Sounding Snow – Brief Poems by Laura Gilpin

Laura Gilpin (October 10, 1950–February 15, 2007) was an American poet, nurse, and advocate for hospital reform. Born in Wisconsin, she was the daughter of Robert Crafton Gilpin and Bertha Burghard. She grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and later attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, and Columbia University, where she was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree. For some time she lived in New York City where she worked for the Teachers and Writers Collaborative and where she co-ordinated the poetry programme of the Henry Street Settlement. She also taught creative writing at the New York Public Library before becoming a registered nurse.

In 1976, Laura Gilpin was awarded the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets for her first book of poetry, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Doubleday, 1976). The judge was William Stafford who selected her collection from among 1,600 submissions and commented: The control pace, cumulative effect, frequent rockets of surprise in The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe make it a very appealing and admirable book. I like the sense of being accompanied page after page by the worthy company of an author who can have the audacity to rely on lines that are just right …

She was awarded a Writer’s Grant in 1981 from the National Endowment for the Arts. That same year she became a registered nurse having attained a Bachelor of Science in nursing from New York University. Her nursing career included paediatric nursing at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and adult oncology at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. In 1985, Laura Gilpin was invited to be a staff nurse on the original Planetree unit which has been described as a pioneering organization dedicated to humanizing patient care in hospitals. ( The name Planetree came from the type of tree under which Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, sat and taught; their goal is to reconnect with his holistic approach that addresses the patient’s body, mind, and spirit.) Laura Gilpin continued working with Planetree for more than twenty years, helping over one hundred hospitals to improve health care. She was eventually promoted to Planetree’s Director of Member Services and then Director of the Planetree Affiliate Network. She was joint editor, along with Susan Frampton and Patrick Charmel of the book Putting Patients First: Designing and Practicing Patient-Centered Care (Jossey-Bass, 2003) In 2004 Putting Patients First was named as Hamilton Book of the Year by the American College of Health Care Executives.

During the course of her nursing career, she continued to work on her poetry. She received a sabbatical in 2004 from Planetree to work on her second collection The Weight of a Soul (Sallie Randolph, 2008), which she completed shortly before her death. Acknowledging, in the foreword, the imminence of her death after a diagnosis of inoperable brain tumours, she wrote: Poetry has always been my persistent passion, my voice, my means of communication … Unfortunately death has become an unexpected deadline. At fifty-six, I have been diagnosed with two glioblastomas (brain tumors) which have restricted my ability to continue work. All my years as a poet and as a nurse are now woven together into becoming a patient. My images and metaphors from poetry, integrated into all I have learned as a nurse, are drawing me into the deepest role of being a patient. Since publishing my first book, The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, I have spent the last thirty years working on poems for my second book, The Weight of a Soul. Many of the poems I have included here bring together my own perspective as well as my experience as a nurse listening to patients faced with illness and death. I hope my years of poetry have provided enough insight.

Five and a half months after a diagnosis of multiple glioblastomas was made in September 2006, Laura Gilpin, 56 years old, died on Thursday, February 15, 2007, at her home in Fairhope, Alabama.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

 

THE TWO-HEADED CALF

Some poems go viral. After Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War” went viral. Similarly, after mass shootings and other tragedies in 2016, a poem called “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith went, as she put it “legit viral on Twitter.” Even earlier, in July 2013, a lengthy prose poem by Patricia Lockwood called The Rape Joke was posted by the current events website The Awl and quickly became a viral sensation as it was shared over 30,000 times on Facebook and retweeted over 2,400 times on Twitter. In its own quiet way, one poem by Laura Gilpin called The Two-Headed Calf has gone viral. On my own Tumblr site – Poem-Today – which has posted a poem a day since 2015, this poem has had far more interactions than any other poem I have posted, and that includes both the Patricia Lockwood poem and the Maggie Smith poem. It continues to appear regularly on internet sites as do images of art work inspired by the poem.  Online, the poem has become the subject of webcomics, fan art and memes  due to its emotional impact. Many have had tattoos inspired by the poem done on their bodies, responding to the text and to the image projected. The poem is brief and worth quoting in full.

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

It is not hard to understand why this short poem has gained such resonance and attracted so many readers. The poem is imaginative, intelligent, intricately paced and intriguing. Like the brief poems below, it conveys so much in such a short space. An interesting, detailed analysis of the poem from Dr Oliver Tearle is available on the Interesting Literature site. The success of this poem has, however, tended to take the focus away from the other poems of Laura Gilpin. She is far from being a “one-hit wonder.”

