[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Welcome. Um, find a seat. Uh, welcome to the new centre.
I think for many of us, it's our first time here and first time in this room.
Um, I'm Alicia Stallings, and I am going to be speaking today about people, poems, portraits in verse.
John Singer. Sergeant is famously supposed to defined a portrait as a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth.
People differ ever so slightly from their portraits.
Um, but portraits are. If memorable also by their nature, in perfect and with a tendency to quirkiness and eccentricity.
Lots of seats in the front. Come have a seat.
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.
My interest, at least this evening, is not in portraits of imaginary people or people whom the poet has met only in the imagination,
for instance, a character from history. I'm interested in portraits that are drawn from life, and largely not so much in self-portraits,
particularly that kind of trendy contemporary category of poems.
Self-Portrait as a bicycle. Self-Portrait as a USB drive.
Self-Portrait as an Energy drink. Um, so I'm interested in portraits.
They are almost always portraits of human beings.
Um, but there are also, I think we consider our pets people.
They might not be human, but they are certainly persons.
Um, the portrait poem. I think lyric poetry has kind of two opposing strands.
And at the universalising of the particular and the particular rising of the universal.
So tonight I'm going to concern myself with the latter. The portrait poem is often an elegy or elegiac in nature.
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.
But it is important to note that not all elegies are portraits.
Um, from Milton's Lycidas.
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.
The particular arising is often not just a matter of detail and observation, um, but in the selection of form for the poet.
Each of the poems I'm going to look at differ slightly in its form and in its strategy.
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.
Um, so what these poems do share is a kind of quirkiness.
Um, the first point we're going to look at, um, is Matthew Pryor.
Uh, he was a poet and diplomat who rose from humble beginnings to become an important statesman and popular satirist satirist.
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.
Well, you make peace.
Thackeray, though, said of his work that, um, his poems are among the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.
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.
Uh, Pryor also has one of the best, uh, poetry career origin stories.
Um, so he was the son of a joiner, a carpenter who died when he was quite small.
Um, and he and his mother moved to, um, in with his uncle, who ran a wine tavern in London.
Um, he went to school for a little bit, but they ran out of money, so he ended up working in the tavern.
Um, and at some point, he's ten years old.
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,
you know, what are you reading? He picks up this book and it happens to be Horace in Latin.
Um, how said Lord Dorset, do you understand Latin?
He replied a little upon saying, which the noble Lord tried.
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,
which Matt did in English metre, and brought it up to the company before they broke up.
The company was so well pleased with the performance. They gave him some money.
They would go into the tavern and give him Horace odes and bits of Covid to translate into English poems.
The upshot is, is that the little Lord pays for his schooling at Westminster, and he then gets a scholarship to Cambridge.
So that's a kind of delightful origin story and a reason to always be seen reading your Horace.
Um, the poem that I'm going to be talking about is Jenney the Just.
Uh, it is a poem.
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.
I don't remember how I came upon this poem, but it is a poem that I do love.
Interestingly, though, it was not actually published until 1907.
Um, for some reason it was uncollected, even though Pope is supposed to have admired it.
So this book, which is upstairs in the library, is a first edition.
Jenny, the just so, um, Jenny the Just is an elegy for Prior's housekeeper, who was also his mistress.
Prior never married. Jane Ainsley, a widow from Flanders, also sometimes called Flanders.
Jane. Um, it's a long poem. I won't read all of it, but I will read some of my favourite bits.
Um, again, if you might consider that prior is from humble beginnings himself.
Um, so he can kind of see this, uh, person, this working person, maybe with clear eyes.
Jenney, the just released from the noise of the butcher and baker, who my old friends be thanked did seldom forsake her.
And from the soft duns of my landlord,
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,
sad mischiefs through which a good housekeeper passes from some real care,
but more fancied vexation from a life party coloured half reason, half passion.
Here lies, after all, the best wench in the nation.
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.
And we have the sense also that she is an immigrant. Her English is not perfect for the idiom of words.
Very little she heated, provided the matter. She drove at, succeeded.
She took and gave languages just as she needed. So for kitchen and market, for bargain and sale.
She paid English or Dutch or French down on the nail.
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.
Her blush helped her out and her jargon became her her habit and main.
She and dear endeavoured to frame to the different goo of the place where she came.
Her outside still changed, but her inside the shame the same at The Hague, in her slippers and hair.
As the moat is at Paris, or far below, fine as a goddess,
and at censuring London in smock sleeves and bodice, she ordered affairs that few people could tell.
And what part about her that mixture to dwell of frow or mistress or mademoiselle.
So we have the sense of her different personalities, maybe in different languages,
but if good household features her person was made, nor by faction cried up,
nor of censure afraid, and her beauty was rather for use than parade, her blood so well mixed,
and flesh so well pasted, that though her youth faded, her comeliness lasted.
