1 00:00:07,200 --> 00:00:11,909 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Welcome. Um, find a seat. Uh, welcome to the new centre. 2 00:00:11,910 --> 00:00:18,420 I think for many of us, it's our first time here and first time in this room. 3 00:00:19,290 --> 00:00:27,120 Um, I'm Alicia Stallings, and I am going to be speaking today about people, poems, portraits in verse. 4 00:00:30,300 --> 00:00:39,360 John Singer. Sergeant is famously supposed to defined a portrait as a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth. 5 00:00:41,310 --> 00:00:44,580 People differ ever so slightly from their portraits. 6 00:00:45,570 --> 00:00:55,670 Um, but portraits are. If memorable also by their nature, in perfect and with a tendency to quirkiness and eccentricity. 7 00:00:55,670 --> 00:00:58,760 Lots of seats in the front. Come have a seat. 8 00:01:00,560 --> 00:01:12,290 There is a category of lyric poem that has long interested and delighted me, and yet which lacks a ready term, I will call them portrait poems. 9 00:01:13,190 --> 00:01:23,450 My interest, at least this evening, is not in portraits of imaginary people or people whom the poet has met only in the imagination, 10 00:01:23,450 --> 00:01:33,320 for instance, a character from history. I'm interested in portraits that are drawn from life, and largely not so much in self-portraits, 11 00:01:33,650 --> 00:01:38,920 particularly that kind of trendy contemporary category of poems. 12 00:01:38,930 --> 00:01:44,210 Self-Portrait as a bicycle. Self-Portrait as a USB drive. 13 00:01:44,480 --> 00:01:50,090 Self-Portrait as an Energy drink. Um, so I'm interested in portraits. 14 00:01:50,330 --> 00:01:53,960 They are almost always portraits of human beings. 15 00:01:54,260 --> 00:01:58,900 Um, but there are also, I think we consider our pets people. 16 00:01:58,910 --> 00:02:02,360 They might not be human, but they are certainly persons. 17 00:02:02,870 --> 00:02:09,379 Um, the portrait poem. I think lyric poetry has kind of two opposing strands. 18 00:02:09,380 --> 00:02:14,840 And at the universalising of the particular and the particular rising of the universal. 19 00:02:15,050 --> 00:02:25,100 So tonight I'm going to concern myself with the latter. The portrait poem is often an elegy or elegiac in nature. 20 00:02:25,100 --> 00:02:35,060 Which makes sense. Perhaps it is only when we have lost someone that we appreciate all the little things that add up to making them themselves. 21 00:02:35,540 --> 00:02:39,950 But it is important to note that not all elegies are portraits. 22 00:02:40,670 --> 00:02:42,400 Um, from Milton's Lycidas. 23 00:02:42,410 --> 00:02:51,290 We may grasp the hugeness of his loss, but we will get to know almost nothing about Edward King except that he is a drowned scholar. 24 00:02:52,430 --> 00:03:01,630 The particular arising is often not just a matter of detail and observation, um, but in the selection of form for the poet. 25 00:03:01,640 --> 00:03:07,610 Each of the poems I'm going to look at differ slightly in its form and in its strategy. 26 00:03:07,910 --> 00:03:16,070 And there is a sense that a poet, the poet, has constructed a vessel, um, of some kind to suit the personality of the person so depicted. 27 00:03:16,520 --> 00:03:21,290 Um, so what these poems do share is a kind of quirkiness. 28 00:03:23,750 --> 00:03:27,290 Um, the first point we're going to look at, um, is Matthew Pryor. 29 00:03:27,530 --> 00:03:35,420 Uh, he was a poet and diplomat who rose from humble beginnings to become an important statesman and popular satirist satirist. 30 00:03:35,450 --> 00:03:44,720 His dates put him between John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and his reputation has, I think, kind of fallen between the cracks of those eminent figures. 31 00:03:45,110 --> 00:03:45,950 Well, you make peace. 32 00:03:45,950 --> 00:03:56,690 Thackeray, though, said of his work that, um, his poems are among the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems. 33 00:03:56,990 --> 00:04:06,290 The Poetry Foundation website has only a few short squibs, so he is the author of poems such as On a Fart, let in the House of Commons. 34 00:04:08,200 --> 00:04:13,570 Uh, Pryor also has one of the best, uh, poetry career origin stories. 35 00:04:13,900 --> 00:04:19,060 Um, so he was the son of a joiner, a carpenter who died when he was quite small. 36 00:04:19,420 --> 00:04:26,140 Um, and he and his mother moved to, um, in with his uncle, who ran a wine tavern in London. 37 00:04:26,350 --> 00:04:31,300 Um, he went to school for a little bit, but they ran out of money, so he ended up working in the tavern. 38 00:04:31,600 --> 00:04:33,790 Um, and at some point, he's ten years old. 39 00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:42,850 He's behind the bar, um, with a book and an aristocrat comes in and notices this young man behind the bar with the book and says, 40 00:04:42,850 --> 00:04:48,400 you know, what are you reading? He picks up this book and it happens to be Horace in Latin. 41 00:04:49,240 --> 00:04:52,270 Um, how said Lord Dorset, do you understand Latin? 42 00:04:52,300 --> 00:04:55,810 He replied a little upon saying, which the noble Lord tried. 43 00:04:55,810 --> 00:05:02,860 If he could construe a place or two. And finding he did, Lord Dorset turned to one of the odes, and bit him, put it into English, 44 00:05:03,190 --> 00:05:08,019 which Matt did in English metre, and brought it up to the company before they broke up. 45 00:05:08,020 --> 00:05:11,350 The company was so well pleased with the performance. They gave him some money. 46 00:05:11,530 --> 00:05:17,770 They would go into the tavern and give him Horace odes and bits of Covid to translate into English poems. 47 00:05:17,950 --> 00:05:24,930 The upshot is, is that the little Lord pays for his schooling at Westminster, and he then gets a scholarship to Cambridge. 48 00:05:24,940 --> 00:05:31,000 So that's a kind of delightful origin story and a reason to always be seen reading your Horace. 49 00:05:32,660 --> 00:05:36,500 Um, the poem that I'm going to be talking about is Jenney the Just. 50 00:05:36,860 --> 00:05:38,190 Uh, it is a poem. 51 00:05:38,210 --> 00:05:47,270 I am on the record, um, in the Covid lockdown period, on some radio show saying that I was obsessed with this poem, and I read this poem. 52 00:05:47,270 --> 00:05:52,790 I don't remember how I came upon this poem, but it is a poem that I do love. 53 00:05:53,060 --> 00:05:58,460 Interestingly, though, it was not actually published until 1907. 54 00:05:58,850 --> 00:06:03,200 Um, for some reason it was uncollected, even though Pope is supposed to have admired it. 55 00:06:03,440 --> 00:06:07,490 So this book, which is upstairs in the library, is a first edition. 56 00:06:08,180 --> 00:06:16,040 Jenny, the just so, um, Jenny the Just is an elegy for Prior's housekeeper, who was also his mistress. 57 00:06:16,040 --> 00:06:21,829 Prior never married. Jane Ainsley, a widow from Flanders, also sometimes called Flanders. 58 00:06:21,830 --> 00:06:27,830 Jane. Um, it's a long poem. I won't read all of it, but I will read some of my favourite bits. 59 00:06:28,160 --> 00:06:32,750 Um, again, if you might consider that prior is from humble beginnings himself. 60 00:06:33,050 --> 00:06:39,410 Um, so he can kind of see this, uh, person, this working person, maybe with clear eyes. 61 00:06:40,480 --> 00:06:48,820 Jenney, the just released from the noise of the butcher and baker, who my old friends be thanked did seldom forsake her. 62 00:06:48,820 --> 00:06:51,190 And from the soft duns of my landlord, 63 00:06:51,190 --> 00:06:59,620 the Quaker duns are cries for money from chiding the footmen and watching the lasses from Nell that burned milk, and Tom that broke glasses, 64 00:06:59,620 --> 00:07:04,179 sad mischiefs through which a good housekeeper passes from some real care, 65 00:07:04,180 --> 00:07:09,400 but more fancied vexation from a life party coloured half reason, half passion. 66 00:07:09,640 --> 00:07:12,790 Here lies, after all, the best wench in the nation. 67 00:07:14,050 --> 00:07:22,210 From the rind to the po. From the Thames to the Rhone. Joanna or Janet and Jenny or Jones was all one to her by what name she was known. 68 00:07:22,930 --> 00:07:27,669 And we have the sense also that she is an immigrant. Her English is not perfect for the idiom of words. 69 00:07:27,670 --> 00:07:31,060 Very little she heated, provided the matter. She drove at, succeeded. 70 00:07:31,210 --> 00:07:37,600 She took and gave languages just as she needed. So for kitchen and market, for bargain and sale. 71 00:07:37,750 --> 00:07:41,200 She paid English or Dutch or French down on the nail. 72 00:07:41,590 --> 00:07:51,070 But in telling a story, she sometimes did fail, then begging excuse as she happened to stammer with respect to her betters, but none to her grammar. 