Photograph: Erika Flowers

THE POETRY OF LAURA GILPIN

Early reviewers of The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe recognized the talent on display. Writing in the Chicago Review – Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 1978) – Thomas A. Stumpf had this to say: Gilpin’s poems are most interesting for their modesty, their refusal to tell us too much or to speak too stridently. Though it violates all kinds of critical shibboleths to say this, the volume introduces us to a personality which we are convinced is Gilpin’s own, and which is subtle and unpredictable enough to be fascinating, to make us turn the page and want to read more, never really sated with what we have. It is a personality blessedly free from poses … The economy, one might even say severity, of imagery in the volume allows Gilpin to exercise the subtle modulations of tone which are her true strength. It also allows her to concentrate on a narrative or on a dramatic situation without interference from verbal fireworks or the extravagant emotions they beget. And, writing in the American Poetry Review – Vol. 8, No. 1 (January/February 1979) – Michael Heffernan commented: Laura Gilpin’s The Hocus Pocus of the Universe is … held together by a mysterious natural power, in this case a first rate poetic gift. Laura Gilpin’s kind of poetry is often referred to as deceptively simple, but there is  nothing deceptive about poems that are as plain-spoken and almost invariably on-the-mark as these are … A dissenting view was proposed by Suzanne Juhasz in a review in the Library Journal – 101, 22 (1976) – where she claimed Laura Gilpin attempts the precision of phrasing, vocabulary, tone, and rhythm that invests William Carlos Williams’s poetry with infinite resonance, but that she lacks an awareness of the complexity involved in such a gesture. But this is, I think, to misread the impulse behind the poems. Instead of seeking or embracing complexity, her poems embrace the simplicity of a low-key demotic far removed from the resonance and the rhetoric of William Carlos Williams. These are not simple poems, but they are written in a quasi-simple style. And they. have their own infinite resonance, one based on conjunctions and disjunctions as can be seen clearly in the brief poems selected below.

In the thirty years between the publication of her first and the publication of her second (posthumous) collection, Laura Gilpin continued to write poems in the same style and with the same subject matter – family, love, illness, death. The fact that this final volume (which contains most of the earlier poems and is, thereby, a collected poems) has not received the same recognition as the first collection is not a refection on its value as poetry. There are some wonderful poems here – in particular the title poem, The Weight of a Soul – but the book has no ambition to redefine the terms set by the first volume. There are more love poems, but mediated through a wry consciousness. Dinosaurs is one of the most unusual love poems I have read. They are at their best when they continue to be written in a relaxed, ambling style. Attempts at formality, as in an extremely cumbersome villanelle – Villanelle: Elegy for my Father – fail to cohere. What comes through most clearly in the best of these poems is a voice that is compassionate, concerned and clearly focused and one worthy of greater attention.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

SAMUEL BECKETT AND LAURA GILPIN

An unlikely alliance. And yet. Samuel Beckett is used for an epigraph to The Weight of a Soul: All poetry is prayer. But the full quotation is abridged, All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer. No less than Beckett, Laura Gilpin was not interested in paradigms of prosody. For her the poetry is in the clarity and the simplicity of the statement. While her innate optimism may run counter to Beckett’s innate pessimism, she recognizes, as does the dour yet witty Irishman, that poetry is prayer without the consolation of religious certainty. And there is more. A well-known quotation from Waiting for Godot reads They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. Many of Laura Gilpin’s poems, early and late, take place astride a grave or concern themselves with those, mainly relatives and friends, who have gone into night once more. In part IV of Life After Death, the poem begins by asserting simply

The things I know:        
how the living go on living        
and how the dead go on living with them

Then the poem goes on to contemplate a dead tree inhabited by young rabbits inculcating the concluding message that could, without the simple underpinning, be considered too pat:

So that nothing is wasted in nature        
or in love.

Like Beckett, there is a constant awareness of the grave. And, like Beckett, there is an absence of morbidity or sentimentality. A late poem, The Moment, begins with a couple having an argument followed by make-up sex. While making love, the poet is momentarily interrupted by an ambulance passing by her apartment- the scream of the siren/the red light spattering/against our skin. For a moment, the moment of the title and the moment of recognition, she contemplates the world of the dying. Then the moment passes, love resumes and life begins again. Even when it came to her own impending death, as in the concluding poem, Death 2006, there is a simple acceptance, unsentimental and unafraid.

