Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI) -- William Shakespeare

(Poem #363) Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI) Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. -- William Shakespeare

The last time we ran a metaphysical poem [1], I went into a rather
detailed analysis of its construction, talking about the many conceits
used, how they fit into a logical sequence, and how the idea of logic
gave structure to the poem as a whole. Several readers wrote in to say
that they enjoyed that particular essay, and they'd like to see more of
the same on the Minstrels.

Of course, not all poems lend themselves to that sort of critical
dissection, and there are many which I believe should _not_ be analysed,
just read and enjoyed in themselves. (Several of you wrote to express
this latter point of view as well; you can't win, sometimes <grin>).
Nevertheless, I will be analysing today's poem in depth; I think it
offers a lot more to the reader who is willing to spend some time
inquiring into its meaning.

The Shakespeare of the sonnets is a very different person from the
playwright who gave us King Lear, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's
Dream. In the plays he is the consummate craftsman, entertaining
audiences with masterpieces of dramatic effect while exploring human
character to a degree seen never before or since. The sonnets, though,
reveal a more thoughtful, introspective writer, a philosopher-poet
inquiring, especially, into the question of Time and its effect on human
affairs. But he's never coldly intellectual;  his sonnets burn with
emotion and (unrequited?) love. And it's in this respect that I feel
that Shakespeare's sonnets are the definitive statement of the
metaphysical poet's art: he presages Donne and Marvell and their
'passionate intelligence' with remarkable accuracy.

'Let me not to the marriage of true minds' is about as metaphysical as a
poem can get; indeed, if I didn't know better, I would have credited it
to Donne. Its themes are the usual Shakespearean preoccupations: in his
commentary to 'Full many a glorious morning have I seen' [2], Martin
writes, "If you've read any of Shakespeare's sonnets, the sequence of
images is instantly familiar. Time triumphs over flesh, and Love over
all.".

This is the central idea of today's poem as well, but whereas in the
previous sonnet Shakespeare talks about the frailty of the flesh, here
he is more concerned with the constancy of Love.

Love (the 'marriage of true minds') does not weaken when the
circumstances that gave rise to it are changed - 'Love is not love /
Which alters when it alteration finds'. Nay, it is a constant, like a
star that glimmers fixed in the sky, far above the tempests that batter
the wandering bark [3]. And the navigator of life's ship can measure a
star's height to obtain a reading of his own position; thus the star
(Love) acts both as a symbol of constancy and as a beacon, guiding the
voyager onwards.

Nor is Love at the mercy of Time; although the external manifestations
of beauty ('rosy lips and cheeks') may fall within the arc of the Grim
Reaper's sickle, Love itself does not decay or crumble with the passage
of hours and weeks.

thomas.

[1] John Donne's Valediction, archived at poem #330 . John Donne is
a relatively recent discovery of mine; be warned, this list will be
seeing quite a bit of him in the near future!

[2] Sonnet XXXIII, at poem #219

[3] This is the familiar conceit of life being a voyage; 'bark' is just
a synonym for boat (usually, with an added implication of frailty).

[Aside]

Until I read today's sonnet, I would never ever have thought of using a
phrase as clunky as 'admit impediments' in a poem... it just goes to
show, I suppose.

Hiawatha's Departure -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(Poem #362) Hiawatha's Departure By the shore of Gitchie Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, At the doorway of his wigwam, In the pleasant Summer morning, Hiawatha stood and waited. All the air was full of freshness, All the earth was bright and joyous, And before him through the sunshine, Westward toward the neighboring forest Passed in golden swarms the Ahmo, Passed the bees, the honey-makers, Burning, singing in the sunshine. Bright above him shown the heavens, Level spread the lake before him; From its bosom leaped the sturgeon, Sparkling, flashing in the sunshine; On its margin the great forest Stood reflected in the water, Every tree-top had its shadow, Motionless beneath the water. From the brow of Hiawatha Gone was every trace of sorrow, As the fog from off the water, And the mist from off the meadow. With a smile of joy and triumph, With a look of exultation, As of one who in a vision Sees what is to be, but is not, Stood and waited Hiawatha. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 from 'The Song of Hiawatha', 1855.

I can think of no other example of a poet making a particular metre his
own as comprehensively as did Longfellow with the publication of
'Hiawatha'. Often belittled and even more often parodied, the poem's
sheer ubiquity is a tribute to the compositional genius of the poet.

thomas.

[On Hiawatha]

One of [Longfellow's] most recognizable works is The Song of Hiawatha,
based on an accumulation of American Indian stories and legends. Much of
this work was based on The Myth of Hiawatha compiled by Jane and Henry
Rowe Schoolcraft. Henry was a historian, explorer, and geologist who was
superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan from 1836 to 1841. Jane
was an Ojibway indian whose name translated into english as 'The Woman
of the Sound Which the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky'. The Ojibway,
and northwestern Michigan, would serve most of a century later as the
background for Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories (a character who
bears several parallels to Hiawatha).

