Monday, October 21, 2013

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - October 6, 2013

Part I - Forest Hills Cemetery - Jamaica Plain, Mass.

While driving the 92 miles from home to Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain it was a sunshine-pretty and blue-sky-pretty kind of day. Within a moment of parking at Forest Hills it began to rain. Dead Poets Remembrance Day is one of my favorite events and occurs in my favorite season; sunshine is nice but poetry sounds good in the rain too. And everything gets filmed for a potential documentary. Film credit today: Lisa Shields.

Lisa Shields as filmist ...

Lisa Shields as poet ... author of The Ultimate Charm of Firefly Glow


First stop was at the grave of e e cummings. I had the pleasure of reciting one of my favorite poems; I'd kept tucked in my wallet for 40 years a copy of this poem, but lost it to a pickpocket in Paris a few years back.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings;and of the gay
great happening ilimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)


Walter Skold at grave of Eugene O'Neill

I didn't know that the playwright Eugene O'Neill wrote poems. But what all don't I know? ... lots! It is said that you're smart when you know how much you don't know.

                      ALL NIGHT I LINGERED AT THE BEACH            
            by: Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)
      LL night I lingered at the Beach
      And trod the board walk up and down--
      I vainly sought to cop a peach.
       
      I had prepared a charming speech,
      To woo the fair ones of the town--
      All night I lingered at the Beach.
       
      Quoth I "Sweet damsel I beseech
      That you will smile on me," poor clown!
      I vainly sought to cop a peach.
       
      With the persistence of a leech,
      I clung to every passing gown--
      All night I lingered at the Beach.
       
      I swore my love to all, but each
      Passed me the haughty freezing frown--
      I vainly sought to cop a peach.
       
      I prayed to all, both white and brown--
      They only "kicked my dog aroun."
      All night I lingered at the Beach--
      I vainly sought to cop a peach.



I've learned that James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) was a Unitarian minister, a tireless abolitionist, and that he attempted to start a Utopian community at Brook Farm in Brookline; I've been told he was a poet but cannot find a single poem by him.


On a path near Anne Sexton's grave a young woman astride a bicycle stopped to stare at our little group. I motioned for her to join us. The concept of visiting the graves of poets seemed new to her, and indeed Anne Sexton is a poet she loves. She recited something -- I wish I could remember what -- from The Awful Rowing Toward God. Her name is Marie Carnegie and she is readying a set of her own poems for publication. A native of Belfast, she spoke so fast and in such a heavy accent that she might actually have said she was readying a pot of tea for public consumption; but my ears heard 'poems' and 'publication.'


Walter Skold adorned Anne Sexton's gravestone with two of her books and a black feather boa. I think Anne would have, on occasion, been a boa-wearing gal. My favorite Sexton anecdote is that when she, Sylvia Plath, and a few others, after attending a session of Robert Lowell's poetry seminar, went out for a drink in the bar of one of Boston's ritzy hotels. Anne regularly parked her beat-up car in the Loading Zone. "Why not?" she reasoned, "We're going to get loaded."



Lisa Shields turned the filming over to Walter and read:

Ringing the Bells

And this is the way they ring
the bells in Bedlam
and this is the bell-lady
who comes each Tuesday morning
to give us a music lesson
and because the attendants make you go
and because we mind by instinct,
like bees caught in the wrong hive,
we are the circle of crazy ladies
who sit in the lounge of the mental house
and smile at the smiling woman
who passes us each a bell,
who points at my hand
that holds my bell, E flat,
and this is the gray dress next to me
who grumbles as if it were special
to be old, to be old,
and this is the small hunched squirrel girl
on the other side of me
who picks at the hairs over her lip,
who picks at the hairs over her lip all day,
and this is how the bells really sound,
as untroubled and clean
as a workable kitchen,
and this is always my bell responding
to my hand that responds to the lady
who points at me, E flat;
and although we are not better for it,
they tell you to go. And you do.



And that, so far as any of us knew, was it for poets in Forest Hills ... just four. And sometimes I'll take a picture of a marker just because it's extra beautiful or unique, like the one above.



Or sometimes I'll photograph a grave stone just because I share the last name of the deceased, and I think I'll go home and research the guy's history, but usually I don't get it done, or, just as usually, find that, such as in this case, there are one hundred or five hundred John Edward Fitzgeralds to sort through, and I throw in the towel.