73 00:07:51,490 --> 00:07:56,469 Her blush helped her out and her jargon became her her habit and main. 74 00:07:56,470 --> 00:08:01,540 She and dear endeavoured to frame to the different goo of the place where she came. 75 00:08:01,750 --> 00:08:08,739 Her outside still changed, but her inside the shame the same at The Hague, in her slippers and hair. 76 00:08:08,740 --> 00:08:12,790 As the moat is at Paris, or far below, fine as a goddess, 77 00:08:13,060 --> 00:08:19,900 and at censuring London in smock sleeves and bodice, she ordered affairs that few people could tell. 78 00:08:19,900 --> 00:08:25,959 And what part about her that mixture to dwell of frow or mistress or mademoiselle. 79 00:08:25,960 --> 00:08:30,370 So we have the sense of her different personalities, maybe in different languages, 80 00:08:31,030 --> 00:08:35,290 but if good household features her person was made, nor by faction cried up, 81 00:08:35,290 --> 00:08:42,459 nor of censure afraid, and her beauty was rather for use than parade, her blood so well mixed, 82 00:08:42,460 --> 00:08:46,570 and flesh so well pasted, that though her youth faded, her comeliness lasted. 83 00:08:46,780 --> 00:08:50,110 And the blue was wore off. But the plum was well tasted. 84 00:08:50,920 --> 00:08:57,160 With a just of virtue. Her soul was in Jude. Not affectively pious nor secretly lewd. 85 00:08:57,310 --> 00:09:00,490 She cut even between the coquette and the prude. 86 00:09:01,330 --> 00:09:04,510 Her will with her duty so equally stood that seldom opposed. 87 00:09:04,660 --> 00:09:09,010 She was commonly good, and did pretty well doing just what she would. 88 00:09:09,520 --> 00:09:14,440 Declining all power, she found means to persuade was then most regarded. 89 00:09:14,440 --> 00:09:21,669 When most she obeyed the mistress in truth, when she seemed but the maid such care of her own proper actions. 90 00:09:21,670 --> 00:09:24,819 She took that on other folks live. She had no time to look. 91 00:09:24,820 --> 00:09:31,180 So censure and praise were struck out of her book, her thought still confined to its own little sphere. 92 00:09:31,300 --> 00:09:41,170 She minded not who did excel or did her just as the matter related to her then two when her private tribunal was reared, her mercy, 93 00:09:41,170 --> 00:09:49,569 so mixed with her judgement appeared that her foes were condemned and her friends always cleared some parts of the Bible by heart. 94 00:09:49,570 --> 00:09:57,690 She recited, and much in historical chapters, delighted, but in points about faith, she was sometimes short sighted, so notions and modes. 95 00:09:57,690 --> 00:10:05,950 She referred to the schools and in matter of conscience adhere to two rules to advise with no bigots and jest with no fools. 96 00:10:06,790 --> 00:10:14,320 So I think you get the sense of what a delightfully likeable, um, person this is, and how wonderful the observations are. 97 00:10:14,560 --> 00:10:19,840 Um, a lot of the rest of the poem goes on to, um, talk about, um, her death and so forth. 98 00:10:20,140 --> 00:10:23,080 Um, but I'm kind of interested in the description from life. 99 00:10:24,430 --> 00:10:33,040 If we consider the poetry of Dryden or Pope, we might expect heroic couplets, rhymed iambic pentameter, 100 00:10:33,490 --> 00:10:38,830 but prior represents, with his verse to society, a different strand of English verse. 101 00:10:39,190 --> 00:10:45,430 His dancy metres are often described in the literature as and a pair stick or maybe and a stick. 102 00:10:45,880 --> 00:10:51,700 Um, but to me these are strongly anti bracket to transmitters that they are in terse. 103 00:10:51,700 --> 00:11:00,309 It's results almost in a blues like form, um, where the a couplet sets up a third rhyme. 104 00:11:00,310 --> 00:11:05,530 And in that third line there's often a push or a twist or a conclusion. 105 00:11:05,800 --> 00:11:11,200 Um, this also strikes me as something about a way of describing Ginny so that they're often, 106 00:11:11,410 --> 00:11:18,040 um, she's not this one extreme or this other extreme, but some perfect third right thing. 107 00:11:18,050 --> 00:11:25,240 So we have these almost all of the lines that sort of seared themselves into my memory from the get go are in the third line, 108 00:11:25,240 --> 00:11:33,760 and they're sort of set up by these rhymes. And it's centring London in smock sleeves and bodice or I love a frow or mistress or Mademoiselle. 109 00:11:33,970 --> 00:11:38,980 And her beauty was rather for use them portrayed. The blue was wear off, but the plum was well tasted. 110 00:11:39,430 --> 00:11:44,680 So we have this sense of wit, humour, imperfection and humanity. 111 00:11:45,250 --> 00:11:56,770 Interestingly, um, she was probably still alive when this poem was composed and, um, that ends up being a kind of thread in some of these elegies. 112 00:11:56,770 --> 00:12:00,680 Several of the elegies that I'm going to talk about were composed while the person was alive. 113 00:12:00,700 --> 00:12:04,630 So it's a kind of portrait that imagines perhaps the person's death. 114 00:12:04,960 --> 00:12:11,020 Um, I obviously don't have an image of Jenney the just. But this is a favourite painting of mine in the Ashmolean. 115 00:12:11,230 --> 00:12:17,410 Um, it's not quite the right dates, and she's in some finery that suggests that she is a lady and not a housekeeper. 116 00:12:17,650 --> 00:12:24,879 But there's something about her candid gaze and her kind of very likeable way that she looks out at us from the canvas. 117 00:12:24,880 --> 00:12:29,530 That made me think that this would suit as an image for Jenny the Just. 118 00:12:33,280 --> 00:12:38,190 Like prior. Cooper was educated at Westminster School. 119 00:12:38,460 --> 00:12:42,550 You get the sense that, um, Pryor probably enjoyed being at school. 120 00:12:42,570 --> 00:12:46,860 That's the sense that I get. Cooper did not enjoy being at school. 121 00:12:47,100 --> 00:12:51,210 He was mercilessly bullied to the point that he had to be removed. 122 00:12:51,600 --> 00:13:01,770 Um, and ever afterwards identified or empathised with the hunted and the oppressed, whether African slave or a hunted animal. 123 00:13:02,100 --> 00:13:07,520 Um, he was beset with mental health crises, um, and suicidal thoughts. 124 00:13:07,530 --> 00:13:13,110 Um, periodically in his life, he was periodically convinced of his own damnation. 125 00:13:13,590 --> 00:13:23,120 Um, portraits are about the peculiar and the exceptional, and I have made an exception here, enlarging upon people to include hares. 126 00:13:23,790 --> 00:13:27,179 Uh, this is, uh, a favourite poem, epitaph on a Hare. 127 00:13:27,180 --> 00:13:30,930 And I'll kind of explain why I think that this does fit as a portrait. 128 00:13:32,870 --> 00:13:37,640 Here lies whom hounds did ne'er pursue. Nor swifter greyhounds follow. 129 00:13:38,060 --> 00:13:42,080 Whose foot ne'er tainted morning do nor ear heard. 130 00:13:42,110 --> 00:13:48,380 Huntsman hollow. Huntsman's hollow old tiny surly liest of his kind. 131 00:13:48,860 --> 00:13:51,919 Who nursed with tender care and two domestic bounds. 132 00:13:51,920 --> 00:13:55,640 Confined was still a wild jack hare. 133 00:13:56,570 --> 00:14:00,770 Though duly from my hand he took his pittance every night. 134 00:14:01,280 --> 00:14:06,230 He did it with a jealous look, and when he would, could, would bite. 135 00:14:07,130 --> 00:14:18,080 His diet was of wheaten bread and milk and oats and straw, thistles or lettuces instead, with sand to scour his mar on twigs of hawthorn, 136 00:14:18,080 --> 00:14:26,000 he regaled on Pippins russet peel, and when his juicy salads failed, sliced carrot pleased him well. 137 00:14:26,750 --> 00:14:35,480 A turkey carpet was his lawn whereon he loved to, bound to skip and gambol like a fan and swing his rump around. 138 00:14:36,350 --> 00:14:39,620 I'm going to open a parentheses here, as we say in Greek. Um. 139 00:14:39,620 --> 00:14:46,040 This is the first description in English of a move that Lagom morphs do, called a binky. 140 00:14:46,610 --> 00:14:49,970 Um, if you have ever had a rabbit, I realise it here is not a rabbit. 141 00:14:50,330 --> 00:14:55,370 Um, and they do this kind of funny little leap and kick their hindquarters in a kind of different direction. 142 00:14:55,640 --> 00:15:01,070 I love this description of the binky. You can actually go on to YouTube and see, um, lots of Binky. 143 00:15:02,150 --> 00:15:06,020 His frisking was at evening hours, but then he lost his fear. 144 00:15:06,230 --> 00:15:14,209 But most before approaching showers or when a storm drew near eight years and five round rolling moons. 145 00:15:14,210 --> 00:15:18,290 He thus saw steal away, dozing out all his idle noons. 