        -- Steve Spanoudi, the Poet's Corner: www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems

[Biography]

   b. Feb. 27, 1807, Portland, Mass. [now in Maine], U.S.
   d. March 24, 1882, Cambridge, Mass.

Longfellow attended private schools and the Portland Academy. He
graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. At college he was attracted
especially to Sir Walter Scott's romances and Washington Irving's Sketch
Book, and his verses appeared in national magazines. He was so fluent in
translating that on graduation he was offered a professorship in modern
languages provided that he would first study in Europe.

On the continent he learned French, Spanish, and Italian but refused to
settle down to a regimen of scholarship at any university. In 1829 he
returned to the United States to be a professor and librarian at
Bowdoin. He wrote and edited textbooks, translated poetry and prose, and
wrote essays on French, Spanish, and Italian literature, but he felt
isolated. When he was offered a professorship at Harvard, with another
opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835.
On this trip he visited England, Sweden, and The Netherlands. In 1835,
saddened by the death of his first wife, whom he had married in 1831, he
settled at Heidelberg, where he fell under the influence of German
Romanticism.

In 1836 Longfellow returned to Harvard and settled in the famous Craigie
House, which was later given to him as a wedding present when he
remarried in 1843. His travel sketches, Outre-Mer (1835), did not
succeed. In 1839 he published Voices of the Night, which contained the
poems "Hymn to the Night," "The Psalm of Life," and "The Light of the
Stars" and achieved immediate popularity. That same year Longfellow
published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. In
1841 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as "The
Wreck of the Hesperus" and "The Village Blacksmith," swept the nation.
The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery (1842),
however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittier's
denunciations on the same theme. Longfellow was more at home in
Evangeline (1847), a narrative poem that reached almost every literate
home in the United States. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers
separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists)
from what is now Nova Scotia. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are
reunited years later as Gabriel is dying.

Longfellow presided over Harvard's modern-language program for 18 years
and then left teaching in 1854. In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's
two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the
trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he
fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Its appeal to the public was
immediate. Hiawatha is an Ojibwa Indian who, after various mythic feats,
becomes his people's leader and marries Minnehaha before departing for
the Isles of the Blessed. Both the poem and its singsong metre have been
frequent objects of parody.

        -- EB

[Links]

The complete Song of Hiawatha is available online at
[broken link] http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/hiawatha.html

Longfellow's _other_ famous poem is Paul Revere's Ride, at poem #172

My favourite Hiawatha parody is, without a question, Lewis Carroll's
brilliant 'Hiawatha's Photographing', which you can read at
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~bhs2u/carroll/hia.html

Cologne -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(Poem #361) Cologne In Kohln, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fang'd with murderous stones And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine? -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This is Coleridge in a vitriolic mood; one would hardly imagine the
writer of these lines to be the same person who gave us

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
   A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
   Down to a sunless sea."

The first five lines of 'Kublai Khan' are, as I've mentioned elsewhere,
possibly my favourite lines anywhere in the canon of English poetry. But
to tell the truth, I like 'Cologne' almost as much.

thomas.

PS. From Merriam-Webster online:
Main Entry: co.logne
Pronunciation: k&-'lOn
Etymology: Cologne, Germany
Date: 1814
1 : a perfumed liquid composed of alcohol and fragrant oils
        -- www.m-w.com

Oh, the irony!

[Links]

'Kublai Khan' was one of the earliest poems to be run on the Minstrels;
you can read it at poem #12

Another beautiful piece of verse invective is Patrick O'Reilly's 'Litany
for Doneraile', at poem #266

while Carl Sandburg's 'Chicago' is an example of just the opposite, the
poetic glorification of a city: poem #5

I Wish You Were a Wave of the Sea -- John Whitworth

Guest poem submitted by Steve Axbey :

I've been meaning to send this in for ages (and now it'll be lost
amongst a big pile of responses to your request: curses!):

(Poem #360) I Wish You Were a Wave of the Sea Fretting my heart as you pedal your bicycle, Perdita, once I called, Perdita, twice I called. Pretty as paint and as cool as a icicle, Perdita Simmons! Shall I tell how we met under fortunate auspices? Presuming a bottle of Spanish Don Horsepiss is Fortunate... This is not one of my coarse pieces, Perdita Simmons. Syllables shimmy as sonnets assemble Themselves in a shadowless summer a-tremble - A ten-guinea ticket for Merton Commem Ball With Perdita Simmons Daddy's a saurian Cambridge historian. Mummy's more chummy. She's tweedy and Tory and Hunts and what-have-you. So very Victorian Is Perdita Simmons. Thus Mainwaring, tall dark and rich, with a glance as much As to say, My dear boy, I don't fancy your chances much I know Perdie of old, and she doesn't like dances much, Doesn't Perdita Simmons. Perdita's hair ruffles fairer and tanglier, Perdita's grin makes my ganglia janglia, Perdita's uncle owns half of East Anglia, All for Perdita Simmons. Mainwaring's plan is for getting a leg over; Wait till she's plastered (the bastard!), then beg of her. No go. (Ho-ho!) Now his face has got egg over. From Perdita Simmons. Oh, how spiffing! (She talks like a school-story serial, While my lexical style is down-market and beery.) All Love is insane and remote and ethereal And Perdita Simmons. As we're pounding the ground in a last hokey-cokey, dawn Fingers two constables, hauling off chokey-borne Mainwaring, pissed as a rat on the croquet lawn. Sweet Perdita Simmons. Half-asleep, climbing from Headington Hill, at the crest of it Sickle moon, scatter of stars and the rest of it, In my hand one small hand (and this is the best of it) Of Perdita Simmons. Perdita murmurs, You'll do for a poet. And kisses me carefully twice, just to show it. Nobody knows what love is. But I know it. It's Perdita Simmons. -- John Whitworth