And the blue was wore off. But the plum was well tasted.
With a just of virtue. Her soul was in Jude. Not affectively pious nor secretly lewd.
She cut even between the coquette and the prude.
Her will with her duty so equally stood that seldom opposed.
She was commonly good, and did pretty well doing just what she would.
Declining all power, she found means to persuade was then most regarded.
When most she obeyed the mistress in truth, when she seemed but the maid such care of her own proper actions.
She took that on other folks live. She had no time to look.
So censure and praise were struck out of her book, her thought still confined to its own little sphere.
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,
so mixed with her judgement appeared that her foes were condemned and her friends always cleared some parts of the Bible by heart.
She recited, and much in historical chapters, delighted, but in points about faith, she was sometimes short sighted, so notions and modes.
She referred to the schools and in matter of conscience adhere to two rules to advise with no bigots and jest with no fools.
So I think you get the sense of what a delightfully likeable, um, person this is, and how wonderful the observations are.
Um, a lot of the rest of the poem goes on to, um, talk about, um, her death and so forth.
Um, but I'm kind of interested in the description from life.
If we consider the poetry of Dryden or Pope, we might expect heroic couplets, rhymed iambic pentameter,
but prior represents, with his verse to society, a different strand of English verse.
His dancy metres are often described in the literature as and a pair stick or maybe and a stick.
Um, but to me these are strongly anti bracket to transmitters that they are in terse.
It's results almost in a blues like form, um, where the a couplet sets up a third rhyme.
And in that third line there's often a push or a twist or a conclusion.
Um, this also strikes me as something about a way of describing Ginny so that they're often,
um, she's not this one extreme or this other extreme, but some perfect third right thing.
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,
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.
And her beauty was rather for use them portrayed. The blue was wear off, but the plum was well tasted.
So we have this sense of wit, humour, imperfection and humanity.
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.
Several of the elegies that I'm going to talk about were composed while the person was alive.
So it's a kind of portrait that imagines perhaps the person's death.
Um, I obviously don't have an image of Jenney the just. But this is a favourite painting of mine in the Ashmolean.
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.
But there's something about her candid gaze and her kind of very likeable way that she looks out at us from the canvas.
That made me think that this would suit as an image for Jenny the Just.
Like prior. Cooper was educated at Westminster School.
You get the sense that, um, Pryor probably enjoyed being at school.
That's the sense that I get. Cooper did not enjoy being at school.
He was mercilessly bullied to the point that he had to be removed.
Um, and ever afterwards identified or empathised with the hunted and the oppressed, whether African slave or a hunted animal.
Um, he was beset with mental health crises, um, and suicidal thoughts.
Um, periodically in his life, he was periodically convinced of his own damnation.
Um, portraits are about the peculiar and the exceptional, and I have made an exception here, enlarging upon people to include hares.
Uh, this is, uh, a favourite poem, epitaph on a Hare.
And I'll kind of explain why I think that this does fit as a portrait.
Here lies whom hounds did ne'er pursue. Nor swifter greyhounds follow.
Whose foot ne'er tainted morning do nor ear heard.
Huntsman hollow. Huntsman's hollow old tiny surly liest of his kind.
Who nursed with tender care and two domestic bounds.
Confined was still a wild jack hare.
Though duly from my hand he took his pittance every night.
He did it with a jealous look, and when he would, could, would bite.
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,
he regaled on Pippins russet peel, and when his juicy salads failed, sliced carrot pleased him well.
A turkey carpet was his lawn whereon he loved to, bound to skip and gambol like a fan and swing his rump around.
I'm going to open a parentheses here, as we say in Greek. Um.
This is the first description in English of a move that Lagom morphs do, called a binky.
Um, if you have ever had a rabbit, I realise it here is not a rabbit.
Um, and they do this kind of funny little leap and kick their hindquarters in a kind of different direction.
I love this description of the binky. You can actually go on to YouTube and see, um, lots of Binky.
His frisking was at evening hours, but then he lost his fear.
But most before approaching showers or when a storm drew near eight years and five round rolling moons.
He thus saw steal away, dozing out all his idle noons.
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.
And forced me to a smile. But now beneath this walnut shade he finds his long last home.
And waits in snug concealment. Laid till gentler puss shall come.
He still more aged, feels the shocks from nature from which no one can save.
And partner. Once of Tiny's box must soon partake his grave.
We know quite a lot about Cooper and his hares, because he published a prose reminiscence when he published the poem,
um, and in it he says in the year 1774, being much indisposed both in mind and body,
incapable of diverting myself either with company or books, and yet in a condition that made such diversion necessary,
I was glad of anything that would engage my attention without fatiguing it.
