high on the Hurrum Hills

I like verse anthologies. I generally read them through, skimming over entries that don't grab my attention, but also trying to read with fresh eyes ones that have painful familarity. It's surprising how often these books contain things both new and admirable. A couple years back I reproduced some poems of this latter sort from Minorities, a notebook of verse which T.E. Lawrence wrote for himself and carried about in the Arabian deserts. The anthology that's currently on my nightstand is Seven ages : poetry for a lifetime, edited by David Owen (London: Michael Joseph, 1992). It's done in sections after the Shakespeare poem.* I've just begun the fourth, the soldier, and was pleased there to find Kipling's "A Code of Morals".

"A Code of Morals"

Lest you should think this story true
I merely mention I
Evolved it lately. 'Tis a most
Unmitigated misstatement.

Now Jones had left his new-wed bride to keep his house in order,
And hied away to the Hurrum Hills above the Afghan border,
To sit on a rock with a heliograph; but ere he left he taught
His wife the working of the Code that sets the miles at naught.

And Love had made him very sage, as Nature made her fair;
So Cupid and Apollo linked , per heliograph, the pair.
At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise -
At e'en, the dying sunset bore her husband's homilies.

He warned her 'gainst seductive youths in scarlet clad and gold,
As much as 'gainst the blandishments paternal of the old;
But kept his gravest warnings for (hereby the ditty hangs)
That snowy-haired Lothario, Lieutenant-General Bangs.

'T'was General Bangs, with Aide and Staff, who tittupped on the way,
When they beheld a heliograph tempestuously at play.
They thought of Border risings, and of stations sacked and burnt -
So stopped to take the message down - and this is what they learnt -

"Dash dot dot, dot, dot dash, dot dash dot" twice. The General swore.
"Was ever General Officer addressed as 'dear' before?
"'My Love,' i' faith! 'My Duck,' Gadzooks! 'My darling popsy-wop!'
"Spirit of great Lord Wolseley, who is on that mountain top?"

The artless Aide-de-camp was mute, the gilded Staff were still,
As, dumb with pent-up mirth, they booked that message from the hill;
For clear as summer lightning-flare, the husband's warning ran: -
"Don't dance or ride with General Bangs -- a most immoral man."

[At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise -
But, howsoever Love be blind, the world at large hath eyes.]
With damnatory dot and dash he heliographed his wife
Some interesting details of the General's private life.

The artless Aide-de-camp was mute, the shining Staff were still,
And red and ever redder grew the General's shaven gill.
And this is what he said at last (his feelings matter not): -
"I think we've tapped a private line. Hi! Threes about there! Trot!"

All honour unto Bangs, for ne'er did Jones thereafter know
By word or act official who read off that helio.
But the tale is on the Frontier, and from Michni to Mooltan
They know the worthy General as "that most immoral man."

About which you might wish to know:

First printed in Civil and Military Gazette, April 6th, 1886, the poem appeared in the New York Tribune on July 6th, 1890. We do not know whether this light-hearted piece was based on a true story, or whether Kipling, intrigued by the possibilities of intercepting heliograph messages, simply made up the incident. The heading suggests the latter, but his readers in Simla or Lahore may have known otherwise. The original heading ('...‘Tis my nineth...') implies that most of his verses were his own inventions, but in fact much of their appeal was that they echoed the scandals and rumours of the day. -- "A Code of Morals" (notes edited by Roberta Baldi)

{Heliograph being used by British soldiers during the Boer War, from the Illustrated London News, 1879; source: storeysltd.co.uk}

{William Mulready, The Seven Ages of Man (1838); source: shakespeare.emory.edu}

--------

Some sources:

Heliograph, article in wikipedia

notes on "A Code of Morals" by Roberta Baldi

What Are The "Seven Ages Of Man"?

William Mulready. The Seven Ages of Man. 1838.