146 00:15:18,560 --> 00:15:26,780 And every night at play I kept him for his humour sake, for he would off beguile my heart of thoughts that made it ache. 147 00:15:26,780 --> 00:15:33,710 And forced me to a smile. But now beneath this walnut shade he finds his long last home. 148 00:15:34,070 --> 00:15:38,600 And waits in snug concealment. Laid till gentler puss shall come. 149 00:15:39,110 --> 00:15:45,650 He still more aged, feels the shocks from nature from which no one can save. 150 00:15:45,800 --> 00:15:50,330 And partner. Once of Tiny's box must soon partake his grave. 151 00:15:52,200 --> 00:15:59,070 We know quite a lot about Cooper and his hares, because he published a prose reminiscence when he published the poem, 152 00:15:59,760 --> 00:16:07,200 um, and in it he says in the year 1774, being much indisposed both in mind and body, 153 00:16:07,590 --> 00:16:15,060 incapable of diverting myself either with company or books, and yet in a condition that made such diversion necessary, 154 00:16:15,600 --> 00:16:19,830 I was glad of anything that would engage my attention without fatiguing it. 155 00:16:20,220 --> 00:16:24,750 The children of a neighbour of mine had a lever it given them to to them as a plaything. 156 00:16:24,930 --> 00:16:28,379 It turns out the children aren't really interested in taking care of this lever. 157 00:16:28,380 --> 00:16:33,510 It it's not in great shape. Um, and so at about three months old, their parents give it to Cooper. 158 00:16:33,870 --> 00:16:39,030 Cooper is so thrilled with his this hair that other neighbours start giving him hairs. 159 00:16:40,920 --> 00:16:45,630 And he ends up with three of them. One of them is Puss. Puss is not a cat, but another hair. 160 00:16:46,200 --> 00:16:50,219 Um, so I was willing enough to take the prisoner under my protection. 161 00:16:50,220 --> 00:17:01,140 He says. Um, and he describes the hairs Puss perfectly tamed Bess, a hair of great humour and drollery tiny alone could not be tamed. 162 00:17:02,010 --> 00:17:07,770 I describe these creatures as having each a character of his own, since they were in fact, 163 00:17:07,770 --> 00:17:16,800 and their countenances were so expressive of that character that when I looked on only on the face of either one, I immediately knew which it was. 164 00:17:17,070 --> 00:17:22,080 Um, so I think, at least for Cooper, um, tiny is definitely a person. 165 00:17:22,920 --> 00:17:27,660 Epitaphs on animals are a commonplace of classical literature. 166 00:17:28,080 --> 00:17:37,229 Um, besides lesbian sparrow and Catullus, we have in the Greek Anthology poems on dead pet dogs and horses, cicadas, and even a hare. 167 00:17:37,230 --> 00:17:43,290 Which poem might be an influence here? But none of these gives any sense of personality, and thus portraiture. 168 00:17:43,800 --> 00:17:49,170 Even Byron's epitaph on his dog, boatswain, really gives you no information. 169 00:17:49,170 --> 00:17:53,520 It's a wonderful poem. I'm not saying it's not a wonderful poem. I love that poem gives us no information. 170 00:17:53,520 --> 00:17:57,360 Besides, that boatswain is faithful in a way that humans are not. 171 00:17:59,210 --> 00:18:04,370 Formerly, one of the first things we would note with Cooper Cooper's epitaph is it's him. 172 00:18:04,370 --> 00:18:07,940 Like that would stanzas in quatrains, but also its length. 173 00:18:08,240 --> 00:18:12,480 It is too long to be chiselled on a stone. It starts traditionally enough. 174 00:18:12,500 --> 00:18:15,740 Here lies whom hounded, ne'er pursue or swift or greyhound follow. 175 00:18:15,920 --> 00:18:19,549 Blah blah blah. But the syntax slips away into a new stanza. 176 00:18:19,550 --> 00:18:22,970 Before we get to the subject. Old Tiny's earliest of his kind. 177 00:18:22,970 --> 00:18:26,150 To nurse with tender care and to domestic bounds. 178 00:18:26,150 --> 00:18:35,360 Confined was still a wild jack here. Those two alone would serve as an epitaph, but we get much more information as we keep going on. 179 00:18:35,540 --> 00:18:38,990 So the rest of the poem describes his likes, dislikes, his behaviour, his age. 180 00:18:39,410 --> 00:18:46,550 Hairs, we might note, are traditionally associated with at least temporary madness as well as magic. 181 00:18:46,910 --> 00:18:51,800 But tiny here is salvific of sanity with his beguiling antics. 182 00:18:52,070 --> 00:18:57,800 There is a shadow poem to this that I think gets across how this poem is a portrait as well as elegy. 183 00:18:58,130 --> 00:19:01,460 Um. So Cooper wrote another epitaph on a hare, but in Latin. 184 00:19:01,670 --> 00:19:05,100 And this is for Puss. Um. 185 00:19:05,700 --> 00:19:10,020 Uh, this is utterly traditional and probably short enough to be on a stone. 186 00:19:10,060 --> 00:19:15,300 Um, I couldn't find an English translation of it, so I did a kind of loose one myself with taking a few liberties. 187 00:19:15,660 --> 00:19:22,550 Um, another epitaph or the other epitaph. Here also lies the hare who lived nine full years. 188 00:19:22,560 --> 00:19:26,760 Puss. Stop while you about to pass. 189 00:19:26,760 --> 00:19:34,920 And consider this him. No hunting hound, no bullet of lead, no snare, no heavy rain put underground. 190 00:19:35,280 --> 00:19:38,669 Yet he is dead as I shall be. Two. Um. 191 00:19:38,670 --> 00:19:42,060 This is one of these epitaphs that was written before the creature died. 192 00:19:42,150 --> 00:19:46,800 Puts lived another to to like 11 or 12 has lived like 3 or 4 more years. 193 00:19:47,400 --> 00:19:52,260 Um, uh, but maybe there was this, uh, sort of urge to, um, respond to it. 194 00:19:52,470 --> 00:19:56,100 Portraits have a way of reflecting on the person observing. 195 00:19:56,370 --> 00:20:01,110 An epitaph on a hare is no different in Cooper's spiritual diary. 196 00:20:01,140 --> 00:20:07,410 Um, that's June, July 1795, written in pencil in a translation of the Odyssey. 197 00:20:07,740 --> 00:20:14,910 Um, he writes some kind of strange, distorted, disjointed, um, thoughts, um, about missed opportunities for suicide. 198 00:20:15,420 --> 00:20:22,250 What opportunities had I. Well, there was any hope except a miserable, um, most miserable moment in 73. 199 00:20:22,260 --> 00:20:30,150 So that would have been shortly before he got his hairs. Who can say what is or what is not meant by every possible means? 200 00:20:30,630 --> 00:20:34,170 It is I who have been the hunted hare. And he. 201 00:20:34,170 --> 00:20:38,460 This is capitalised. Perhaps God who turned me out to be hunted has. 202 00:20:39,060 --> 00:20:45,300 And there it breaks off. This is a stained glass window in Norfolk. 203 00:20:45,650 --> 00:20:50,490 Um, and in it we have his dog, Bo. Tiny and Puss. 204 00:20:52,100 --> 00:21:00,579 I would love to go see this in person sometime. Um, I said we largely are going to avoid, um, the, the self-portrait. 205 00:21:00,580 --> 00:21:04,600 But, um, this whole talk is going to be about exceptions. So here's another exception. 206 00:21:05,140 --> 00:21:09,969 Um, you know, when we think of Edward Lear, we associated with nonsense verse. 207 00:21:09,970 --> 00:21:13,960 He was the youngest surviving child of a family of 21 children. 208 00:21:14,620 --> 00:21:19,010 Um, he was basically raised by an older sister. He did not really go to school. 209 00:21:19,030 --> 00:21:22,810 He was brought up, um, uh, he had to make drawings. 210 00:21:22,840 --> 00:21:26,380 Um, and sort of make a living off that from a very young age. 211 00:21:26,800 --> 00:21:31,030 He suffered from epilepsy, a condition he referred to as his demon. 212 00:21:31,480 --> 00:21:35,230 Um, and he suffered also from depression, which he called the morbid. 213 00:21:35,890 --> 00:21:40,480 He spent much of his life travelling in Greece and Italy and the Levant, making landscape painting. 214 00:21:40,780 --> 00:21:47,650 Um, so I will include one self-portrait. Um, this is the poem usually called how Pleasant to Know Mister Lear. 215 00:21:48,190 --> 00:21:53,260 Um, but that might not really be the title. We might say the title is by way of preface. 216 00:21:53,680 --> 00:21:56,860 Um, and it appears at the beginning of one of the nonsense books. 217 00:21:57,190 --> 00:22:01,020 Um, with a bit of prose. Um, it is believed that all, say, 218 00:22:01,030 --> 00:22:06,700 of the youngest readers of these nonsense books will be interested in the two following autobiographical letters by the author, 219 00:22:06,940 --> 00:22:09,250 which have never till now been published. 220 00:22:09,910 --> 00:22:15,790 The first, written nearly a quarter of a century back just before one of his journeys in search of the picturesque, 221 00:22:16,060 --> 00:22:24,910 is a strict recital of date and fact, the second composed some years later and after he had set up his residence at San Remo in Italy, 222 00:22:25,120 --> 00:22:30,219 was written for a young lady of his acquaintance, who had quoted to him the words of a young lady, 223 00:22:30,220 --> 00:22:33,910 not of his acquaintance, which formed the refrain of the verses. 