The children of a neighbour of mine had a lever it given them to to them as a plaything.
It turns out the children aren't really interested in taking care of this lever.
It it's not in great shape. Um, and so at about three months old, their parents give it to Cooper.
Cooper is so thrilled with his this hair that other neighbours start giving him hairs.
And he ends up with three of them. One of them is Puss. Puss is not a cat, but another hair.
Um, so I was willing enough to take the prisoner under my protection.
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.
I describe these creatures as having each a character of his own, since they were in fact,
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.
Um, so I think, at least for Cooper, um, tiny is definitely a person.
Epitaphs on animals are a commonplace of classical literature.
Um, besides lesbian sparrow and Catullus, we have in the Greek Anthology poems on dead pet dogs and horses, cicadas, and even a hare.
Which poem might be an influence here? But none of these gives any sense of personality, and thus portraiture.
Even Byron's epitaph on his dog, boatswain, really gives you no information.
It's a wonderful poem. I'm not saying it's not a wonderful poem. I love that poem gives us no information.
Besides, that boatswain is faithful in a way that humans are not.
Formerly, one of the first things we would note with Cooper Cooper's epitaph is it's him.
Like that would stanzas in quatrains, but also its length.
It is too long to be chiselled on a stone. It starts traditionally enough.
Here lies whom hounded, ne'er pursue or swift or greyhound follow.
Blah blah blah. But the syntax slips away into a new stanza.
Before we get to the subject. Old Tiny's earliest of his kind.
To nurse with tender care and to domestic bounds.
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.
So the rest of the poem describes his likes, dislikes, his behaviour, his age.
Hairs, we might note, are traditionally associated with at least temporary madness as well as magic.
But tiny here is salvific of sanity with his beguiling antics.
There is a shadow poem to this that I think gets across how this poem is a portrait as well as elegy.
Um. So Cooper wrote another epitaph on a hare, but in Latin.
And this is for Puss. Um.
Uh, this is utterly traditional and probably short enough to be on a stone.
Um, I couldn't find an English translation of it, so I did a kind of loose one myself with taking a few liberties.
Um, another epitaph or the other epitaph. Here also lies the hare who lived nine full years.
Puss. Stop while you about to pass.
And consider this him. No hunting hound, no bullet of lead, no snare, no heavy rain put underground.
Yet he is dead as I shall be. Two. Um.
This is one of these epitaphs that was written before the creature died.
Puts lived another to to like 11 or 12 has lived like 3 or 4 more years.
Um, uh, but maybe there was this, uh, sort of urge to, um, respond to it.
Portraits have a way of reflecting on the person observing.
An epitaph on a hare is no different in Cooper's spiritual diary.
Um, that's June, July 1795, written in pencil in a translation of the Odyssey.
Um, he writes some kind of strange, distorted, disjointed, um, thoughts, um, about missed opportunities for suicide.
What opportunities had I. Well, there was any hope except a miserable, um, most miserable moment in 73.
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?
It is I who have been the hunted hare. And he.
This is capitalised. Perhaps God who turned me out to be hunted has.
And there it breaks off. This is a stained glass window in Norfolk.
Um, and in it we have his dog, Bo. Tiny and Puss.
I would love to go see this in person sometime. Um, I said we largely are going to avoid, um, the, the self-portrait.
But, um, this whole talk is going to be about exceptions. So here's another exception.
Um, you know, when we think of Edward Lear, we associated with nonsense verse.
He was the youngest surviving child of a family of 21 children.
Um, he was basically raised by an older sister. He did not really go to school.
He was brought up, um, uh, he had to make drawings.
Um, and sort of make a living off that from a very young age.
He suffered from epilepsy, a condition he referred to as his demon.
Um, and he suffered also from depression, which he called the morbid.
He spent much of his life travelling in Greece and Italy and the Levant, making landscape painting.
Um, so I will include one self-portrait. Um, this is the poem usually called how Pleasant to Know Mister Lear.
Um, but that might not really be the title. We might say the title is by way of preface.
Um, and it appears at the beginning of one of the nonsense books.
Um, with a bit of prose. Um, it is believed that all, say,
of the youngest readers of these nonsense books will be interested in the two following autobiographical letters by the author,
which have never till now been published.
The first, written nearly a quarter of a century back just before one of his journeys in search of the picturesque,
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,
was written for a young lady of his acquaintance, who had quoted to him the words of a young lady,
not of his acquaintance, which formed the refrain of the verses.
How pleasant to know, Mister Lear.
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.
Um, and, uh, he's an expert on drawing things like parrots.
Although Lear's own favourite bird, the bird he thought it was most beautiful of all birds is the pigeon.
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.
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear, who has written such volumes of stuff.