Oliver Kenison joined us again this year; we met him on 2012's Dead Poets Remembrance Day at the grave of his uncle, Buckminster Fuller in Cambridge's Mt. Auburn Cemetery. I like Oliver. He's got a brain brimful with knowledge, particularly of the history of Boston and its citizens, and I love listening and learning. Last year he recited as much as he could remember of a limerick his Uncle Bucky would say to him when Oliver was a youngster. Back home I easily googled up the entire lyric and sent it to Oliver. Somehow this led him to learn and memorize not just the names of the four provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Ulster, Munster, and Connacht) but also the names of the 32 counties and which province they are a piece of!


Gravestone of John Boyle O'Reilly
After lunch at a hole-in-the-wall in a non-descript strip-mall on Boyleston Street in Brookline, which just happened to have the best chicken pot pie I've ever eaten, Lisa, Walter, and I made our way to the nearby Holyhood Cemetery because Walter wanted us to see the mammoth gravestone of John Boyle O'Reilly, an Irish-American poet. I have since acquainted myself with the biography of O'Reilly; he was a Fenian (a precursor of the IRA), an Irish patriot, and I am in love with Ireland and with my Irish heritage, which means he's now one of my new heroes. Besides being a fierce Fenian he wrote lovely poems; here's a sample of his style:

''The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.''

John Boyle O'Reilly
(This comment is pretty much neither here nor there, perhaps just a sad commentary on what trivia I've filled my brain with over the years, but when we were approaching Holyhood Cemetery I recognized the stone wall as being the same one I noticed in the 1984 television coverage as the hearse carrying the body of David Kennedy, the son of Robert and Ethyl, who died at 28 of a drug overdose, approached this cemetery. And, indeed, David Kennedy, as well as his grandparents, Joseph and Rose Kennedy, are buried in Holyhood Cemetery.) 

Part II - Hope Cemetery - Worcester, Mass.



You probably wouldn't expect Worcester to be the hotbed of poetry it is; a good number of renowned poets have come from there, and an organization called The Worcester County Poetry Assn. is very active.

As in previous years, we lovers of poetry gathered at the grave of Elizabeth Bishop. But even on this hallowed ground I am distracted because I am glancing regularly toward the corner of the cemetery where the father of Stanley Kunitz is buried. (Shouldn't I just call Kunitz my favorite poet for life, and be done with it?) I marvel over and over again, for ever and ever, at the stunningly beautiful and poignant poems Stanley Kunitz crafted from tragedy.

Pay attention, I tell myself, there at Bishop's grave. In the above picture a local woman named Lynda Johnson is reciting some poems that came from the hand of her friend -- Louise Monfredo, who lies buried in the Catholic cemetery, behind us, across Webster Street. The poems Lynda Johnson reads are beautiful and witty, and also, sometimes, really funny. I want to read more of Louise Monfredo.






As usual, other poems by Worcester poets are recited. Above Carle Johnson reads someone ... I'm staring towards the far corner, distracted again, and don't remember whose work Carle is reading ... and then the woman in the red coat, named Fredda Levine, reads one of her own poems, and her recitation is followed by a chorus of "You need to send that out, you need to get that published!" And, finally, Carle and I recite -- each saying every other line -- Elizabeth Bishop's "The Bight". Normally everyone in the group would speak lines in turn but because of the rain we had to be umbrella-ed, and there's not room under an umbrella for more than a couple, and, anyhow, we had but one copy of the poem.

So ... another great Dead Poets Remembrance Day has come to an end. Several are heading to a restaurant for a meal, but I need to head for Holyoke. I do not know it as I head west on the turnpike, but I'm about to meet a man in Holyoke who's going to become a friend. This is remarkable only because the older you get the rarer it is that you make a new friend. That only makes it more wonderful.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

To Ireland ...

The guy pictured above in 1966, will, along with his friend Mark, be going
 back to Ireland tomorrow. That little pack on my back is all I had with me
as a friend and I hitchhiked around Ireland on that trip. Now I have
an upscale rolling suitcase from Ralph Lauren. And we're flying
Aer Lingus instead of the 1966 cheap Icelandic Airlines which always
layed over an hour in Reykjavik hoping you'd buy something woolen,
and which also always dropped you off in only one place: Luxembourg.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Thanks, Huck!


Cruising the Internet can sometimes bring great enjoyment. I don't remember how I came across a man named Hank Gutman, a professor of poetry at the University of Vermont, but he, very irregularly but faithfully, sends out an occasional email which wonderfully explicates some certain poem. He is clearly an excellent teacher, and I'm always happy to see "From: Huck.Gutman@UVM.EDU" in my mailbox. (I don't know why "Huck" instead of "Hank"in his address.)