224 00:22:34,150 --> 00:22:35,800 How pleasant to know, Mister Lear. 225 00:22:36,040 --> 00:22:43,210 And you can see that, um, the prose bit is basically when he was born, and he starts, um, he starts doing drawings for cheese. 226 00:22:43,660 --> 00:22:47,590 Um, and, uh, he's an expert on drawing things like parrots. 227 00:22:47,620 --> 00:22:52,720 Although Lear's own favourite bird, the bird he thought it was most beautiful of all birds is the pigeon. 228 00:22:53,950 --> 00:23:02,170 Um, by way of preface. And so you can see that that first bit is in quotation marks, because this is, um, the bit that has been quoted to him. 229 00:23:02,530 --> 00:23:06,280 How pleasant to know Mr. Lear, who has written such volumes of stuff. 230 00:23:06,520 --> 00:23:14,260 Some think him ill tempered and queer, but if you think him pleasant enough, his mind is concrete and fastidious. 231 00:23:14,560 --> 00:23:19,570 His nose is remarkably big. His visage is more or less hideous. 232 00:23:19,960 --> 00:23:25,540 His beard resembles a wig. He has ears and two eyes and ten fingers. 233 00:23:25,720 --> 00:23:31,570 Leastways, if you reckon two thumbs. Long ago he was one of the singers. 234 00:23:32,110 --> 00:23:37,830 But now he is one of the dumbs. He sits in a beautiful parlour with hundreds of books on the wall. 235 00:23:37,840 --> 00:23:41,290 He drinks a great deal of Marsala, but never gets tipsy at all. 236 00:23:41,770 --> 00:23:45,010 He has many men, many friends, laymen and clerical. 237 00:23:45,250 --> 00:23:49,149 Old farce is the name of his cat. I will just add that, um. 238 00:23:49,150 --> 00:23:52,950 Fast is short for I. There was, um, the Greek for brother. 239 00:23:52,990 --> 00:23:56,770 So maybe we should be pronouncing it Fosse. Old Fosse is the name of his cat. 240 00:23:57,250 --> 00:24:04,479 His body is perfectly spherical. He wears a run symbol hat when he walks in waterproof white. 241 00:24:04,480 --> 00:24:08,740 The children run after him. So calling out, he's come out in his nightgown. 242 00:24:08,740 --> 00:24:14,530 That crazy old Englishman. Oh, he weeps by the side of the ocean. 243 00:24:14,740 --> 00:24:21,460 He weeps. On the top of the hill. He purchases pancakes and lotion and chocolate shrimps from the mill. 244 00:24:22,400 --> 00:24:28,340 He reads, but he cannot speak Spanish. He cannot abide ginger beer, or the days of his pilgrimage vanish. 245 00:24:28,520 --> 00:24:36,530 How pleasant to know, Mr. Lear. Um, so this poem, uh, which is basically all biographies of Edward Lear start by quoting this poem. 246 00:24:37,010 --> 00:24:45,020 Um, I think does work as a kind of portrait, and it's a portrait in nonsense verse, um, which I think is a kind of neat trick. 247 00:24:45,740 --> 00:24:53,750 I think that the form of this was possibly, um, suggested by the quotation that was, um, quoted to him. 248 00:24:53,750 --> 00:24:59,740 How pleasant to know Mr. Lear, because, uh, this is that kind of envy bracket, 249 00:24:59,870 --> 00:25:07,790 a big I'm a big and feeble person and fee bracket, um, trimmer that we associate with the Limerick, you know. 250 00:25:08,120 --> 00:25:12,499 Um, there once was a fellow from Perth who was born on the day of his birth, etc. 251 00:25:12,500 --> 00:25:15,680 So how pleasant to know Mr. Lear. Um, exactly. 252 00:25:15,680 --> 00:25:19,880 Plugs into the Lear Limerick form, which Lear is so adept at. 253 00:25:20,360 --> 00:25:24,160 Um, and we get some we get some ideas of of what he might be like. 254 00:25:24,170 --> 00:25:30,440 He is ill tempered and queer to some people, so perhaps he's kind of introverted, but to his friends or to other people, he is pleasant enough. 255 00:25:30,800 --> 00:25:37,490 Uh, maybe like tiny, he is earliest of his kind. I like the observation that his mind is concrete and fastidious. 256 00:25:37,820 --> 00:25:41,809 I'm willing to take him at, uh, at his word on that. 257 00:25:41,810 --> 00:25:47,320 And certainly somebody who is drawing, um, animals in the zoo and drawing, um, 258 00:25:47,330 --> 00:25:53,300 anatomical things for, um, for textbooks and so forth, has a kind of concrete and fastidious mind. 259 00:25:53,510 --> 00:26:02,239 He was very self-conscious about his nose. That comes out again and again, and you get these kind of, um, nonsense verse gestures, 260 00:26:02,240 --> 00:26:08,510 for instance, the kind of silly, pompous rhetoric of he has ears and two eyes and ten fingers. 261 00:26:08,690 --> 00:26:11,720 Leastways, if you reckon two thumbs, which we all do. 262 00:26:12,500 --> 00:26:17,690 Um, then I get, I you get, I think two of the darkest lines in English poetry. 263 00:26:18,050 --> 00:26:24,740 Um, this one I just always find getting long ago he was one of the singers, but now he is one of the dumbs. 264 00:26:24,780 --> 00:26:32,930 Um, I think this is, um. I don't know if we're talking about the morbid or writer's block of some kind, but there's something very dark in that. 265 00:26:33,080 --> 00:26:37,600 We have kind of fun rhymes where you have to pronounce them a certain way to do parlour and Marsala. 266 00:26:37,610 --> 00:26:46,270 I can't do it because I'm American. Um. Uh, then we have a kind of strange stanza where we have, uh, extreme enjambment. 267 00:26:46,310 --> 00:26:50,060 You know, he comes out in waterproof white. I'm not sure that the, uh, is supposed to be there. 268 00:26:50,600 --> 00:26:54,980 It might be when he walks in waterproof white. It's. There's something metrical that happens there, too. 269 00:26:55,190 --> 00:26:59,030 The children run after him. So this must be in San Remo calling out. 270 00:26:59,150 --> 00:27:03,620 He's come out in his night gown. That crazy old Englishman. 271 00:27:03,900 --> 00:27:11,180 Oh, and you know, you wonder if this is some kind of mental health crisis or insomnia, or why he is wandering around in his nightgown. 272 00:27:11,510 --> 00:27:16,940 And then again, you come to this very kind of dark. He weeps by the side of the ocean. 273 00:27:17,210 --> 00:27:25,010 He weeps on the top of the hill. Here, of course, we have a landscape painter, so he might be beside the ocean or on top of a hill. 274 00:27:25,340 --> 00:27:28,940 Um. I also sort of weeping by the side of the ocean. Reminds me of the Odyssey. 275 00:27:29,210 --> 00:27:36,260 But he kind of then undercuts it with that very traditional nonsense gesture, um, of, you know, pancakes and lotion. 276 00:27:36,260 --> 00:27:39,170 You know, he purchases pancakes and lotion and chocolate chips from the mill. 277 00:27:39,500 --> 00:27:44,870 And there's almost as kind of reassuring facts and random details that children would appreciate. 278 00:27:44,870 --> 00:27:48,380 He reads, but he cannot speak Spanish. He cannot abide ginger beer. 279 00:27:48,620 --> 00:27:53,660 Er, the days of his pilgrimage vanish. How pleasant to know, Mr. Lear. 280 00:27:54,110 --> 00:27:58,760 Um, I was saying that I wasn't going to have poems by, you know, that are not from life. 281 00:27:59,070 --> 00:28:04,080 Um, but I will just add that there is a terrific Auden sonnet about Edward Lear. 282 00:28:04,100 --> 00:28:10,640 Obviously, I hadn't met Edward Lear, and this is produced after reading a biography of Edward Lear. 283 00:28:10,880 --> 00:28:18,140 Um, but the ending, I think, both plugs into the morbid and the melancholy and the demons and so forth that, 284 00:28:18,530 --> 00:28:23,570 um, by way of preface, does and takes us somewhere else, this wonderful ending. 285 00:28:23,840 --> 00:28:28,249 Um, guided by tears, he has successfully reached his regret, and that's capitalised. 286 00:28:28,250 --> 00:28:31,700 If it's as if it's a place. How prodigious the welcome was. 287 00:28:31,970 --> 00:28:35,780 Flowers took his hat and bore him off to introduce him to the tongs. 288 00:28:36,140 --> 00:28:43,730 The demons false nose made the table laugh. A cat soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand. 289 00:28:43,940 --> 00:28:47,269 Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs. Um. 290 00:28:47,270 --> 00:28:53,540 Lear was also a composer, had sent um Tennyson's poems to music, and children swarmed to him. 291 00:28:53,540 --> 00:28:59,170 Like settlers, he became a land. Here's for. 292 00:29:00,340 --> 00:29:07,030 In fact, this, um, this one of the touching things about this photograph, which was taken shortly before his death, 293 00:29:07,330 --> 00:29:16,810 is apparently for his hand is crooked that way, because Foss was in the crook of his arm, and it leapt away just before the shutter, as it were. 294 00:29:19,170 --> 00:29:23,160 Um, Gerard Manley Hopkins needs no introduction in Oxford. 295 00:29:23,520 --> 00:29:27,270 I think, um, and we're just, um, maybe half a mile. 296 00:29:27,270 --> 00:29:30,540 A quarter mile less than that, um, from one of his churches. 