Some think him ill tempered and queer, but if you think him pleasant enough, his mind is concrete and fastidious.
His nose is remarkably big. His visage is more or less hideous.
His beard resembles a wig. He has ears and two eyes and ten fingers.
Leastways, if you reckon two thumbs. Long ago he was one of the singers.
But now he is one of the dumbs. He sits in a beautiful parlour with hundreds of books on the wall.
He drinks a great deal of Marsala, but never gets tipsy at all.
He has many men, many friends, laymen and clerical.
Old farce is the name of his cat. I will just add that, um.
Fast is short for I. There was, um, the Greek for brother.
So maybe we should be pronouncing it Fosse. Old Fosse is the name of his cat.
His body is perfectly spherical. He wears a run symbol hat when he walks in waterproof white.
The children run after him. So calling out, he's come out in his nightgown.
That crazy old Englishman. Oh, he weeps by the side of the ocean.
He weeps. On the top of the hill. He purchases pancakes and lotion and chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak Spanish. He cannot abide ginger beer, or the days of his pilgrimage vanish.
How pleasant to know, Mr. Lear. Um, so this poem, uh, which is basically all biographies of Edward Lear start by quoting this poem.
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.
I think that the form of this was possibly, um, suggested by the quotation that was, um, quoted to him.
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear, because, uh, this is that kind of envy bracket,
a big I'm a big and feeble person and fee bracket, um, trimmer that we associate with the Limerick, you know.
Um, there once was a fellow from Perth who was born on the day of his birth, etc.
So how pleasant to know Mr. Lear. Um, exactly.
Plugs into the Lear Limerick form, which Lear is so adept at.
Um, and we get some we get some ideas of of what he might be like.
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.
Uh, maybe like tiny, he is earliest of his kind. I like the observation that his mind is concrete and fastidious.
I'm willing to take him at, uh, at his word on that.
And certainly somebody who is drawing, um, animals in the zoo and drawing, um,
anatomical things for, um, for textbooks and so forth, has a kind of concrete and fastidious mind.
He was very self-conscious about his nose. That comes out again and again, and you get these kind of, um, nonsense verse gestures,
for instance, the kind of silly, pompous rhetoric of he has ears and two eyes and ten fingers.
Leastways, if you reckon two thumbs, which we all do.
Um, then I get, I you get, I think two of the darkest lines in English poetry.
Um, this one I just always find getting long ago he was one of the singers, but now he is one of the dumbs.
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.
We have kind of fun rhymes where you have to pronounce them a certain way to do parlour and Marsala.
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.
You know, he comes out in waterproof white. I'm not sure that the, uh, is supposed to be there.
It might be when he walks in waterproof white. It's. There's something metrical that happens there, too.
The children run after him. So this must be in San Remo calling out.
He's come out in his night gown. That crazy old Englishman.
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.
And then again, you come to this very kind of dark. He weeps by the side of the ocean.
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.
Um. I also sort of weeping by the side of the ocean. Reminds me of the Odyssey.
But he kind of then undercuts it with that very traditional nonsense gesture, um, of, you know, pancakes and lotion.
You know, he purchases pancakes and lotion and chocolate chips from the mill.
And there's almost as kind of reassuring facts and random details that children would appreciate.
He reads, but he cannot speak Spanish. He cannot abide ginger beer.
Er, the days of his pilgrimage vanish. How pleasant to know, Mr. Lear.
Um, I was saying that I wasn't going to have poems by, you know, that are not from life.
Um, but I will just add that there is a terrific Auden sonnet about Edward Lear.
Obviously, I hadn't met Edward Lear, and this is produced after reading a biography of Edward Lear.
Um, but the ending, I think, both plugs into the morbid and the melancholy and the demons and so forth that,
um, by way of preface, does and takes us somewhere else, this wonderful ending.
Um, guided by tears, he has successfully reached his regret, and that's capitalised.
If it's as if it's a place. How prodigious the welcome was.
Flowers took his hat and bore him off to introduce him to the tongs.
The demons false nose made the table laugh. A cat soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand.
Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs. Um.
Lear was also a composer, had sent um Tennyson's poems to music, and children swarmed to him.
Like settlers, he became a land. Here's for.
In fact, this, um, this one of the touching things about this photograph, which was taken shortly before his death,
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.
Um, Gerard Manley Hopkins needs no introduction in Oxford.
I think, um, and we're just, um, maybe half a mile.
A quarter mile less than that, um, from one of his churches.
Um, here again, we're going to go back into elegiac mode.
Um, and we're going to talk about a favourite sonnet, uh, that perhaps I long thought was of an imagined person.
Um, an ideal portrait of a type, as one might see in Edwin Arlington Robinson or Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River anthology.