I'm also sort of fond of Hank/Huck because he for several years took leave from the university to become a Washington D.C. assistant to my favorite Senator, Vermont's Bernie Sanders.

A. E. Housman

A. E. Housman, or poems don’t have to be hard to be deep

(Gutman's latest email)


Gerard Manley Hopkins,in one of his late sonnets,addresses his writer’s block.(No, I have not had writer’s block). His concluding lines contain one of my favorite phrases:

Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;

I want the one rapture of an inspiration.

O then if in my lagging lines you miss

The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,

My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss

Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.


When her literary correspondent Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts they had what, in my view (and perhaps in his?) was the richest conversation in history.  Among the other things she said that Higginson recorded in a letter to his wife, there was this: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

I’m not Emily Dickinson, and my criterion for poems is not hers, though I find hers stunning.  Tossing that out in a conversation in her living room?  Incredible. 

For my part, I look in poems for what Hopkins describes as “the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.” If in some fashion the roll and rise are not there, what I am reading is not a poem. If it is, then it is a poem. 

But I begin with Hopkins not of that marvelous line, but because that poem affords me the chance to explain my long silence, the long gap between this email and its predecessor. 

I had intended, on leaving Washington in January, to return to sending out a poem a month. Instead, I embarked on a self-indulgent and happy project. Having read many hundreds of mystery novels during my time working on Capitol Hill – my great escape from the pressures of dysfunctional government and from pushing a progressive agenda forward in the face of very strong headwinds – I decided to write one. So rather than write about poems, I spent day after day happily spinning out a story of murder and modest mayhem and the search for the murderer.

Then September came and I returned to teaching at the University of Vermont, to teaching courses in poetry. A wonderful pleasure.

Recently in my introductory poetry course we turned to Emily Dickinson, and I could feel some of my students thinking – without their articulating it – ‘Oh, some of these poems are so depressing.  She confronts such despair. I’m not sure I like these poems.”

As it happens, just last week a friend told me of a visit to the doctor – a most enlightened doctor, I think – who suggested an occasional evening beer as a way to modestly alleviate anxiety.  Almost without thinking, I cited A. E. Housman: 

“For malt does more than Milton can/
To justify God's ways to man.”  

(Turns out, the first word was wrong. Oh well. My friend had never read Housman, so I looked up the poem. 

I was wonderfully surprised by how the poem with the malt/Milton line directly addressed what I feared some of my students might be thinking about the poet they were reading. I read Housman’s poem again, and immediately sent it to my friend, and gave copies to three of my colleagues. What a wonderful poem, I thought. 

And so I send it to you. It is fairly long, but I think you will love it as much as I do. At least, I hope so. And it is not a heavy slog: it makes for (dare I say it) delightful reading. 

Terence, This is Stupid Stuff

A.E. HOUSMAN (1896)

"Terence, this is stupid stuff!
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache!
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head...
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow!
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad!
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad!"

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.



Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
--I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.



A.E. Housman taught classics at University College, London. His first and finest book, A Shropshire Lad, was published in 1896.  Scholars look back on it as a fine collection, an example of a dying tradition – modernism in painting, music and poetry was about to be born into the world – by a minor poet who was even in his own time out of synch with the rich vocabulary and syntax of the fin-de-siècle poets who were his contemporaries.

Hardly. Housman wrote in a throwback style – rhyme, meter, restraint – in a time when poetic language, rhythm and form were about to be revolutionized, but that does not mean, to me at least, that he can’t speak powerfully, or that in his lines I cannot find “the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.” Of all the poems I know, I probably recite to myself his “Loveliest of trees the cherry now”, more than any other as I move through my life and my world,. It speaks to me, deeply, even though it is rhymed and not elliptical, even though it tells more than it shows, even though it eschews ambiguity and symbolism and all that other good modern stuff. To my mind, Housman is either a great minor poet, or a wonderful but lesser major poet. Why the modest reservations? I think his canvas may not be broad enough, and his palette may be too modest. What he does, he does remarkably well, but then: does he do enough?

I promised you would like “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff” and you have probably found that to be the case. If not, bear with me.

Perhaps the hardest part of the poem is getting oriented as we read the opening, and that is because we are accustomed to most non-narrative, non-dramatic, non-epic poems being about the poet himself. But this first stanza, which we notice is in quotation marks, is not Housman speaking, but some fellows in a bar, and they are not speaking to Alfred Edward Housman but to some guy named ‘Terence.’