Another Beckett quotation, this one from Endgame, is apt. The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. Aware of how everything ends in death, Laura Gilpin’s poems continue to explore life. To reiterate that Beckett epigraph, All poetry is prayer. And, in a life devoted to concerns wider than the circumscribed world of poetry, she continued to exemplify a form of prayer that deserves a wider audience.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

Brief Poems by Laura Gilpin

My Grandmother’s Eighty-sixth Birthday 

The cake at my grandmother’s birthday party
was chocolate with white icing which is her 
favourite.

Although she could not blow out all the
candles, she said her wish had already
come true.

***

An Afternoon of Painting

And the artist, carrying
his watercolor, walks
home in the rain.

***

The Tomb of the Unborn Soldier

It is a  way of life for these women
who go each day to the cemeteries
carrying flowers and who return
empty-handed.

***

The Whole of It

I am as resilient as a robin’s egg
falling out of the nest
twenty feet above ground.

My one salvation
is the little boy across the street
who collects odds and ends.

***

Night Song

And when she
woke suddenly
in the empty room
crying mother, mother,

the moon, watching
at a distance, rose
over her bed
and stayed there
until she was
asleep.

***

Snow

Each flake of snow
so separate
so distinct

yet in the morning
the hillside is a
solid field of white.

***

Differences

Of the six kernels of corn I planted,
only four sprouted, and of these four,
only two survived, and of these two,
one is taller.

***

Laws of Physics

(Corollary to Coulomb’s Law)

If body (1) of mass (m 1) and charge (q 1)
is attracted to body (2) of mass (m 2) and charge (q 2)
and if body (2) is repelled by body (1)
and attracted to body (3),

which of them will have a date on Saturday night?

***

Seeing a Dog in the Rain

It is raining and there is a dog lying
in the gutter and the gutter is filling
with water because the sewer is clogged.

If the dog were alive he would be drowning
but as it is, the water is simply stroking
his fur.

***

Death

Time stops.
At last it is quiet enough
for me to go to sleep.

Time starts again,
I go on sleeping.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

LINKS

The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe on the Internet Archive Site

The Weight of a Soul on the Internet Archive Site

Putting Patients First on the Internet Archive Site

The Wikipedia page on Laura Gilpin

The Laura Gilpin page (with links to six poems) on the Best Poems site

A Summary and Analysis of Laura Gilpin’s Two-Headed Calf

Website of the Planetree Organization

Laura Gilpin obituary

Laura Gilpin gravestone in the Colony Cemetery in Fairhope, Alabama

Mountain Dreams – Brief Poems by Francis Harvey

Francis Harvey (13 April 1925 – 7 November 2014) was an Irish poet born in Belmore Street, Enniskillen in 1925. His Catholic mother eloped with his Protestant father Hamilton Harvey, who died when the young Frank Harvey was only six. His mother was from Ballyshannon in Donegal and she moved back there. Frank stayed on and completed his secondary education in Enniskillen. He went to University College, Dublin, where he studied medicine for a year. As his family needed him to be working, he went into the bank, which took him around Ireland, but mostly he was stationed in Donegal. 

His first poem, about potato-digging, was published when he was 16, in the Weekly Independent. Subsequently he published several short stories and had a number of his plays produced on stage and radio. His prize-winning play, Farewell to Every White Cascade, was broadcast on RTÉ in the 1960s and thereafter on the BBC and numerous radio stations around the world. He describes his introduction to writing: What made a writer of me really was I became a member of the library in the town I was born, in Enniskillen, the Carnegie Library, and I discovered Dickens and I discovered Thackeray. I discovered D.H. Lawrence and umpteen others. I began to read.

In the mid-1970s he left fiction and playwriting behind him and concentrated on poetry. His first collection, In the Light on the Stones, was published by Gallery Press in 1978. The following year he took early retirement from the Bank of Ireland where he was an assistant manager. Gallery Press also published his next collection, The Rainmakers (1988) while Dedalus published his four subsequent collections, The Boa Island Janus (1996), Making Space (2001) , Collected Poems (2007) and Donegal Haiku (2013).

His poem, Heron, won the 1989 Guardian and World Wildlife Fund poetry competition when Ted Hughes was judge. His work has also featured in publications such as The Spectator and The Irish Times. In the 1970s he won The Irish Times/Yeats Summer School prize. In 1990 he won a Peterloo Poets Prize and was a prizewinner in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. 

 Francis Harvey died on 7th November 2014 at the age of 89.