Um, but Felix Randall is an actual parishioner of Hopkins.
Um, although he was a farrier whose real name was Felix Spencer, um, who died when Hopkins was serving in Liverpool.
Sonnets are very well suited for portraits.
Their very shape says portrait rather than landscape, and they're suited for epitaphs and elegies because they're also kind of tombstone shaped.
So let's consider this poem. Felix Randall, the farrier.
Oh, is he dead? Then my duty all ended.
Who have watched his mould of man. Big boned and hearty, handsome, pining.
Pining till time when reason rambled in it.
And some fatal four disorders. Flesh there all contended sickness broke him.
Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended being anointed.
And all though a heavenly or heart began some months earlier.
Since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom tendered to him, I well, God rest him all road every offended this.
Seeing the sick endears them to us.
Us two it endears my tongue had taught the comfort touch that had quenched thy tears.
Thy tears that touched my heart, child. Felix. Poor Felix Randall.
How far from then forethought of all thy more boisterous years.
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, didst fettle for the great grey dray horse, his bright and battering sandal.
This was written in 1880. Um.
Uh, we have since discovered it's been discovered that Felix Spencer, um, was a 31 year old blacksmith who died of tuberculosis.
Um, a sonnet? Yes, but an unusual sonnet.
The rhyme scheme is a traditional Italian sonnet.
Although we might make note of how intricate, how finely fettled the falling cadence rhymes are, especially those sandwiched ones.
Handsome. And some began, some culminating in the Christian redemption of ransom.
Somehow they do not come across as light or humorous as in Byron they would be.
They set off a musical falling cadence, um, so that we reinforce the poem's critical rhyme of Randall and sandal.
Obviously, one of the reasons for changing Felix Randall's name, um, just to the.
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.
The sonnet is like Felix Randall, big boned and hearty.
Handsome. Hexameter is the measure of epic, and Hopkins makes the farrier larger than life,
powerful amidst peers have faced us like as if fashioning armour for a great grey steed like Achilles.
Isn't this the poem kind of escapes its Christian occasion?
Um, although the dearness and the anointing of the sick and the last rites and so on to something.
Homeric sandal is a specific word in varying, apparently for horseshoes.
Um, it's also a dialect word for clog and appropriate to the Lancashire setting.
But metal sandals are also the footwear of gods.
In this portrait.
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.
Hopkins has his own heady, poetic dialect. Um, but there are, to my ears, two registers of English here.
Um, a fairly standard, if elevated, English as if of a sermon.
This seeing the sick endears them to us. Us two it endears with its Latinate chiasmus.
Um, but we also have, um, local Liverpool dialect inflected, um, cadences and phrases all road for all ways.
Um, even the biblical thy and thou.
Although, um Hopkins does use them another poet poems maybe feels particularly vernacular here, as does anointed and uh, random grim.
Uh, forge stopped me for a while, and, um, I had to think about that for a long time.
Um, but there are notes to the poem that suggests that this means disorderly and grimy in dialect, but it works two ways.
I think. Also death is random and grim, and our deaths are forged in random and grim ways.
Um, we have quench, which is wonderful, uh, word for a blacksmith, um, and so on.
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.
And we also have something from 1881, um, where Hopkins talks about the importance of poems being about real people and real occasions.
It seems to me, in general a hazardous thing. He writes a pity to make one's own plots.
One cannot well have the independence, the spontaneous ness of production which one gets from a true story.
Um. He says that besides motive, a plot should have scenes and intrigue explaining.
By scenes I mean localisation with local colour and particular details and keep things.
So I think this poem definitely has that. Um, I obviously don't have a picture of Felix Randall, but I liked this Jericho.
Um, with the strong, muscular, heroic farrier and this great dapple grey dray horse.
Another poem, um, that serves as elegy and that is a poem that has interested me by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Brooks is the right the rights for cousin Right.
Um. Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas.
Um, she was raised on the south Side of Chicago. She was the first African American poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize,
and she received it for a book called Annie Allen, Um, which contains an epic poem within it called the Annie ad.
Um, rather wonderfully. And it's about, uh, a woman's coming of age and into womanhood.
Um, so she was, uh, the US poet laureate.
Um, she was the first African-American inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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.
The rights for cousin Vit or Vit.
Carried her on protesting out the door, kicked back the casket stand.
But it can't hold her that stuff. And Saturn aiming to enfold or the lids contrition, nor the bolts before 000.
Too much, too much even now.
Surmise. She rises in the sunshine.
There she goes. Back to the bar she knew. And the repose and love rooms.
And the things in people's eyes. Two vital and two squeaking must emerge.
Even now. She does. The snake hips with a hiss, slaps the bad wine across her Shan tongues.
Talks of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework walks in parks or alleys.