-----------

Note:

* Here's what Shakespeare wrote:

At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
-- The Seven Ages of Man, William Shakespeare

canzoni

Turmoil is too weak a descriptor for the heart-rending tragedies inflicted by gods and their fellow men on earth's undeserving souls. In celebrating the genius of W.H. Auden, Hannah Arendt tries to help us come to terms with it all. She quotes the poet:

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

And she says his deep acknowledgement of "unsuccess" in himself and all of us is one of the things that made him not just good but great. He invoked Yeats' voice and his own in a hymn of praise, not as thanksgiving but as reconciliation. She says the poets' praise "sucks its own strength from the wound." For her Auden, Yeats, and all the great poets sang of gods that "spin unhappiness and evil things toward mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs."

Here is how Auden rendered this song:

Faces, orations, battles, bait our will
As questionable forms and noises will;
Whole phyla of resentments every day
Give status to the wild men of the world
Who rule the absent-minded and this world.

...

Our claim to own our bodies and our world
Is our catastrophe. What can we know
But panic and caprice until we know
Our dreadful appetite demands a world
Whose order, origin, and purpose will
Be fluent satisfaction of our will?

...

For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgiven, even love.

...

Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love
That we are so admonished, that no day
Of conscious trial be a wasted day.

Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
Loose ends and jumble of our common world,
And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;
Or else our changing flesh may never know
There must be sorrow if there can be love.

Auden told us, Arendt says, to shun rhetoric, doctrine, and theoretical systems, and to beware of seductions that blind one to reality. He wrote,

I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn't there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?

Photos from more than a decade before they met, when both were young.

{Arendt; source: outlaws4x4.com — Auden; source: drudginggoblin.blogspot.com}

Welcome to National Poetry Month.

----------

A note on sources:

Arendt's comments on Auden were first published in the New Yorker in 1973 and, since then, in Reflections on literature and culture by Hannah Arendt, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford University Press, 2007).

The first poem quoted is Auden's In Memory of W. B. Yeats.

The second is his Canzone.

The third is his 'Precious five'.

Other sources:

Hannah Arendt: for love of the world by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Yale University Press, 2004)

"In Memory of WB Yeats" by W H Auden (poetry reading) on Youtube

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone"and Arendt's Notes on Willing by Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb

Hannah Arendt: for love of the world by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Yale University Press, 2004)

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's Notes on Willing
Author(s): Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 131-150
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593505 .

cries and wings surprise our surest act

The Kestrels

When I would think of you, my mind holds only
The small defiant kestrels — how they cut
The raincloud with sharp wings, continually circling
About a storm-rocked elm, with passionate cries.
It was an early month. The plow cut hard.
The May was knobbed with chilly buds.
My folly was great enough to lull away my pride.

There is no virtue now in blind reliance
On place or person or the forms of love.
The storm bears down the pivotal tree, the cloud
Turns to the net of an inhuman fowler
And drags us from the air. Our wings are clipped.
Yet still our love and luck lies in our parting:
Those cries and wings surprise our surest act.

-- Sidney Keyes

---------------

The Windhover

(to Christ our Lord)
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

These have as subject the same small bird of prey. I found the first in an anthology I keep bedside these nights. It's little-known, appears in no other anthology. The other popped up while I was searching out kestrel stuff on web. It's one of the poet's better-known, appears frequently in anthologies. As you'd expect they make similar use of falcon flight, yet I was pleasantly surprised to see plows and furrows appear in both.

---------------

some links:

• Common Kestrel in wikipedia
• Sidney Keyes entry on findagrave.com
• Sidney Keyes entry in wikipedia
• The Windhover" a student essay on the Hopkins poem
• What is sillion? about the use of the word in Hopkins' poem
• “The Windhover”, an analysis on poetryfoundation.org by Ange Mlinko

---------------
some images:

{a young male kestrel; the photo shows its size; source: wikipedia}

{kestrel; source: mariewinn.com}

{elm tree with clouds; source: berrizbeitia-design.com}

{storm-rocked elm; source: flickr}

{chilly buds; source: flickr}

Milton, found

Where I live these days have been hot and hazy; I see thunder clouds but there's been no rain. Perfect weather for the current issue of Poetry. As Dwight Garner of NYT's Papercuts blog says, it celebrates The Poetry of Summer. Typical of its worth is the short poem Captain Haddock vs. the PTA by Amy Beeder ("a former human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname, and a high school teacher in West Africa").