297 00:29:30,900 --> 00:29:35,410 Um, here again, we're going to go back into elegiac mode. 298 00:29:35,760 --> 00:29:42,870 Um, and we're going to talk about a favourite sonnet, uh, that perhaps I long thought was of an imagined person. 299 00:29:43,230 --> 00:29:50,340 Um, an ideal portrait of a type, as one might see in Edwin Arlington Robinson or Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River anthology. 300 00:29:51,090 --> 00:29:55,680 Um, but Felix Randall is an actual parishioner of Hopkins. 301 00:29:55,980 --> 00:30:04,350 Um, although he was a farrier whose real name was Felix Spencer, um, who died when Hopkins was serving in Liverpool. 302 00:30:04,830 --> 00:30:07,559 Sonnets are very well suited for portraits. 303 00:30:07,560 --> 00:30:16,710 Their very shape says portrait rather than landscape, and they're suited for epitaphs and elegies because they're also kind of tombstone shaped. 304 00:30:17,010 --> 00:30:21,890 So let's consider this poem. Felix Randall, the farrier. 305 00:30:22,250 --> 00:30:25,310 Oh, is he dead? Then my duty all ended. 306 00:30:25,320 --> 00:30:30,890 Who have watched his mould of man. Big boned and hearty, handsome, pining. 307 00:30:31,220 --> 00:30:34,220 Pining till time when reason rambled in it. 308 00:30:34,520 --> 00:30:40,430 And some fatal four disorders. Flesh there all contended sickness broke him. 309 00:30:40,850 --> 00:30:45,049 Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended being anointed. 310 00:30:45,050 --> 00:30:49,280 And all though a heavenly or heart began some months earlier. 311 00:30:49,460 --> 00:30:58,910 Since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom tendered to him, I well, God rest him all road every offended this. 312 00:30:58,910 --> 00:31:02,330 Seeing the sick endears them to us. 313 00:31:02,900 --> 00:31:10,460 Us two it endears my tongue had taught the comfort touch that had quenched thy tears. 314 00:31:10,640 --> 00:31:15,140 Thy tears that touched my heart, child. Felix. Poor Felix Randall. 315 00:31:16,170 --> 00:31:21,420 How far from then forethought of all thy more boisterous years. 316 00:31:21,570 --> 00:31:34,620 When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, didst fettle for the great grey dray horse, his bright and battering sandal. 317 00:31:38,670 --> 00:31:41,760 This was written in 1880. Um. 318 00:31:41,790 --> 00:31:50,790 Uh, we have since discovered it's been discovered that Felix Spencer, um, was a 31 year old blacksmith who died of tuberculosis. 319 00:31:51,300 --> 00:31:55,050 Um, a sonnet? Yes, but an unusual sonnet. 320 00:31:55,620 --> 00:31:58,350 The rhyme scheme is a traditional Italian sonnet. 321 00:31:58,380 --> 00:32:08,010 Although we might make note of how intricate, how finely fettled the falling cadence rhymes are, especially those sandwiched ones. 322 00:32:08,370 --> 00:32:14,670 Handsome. And some began, some culminating in the Christian redemption of ransom. 323 00:32:15,300 --> 00:32:20,490 Somehow they do not come across as light or humorous as in Byron they would be. 324 00:32:20,850 --> 00:32:30,000 They set off a musical falling cadence, um, so that we reinforce the poem's critical rhyme of Randall and sandal. 325 00:32:30,030 --> 00:32:34,919 Obviously, one of the reasons for changing Felix Randall's name, um, just to the. 326 00:32:34,920 --> 00:32:43,650 I think it is evident that this poem is long limbed for a sonnet, and the ear confirms that we are in some kind of hexameter. 327 00:32:44,280 --> 00:32:49,169 The sonnet is like Felix Randall, big boned and hearty. 328 00:32:49,170 --> 00:32:55,590 Handsome. Hexameter is the measure of epic, and Hopkins makes the farrier larger than life, 329 00:32:55,830 --> 00:33:02,250 powerful amidst peers have faced us like as if fashioning armour for a great grey steed like Achilles. 330 00:33:02,310 --> 00:33:06,420 Isn't this the poem kind of escapes its Christian occasion? 331 00:33:06,810 --> 00:33:11,040 Um, although the dearness and the anointing of the sick and the last rites and so on to something. 332 00:33:11,250 --> 00:33:16,410 Homeric sandal is a specific word in varying, apparently for horseshoes. 333 00:33:16,740 --> 00:33:21,000 Um, it's also a dialect word for clog and appropriate to the Lancashire setting. 334 00:33:21,300 --> 00:33:24,360 But metal sandals are also the footwear of gods. 335 00:33:25,330 --> 00:33:26,409 In this portrait. 336 00:33:26,410 --> 00:33:32,980 I think we've had a lot of visuals in the portrait, but this is a portrait where I think we hear something of the voice of Felix Randall. 337 00:33:33,310 --> 00:33:40,060 Hopkins has his own heady, poetic dialect. Um, but there are, to my ears, two registers of English here. 338 00:33:40,390 --> 00:33:44,800 Um, a fairly standard, if elevated, English as if of a sermon. 339 00:33:45,130 --> 00:33:51,700 This seeing the sick endears them to us. Us two it endears with its Latinate chiasmus. 340 00:33:52,060 --> 00:34:01,360 Um, but we also have, um, local Liverpool dialect inflected, um, cadences and phrases all road for all ways. 341 00:34:01,660 --> 00:34:04,330 Um, even the biblical thy and thou. 342 00:34:04,330 --> 00:34:13,990 Although, um Hopkins does use them another poet poems maybe feels particularly vernacular here, as does anointed and uh, random grim. 343 00:34:14,080 --> 00:34:20,200 Uh, forge stopped me for a while, and, um, I had to think about that for a long time. 344 00:34:20,560 --> 00:34:27,340 Um, but there are notes to the poem that suggests that this means disorderly and grimy in dialect, but it works two ways. 345 00:34:27,340 --> 00:34:33,370 I think. Also death is random and grim, and our deaths are forged in random and grim ways. 346 00:34:33,700 --> 00:34:39,819 Um, we have quench, which is wonderful, uh, word for a blacksmith, um, and so on. 347 00:34:39,820 --> 00:34:48,610 So we have a lot of this kind of, um, language that gives us maybe, um, a sense of how Felix Randall might have spoken. 348 00:34:48,940 --> 00:34:59,590 And we also have something from 1881, um, where Hopkins talks about the importance of poems being about real people and real occasions. 349 00:35:00,520 --> 00:35:06,220 It seems to me, in general a hazardous thing. He writes a pity to make one's own plots. 350 00:35:06,640 --> 00:35:13,510 One cannot well have the independence, the spontaneous ness of production which one gets from a true story. 351 00:35:14,140 --> 00:35:20,350 Um. He says that besides motive, a plot should have scenes and intrigue explaining. 352 00:35:20,350 --> 00:35:27,550 By scenes I mean localisation with local colour and particular details and keep things. 353 00:35:28,090 --> 00:35:36,370 So I think this poem definitely has that. Um, I obviously don't have a picture of Felix Randall, but I liked this Jericho. 354 00:35:36,640 --> 00:35:43,660 Um, with the strong, muscular, heroic farrier and this great dapple grey dray horse. 355 00:35:45,930 --> 00:35:53,060 Another poem, um, that serves as elegy and that is a poem that has interested me by Gwendolyn Brooks. 356 00:35:53,130 --> 00:35:56,910 Brooks is the right the rights for cousin Right. 357 00:35:57,480 --> 00:36:00,700 Um. Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas. 358 00:36:00,720 --> 00:36:08,190 Um, she was raised on the south Side of Chicago. She was the first African American poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize, 359 00:36:08,580 --> 00:36:17,100 and she received it for a book called Annie Allen, Um, which contains an epic poem within it called the Annie ad. 360 00:36:17,790 --> 00:36:24,060 Um, rather wonderfully. And it's about, uh, a woman's coming of age and into womanhood. 361 00:36:24,510 --> 00:36:28,530 Um, so she was, uh, the US poet laureate. 362 00:36:28,560 --> 00:36:33,450 Um, she was the first African-American inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 363 00:36:33,720 --> 00:36:40,230 She was the child of a janitor who had wanted to be a doctor, and a school teacher who was trained as a classical pianist. 364 00:36:41,510 --> 00:36:44,690 The rights for cousin Vit or Vit. 365 00:36:46,490 --> 00:36:51,440 Carried her on protesting out the door, kicked back the casket stand. 366 00:36:51,680 --> 00:37:00,530 But it can't hold her that stuff. And Saturn aiming to enfold or the lids contrition, nor the bolts before 000. 367 00:37:00,530 --> 00:37:04,339 Too much, too much even now. 368 00:37:04,340 --> 00:37:07,520 Surmise. She rises in the sunshine. 369 00:37:07,790 --> 00:37:12,349 There she goes. Back to the bar she knew. And the repose and love rooms. 370 00:37:12,350 --> 00:37:19,070 And the things in people's eyes. Two vital and two squeaking must emerge. 371 00:37:19,280 --> 00:37:26,059 Even now. She does. The snake hips with a hiss, slaps the bad wine across her Shan tongues. 372 00:37:26,060 --> 00:37:32,330 Talks of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework walks in parks or alleys. 