"Terence, this is stupid stuff!
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.

The fellows are in a pub (they note how he drinks his beer: fast, and lots). A sunnier or less pompous beginning of a poem is hard to imagine. You write stupid stuff, and yet you seem like one of the guys, eating your supper pretty damn fast and guzzling your beer.

The “stupid stuff” is, as we learn, his poems. “Oh, good Lord, the verse you make/ It gives a chap the belly-ache!” And then the chaps mimic his poems, not taking at all seriously his efforts to address mortality and the long forgetfulness that is death. (Terence is not drinking with literary critics, professors, or any sort of intellectuals. These are regular blokes, drinking their beer. So they read his verses as drunken blokes might.)

The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head...

Such is the stuff of poems, to his companions in the pub, and they feel afflicted at having to listen to the kind of verses Terence writes. A good friend, they insist, would sing “a tune to dance to” rather than a poem about dying cows that will “rhyme/your friends to death before their time.”

Should I tell you the poem is in couplets, the predominant verse form of the eighteenth century (and not used too often after) and that using tetrameter --  four feet, eight syllables to the line – makes it sound a whole lot less serious than the pentameter used by such ‘greats’ as Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth? I guess I just told you, so let’s proceed to the second stanza, in which Terence responds.

The fun, and the lightness of the lines, continues. Terence reminds them that there is certainly a quicker route to dancing and happy feelings than poems. If you want to prance around, there’s always beer….

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?

Hops, of course, are along with malt a key ingredient of beer.  And Burton upon Trent? Figuring what that refers to is, in our day, what Wikipedia can be good for: “Burton upon Trent, also known as Burton-on-Trent or simply Burton, is a town straddling the River Trent in the east of Staffordshire, England. Burton is best known for its brewing heritage, having been home to over a dozen breweries in its heyday.” 

Lots of noblemen brew better stuff, beer and ale, than poets (like Terence in this poem, or the great poet John Milton) ‘brew’ in writing their verses.  The reference to Milton comes in the next couplet, with its allusion to the opening of Paradise Lost, where Milton asserts that his aim is “to justify the ways of God to men.” As I wrote earlier, I love this line and quote it often – including the other day.

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

Nobody has ever, ever, come up with a more trenchant and telling attack on poetry than these two lines. ‘Having trouble?  Have a drink. Poems are no great help. (As Auden says, with irony I  believe, “for poetry makes nothing happen.”)’   

Of course, as the poem proceeds, Housman will undermine these lines, argue against them, and build a stirring defense of poems.

But for now: “Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink.” (The claim destabilizes itself immediately instead it ends not with a period but a comma, and what follows is: “For fellows whom it hurts to think.” Only imbeciles, as he so decorously manages to say, really think alcohol is the way to go.)

Ah, Terence says, look into your tankard and you can “see the world as the world’s not.” Still, drinking is pretty as it happens, only: that happening is brief in compass. Time passes and drink wears off.

“And faith ‘tis pleasant till ‘tis past/ The mischief is it will not last.”

Hilarious, the example he gives of the pleasures of drink, its mindlessness, and the terrible psychological hangover after. 

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:

Losing his tie in a drunken stupor. The surge of exhilaration of being drunk, and pushing one’s doubts at bay in an alcohol-based surge of energy and good feelings. I love that lying down in the muck (“lovely muck”) and not caring, and the unstated shock of waking up in a muddy ditch.

But of course the alcohol-induced haze is just that, a haze. “Heigho, the tale was all a lie.” And then, amid all the bonhomie – “Ale man, ale…faith, ‘tis pleasant…pints and quarts of Ludlow beer…sterling lad…happy…heigho” come a line as deep and trenchant as any line a poet has ever written, bringing us readers to what I might call reality or truth: “The world, it was the old world yet.”  We do not, cannot, escape reality. Well, that’s me talking in a cumbersome and pretentiously assertive way, not Housman.  How much better he says it: “The world, it was the old world yet.”

But the bonhomie, or at least the lightness of the octosyllabic lines and the unstilted diction reasserts itself, banging home the truth but in the lightest of fashions:

The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,

Of course his clothes are wet.  He has, after all, lain down in the muck. 

And then, the great flaw in drink: it doesn’t last, and one has to get drunk all over again. “And nothing now remained to do/ But begin the game anew.”