{Click the link to read it; I won't violate copyright by reproducing it here.}

The mag also contains a good article on the bowdlerization of Milton's Paradise Lost: Sing, God-awful Muse! by Philadelphia poet Daisy Fried. Both the article and reader comments that follow it are worth the read.

She sounds off about lit profs and their students who complain that the poem is too hard to understand and she compares the profs nattering to the warnings of a prenatal instructor who told her that giving birth and nurturing a baby were undertakings fraught with pain, difficulty, and constant threat of missteps leading near to disaster — and who then commanded her to "relax." Refreshingly, she says both the profs and the instructor are full of it. I agree.

I carried a small book of Milton's poetry with me one winter while traveling on business. Stuck in O'Hare while storms raged all round, I relished the intense concentration Paradise Lost required and enjoyed the whole of it page after page.

It comforts me to recall my view of the huge snow drifts across the runways, seated as I am now, a bit sweaty, typing these words, barefoot, clothed in shorts and a T shirt. I think of relatives recently returned from a Jamaica whose honeymoon photo gallery includes a shot of the two posed before a jungle of palm fronds with a great snake entwining them.

Daisy Fried quotes this out of Milton:

Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.

And then quotes on prof's supposed clarification of these supposedly mystifying words:

Tell the story, Heavenly Muse: of humankind’s first trespass, of forbidden fruit whose lethal taste brought death and sorrow to our world, and drove us out of Eden—until one greater human should redeem us and regain the happy place we lost.

She goes on —

God-awful enough to tempt me to try my own prose version:

Sing, Muse, of our first sin, the bite of the apple which brought death and woe to the world, and lost us paradise, which we won’t get back till Jesus Christ —

Worse than God-awful! But trying to make Milton idiomatic forced me to discover how necessary his language — syntactically Latinate, defiantly unidiomatic in his own time — is to meaning and to feeling in Paradise Lost.

Good for her!

{thunder cloud; source: www.abc.net.au}

{Angel Raphael visits Eden, from Milton's Paradise Lost. [John Martin, 1825]; source: roofhouse.com}

{Eve in the garden; source: jurisdynamics.blogspot.com}

{a birth helper — doula — as doulas should be; source: http://www.intuitivedoula.com/}

Life must go on

Last March, the New York Public Library staged an excellent Tribute to John Updike presented by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker magazine which published most of his poems and many stories. All speakers but one are connected with those two organizations. The exception is his son, David, an author himself, who teaches English at Roxbury Community College, in Boston.

The reminiscences are touching, humorous, and — as you'd expect — literate. One alone addresses the side of Updike's work I most appreciate: his poetry. This speaker, Deborah Garrison, said "his poetry has a very special place for us as readers, I think, because in the poems we feel that the distinction between the speaker’s voice and John Updike himself dissolves and rightly or wrongly, we have a sense that we’re hearing directly from him as he contemplates earthworms or turning sixty-one or dream objects and we have a great sense of intimacy and for those of us who — for readers, of course, who would never meet him or those of us who were only privileged to meet him on occasion over the years in the city, this was a real gift to us, this sense of intimacy that we felt in the poems, that we were really hearing his own thoughts."

{Photo credit: Robert Spencer for The New York Times}

She read three poems: The Stunt Flier, Fine Point, and A Rescue. In this last one, Updike writes:

Today I wrote some words that will see print.
Maybe they will last ‘forever,’ in that
someone will read them, their ink making
a light scratch on his mind or hers.

He then tells a small anecdote of a time he rescued a bird from his garden shed —

Without much reflection, for once, I stepped
to where its panicked heart
was making commotion, the flared wings drumming,
and with clumsy soft hands
pinned it against a pane,
held loosely cupped
this agitated essence of the air,
and through the open door released it,
like a self-flung ball,
to all that lovely perishing outdoors.