Comes happily on the verge of happiness. Happily hysterics is.
Again, I think I had long kind of thought that this was perhaps an imagined person, but it is not.
Um. Gwendolyn Brooks, in an interview, um, asked about this poem, says, well, that too is based on a real happening visit.
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.
Obviously wheat or vite vital vitality is a good choice here.
So again, the portrait is not just in the description though, but in the choice of form itself.
If sonnets are tombstone shapes, they can also be coffins.
Sonnets, after all, are traditionally containers, and one of their themes is containment.
Nuns fret not to their convents narrow rooms, but here is one where the coffin cannot contain.
Um. So the box of the sonnet begins traditionally enough in a largely and stopped envelope rhymed quatrain.
That's that, says Italian sonnet. But the signs are already there that something is kind of going awry.
The grammar is telescoped or lopped off. There's no subject at the beginning.
Carried her under testing out the door, kicked back the casket stand.
Um, uh. And the sonnet seems to close down before reopening.
The Volta starts early. I would say that the turn of the sonnet is in line five, so it's almost upside down.
Oh, oh, too much. And now Cousin Vit is resurrected.
The repose is not eternal repose, but repose in love rooms.
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,
the end talks of pregnancy walks in parks or alleys until we end up happily on the verge of happiness.
Hysterics is, I think, a verb here in 14 lines.
We've been carried from dead weight to a one word verb as sentence or noun in the infinite present is.
Um, obviously I don't have a picture for Cousin Vit,
but the interviewer was saying that she thought maybe the poem had something to do with Bessie Smith,
so I thought I'd have an image of Bessie Smith for that.
Um. John Crowe Rance. I am.
I had sort of one remove from John Ransome.
Um, I lived for a while in John Crow Ransom's niece's basement.
I spent a year immersed in his poetry and criticism under her roof.
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.
Um, as a Rhodes Scholar. He attended Christ's Church from 1910 to 1913 and read greats.
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.
Okay. This is bells for John Whitesides.
Delta. There was such speed in her little body and such lightness in her footfall.
It is no wonder her brown study astonishes us all.
Her was well rooted in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond, where she took up arms against her shadow.
Oh, Harry Dunn, to the pond. The lazy geese like a snow cloud.
Dripping their snow on the green grass.
Flicking and stopping. Sleepy and proud.
Who cried in goose. Alas for the tireless hard within.
The little lady with rod that made them rise from their noon apple dreams.
And scuttle goose fashion under the skies.
But now go the bells and we are ready.
In one house we are sternly stopped to say.
We are vexed at her brown studies, lying so primly propped.
I was asked at one point to write about a poem, uh, for an anthology called Poems That Make Grown Women Cry.
And this was my choice. Um, in it I wrote, um, it's folk.
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.
Um. Ransom uses two effective strategies. One is understatement.
Um. We are vexed and sternly stopped by death.
And death is merely a brown study that is a thoughtful mood.
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.
Um, if anything, she's sort of like, uh, Scout from To Kill a mockingbird.
Um, and then there is this fairy tale register of the scuttling geese crying.
Alas! Or, uh, lass in Goose.
And I kind of love the way John Crow Ransome says goose. Um, the poem is in what I would call an English sapphic.
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.
Um, it's in these rhymed quatrains, in nearly every quatrain.
One of the rhymes is slightly off, um, which gives it that kind of unbalanced, um, elegance moving forward.
Um, and then there's a short line in each stanza that pulls you up short.
And these short lines often have a very strong emotional effect.
So we get pulled up by these two limiters. Um, lying so primly propped, all we have is the girl's patronymic.
Part of death's taming of her.
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.
Then I read something somewhere that suggested that the girl was imaginary, which led me to rethink why the poem was so successful.
The truth here is more complex. The girl is a real girl.
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.
He had imagined what it would be like were she to die.
Anyway, this is very disturbing. Um.
The poem was published in his book from 1924, Chills and Fever.
And perhaps we should see some of its concerns with illness, mortality and death in light of World War One.
He served in France and the Spanish flu as a new critic.
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.
Um, but we can see a little of his poetic concerns in a 1927 letter to Alan Tate.
My object as a poet might be something like the following one.
I want to find the experience that is in the common actuels.
Two. I want this experience to carry by associations.
Of course, the dearest possible values to which we have attached ourselves.
And three. I want to face the disintegration or nullification of these values as calmly and religiously as possible.
So that is some of where this, um, devastating, strange poem comes um, from.
I also like how we've got these sort of tidy ish quatrains.
Um, but the syntax, again,
the life force of the syntax keeps leaking out and across until we finally get that truly and stopped lying so primly propped.
Okay, this next one you'll be glad to know is not an elegy.