373 00:37:32,510 --> 00:37:38,030 Comes happily on the verge of happiness. Happily hysterics is. 374 00:37:39,820 --> 00:37:45,550 Again, I think I had long kind of thought that this was perhaps an imagined person, but it is not. 375 00:37:46,240 --> 00:37:55,770 Um. Gwendolyn Brooks, in an interview, um, asked about this poem, says, well, that too is based on a real happening visit. 376 00:37:55,780 --> 00:38:06,310 Of course, that wasn't her name was a friend of mine who had that impressive Aeropress ability that seems unconfined about even in death. 377 00:38:06,580 --> 00:38:11,230 Obviously wheat or vite vital vitality is a good choice here. 378 00:38:11,410 --> 00:38:16,570 So again, the portrait is not just in the description though, but in the choice of form itself. 379 00:38:17,050 --> 00:38:20,590 If sonnets are tombstone shapes, they can also be coffins. 380 00:38:21,040 --> 00:38:26,230 Sonnets, after all, are traditionally containers, and one of their themes is containment. 381 00:38:26,560 --> 00:38:32,200 Nuns fret not to their convents narrow rooms, but here is one where the coffin cannot contain. 382 00:38:32,740 --> 00:38:40,330 Um. So the box of the sonnet begins traditionally enough in a largely and stopped envelope rhymed quatrain. 383 00:38:40,330 --> 00:38:46,600 That's that, says Italian sonnet. But the signs are already there that something is kind of going awry. 384 00:38:46,600 --> 00:38:50,800 The grammar is telescoped or lopped off. There's no subject at the beginning. 385 00:38:51,010 --> 00:38:56,140 Carried her under testing out the door, kicked back the casket stand. 386 00:38:56,650 --> 00:39:00,580 Um, uh. And the sonnet seems to close down before reopening. 387 00:39:00,580 --> 00:39:06,760 The Volta starts early. I would say that the turn of the sonnet is in line five, so it's almost upside down. 388 00:39:07,120 --> 00:39:11,799 Oh, oh, too much. And now Cousin Vit is resurrected. 389 00:39:11,800 --> 00:39:16,270 The repose is not eternal repose, but repose in love rooms. 390 00:39:16,600 --> 00:39:25,480 The poem started in the past tense, but shifts to the present even now, and the tidiness of the end stopped lines destabilises toward this, 391 00:39:25,510 --> 00:39:35,230 the end talks of pregnancy walks in parks or alleys until we end up happily on the verge of happiness. 392 00:39:36,130 --> 00:39:41,260 Hysterics is, I think, a verb here in 14 lines. 393 00:39:41,260 --> 00:39:49,570 We've been carried from dead weight to a one word verb as sentence or noun in the infinite present is. 394 00:39:51,090 --> 00:39:53,340 Um, obviously I don't have a picture for Cousin Vit, 395 00:39:53,340 --> 00:39:57,870 but the interviewer was saying that she thought maybe the poem had something to do with Bessie Smith, 396 00:39:57,880 --> 00:40:01,410 so I thought I'd have an image of Bessie Smith for that. 397 00:40:02,440 --> 00:40:08,580 Um. John Crowe Rance. I am. 398 00:40:09,660 --> 00:40:13,030 I had sort of one remove from John Ransome. 399 00:40:13,440 --> 00:40:18,600 Um, I lived for a while in John Crow Ransom's niece's basement. 400 00:40:20,050 --> 00:40:23,970 I spent a year immersed in his poetry and criticism under her roof. 401 00:40:23,980 --> 00:40:31,990 So, um, one of the fugitive poets and Southern agrarian, he was the founding editor of the Kenyon Review, and he's also an Oxford person. 402 00:40:32,470 --> 00:40:38,680 Um, as a Rhodes Scholar. He attended Christ's Church from 1910 to 1913 and read greats. 403 00:40:38,980 --> 00:40:46,180 Um, this has long been a favourite poem and I'm going to try to do a sound file, and I have practised this, but we'll see how it goes. 404 00:40:46,210 --> 00:40:50,140 Okay. This is bells for John Whitesides. 405 00:40:50,140 --> 00:40:58,280 Delta. There was such speed in her little body and such lightness in her footfall. 406 00:40:59,030 --> 00:41:04,520 It is no wonder her brown study astonishes us all. 407 00:41:05,960 --> 00:41:10,220 Her was well rooted in our high window. 408 00:41:10,760 --> 00:41:17,840 We looked among orchard trees and beyond, where she took up arms against her shadow. 409 00:41:18,260 --> 00:41:24,530 Oh, Harry Dunn, to the pond. The lazy geese like a snow cloud. 410 00:41:24,530 --> 00:41:28,010 Dripping their snow on the green grass. 411 00:41:28,310 --> 00:41:31,820 Flicking and stopping. Sleepy and proud. 412 00:41:32,090 --> 00:41:37,399 Who cried in goose. Alas for the tireless hard within. 413 00:41:37,400 --> 00:41:44,090 The little lady with rod that made them rise from their noon apple dreams. 414 00:41:44,390 --> 00:41:48,050 And scuttle goose fashion under the skies. 415 00:41:49,420 --> 00:41:53,650 But now go the bells and we are ready. 416 00:41:54,520 --> 00:41:59,500 In one house we are sternly stopped to say. 417 00:41:59,680 --> 00:42:06,640 We are vexed at her brown studies, lying so primly propped. 418 00:42:07,850 --> 00:42:14,690 I was asked at one point to write about a poem, uh, for an anthology called Poems That Make Grown Women Cry. 419 00:42:15,050 --> 00:42:19,790 And this was my choice. Um, in it I wrote, um, it's folk. 420 00:42:19,790 --> 00:42:29,450 This poem is spoken in the coral we. The poem evokes the girl's speed, her quickness, only to take it away, to turn a body into a study. 421 00:42:29,840 --> 00:42:34,070 Um. Ransom uses two effective strategies. One is understatement. 422 00:42:34,400 --> 00:42:37,580 Um. We are vexed and sternly stopped by death. 423 00:42:37,760 --> 00:42:41,600 And death is merely a brown study that is a thoughtful mood. 424 00:42:41,840 --> 00:42:52,130 The other is that the poem looks away and focuses on the young lady's, um, unladylike tomboy behaviour so that she's kind of loud and wild. 425 00:42:52,140 --> 00:42:56,090 Um, if anything, she's sort of like, uh, Scout from To Kill a mockingbird. 426 00:42:56,480 --> 00:43:00,469 Um, and then there is this fairy tale register of the scuttling geese crying. 427 00:43:00,470 --> 00:43:03,740 Alas! Or, uh, lass in Goose. 428 00:43:03,740 --> 00:43:12,410 And I kind of love the way John Crow Ransome says goose. Um, the poem is in what I would call an English sapphic. 429 00:43:12,770 --> 00:43:19,070 Um, that is to say, it sort of looks like, um, sapphic on the page, even though that's not really what it's doing. 430 00:43:19,340 --> 00:43:23,150 Um, it's in these rhymed quatrains, in nearly every quatrain. 431 00:43:23,180 --> 00:43:30,890 One of the rhymes is slightly off, um, which gives it that kind of unbalanced, um, elegance moving forward. 432 00:43:31,220 --> 00:43:34,820 Um, and then there's a short line in each stanza that pulls you up short. 433 00:43:34,820 --> 00:43:39,760 And these short lines often have a very strong emotional effect. 434 00:43:39,770 --> 00:43:46,820 So we get pulled up by these two limiters. Um, lying so primly propped, all we have is the girl's patronymic. 435 00:43:47,120 --> 00:43:48,950 Part of death's taming of her. 436 00:43:49,550 --> 00:43:58,250 For many years, I assumed that the emotional punch of this poem came from its being about a real girl and addressed to her father. 437 00:43:59,000 --> 00:44:08,240 Then I read something somewhere that suggested that the girl was imaginary, which led me to rethink why the poem was so successful. 438 00:44:08,810 --> 00:44:13,160 The truth here is more complex. The girl is a real girl. 439 00:44:13,730 --> 00:44:22,910 Ransome told his biographer that the poem had been suggested to him while watching a little girl from a neighbour's house at play on a street nearby. 440 00:44:23,240 --> 00:44:28,130 He had imagined what it would be like were she to die. 441 00:44:30,060 --> 00:44:33,480 Anyway, this is very disturbing. Um. 442 00:44:33,780 --> 00:44:37,559 The poem was published in his book from 1924, Chills and Fever. 443 00:44:37,560 --> 00:44:43,660 And perhaps we should see some of its concerns with illness, mortality and death in light of World War One. 444 00:44:43,680 --> 00:44:47,460 He served in France and the Spanish flu as a new critic. 445 00:44:47,880 --> 00:44:55,950 Ransome would be turning in his grave right now. You're not supposed to look at any biographical details, but just look at the poem on the page. 446 00:44:56,280 --> 00:45:00,870 Um, but we can see a little of his poetic concerns in a 1927 letter to Alan Tate. 447 00:45:01,440 --> 00:45:05,370 My object as a poet might be something like the following one. 448 00:45:05,850 --> 00:45:10,550 I want to find the experience that is in the common actuels. 449 00:45:11,540 --> 00:45:16,159 Two. I want this experience to carry by associations. 450 00:45:16,160 --> 00:45:19,819 Of course, the dearest possible values to which we have attached ourselves. 451 00:45:19,820 --> 00:45:29,000 And three. I want to face the disintegration or nullification of these values as calmly and religiously as possible. 