She did not read my favorite, Aerie, which begins

By following many a color-coded corridor
and taking an elevator up through the heart of the hospital
amid patients with the indignant stare of parrots
from within their cages of drugs,
one can arrive at the barbershop . . .

Or his typically backhanded celebration of Pain which begins:

Pain flattens the world - its bubbles
of bliss, its epiphanies, its upright
sticks of day-to-day business -
and shows us what seriousness is.

And which includes this powerful image of those who try to help its sufferers:

. . . and women bring their engendering smiles
and eyes of famous mercy,
these kind things slide away
like rain beating on a filthy window

The tribute by his son is quoted in yesterday's New York Times: A Toast to the Visible World: Remembering John Updike. It shows Updike as a man at ease with himself, wearing his celebrity comfortably, enjoying the ordinary pleasures of life.

Updike's poetic images reveal connections between astounding artistic achievement and the commonplace elements of daily life. Here's the start of a close observation of some great paintings:

Gradations of Black

(Third Floor, Whitney Museum)

Ad Reinhardt's black, in Abstract Painting 33,
    seems atmosphere, leading the eye into
that darkness where, self-awakened, we
grope for the bathroom switch; no light comes on,
    but slowly we perceive the corners of his square
black canvas to be squares just barely brown.
. . .

I saw a painting in the same series — Reinhardt's "Abstract Painting No. 4" of 1961 — in the Westmoreland Museum of American Art on our return trip from a brief midwest holiday. Having — the day before — been delayed by a breakdown and some heavy traffic outside Chicago, our visit to this hilltop museum was a special delight.

The Reinhardt is a square painting which at first sight seems uniformly black, but, more closely inspected, shows itself to be made up of nine squares in shades of very dark greys and browns — as Updike tells us. View this reproduction in full-size to get the general idea.

{source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannydanh/ on flickr}

The show is a traveling exhibit called
Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I liked all of it, in addition to the Reinhardt, particularly the Gottliebs and the paintings of Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan which aren't shown as often as those of their male counterparts.

{Image credit: Joan Mitchell, My Landscape II, 1967, oil, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection; source: Westmoreland Museum}

{This is MoMa's black Reinhardt. Photo by "ListenMissy!" on Flickr via
http://www.preservationtoday.com/tag/education/}

Here are some images from the exhibit. Source: Westmoreland Museum of American Art


Some links on the exhibit:

• Abstracts open door to art heritage
• Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Modern Masters From Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Exhibitions -- Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Addendum: During our travels we stayed in motels run by the Country Inn & Suites chain (which we liked). One of their amenities is a small library for guests to raid for evening reads. There I found the Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay containing this with its striking (and somewhat Updike-esque) final line:

LAMENT, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I'll make you little jackets;
I'll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There'll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.

{Image source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jmillay.htm}

Disclaimer: The quotes on this page have all been made under fair use provisions of US copyright law.

pride without, and a dark firmament within

Happy Independence Day

My favorite patriotic poem is Emerson's Concord Hymn, "Sung at the Completion of Concord Monument, April 19, 1836."

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world,

The foe long since in silence slept,
Alike the Conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone,
That memory may their deed redeem,
When like our sires our sons are gone.

Spirit! who made those freemen dare
To die, or leave their children free,
Bid time and nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and Thee.

Pride is not the only emotion I feel on this day. I've been reading John Updike's Collected Poems these days and have come across his anti-heroic meditation, Fireworks. Written July 5, 1963, it is personal, internal, and private; not made for public recitation. All the same it seems to be colored by its time: Kennedy was President and Mao was Chairman; Cuba was embargoed and Khrushchev blustering; the Beatles were coming of age and the diet cola, TAB, was launched; the battle for civil rights in the South had no certain victor — MLK jailed, Bull Connor brandishing, Medgar Evers murdered, and George Wallace declaring "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!" For me the dominant symbol of the time was to become a photo showing a Buddhist monk protesting religious persecution by the government of South Vietnam by committing self-immolation on the streets of Saigon.

