On the Grasshopper and the Cricket -- John Keats

Guest poem submitted by Mike Christie:

(Poem #910) On the Grasshopper and the Cricket The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper's -- he takes the lead In summer luxury -- he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills. -- John Keats

It's cricket season here in Texas, and the other day a cricket found its way
into our office and started serenading us from a coworker's desk.  We
eventually tracked him down and released him outside, though the corpses of
dozens of his brethren are littering our parking lot, lobby and staircase.

Anyway, he reminded me of Keats' sonnet above, which I've liked since I read
it decades ago.  As I recall, the sonnet was written relatively early in
Keats' career, and was the result of a competition with a friend to write a
sonnet on a grasshopper.  I've never known who the friend was or how his
sonnet came out, though I rather suspect Keats won the competition.  If
anyone can find out I'd love to know.

Mike Christie.

[Minstrels Links]

Other poems by Keats:
Poem #12, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
Poem #182, La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Poem #316, Ode to a Nightingale
Poem #433, Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
Poem #575, To Mrs Reynolds' Cat
Poem #696, Last Sonnet
Poem #770, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for Ever
Poem #910, On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

Poetry competitions seem to have been quite popular with the Romantics; see
Poem #22, Ozymandias  -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
and its companion piece:
Poem #285, On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in
the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below  -- Horace Smith

The Limerick Packs Laughs Anatomical -- Anonymous

(Poem #909) The Limerick Packs Laughs Anatomical The limerick packs laughs anatomical Into space that is quite economical. But the good ones I've seen So seldom are clean - And the clean ones so seldom are comical. -- Anonymous

The poem says it all <g>.

More seriously, while there are several excellent clean limericks, the vast
majority do tend to be - well, as Don Marquis put it, there are three
distinct types: "Limericks to be told when ladies are present; limericks to
be told when ladies are absent but clergymen are present--and LIMERICKS".

As I said in a previous commentary, the limerick is a nicely balanced
combination of a clever and entertaining structure and a fairly low entry
barrier; this has been responsible for a flood of limericks that is,
conceivably, greater in volume than the sum total of all other amateur
verse. And, while the form was popularised by the decidedly clean (but so
seldom comical[1]) limericks of Lear, somewhere along the line it became
inextricably intertwined with the bawdy.

[1] please don't flame me :)

An intriguing thing about limericks is that, while few of them are
attributed, they nonetheless have a surprising spreading power and lifetime.
There is a large body of famous limericks, many of them in several minor
variations, that seem to have entrenched themselves in the collective canon
without much benefit of formal publication or compilation. The humour
definitely helps here, as does the simple, and easily memorised verse form -
good limericks can and do get spread very rapidly by word of mouth (and
now, of course, the internet).

One drawback (if you can call it that) of the form is that it is almost
irretrievably frivolous. It's nigh impossible to write a serious poem in
limerick form (though I have seen some scattered examples), and most people
don't even bother trying. Also, the limerick is a very self-contained form;
while I've seen several poems with each verse consisting of a limerick, I
feel that the technique doesn't really work, because of the irresistible
feeling of closure when the reader reaches the fifth line.

Links:

  http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/classes/Handbook/limerick.html is an
  excellent essay on limericks

  http://www.interviews-with-poets.com/poetry-directory/limerick.html has a
  nice collection of links

  We've run a couple of limericks on Minstrels:
    Poem #378: "There Was an Old Man with a Beard", Edward Lear
    Poem #801: "A Mosquito Was Heard to Complain", Dr. D. D. Perrin

-martin

Haiku -- Yosa Buson

Guest poem submitted by Radhika Gowaikar:

(Poem #908) Haiku Departing spring hesitates, in the late cherry blossoms -- Yosa Buson

In the Indian summer Goldrush blossoms everywhere. It is brightest yellow at
the height of summer - in fact, the trees are without leaves then, only the
flowers are seen - and slowly, as the rains set in, the leaves reappear and
the Goldrush makes a half-hearted attempt at retaining colour. It fails
miserably, managing only a sad off-white, before the green takes over
altogether.

The setting in the haiku is obviously different, but it is always the
gradualness of the change that I am struck by and I think Buson captures it
admirably. The fact that he manages it in a haiku only adds to the effect.

Radhika.

[Moreover]

I am not into painting - never have been. However, an opportunity to visit
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presented itself yesterday.
Among the other things on display, was a set of 20 paintings by one Stanton
MacDonald-Wright. All of these sought to "represent" a haiku.  Only a few of
them were literal relative to the haiku - most were an abstraction. I played
a small game - reading a haiku arbitrarily and then going around trying to
see which painting it corresponded to. (This was possible since the haikus
were listed separately and numbered.) To my surprise, some of the more
abstract ones were the easiest to correlate and somehow seemed instinctively
'right'. The above haiku was one of them.