452 00:45:29,480 --> 00:45:36,890 So that is some of where this, um, devastating, strange poem comes um, from. 453 00:45:37,100 --> 00:45:40,850 I also like how we've got these sort of tidy ish quatrains. 454 00:45:41,120 --> 00:45:42,859 Um, but the syntax, again, 455 00:45:42,860 --> 00:45:51,860 the life force of the syntax keeps leaking out and across until we finally get that truly and stopped lying so primly propped. 456 00:45:53,880 --> 00:45:57,300 Okay, this next one you'll be glad to know is not an elegy. 457 00:45:57,690 --> 00:46:03,239 Um, Elizabeth Bishop, uh, was consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, 458 00:46:03,240 --> 00:46:06,960 which was the position that became, uh, the poet laureate of the United States. 459 00:46:07,120 --> 00:46:14,760 She won the Pulitzer Prize. She met, uh, Marianne Moore, who was, um, uh, older than she when she was still at Vassar. 460 00:46:15,030 --> 00:46:19,770 Um, there was a lovely talk here by Erica McAlpine about Marian Moore. 461 00:46:19,950 --> 00:46:24,780 Um, and we have this description, um, about Marian Moore from Elizabeth Bishop. 462 00:46:25,080 --> 00:46:31,350 Uh, that she was 47. The large, flat black hat was, as I'd expected it to be. 463 00:46:31,830 --> 00:46:39,270 She wore a blue tweed suit that day, and as she usually did then, a man's polo shirt, as they were called, with a black bow at the neck. 464 00:46:39,480 --> 00:46:42,930 The effect was quaint, but stylish at the same time. 465 00:46:43,320 --> 00:46:46,410 Um, this is Marian Moore. I mean, it's. 466 00:46:46,710 --> 00:46:50,850 She had a look. Um, so we have this invitation. 467 00:46:50,850 --> 00:46:54,749 It was a birthday poem written to Marian Moore in 1937. 468 00:46:54,750 --> 00:46:58,680 So I guess this would have been for her 50th birthday, if I'm doing the math right. 469 00:46:58,710 --> 00:47:00,510 Um, I'm not a really a math person. 470 00:47:00,900 --> 00:47:08,309 Um, and we have this really strange, um, poem of invitation from Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge on this fine morning. 471 00:47:08,310 --> 00:47:12,750 Please come flying in a cloud of fiery, pale chemicals. 472 00:47:12,750 --> 00:47:20,100 Please come flying to the rapid rolling of thousands of blue, small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky. 473 00:47:20,550 --> 00:47:25,710 Um, there are a there is a point where I think it really does become kind of a portrait as well. 474 00:47:26,070 --> 00:47:34,200 Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe trailing a sapphire highlight with a black cape full of butterfly wings, 475 00:47:34,200 --> 00:47:40,860 and Bonomo with heaven knows how many angels, all riding on the broad black brim of your hat. 476 00:47:41,340 --> 00:47:45,980 Please come flying. Bearing a musical inaudible abacus. 477 00:47:45,990 --> 00:47:54,120 I think this is an excellent description of Marian Moore's own technique of using syllables instead of feet in her poetry, 478 00:47:54,390 --> 00:47:57,060 um, where you're counting the abacus of the syllables, 479 00:47:57,270 --> 00:48:06,870 but maybe you're not hearing the feet, a slight, censorious frown and blue ribbons please come flying facts and Christ skyscrapers glint in the tide. 480 00:48:07,140 --> 00:48:10,770 Marianne Moore's poems are full of facts. Please come flying. 481 00:48:11,070 --> 00:48:14,790 Mounting the sky with natural heroism. Above the accidents. 482 00:48:15,060 --> 00:48:20,190 Accident is a big Marian Moore word. Omissions are not accidents, she writes. 483 00:48:20,610 --> 00:48:24,150 Um, there's a soft un invented music again, which sounds like syllabic. 484 00:48:24,420 --> 00:48:31,260 And Marian Moore loved to write about animals for whom the grim museums will behave like courteous male bower birds, 485 00:48:31,530 --> 00:48:40,469 for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait on the steps of the public library, eager to rise and follow through the doors up into the writing rooms. 486 00:48:40,470 --> 00:48:46,200 The reading rooms. Um. So there are all kinds of wonderful things that are very Marian moreish. 487 00:48:46,200 --> 00:48:49,800 I've been thinking about the form of this and what this might be saying. 488 00:48:50,070 --> 00:48:53,070 In one way, the form is the form of an invitation. 489 00:48:53,370 --> 00:49:01,559 Um, we have examples of this again out of the Greek anthology, um, out of Catullus, where a poet issues a poetic invitation. 490 00:49:01,560 --> 00:49:04,920 So you can say that this is part of a kind of genre of poetic invitation. 491 00:49:05,400 --> 00:49:10,110 Um, it doesn't really resemble any of Marianne Moore's poems, particularly. 492 00:49:10,110 --> 00:49:13,740 It does. You can correct me if I'm wrong on that. I'm happy to learn more. 493 00:49:14,040 --> 00:49:20,160 Um, or Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop often construct sort of ad hoc forms for her poems. 494 00:49:20,490 --> 00:49:28,350 Um, but I there's these don't appear to be syllabic. Um, the stanzas are not of any kind of consistent size for the most part. 495 00:49:28,920 --> 00:49:32,459 Um, so it somewhat puzzles me. This poem is in 1937. 496 00:49:32,460 --> 00:49:37,290 If it were 1939. I have this image from, uh, The Wizard of Oz. 497 00:49:37,290 --> 00:49:41,339 Of the witch on the bicycle. Turning to the witch on the broom with her black hat. 498 00:49:41,340 --> 00:49:47,969 Obviously Marion Moore is not an evil witch, but a good witch. Um, but there is something kind of magical and surreal about this. 499 00:49:47,970 --> 00:49:51,810 So I was really stumped about what I thought about the form of this. 500 00:49:51,810 --> 00:49:59,520 And it turns out there is another poem in back of this poem, um, by Pablo Neruda. 501 00:49:59,520 --> 00:50:02,520 It's a very long poem. This is only a section of the poem. 502 00:50:03,000 --> 00:50:13,590 Alberto Rojas, humanist Vienna. Orlando. Um, and we have this idea of a poet writing to another poet, um, and having them flying. 503 00:50:14,130 --> 00:50:19,110 Um, but this is an elegy. This is a poet writing to a mentor who has died. 504 00:50:19,590 --> 00:50:23,819 Um, so I'm not sure what, if anything, this suggests to Marion Moore. 505 00:50:23,820 --> 00:50:31,590 Maybe Marion Moore just thought this was a really cool form or cool idea, and it doesn't have this other dark thing going on behind it. 506 00:50:32,010 --> 00:50:35,640 Um. It's surreal. Um, it's extremely dark poem. 507 00:50:35,970 --> 00:50:39,540 Um, we do know that she thought about Neruda. 508 00:50:39,540 --> 00:50:43,349 She met Neruda, but only after she had written this invitation to Marion Moore. 509 00:50:43,350 --> 00:50:51,270 I assume that she's getting some part of it from this poem she wrote to Marion Moore from Mexico, but in 1942. 510 00:50:51,300 --> 00:50:55,450 So again afterwards. About Pablo Neruda's poetry. 511 00:50:56,100 --> 00:51:01,690 Um, I am reading it with the dictionary, but I'm afraid it is not the kind I nor you like. 512 00:51:02,570 --> 00:51:07,070 It's very loose, surrealistic imagery, etc. I may be misjudging it. 513 00:51:07,100 --> 00:51:12,620 It is so hard to tell about foreign poetry, but I feel I recognise the type only too well. 514 00:51:13,010 --> 00:51:19,819 His chief interest in life. Or did I tell you all this? Besides, communism seems to be shells and he has a beautiful collection, 515 00:51:19,820 --> 00:51:24,290 most of them laid in the top of a large, heavy, specially built coffee table with glass over them. 516 00:51:24,440 --> 00:51:31,280 This is how I happened to try to recite and explain to him what I could remember of your a glass ribbed nest. 517 00:51:31,610 --> 00:51:36,860 So there is some kind of very strange thing going on here, but I could not tell you what it is. 518 00:51:36,860 --> 00:51:40,970 I just present it to you. This is, um, one of these strange connections. 519 00:51:41,270 --> 00:51:45,530 Um, we're rounding the bend here. We have just two more poems that we're looking at. 520 00:51:46,040 --> 00:51:57,020 Um. Awes. Merwin. He is photographed here in his kind of famous, um, ecological, uh, arboretum that he built or grew in Hawaii. 521 00:51:57,410 --> 00:52:04,640 An American poet who had been the tutor to Robert Graves as children, among other things, um, he served as US poet laureate. 522 00:52:05,420 --> 00:52:13,610 Um, his interest is in justice. Wasn't justice, peace, the environment winner of Yale younger uh prize judged by Auden. 523 00:52:14,030 --> 00:52:18,800 Um, I met him, uh, after he had taken over the Yale Younger Prize. 524 00:52:19,010 --> 00:52:24,950 And that first year, he decided that none of the manuscripts were good enough to win, and mine was among them. 525 00:52:27,440 --> 00:52:31,610 Um, he has a wonderful poem called Berryman. I will say something about Merlin's poetry. 