Here's an extract from the poem:

From Fireworks by John Updike:

These spasms and chrysanthemums of light
are like emotions
exploding under a curved night that corresponds
to the dark firmament within.

. . .
behold, above, the sudden bloom,
turquoise, each tip a comet,
of pride - followed, after an empty bang,
by an ebbing amber galaxy, despair.

We feel our secrets bodied forth like flags
as wide as half the sky.

---

{the bridge; source: flickr}

{the monument; source: talkingtree}

Emerson meets Tennyson

From the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

[ca. May 7 1848]        

I saw Tennyson, first, at the house of Coventry Patmore, where we dined together [on May 5]. His friend Brookfield was also of the party. I was contented with him, at once. He is tall, scholastic-looking, no dandy, but a great deal of plain strength about him, and though cultivated, quite unaffected; quiet, sluggish sense and strength, refined, as all English are, and good-humoured. The print of his head in Homes book is too rounded and handsome. There is in him an air of general superiority, that is very satisfactory. He lives very much with his college set, Spedding, Brookfield, Hallam, Rice, and the rest, and has the air of one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives with, like George Bradford. Take away Hawthorne's bashfulness, and let him talk easily and fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson.

He has just come home from Ireland, where he had seen much vaporing of the Irish youth against England, and described a scene in some tavern, I think, where a hot young man was flourishing a drawn sword, and swearing that he would drive it to the hilt into the flesh and blood of Englishmen. Tennyson was disgusted, and going up to the young man, took out his penknife, and offered it to him. "I am an Englishman," he said, "and there is my penknife, and, you know, you will not so much as stick that into me." The youth was disconcerted and said he knew he was not an Englishman. "Yes, but I am." Hereupon the companions of the youth interfered, and apologized for him, he had been in drink and was excited, etc.

Tennyson talked of Carlyle, and said, "If Carlyle thinks the Christian religion has lost all vitality, he is wholly mistaken." Tennyson and all Carlyle's friends feel the caprice and incongruity of his opinions. He talked of London as a place to take the nonsense out of a man.

It is his brother, Tennyson Turner, who wrote the verses which Wordsworth praised.

When Festus was spoken of, I said that a poem must be made up of little poems, but that in Festus were no single good lines; you could not quote one line. Tennyson quoted

There came a hand between the sun and us, And its five fingers made five nights in air.

After dinner, Brookfield insisted that we should go to his house, so we stopped an omnibus, and, not finding room inside for all three, Tennyson rode on the box, and B. and I within. Brookfield, knowing that I was going to France, told me that, if I wanted him, Tennyson would go. "That is the way we do with him," he said. "We tell him he must go and he goes. But you will find him heavy to carry."

At Brookfield's house we found young Hallam, with Mrs. Brookfield, a very pleasing woman. I told Tennyson that I heard from his friends very good accounts of him, and I and they were persuaded that it was important to his health, an instant visit to Paris; and that I was to go on Monday, if he was ready. He was very good-humoured, and affected to think that I should never come back alive from France, it was death to go. But he had been looking for two years for somebody to go to Italy with, and was ready to set out at once, if I would go there. I was tempted, of course, to pronounce for Italy; but now I had agreed to give my course in London. He gave me a cordial invitation to his lodgings (in Buckingham Place), where I promised to visit him before I went away.

On [the next day?] I found him at home in his lodgings, but with him was a Church clergy man, whose name I did not know, and there was no conversation. He was sure, again, that he was taking a final farewell of me, as I was going among the French bullets, but promised to be in the same lodgings, if I should escape alive after my three weeks in Paris. So we parted. I spent a month in Paris, and, when I returned, he had left London.[added later]

Carlyle describes him as staying in London through a course of eight o'clock dinners every night for months until he is thoroughly fevered. Then, notice is given to one of his friends, as lately to Aubrey de Vere, who has a fine estate in Ireland (thirty miles from Limerick), to come and carry him off bodily. Tennyson had capitulated, on three conditions: first, that he should not hear anything about Irish distress; second, that he should not come downstairs to breakfast; third, that he might smoke in the house. I think these were the three. So poor Tennyson, who had been in the worst way, but had not force enough to choose where to go, and so sat still, was now disposed of.