I am surpised to realise that this is one of my favourite poems (I
immediately knew that it would be this poem that I would one day send in
to the Wondering Minstrels).

I love it for the rythyms, the clever rhymes, the abrupt changes of pace
(but still managing to flow) and the ending. But most of all because
it's so much fun.  (It also helps, perhaps, that I first heard it read
live by the author while I myself was a student at university).

John Whitworth was born in 1945 (the book jacket says) and his first
collection was called Unhistorical Fragments. This poem is taken from
Poor Butterflies (1982) published by  Secker and Warburg.  I couldn't
find any biography on the net and as far as I know he isn't at all
famous - but I would be pleased to be corrected!

Re-reading the poem again it suddenly strikes me how British it is so,
for the benefit of the non-Brits, here's a glossary:

Merton Commem Ball - Merton is a college at Oxford University. Their
annual Commemoration Ball is a lavish, sparkling affair.
Tory - Conservative
Mainwaring - is pronounced "Mannering" (so the poem does scan!)
plastered - drunk
chokey - prison
pissed - drunk (in the UK "pissed off" means annoyed, but "pissed" means
drunk, causing endless Anglo-American fun).

Steve.

[thomas adds]

Ever since Steve sent this poem in, I've been going around singing
'Perdita's grin makes my ganglia janglia' at random intervals...

The Angler -- Thomas Buchanan Read

(Poem #359) The Angler But look! o'er the fall see the angler stand, Swinging his rod with skilful hand; The fly at the end of his gossamer line Swims through the sun like a summer moth, Till, dropt with a careful precision fine, It touches the pool beyond the froth. A-sudden, the speckled hawk of the brook Darts from his cover and seizes the hook. Swift spins the reel; with easy slip The line pays out, and the rod like a whip, Lithe and arrowy, tapering, slim, Is bent to a bow o'er the brooklet's brim, Till the trout leaps up in the sun, and flings The spray from the flash of his finny wings; Then falls on his side, and, drunken with fright, Is towed to the shore like a staggering barge, Till beached at last on the sandy marge, Where he dies with the hues of the morning light, While his sides with a cluster of stars are bright. The angler in his basket lays The constellation, and goes his ways. -- Thomas Buchanan Read

The most notable feature of today's poem is its vividness - the colours, the
textures, the play of light are all captured with elegance and economy, and
it is no great surprise to learn that Read was primarily a painter. As
longtime readers of Minstrels are doubtless aware, I greatly enjoy such
poetry, especially when combined with the wonderfully flowing verse Read has
attained in today's piece. Throw in some lovely imagery and some nice studies
in contrast, and you have a poem that is a pleasure both to read and to
recite - a poem that will never, perhaps, take its place among the immortal
greats, but one that I was nonetheless glad to have encountered.

Biography and Assessment

  (1822-1872) Poet and painter. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Spent
  his later years in Rome and Florence. Painted Thackeray and Browning.
  Became a writer at Longfellow's urging. Works include Poems (1847); Lays
  and Ballads (1848); "Sheridan's Ride" (poem); "Drifting" (poem); and "The
  Closing Scene" (poem).

    -- [broken link] http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/authors/tbr.html

  The latest production of Mr. Read, published in Philadelphia in 1855,
  during the author's residence in Italy, The New Pastoral, is the most
  elaborate of his compositions. It is a series of thirty-seven sketches,
  forming a volume of two hundred and fifty pages, mostly in blank verse.
  The thread which connects the chapters together is the emigration of a
  family group of Middle Pennsylvania to the Mississippi. The description of
  their early residence; the rural manners and pursuits; the natural scenery
  of their home; the phenomena of the seasons; the exhibitions of religious,
  political, and social life; the school; the camp meeting; the election;
  Independence Day, with an elevating love theme in the engagement of a
  village maiden to a poetic lover in Europe; the incidents of the voyage on
  the Ohio, with frequent episodes and patriotic aspirations, are all
  handled with an artist's eye for natural and moral beauty. The book
  presents a constant succession of truthful, pleasing images, in the
  healthy vein of the Goldsmiths and Bloomfields.

  The characteristics we have noted describe Mr. Read's poems in his several
  volumes, which have exhibited a steady progress and development, in the
  confidence of the writer, in plain and simple objects, in strength of
  fancy and poetic culture.

    -- [broken link] http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/authors/cal/tbrCal.html