Um, Elizabeth Bishop, uh, was consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress,
which was the position that became, uh, the poet laureate of the United States.
She won the Pulitzer Prize. She met, uh, Marianne Moore, who was, um, uh, older than she when she was still at Vassar.
Um, there was a lovely talk here by Erica McAlpine about Marian Moore.
Um, and we have this description, um, about Marian Moore from Elizabeth Bishop.
Uh, that she was 47. The large, flat black hat was, as I'd expected it to be.
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.
The effect was quaint, but stylish at the same time.
Um, this is Marian Moore. I mean, it's.
She had a look. Um, so we have this invitation.
It was a birthday poem written to Marian Moore in 1937.
So I guess this would have been for her 50th birthday, if I'm doing the math right.
Um, I'm not a really a math person.
Um, and we have this really strange, um, poem of invitation from Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge on this fine morning.
Please come flying in a cloud of fiery, pale chemicals.
Please come flying to the rapid rolling of thousands of blue, small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky.
Um, there are a there is a point where I think it really does become kind of a portrait as well.
Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe trailing a sapphire highlight with a black cape full of butterfly wings,
and Bonomo with heaven knows how many angels, all riding on the broad black brim of your hat.
Please come flying. Bearing a musical inaudible abacus.
I think this is an excellent description of Marian Moore's own technique of using syllables instead of feet in her poetry,
um, where you're counting the abacus of the syllables,
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.
Marianne Moore's poems are full of facts. Please come flying.
Mounting the sky with natural heroism. Above the accidents.
Accident is a big Marian Moore word. Omissions are not accidents, she writes.
Um, there's a soft un invented music again, which sounds like syllabic.
And Marian Moore loved to write about animals for whom the grim museums will behave like courteous male bower birds,
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.
The reading rooms. Um. So there are all kinds of wonderful things that are very Marian moreish.
I've been thinking about the form of this and what this might be saying.
In one way, the form is the form of an invitation.
Um, we have examples of this again out of the Greek anthology, um, out of Catullus, where a poet issues a poetic invitation.
So you can say that this is part of a kind of genre of poetic invitation.
Um, it doesn't really resemble any of Marianne Moore's poems, particularly.
It does. You can correct me if I'm wrong on that. I'm happy to learn more.
Um, or Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop often construct sort of ad hoc forms for her poems.
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.
Um, so it somewhat puzzles me. This poem is in 1937.
If it were 1939. I have this image from, uh, The Wizard of Oz.
Of the witch on the bicycle. Turning to the witch on the broom with her black hat.
Obviously Marion Moore is not an evil witch, but a good witch. Um, but there is something kind of magical and surreal about this.
So I was really stumped about what I thought about the form of this.
And it turns out there is another poem in back of this poem, um, by Pablo Neruda.
It's a very long poem. This is only a section of the poem.
Alberto Rojas, humanist Vienna. Orlando. Um, and we have this idea of a poet writing to another poet, um, and having them flying.
Um, but this is an elegy. This is a poet writing to a mentor who has died.
Um, so I'm not sure what, if anything, this suggests to Marion Moore.
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.
Um. It's surreal. Um, it's extremely dark poem.
Um, we do know that she thought about Neruda.
She met Neruda, but only after she had written this invitation to Marion Moore.
I assume that she's getting some part of it from this poem she wrote to Marion Moore from Mexico, but in 1942.
So again afterwards. About Pablo Neruda's poetry.
Um, I am reading it with the dictionary, but I'm afraid it is not the kind I nor you like.
It's very loose, surrealistic imagery, etc. I may be misjudging it.
It is so hard to tell about foreign poetry, but I feel I recognise the type only too well.
His chief interest in life. Or did I tell you all this? Besides, communism seems to be shells and he has a beautiful collection,
most of them laid in the top of a large, heavy, specially built coffee table with glass over them.
This is how I happened to try to recite and explain to him what I could remember of your a glass ribbed nest.
So there is some kind of very strange thing going on here, but I could not tell you what it is.
I just present it to you. This is, um, one of these strange connections.
Um, we're rounding the bend here. We have just two more poems that we're looking at.
Um. Awes. Merwin. He is photographed here in his kind of famous, um, ecological, uh, arboretum that he built or grew in Hawaii.
An American poet who had been the tutor to Robert Graves as children, among other things, um, he served as US poet laureate.
Um, his interest is in justice. Wasn't justice, peace, the environment winner of Yale younger uh prize judged by Auden.
Um, I met him, uh, after he had taken over the Yale Younger Prize.
And that first year, he decided that none of the manuscripts were good enough to win, and mine was among them.
Um, he has a wonderful poem called Berryman. I will say something about Merlin's poetry.
Um, it's not generally my cup of tea.