Tennyson was in plain black suit and wears glasses. Carlyle thinks him the best man in England to smoke a pipe with, and used to see him much; had a place in his little garden, on the wall, where Tennyson's pipe was laid up. He has other brothers, I believe, besides Tennyson Turner, the elder; and, I remember, Carlyle told me with glee some story of one of them, who looked like Alfred, and whom some friend, coming in, found lying on the sofa and addressed him, "Ah, Alfred, I am glad to see you," and he said, "I am not Alfred, I am Septimus; I am the most morbid of all the Tennysons."

I suppose he is self-indulgent and a little spoiled and selfish by the warm and universal favor he has found. Lady Duff Gordon told me that the first day she saw him he lay his whole length on the carpet, and rolled himself to her feet and said, "Will you please to put your feet on me for a stool." Coventry Patmore described him as very capricious and as once spending the evening with a dozen friends, "not, to be sure, his equals, but as nearly his equals as any that could be collected." Yet Tennyson would not say a word, but sat with his pipe, silent, and at last said, "I am going to Cheltenham; I have had a glut of men." When he himself proposed, one day, to read Tennyson a poem which he had just finished, that Tennyson might tell him of anything which his taste would exclude, Tennyson replied, "Mr. Patmore,you have no idea how many applications of this sort are made to me."

Dr. T. P. Shepherd, of Providence, who travelled in the East with W. Stirling, told me that he met Tennyson at a hotel in Amsterdam, and lived there a fortnight with him, not knowing his name, but riding out with him to see the environs, and meeting at the table d'hote. He set his servant to ascertain from Tennyson's servant his master's name; but the man was only a valet de place, and did not know; for Tennyson scrupulously concealed his name, and got into trouble with the police about his passport. Dr. Shepherd thought he must be Carlyle, from the strength and brilliancy of his conversation, until he spoke of Carlyle. One day, however, he recited the "Moated Grange," and inquired of Dr. Shepherd if they liked such verses in America. Dr. Shepherd replied, yes, he knew the verses; they were by Tennyson, and, though he could not say they were widely known, yet they had a very cordial troop of admirers in the United States. "Well," replied the other, "I am Tennyson." And thereafter their acquaintance was intimate, and he made Dr. Shepherd promise to visit him in England. But when Dr. Shepherd was in England, and inquired for him, he found, he said, that he was in a kind of retreat for the sane, which they keep there, and so saw him not.

Mr. Sylvester told me that Mr. Farie could draw a model of any loom or machine after once seeing it, for Rees's Cyclopaedia, and did so in the Strutt's mills.

Mr. Hallam asked me, at Lord Ashburton's, "Whether Swedenborg were all mad, or partly knave?" He knew nothing of Thomas Taylor, nor did Milman, nor any Englishman.

---

{Tennyson as a young man; source: Twickenham Museum}

{Coventry Patmore; source: famouspoetsandpoems.com}

William Henry Brookfield entry in wikipedia


James Spedding entry in wikipedia

Arthur Hallam entry in wikipedia

{Henry Hallam; source: today in literature}

Festus, a poem by the English poet Philip James Bailey - wikipedia entry

Festus, by Philip James Bailey (text)

Aubrey Thomas De Vere, entry in the Britannica 11th ed.

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Some sources:

Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1820-1872, with Annotations, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes; Vol. VII, 1845-1848 (London, Constable & Co.; Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913)

Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1820-1872, with Annotations, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes; Vol. VII, 1845-1848, (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912)

T.E. Lawrence, Minorities, Nos. 30-43

Here are links to the 30th-43rd poems that T.E. Lawrence wrote out in Minorities, his pocket book of blank pages. With exception of two, they're all from his copy of the The Oxford Book of English Verse. I'm particularly fond of no. 42.

