the London Magazine during its heyday, when its circle of
  brilliant contributors included Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and
  William Hazlitt. In 1827 he published a volume of poems strongly
  influenced by Keats, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies. Several of the
  poems in it suggest that Hood might possibly have become a poet of the
  first rank. However, the success of his amusing Odes and Addresses to
  Great People (1825), written in collaboration with his brother-in-law,
  J.H. Reynolds, virtually obliged him to concentrate on humorous writing
  for the rest of his life. There is something sinister about Hood's sense
  of humour, a trait that was to reappear in the "black comedy" of the
  latter 20th century. His pages are thronged with comic mourners and
  undertakers, and a corpse is always good for a laugh. He was famous for
  his punning, which appears at times to be almost a reflex action, serving
  as a defense against painful emotion. Of his later poems, the grim ballads
  "The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer" and "The Last Man," "The Song of
  the Shirt," "The Lay of the Labourer," and "The Bridge of Sighs" are
  moving protests against social evils of the day--sweated labour,
  unemployment, and the double sexual standard.

        -- E.B.