DONEGAL HAIKU

Irish haiku, as I argue in my Dangerous Pavements post, with some assistance from Anatoly Kudryavitsky, editor of Shamrock Haiku Journal, is a distinctive form of haiku. While some poets, such as Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, have used the form fitfully, others, such as Paul Muldoon, have, in a ludic, almost ludicrous fashion, moulded it to their own playful applications. And then there is the sense of place. Many of the practitioners have composed haiku sequences devoted to particularly Irish locales: these include Michael Hartnett with his Inchicore Haiku, (Raven Arts Press, 1985); Pat Boran with his  Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (Dedalus Press, 2015); and, of course, Francis Harvey. In his case this involves a heightened awareness of the flora and fauna of his native Donegal. There are, as can be seen in the poems below, sheep, dogs, cuckoos, blackbirds, crows, butterflies, flowers, mountains, strands, lakes and Mount Errigal, all as peculiarly Irish and as peculiarly local as the wind and the rain mentioned in the concluding haiku below.

Donegal Haiku is a collection of 122 haikus opening and closing with a single haiku on single pages while the rest of the book features three haikus arranged on each of sixty page spreads. The cover, designed and photographed by Francis Harvey’s daughter, Esther, depicts Mount Errigal in Donegal with an upturned image of Mount Fuji in Japan reflected in the water. (See image right.) The congruence between the Irish landscape and the Japanese form is explicitly acknowledged in the first haiku below.

Fellow Donegal poet Moya Cannon, in her introduction to his Collected Poems, describes Harvey as a “Bashō-like figure”. But there are distinct differences. While Bashō travelled widely and wrote of his travels, Harvey remained rooted to Donegal and its landscape. I love the landscape of Donegal …landscape does something for me. It turns me on…I’m more at home in the middle of a bog than I would be in the middle of a city … And I love looking at the shape of the land and the contours, sometimes the lovely sensuous contours that land has, like a human body …. a haunch or a breast …. I love that, and I like the roughnesses in the landscape in Donegal too … I need roughness, I need wildness. While there is some humour in Bashō’s work, the type of mordant humour found in the haiku of Francis Harvey reminds me more of the work of Kobayashi Issa. And there are, to the best of my knowledge, no frogs, Bashō-like or otherwise, in his poetry. Moya Canon is on surer ground when she compares his poems, rightly in my opinion, with the work of Scottish poet Norman MacCaig and Welsh poet R. S. Thomas.

IRISH POETS ON FRANCIS HARVEY

Brendan Kennelly: There is throughout a concern for craft and conciseness. The poems are, on the whole, lucid and warmhearted. There is an admirable variety of technique and theme. Above all there is the sense that the poet is content to explore his own world in all its limitation and potential. It is this note of quiet, unruffled integrity that makes the poetry of Francis Harvey such a pleasant reading experience.

Eamon Grennan: The poems of Francis Harvey lodge us deep inside a rural (south Donegal) landscape, the overlapping emotional and physical maps of which Harvey knows with startling, at times corrosive, intimacy. In the rinsed light of his minute observations a world is brought to vivid life, animated by compassion, understanding, and a tough grace of observation.

Moya Cannon: Francis Harvey has done for Donegal and, by extension, for the west of Ireland, what Norman McCaig (sic) did for Scotland and what R. S. Thomas did for Wales. He has accorded the landscapes of South Donegal and the people who have lived in them a dignity which has been stripped away as much, almost, by tourism as by earlier forms of invasion. This he has achieved with a naturalist’s passion for precision and with an utter lack of sentimentality …. Francis Harvey’s work combines the passion for precision of a naturalist and the yearning for grace of a poet, except for the fact that a passion for precision, for naming, is also part of the bedrock of poetry. In [his] poems there is a vivid sense of how we are all moving, “free but tethered, through time’s inexorable weathers.”

Nessa O’Mahony: The poetry book that I got greatest pleasure from in 2007 was the Collected Poems of Francis Harvey. Harvey is the ultimate landscape artist of Irish poetry; to read his poetry is to get a sense of a man growing up and becoming assimilated into nature, in particular the nature of West Donegal where he lives. The poems are full of precise, loving but utterly unsentimental description of this harsh country in which one manages to survive rather than thrive. Harvey has an uncanny ability to empathise with his subjects and to show that innate beauty and misery are intertwined in the solitary lives he depicts.

Brief Poems by Francis Harvey

Sleeping, I think of 
Errigal and Mount Fuji,
The shape of my dreams.

***

A butterfly sways
on a pink dunghill flower.
The beauty of roots.

***

Who prays at the graves
of the unbaptised children?
A sheep on its knees.

***

Something on my mind
and on the mountain I climb.
The weight of two clouds.

***

Not a breath of wind.
The vanity of clouds
in the lake’s mirror.

***

Woodhill. The cuckoo
calls and, more than the wind,
is holding its breath.