30. Dominus Illuminatio Mea, by R.D. Blackmore

31. Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, by William Wordsworth

32. Salve!, by T.E. Brown

33. Elizabeth of Bohemia, by Sir Henry Wotton*

34. Love, by George Herbert

35. The Great Misgiving, by William Watson. The editor of Minorities says Lawrence wrote this poem into his pocket book on November 4, 1917, a day on which he learned of the treachery of a fighting companion. Having planned an attack on a railway and now being certain that the enemy knew his plans, he decided to proceed regardless. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom he wrote: 'The Turks, if they took the most reasonable precautions, would trap us at the bridge. We took council with Fahad and decided to push on none the less, trusting to the usual incompetence of our enemy. It was not a confident decision.'

36. Youth and Age, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge**

37. Death the Leveller, by James Shirley.

38. The Vine, by James Thomson. In 1922 Lawrence wrote to Robert Graves: 'By the way James Thomson's Sunday up the River is most excellent, isn't it?'

39. Lawrence did not copy this out of his OBEV. It is verse XVI from 'Sunday up the River' by James Thompson's The City of Dreadful Night, and other poems (London, 1910)

My love is the flaming Sword
To fight through the world;
Thy love is the Shield to ward,
And the Armor of the Lord
And the Banner of Heaven unfurled.

40. Bride Song, from 'The Prince's Progress' by Christina Georgina Rossetti

41. Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In general, Lawrence did not think highly of Coleridge's work. He wrote his friend Charlotte Shaw that the man 'wrote so little that was quintessential: and a cargo of dross.' (30.X.28 to C. F. Shaw.)

42. Lawrence did not copy this out of his OBEV. It is 'Everyone Sang' from Siegfried Sassoon's Picture Show (Cambridge, 1919)

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on — on — and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

In a letter written in 1929 Lawrence said Sassoon's poetry 'touches nearer to my own train of mind than the work of anyone else publishing. Every verse of his makes me say "I wish to God I'd said that": and his fox-hunting gave me a shock of astonishment that he was so different and so good to know. If I was trying to export the ideal Englishman to an international exhibition, I think I'd choose S.S. for chief exhibit.'

43. Ode to a Nightingale, by John Keats

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{Siegfried Sassoon; source: ebooks-library}

{Siegfried Sassoon; source: Imperial War Museum}

{Siegfried Sassoon at the Fourth Army School, May 1916; source: Imperial War Museum}

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Notes:
* Lawrence wrote out the first three verses and omitted the last:

You meaner beauties of the night,
  That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
  You common people of the skies;
  What are you when the moon shall rise?

You curious chanters of the wood,
  That warble forth Dame Nature's lays,
Thinking your passions understood
  By your weak accents; what 's your praise
  When Philomel her voice shall raise?

You violets that first appear,
  By your pure purple mantles known
Like the proud virgins of the year,
  As if the spring were all your own;
  What are you when the rose is blown?

** Lawrence omitted parts of this poem, as shown.

Verse, a breeze 'mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee —
Both were mine! Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
      When I was young!
When I was young? — Ah, woful When!
Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O'er aery cliffs and glittering sands,
How lightly then it flash'd along —
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Naught cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in 't together.

Flowers are lovely! Love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
O the joys, that came down shower-like,
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,
      Ere I was old!
Ere I was old? Ah, woful Ere,
Which tells me, Youth 's no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known that thou and I were one;
I'll think it but a fond conceit —
It cannot be that thou art gone!
Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd —
And thou wert aye a masker bold!
What strange disguise hast now put on,
To make believe that thou art gone?
I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this alter'd size:
But springtide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!
Life is but thought: so think I will
That Youth and I are housemates still.

Dewdrops are the gems of morning,
But the tears of mournful eve!
Where no hope is, life 's a warning
That only serves to make us grieve,
      When we are old!

That only serves to make us grieve
With oft and tedious taking-leave,
Like some poor nigh-related guest
That may not rudely be dismist.
Yet hath outstay'd his welcome while,
And tells the jest without the smile.