526 00:52:31,660 --> 00:52:34,920 Um, it's not generally my cup of tea. 527 00:52:34,940 --> 00:52:37,070 Um, so maybe we were just mutually exclusive. 528 00:52:37,100 --> 00:52:45,320 I mean, he's kind of one of those, um, moon bound stone blood poets, um, where there are sort of not a lot of, 529 00:52:45,890 --> 00:52:51,799 um, kind of interesting things going on in the, in the, on the level of simile and language and so forth. 530 00:52:51,800 --> 00:52:55,640 But there's an exception. This is my favourite poem by his, and it's called Berryman. 531 00:52:56,060 --> 00:53:05,660 Um, I, I will just add that, um, Merwin is also the first sort of cohort of American poets who study creative writing. 532 00:53:05,930 --> 00:53:11,090 Um, so there's a kind of shift that happens, um, as poetry becomes professionalised. 533 00:53:11,450 --> 00:53:16,909 Um, Stephanie Burt, um, the poet and critic reminds us, um, 534 00:53:16,910 --> 00:53:25,130 that the poet John Berryman was teaching at Princeton University when 17 year old Merwin matriculated there in 1944. 535 00:53:25,730 --> 00:53:31,690 Berryman had already published poems in nationally prominent magazines such as The Nation, 536 00:53:31,700 --> 00:53:38,480 but his first book, The Dispossessed, would not appear until 1948, along with the critic R.P. Blackmer. 537 00:53:38,510 --> 00:53:42,830 Berryman in those years launched Princeton's Creative Writing program. 538 00:53:43,280 --> 00:53:47,750 Merwin remembered in 2010 that he discussed literature with Blackmer. 539 00:53:47,870 --> 00:53:52,670 He was the, quote, wisest man and the greatest literary intelligence I ever knew, 540 00:53:52,970 --> 00:53:58,280 but showed his own poems instead to Berryman, who was absolutely ruthless. 541 00:53:58,610 --> 00:54:01,900 It was very good for me. Berryman. 542 00:54:05,040 --> 00:54:14,400 I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war, as we then called the Second World War. 543 00:54:15,270 --> 00:54:18,690 Don't lose your arrogance yet, he said. 544 00:54:18,900 --> 00:54:24,960 You can do that when you're older. Lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity. 545 00:54:25,710 --> 00:54:31,710 Just one time, he suggested changing the usual order of the same words in a line of verse. 546 00:54:31,920 --> 00:54:37,420 Why point out a thing twice? He suggested I pray to the moon. 547 00:54:37,440 --> 00:54:40,980 The muse get down on my knees and pray. 548 00:54:41,160 --> 00:54:44,640 Right there in the corner. And he said he meant it literally. 549 00:54:45,830 --> 00:54:52,220 It was in the days before the beard and the drink, but he was deep in tides of his own, 550 00:54:52,430 --> 00:54:59,420 through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop. 551 00:55:00,450 --> 00:55:05,330 He was far older than the dates allowed for much older than I was. 552 00:55:05,340 --> 00:55:10,470 He was in his 30s. He snapped down his nose with an accent. 553 00:55:10,680 --> 00:55:18,270 I think he had affected in England. As for publishing, he advised me to paper my walls with rejection slips. 554 00:55:18,450 --> 00:55:24,750 His lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry. 555 00:55:25,560 --> 00:55:32,670 He said, the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion. 556 00:55:33,030 --> 00:55:38,160 Passion was genius. And he praised movement and invention. 557 00:55:39,300 --> 00:55:48,840 I had hardly begun to read. I asked, how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all? 558 00:55:48,840 --> 00:55:53,580 And he said, you can't. You can't. You can never be sure. 559 00:55:53,760 --> 00:55:58,650 You die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good. 560 00:55:58,890 --> 00:56:02,520 If you have to be sure, don't write. 561 00:56:05,410 --> 00:56:10,380 I am often prescribing that poem. To young people who come to me. 562 00:56:10,640 --> 00:56:14,650 Um, I've been asked, uh, why I never discuss my own poems. 563 00:56:14,680 --> 00:56:18,570 I mean, these are not craft lectures, and I think it would be frowned upon for me to discuss my own poems. 564 00:56:18,930 --> 00:56:22,530 Um, but I will make an exception, because this is all about exceptions. 565 00:56:23,070 --> 00:56:31,860 Um. Oh, here's a wonderful. You can see that, you know, he's leaning into his thought and the the long, bony fingers. 566 00:56:31,960 --> 00:56:38,250 The wonderful portrait. Um, but I will end with a poem of mine that is a portrait of another poet. 567 00:56:38,280 --> 00:56:40,950 I hope that that will be permitted. Um. 568 00:56:40,950 --> 00:56:48,930 I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, a carpetbagger southern town where one of the movie theatres played gone with the wind on a loop. 569 00:56:50,290 --> 00:56:56,020 Um, the hum of Coca Cola. It is not an obvious place for a poet to evolve. 570 00:56:56,470 --> 00:57:05,560 There were at the time, three real poets associated with the town James Dickey, David Bottoms and Turner Cassidy. 571 00:57:06,370 --> 00:57:13,569 It was Turner I got to know well, a disciple of Ivor Winters, um, and a former marine. 572 00:57:13,570 --> 00:57:20,590 He was a gay southerner from Mississippi who dismissed a certain southern poetry mode. 573 00:57:21,010 --> 00:57:27,190 The ladies with three names, perhaps, who wrote poems with titles like Butterflies at Chickamauga. 574 00:57:28,300 --> 00:57:34,210 Early on, I encountered a poem of hers about the Fox Theatre in Atlanta and the Fox Theatre. 575 00:57:34,480 --> 00:57:43,990 Um is just a wonderful local landmark that, um, is from the 20s and is in that that high Egyptian, um, kind of movie palace style. 576 00:57:43,990 --> 00:57:49,990 It's a very Atlanta place. And he wrote a wonderful poem about it, and I suddenly realised I could write poems set in this place. 577 00:57:50,230 --> 00:57:53,980 So I wrote to him and we corresponded and became friends. 578 00:57:54,250 --> 00:58:00,129 Um, he died in 2009, and I wanted to write something for him. 579 00:58:00,130 --> 00:58:03,670 So this is a kind of elegy. It's also a portrait. 580 00:58:03,940 --> 00:58:07,329 I realised, as I was looking at it that one of the rhymes was wonky. 581 00:58:07,330 --> 00:58:11,740 And I've tried to fix that because I don't think Turner or Ivor Winters would approve. 582 00:58:12,370 --> 00:58:15,520 Um, so these are lines for Turner. Cassidy. 583 00:58:17,620 --> 00:58:25,090 Librarian with military bearing. You've left us poems critics call unsparing. 584 00:58:25,480 --> 00:58:28,540 A wit not merely clever, but hard bitten. 585 00:58:29,350 --> 00:58:33,400 Sometimes I hear you utter over written. 586 00:58:34,120 --> 00:58:39,580 And even at this distance, there's no choice but hear the word in that distinctive voice, 587 00:58:39,880 --> 00:58:45,190 not circumflex, sing, drawl, diphthong to legato, but southern, 588 00:58:45,370 --> 00:58:57,280 brisk, particular, staccato, inimitable voice for never cruel, impatient, only of the pompous fool and vagueness that gesticulate at truth. 589 00:58:57,730 --> 00:59:05,890 Clear and diptych. As a dry vermouth, you taught the courtesy of kindness, bent on shaming, false and floral sentiment. 590 00:59:06,340 --> 00:59:19,300 Death's crude arithmetic only exacts the estimate of flesh and bone for tax you it has taken and yet misconstrued, for it has left us your exactitude. 591 00:59:21,650 --> 00:59:26,450 So this is a poem. It's in couplets, I think. Um, Turner Cassidy would appreciate that. 592 00:59:26,510 --> 00:59:31,819 Um, they are pretty and stopped. There's not any kind of, on the whole crazy and jam charts and so forth. 593 00:59:31,820 --> 00:59:36,080 This is, um, perhaps similar to his style or answering of his style. 594 00:59:36,410 --> 00:59:44,660 Um, you might hear an echo at the end, um, to William Johnson Corey's, um, translation of Callimachus. 595 00:59:44,960 --> 00:59:49,310 They told me, Heraclitus. They told me you were dead. Still are thy pleasant voices. 596 00:59:49,310 --> 00:59:55,100 Thy nightingale gales awake for death. He taketh all away, but them he cannot take. 597 00:59:55,110 --> 00:59:59,030 Um. I think, uh, Turner would appreciate that kind of nod. 598 00:59:59,330 --> 01:00:02,930 Um, so that's my own effort, um, at a portrait. 599 01:00:02,930 --> 01:00:07,280 And since I've had pictures of all the portraits, I hate photographs of me. 600 01:00:07,730 --> 01:00:14,630 Um, but I will end with a drawing of me done by my daughter last year when she was 15. 601 01:00:15,410 --> 01:00:18,460 Um, it is a very, very flattering drawing. 602 01:00:18,470 --> 01:00:23,450 I look about 20 years younger here for some reason. Um, but I won't complain about that. 603 01:00:23,690 --> 01:00:27,020 However, um, I think she's done pretty well with the mouth. 604 01:00:27,650 --> 01:00:28,070 Thank you.