The third stanza, obviously draws a conclusion since its first word is “therefore.” It begins with what happy drunks cannot acknowledge (nor can Terence’s drinking companions, who we remember are fellows “whom it hurts to think”). Life is often tough – a lot more often tough than fortunate – and we end up in suffering, and ultimately in decline and death. The sprightly octosyllabic verse hides the truth at the same time as the poet reveals it:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure.

This being the case, wisdom lies in preparation for the trouble that is sure to come, “I'd face it as a wise man would,/ And train for ill and not for good.”

Therefore…so… it may make more sense to write poems about trouble than to sing songs of cheer, or “pipe a tune to dance to.” Maybe poems are not beer, but they may have more enduring value. (That sentence sounds pompous; notice that Housman doesn’t sound at all pompous in his octosyllabic tetrameter lines.)

'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

That ‘stem that scored the hand?” The toughest line in this rather transparent poem, for me. I think it means the pen he writes with (what the poet William Blake called “a rural pen”), and that the writing comes from/with laceration and not delight. His verse is “wrung” from him, and it emanates from a place no one wants to vacation in, a “weary land.” Its taste is “sour,” but that taste is suitable for “the embittered hour.”  Not beer, no, but a tonic nonetheless that likely will “do good to heart and head” when the reader of his poems is in as dire straits as those in which Terence sometimes discovers himself, “when your soul is in my soul’s stead.” He will be our friend, and accompany us not to the pub or bar – we can find many putative friends there on our own – but on a “dark and cloudy day.”

The poem could end there. But it doesn’t. If the poem begins in drama – the fellows in the pub making fun of the poet who writes verse they see as, “The cow, the old cow, she is dead” — it ends in narrative.  For the final stanza tells a story about the mythic king based on an actual ruler of a region that today is in Turkey. 

In the first eight lines of the final section, the speaker provides the setting. Living in a treacherous land (not unanalagous to ours, we who live an existence where “trouble’s sure”) the king knows there is a danger that he will be poisoned.  In an apocryphal story that many kids hear when young, he takes small and then increasingly larger portions of poison, so that his body will grow accustomed the toxins and be able to withstand them without damage. (Kind of like vaccination, in our age.)  Having “sampled all her killing store,” the eastern potentate can sit easy on his throne.

And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.

Conspiring nobles or enemies can toast him with poisonous wine and he, “seasoned,” can quaff the liquid that would otherwise kill him. What wonderful lines – you can quite clearly see the enemies of the king respond, I think – follow:

They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:

Ah, the king knew. If you work to accommodate yourself to the dangers which face you, if you are inoculated, you will not die of what would otherwise destroy you. His putative poisoners, not the king, die from consuming poisoned meat and drink. (There is an echo here: Terence may outlive the happy unthinking fellows he drinks with in the opening.)

The final couplet shows Housman’s skill. It shocks me every time I read it. Not what it says, but how Housman has written it. The first of those two lines is iambic, almost too conventional in its meter: “I hear [stress] the tale [stress] that I [stress] heard told [stress].” What follows is that mouthful, “Mithridates,” also iambic but amazingly alien in this poem of “lads” and “cows” and “ale” and “my things were wet.”

And then. Well, a rarity in English verse is the spondee, two stressed syllables in one metrical foot. (A foot, a unit of the meter or rhythm, is almost always composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.) What do we have here? Three stressed syllables in a row.

“he [stress] died [stress] old [stress.]”   

Way beyond a spondee. You could look it up. (I did.) In Greek and Roman verse, where feet were comprised of long and short syllables, rather than stressed ones, there was something known as molossus. (I told you, I had to look it up.)  Three long syllables in a row. In English? Well, three stressed syllables in a row just doesn’t happen.

Except Housman does just that at the conclusion of “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff.” “Mithridates, he died old.”  Poems can help us through “the dark and cloudy day” that is always coming, can sustain us “in a weary land,” can “do good to heart and head. Death will come, but we can, like Mithridates, grow old, forewarned and forearmed by what we read.” Poetry can save your life. “Mithridates, he died old.”

Amazing, that Housman can start with beer and end with one of the deepest reasons to read poems. All in octosyllabic light verse. Ending with that – what was it called? –  molossus. 

What a poem. To me, a tour de force. And wise, as well.

-----------
(About getting these email seminars from Gutman:

If you know a friend who wants to subscribe, just have them address  an email to  LISTSERV@list.uvm.edu and in the body of the email write:  sub poetry Your Name  then send the email, and you will be added to the list.  eg: sub  poetry Mary Miller  [Make sure there is nothing else in the body of the msg – no signature, for instance])

Huck Gutman (pictured maybe 20 years ago)