Also, I like to think that the connection with the words helped me
appreciate the painting better.

About the painter: Stanton MacDonald Wright (1890-1973), co-founder of
Synchromism, was apparently strongly influenced by Japanese culture and art.
These 20 paintings were done in woodblock - a Japanese technique.

http://www.stantonmacdonald-wright.com and http://www.lacma.org are
interesting.

Google gives some leads on Synchromism - http://www.xrefer.com/entry/145636

Radhika.

[Martin adds]

On the haiku:

  In Japan in the 15th century, a poetic form named "renga" blossomed.

  Renga is a poem several poets create cooperatively. Members alternately
  add verses of 17 syllables (5, 7, and 5 syllables) and
  those of 14 syllables (7 and 7 syllables), until they complete a poem
  generally composed of 100 verses.

  Renga was an dignified academic poem. Members were traditionally demanded
  to present their verses following the medieval
  aesthetics and quoting the classics.

  In the 16th century, instead of renga, it was haikai - humorous poem -
  that became popular. Haikai (haikai-renga) is a poem made of verses of 17
  and 14 syllables like renga, but it parodies renga introducing modern
  vulgar laughter. Haikai poets used plays on words and treated preferably
  things of daily life renga hadn't found interesting.

  The first verse of renga and haikai is called "hokku". Haikai poets
  sometimes presented their hokkus as independent poems.
  These were the origin of haiku.

        -- Ryu Yotsuya, "History of the Haiku"
        http://www.big.or.jp/~loupe/links/ehisto/eavant.shtml

Noteworthy is the fact that today's poem, in translation, does not conform
to the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. This is not a mistake - the syllable count
restriction is very different in English and Japanese, and 17 English
syllables can convey a lot more than 17 Japanese ones.

The following essay on English haiku goes into more detail on this:
  [broken link] http://www.ahapoetry.com/keirule.htm

http://www.ahapoetry.com/haiku.htm is an excellent collection of haiku links

The chapter on Buson, from the aforequoted 'History of the Haiku':
http://www.big.or.jp/~loupe/links/ehisto/ebuson.shtml

And a biography of Buson:
  [broken link] http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Island/5022/busonbio.html

Miss Charlotte Brown, Librarian, Goes Mad -- Felix Jung

Next on our list of named verse forms, the pantoum:

(Poem #907) Miss Charlotte Brown, Librarian, Goes Mad Today, I have decided to read every poem ever written in the short history of our civilization. I know it is a selfish thing to read. Every poem ever written has its good intentions. I know, I know, it is a selfish thing. I want to believe that. Poetry has its good intentions. I know reading poems can't help much. I want to believe that poetry books have the answer. I'll start reading. Poems can't help much in the short history of our civilization. Books have the answer. I'll start today. I have decided. -- Felix Jung

[Note on form]

"Ernest Fouinet introduced the Malayan pantoum into French versification,
and Victor Hugo popularized it in the Orientales. It is written in four-line
stanzas; and the second and fourth line of each stanza become the first and
third of the succeeding stanza. In the last stanza, the second and fourth
lines are the third and first of the first stanza; so that the opening and
closing lines of the pantoum are identical. The rhyme scheme would then be:
1, 2, 1, 2;   2, 3, 2, 3;   3, 4, 3, 4;   . . .   n, 1, n, 1."
        -- Clement Wood, the Doubleday Rhyming Dictionary (1936)

[Commentary]

This is not a particularly brilliant poem (I find the title, especially,
rather facetious and even a bit cruel), but it is a good example of that
most fiendishly difficult of verse forms, the pantoum. Sestinas,
villanelles, triolets, rondeaux - they each have their peculiar contortions
and convolutions, but pantoums are the trickiest of the lot [1]. To write a
pantoum that parses naturally is no mean task; to write one that expresses a
logical sequence of ideas (no matter how hackneyed) without tying itself up
in lexical knots is very impressive indeed.

thomas.

[1] Isn't it interesting how repetitive verse forms tend to be imported into
English from other languages? Sestinas from the Italian, villanelles,
triolets and rondeaux from the French, pantoums from the Malay... is there
something about these languages which makes it easier to play around with
sentence patterns?

Contrariwise, poetry written in English tends to be rhymed much more often
than that in other languages. Is this due to the abundance of end-rhymes
available in English?

Douglas Hofstadter addresses these questions, and much much much more, in
his magnificent "Le Ton beau de Marot", a stunning investigation of
translation and the essence of language which I _strongly_ reccomend.

[Moreover]

The subject material of today's poem seems especially apt in light of a very
thought-provoking thread that's been running on [minstrelsd] of late [2],
about the importance of _context_ to poetry. Can/should one judge art from a
moral standpoint? Is there a difference between poetry and other forms of
expression (eg. music) in the level of abstraction they offer? How important
are the poet's intentions? What about the circumstances under which a given
poem was written, are they important, or are they artefacts of the dead
past?