Um, so maybe we were just mutually exclusive.
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,
um, kind of interesting things going on in the, in the, on the level of simile and language and so forth.
But there's an exception. This is my favourite poem by his, and it's called Berryman.
Um, I, I will just add that, um, Merwin is also the first sort of cohort of American poets who study creative writing.
Um, so there's a kind of shift that happens, um, as poetry becomes professionalised.
Um, Stephanie Burt, um, the poet and critic reminds us, um,
that the poet John Berryman was teaching at Princeton University when 17 year old Merwin matriculated there in 1944.
Berryman had already published poems in nationally prominent magazines such as The Nation,
but his first book, The Dispossessed, would not appear until 1948, along with the critic R.P. Blackmer.
Berryman in those years launched Princeton's Creative Writing program.
Merwin remembered in 2010 that he discussed literature with Blackmer.
He was the, quote, wisest man and the greatest literary intelligence I ever knew,
but showed his own poems instead to Berryman, who was absolutely ruthless.
It was very good for me. Berryman.
I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war, as we then called the Second World War.
Don't lose your arrogance yet, he said.
You can do that when you're older. Lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity.
Just one time, he suggested changing the usual order of the same words in a line of verse.
Why point out a thing twice? He suggested I pray to the moon.
The muse get down on my knees and pray.
Right there in the corner. And he said he meant it literally.
It was in the days before the beard and the drink, but he was deep in tides of his own,
through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop.
He was far older than the dates allowed for much older than I was.
He was in his 30s. He snapped down his nose with an accent.
I think he had affected in England. As for publishing, he advised me to paper my walls with rejection slips.
His lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry.
He said, the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion.
Passion was genius. And he praised movement and invention.
I had hardly begun to read. I asked, how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all?
And he said, you can't. You can't. You can never be sure.
You die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good.
If you have to be sure, don't write.
I am often prescribing that poem. To young people who come to me.
Um, I've been asked, uh, why I never discuss my own poems.
I mean, these are not craft lectures, and I think it would be frowned upon for me to discuss my own poems.
Um, but I will make an exception, because this is all about exceptions.
Um. Oh, here's a wonderful. You can see that, you know, he's leaning into his thought and the the long, bony fingers.
The wonderful portrait. Um, but I will end with a poem of mine that is a portrait of another poet.
I hope that that will be permitted. Um.
I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, a carpetbagger southern town where one of the movie theatres played gone with the wind on a loop.
Um, the hum of Coca Cola. It is not an obvious place for a poet to evolve.
There were at the time, three real poets associated with the town James Dickey, David Bottoms and Turner Cassidy.
It was Turner I got to know well, a disciple of Ivor Winters, um, and a former marine.
He was a gay southerner from Mississippi who dismissed a certain southern poetry mode.
The ladies with three names, perhaps, who wrote poems with titles like Butterflies at Chickamauga.
Early on, I encountered a poem of hers about the Fox Theatre in Atlanta and the Fox Theatre.
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.
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.
So I wrote to him and we corresponded and became friends.
Um, he died in 2009, and I wanted to write something for him.
So this is a kind of elegy. It's also a portrait.
I realised, as I was looking at it that one of the rhymes was wonky.
And I've tried to fix that because I don't think Turner or Ivor Winters would approve.
Um, so these are lines for Turner. Cassidy.
Librarian with military bearing. You've left us poems critics call unsparing.
A wit not merely clever, but hard bitten.
Sometimes I hear you utter over written.
And even at this distance, there's no choice but hear the word in that distinctive voice,
not circumflex, sing, drawl, diphthong to legato, but southern,
brisk, particular, staccato, inimitable voice for never cruel, impatient, only of the pompous fool and vagueness that gesticulate at truth.
Clear and diptych. As a dry vermouth, you taught the courtesy of kindness, bent on shaming, false and floral sentiment.
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.
So this is a poem. It's in couplets, I think. Um, Turner Cassidy would appreciate that.
Um, they are pretty and stopped. There's not any kind of, on the whole crazy and jam charts and so forth.
This is, um, perhaps similar to his style or answering of his style.
Um, you might hear an echo at the end, um, to William Johnson Corey's, um, translation of Callimachus.
They told me, Heraclitus. They told me you were dead. Still are thy pleasant voices.
Thy nightingale gales awake for death. He taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
Um. I think, uh, Turner would appreciate that kind of nod.
Um, so that's my own effort, um, at a portrait.
And since I've had pictures of all the portraits, I hate photographs of me.
Um, but I will end with a drawing of me done by my daughter last year when she was 15.
Um, it is a very, very flattering drawing.
I look about 20 years younger here for some reason. Um, but I won't complain about that.
However, um, I think she's done pretty well with the mouth.
Thank you.