[2] In case you missed it, [minstrelsd] is a parallel discussion group to
[minstrels], where list-members (not just Martin and myself) exchange
occasional emails about the poems we run, poets, and poetry. If you'd like
to join, simply send a blank mail to .

[Mintstrels Links]

This week's theme: "named verse forms".
Sestina: Poem #904, The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina -- Miller Williams
Sonnet:  Poem #905, I will put Chaos into fourteen lines -- Edna St. Vincent
Millay
Triolet: Poem #906, To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train -- Frances Cornford
Pantoum: Poem #907, Miss Charlotte Brown, Librarian, Goes Mad -- Felix Jung

For a truly brilliant pantoum, see
Poem #195, Juggler, Magician, Fool - A Pantoum  -- Peter Schaeffer

To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train -- Frances Cornford

Moving on with the named verse form theme, here's a triolet...

(Poem #906) To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, Missing so much and so much? O fat white woman whom nobody loves, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves, When the grass is soft as the breast of doves And shivering sweet to the touch? O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, Missing so much and so much? -- Frances Cornford

triolet: a poem or stanza of eight lines in which the first line is repeated
  at the fourth and seventh and the second line as the eight with a rhyme
  scheme of ABaAabAB.

  The English pronunciation is tr<e>i;olet, though it is tree-o-lay in
  French.

Today's poem is not particularly great, except for one thing - it makes
excellent use of the triolet form. Rather than employ the more modern custom
of attempting to vary the reading of the repeated lines, Cornford structures
the poem so that the repetition reads easily and naturally - it's not
obscured, but it doesn't need to be, since it adds to, rather than
detracts from, the poem.

As for the content of the poem, the "O fat white woman whom nobody loves"
is rather jarring to modern sensibilities; I can't imagine it being
too far otherwise even to her contemporaries. In particular, I find the
'whom nobody loves' a rather odd sort of deduction to make from a train
window, and have to wonder if it was intended as a comment on the narrator
as much as on the woman.

Like 'Trees', like 'The Ballad of the Tempest', today's poem has just that
combination of popular and annoying qualities that make it almost guaranteed
to attract parodies. Chesterton was moved to reply on the woman's behalf:

  Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
  Guessing so much and so much.
  Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
  Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
  And why do you know such a frightful lot
  About people in gloves and such?
    -- Chesterton, 'The Fat White Woman Speaks'
        (c. 1933); an answer to Frances Cornford.

and Housman skewered the poem rather neatly:

  O why do you walk through the fields in boots,
       Missing so much and so much?
  O fat white woman whom nobody shoots,
  Why do you walk through the fields in boots,
  When the grass is soft as the breast of coots
       And shivering-sweet to the touch?

    -- Housman; see [broken link] http://vp.engl.wvu.edu/Fall98/burnett.htm for the rest
    of the (excellent) piece on Housman's reworking of other poets' poems.

On Triolets:

  Like most of the repeated line verse forms, triolets are influenced rather
  heavily by the constraint. Unlike the villanelle, however, the poem itself
  is short enough that the repetition can be worked with, rather than
  around, a lot more easily (though workarounds are, of course, popular,
  from the shifting of punctuation and parts of speech to the use of
  homophones and homonyms, taking advantage of the fact that the repeated
  lines merely have to *sound* identical).

  Here are some essays on the triolet:

    Going back at least to the thirteenth century, triolets are short,
    usually witty poems, just perfect for tucking into a box of candy or
    some flowers. Its name comes from the repetition of the key line three
    times (French "tri").

      -- [broken link] http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/triolet.html

    [broken link] http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/henley01.html is a
    self-referential triolet

    [broken link] http://pub4.ezboard.com/fthesonnetboardnotsonnets.showMessage?topicID=343.topic
    is another amusingly self-referential piece about the English/French
    pronunciation differences (the triolet is, in general, a fun form to
    play with, and popular among amateur writers of light verse).

    [broken link] http://pub34.ezboard.com/fla1frm30.showMessage?topicID=2.topic is
    another nice essay

    The earliest English triolets were of a devotional nature composed by
    Patrick Carey, a Benedictine monk, in 1651. It was reintroduced by
    Robert Bridges in 1873.

      -- http://www.themediadrome.com/content/articles/words_articles/right_word4_fixed_forms.htm#triolet

A brief biography of Conford:
  http://www.traditional-poetry.org/cornford.htm

Minstrels Links:
  Poem #84: "From a Railway Carriage", R. L. Stevenson
  Poem #212: "To Alice-Sit-By-The-Hour", Franklin Adams

-martin