***

What did he taste when
he kissed the island girl’s lips?
The sweetness of salt.

***

Tell me who waits for
the lightening to strike more than
once in the same place.

***

Not a breath of wind.
The vanity of clouds
in the lake’s mirror.

***

The bluebells blossom.
A blackbird sings in the grove.
Swallows and poems.

***

You planted a tree.
I wrote a poem. What more
could anyone do?

***

Myself and two crows
by a frozen lake, silent.
Who will break the ice?

***

Myself and my dog
skirt a mountain to avoid
a man and his dog.

***

I watched him that day
take his last walk on the strand.
The tide was ebbing.

***

He was so obsessed
with death he began sending
mass cards to himself.

***

Five crows in a tree.
The wind ruffles their feathers.
The leaves of my book.

***

Snow on the mountain.
Crowsfeet and your first white hair.
The end of autumn.

***

The wind and the rain.
The wind and the rain again
and again. Ireland.

***

These brief poems are from Donegal Haiku published by Dedalus Press (2013). The cover design (and the colour image used on this page) are by the daughter of Francis Harvey, Esther.

LINKS

The Dedalus Press page for Donegal Haiku

The Dedalus Press page for Collected Poems

Kathleen McCracken reviews The Boa Island Janus (Dedalus Press, 1996) for  The Poetry Ireland Review

Macdara Woods reviews Making Space: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2001) for The Poetry Ireland Review

Hugh McFadden reviews Collected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2001) for Books Ireland

Tom Hubbard reviews Collected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2007) for The Poetry Ireland Review

Donna L. Potts reviews Donegal Haiku (Dedalus Press, 2013) for New Hibernia Review

This Landscape’s Fierce Embrace: The Poetry of Francis Harvey, Edited by Donna L. Potts

An article on Francis Harvey in The Irish Times

A radio documentary commissioned by RTÉ lyric fm’s The Lyric Feature (first broadcast in 2014)

Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary on Francis Harvey

The cover design of Donegal Haiku , published by Dedalus Press (2013), and the colour image used on this page, are both by the daughter of Francis Harvey, Esther.

Footy and Film – Brief Poems by Damian Balassone

Damian Balassone was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1972, the child of an Italian migrant family who had settled in the  working class suburb of Collingwood.  He graduated from Deakin University in 1994 and has worked variously as an itinerant fruit picker, a bean counter, and as a teacher.  His poems have appeared in a variety of Australian and international publications.  His first book Chime (Ginninderra Press, 2013, later reissued on Kindle) is a collection of song lyrics, ballads and narrative poems that span the width and breadth of the Australian continent.

Since the publication of Chime he has suffered from severe hearing loss, tinnitus and hyperacusis (hypersensitivity to everyday sounds) with obvious consequences to his headspace – hence, a propensity to focus on shorter works of poetry.  In doing so, he swapped the panoramic Australian landscape for what he calls pithy takes on popular culture, corporate duplicity and political wankery.  These short poems and epigrams later came to the attention of the acclaimed Australian poet Les Murray, who published a stack of them and described Balassone as a ‘virtuoso’.

During this period, Balassone released Strange Game in a Strange Land (Wilkinson Publishing, 2019), a collection of short, playful rhymes about the great and glorious game of Australian Rules Football.  Unexpectedly, the book met with some success in his homeland, acquiring national radio and television exposure, and selling several thousand copies.

His third book Love is a Weird Cat is forthcoming.  This collection contains more than 100 short poems and epigrams that have been published in venues such as The New York Times, The Australian, The Spectator, The Canberra Times, Light, Abridged, Cordite, Quadrant, First Things, Shot Glass Journal, Eureka Street, Arena, The American Bystander, Asses of Parnassus, Snakeskin, Better Than Starbucks, New Verse News, Daily Drunk Magazine, News Weekly and Lighten Up.  In addition to the epigrams, the book also includes many short prose-poems that combine arresting imagery with emotional impact.  

Damian Balassone’s poems have appeared in more than 100 publications, most notably in The New York Times, The Australian, The Canberra Times and The Spectator.

He now lives in Warrandyte, Victoria, an outer suburb of Melbourne.

FOOTY – POETRY AND AUSTRALIAN RULES FOOTBALL

Australian Rules Football (also called Aussie Rules, or footy) is a contact sport played between two teams on an oval field.  Goals are worth six points and the primary methods of moving the oval ball are by kicking, handballing and running with the ball.  The game features frequent physical contests, spectacular marking (i.e. catching the ball from a kick), fast movement and high scoring.  The sport has the highest spectator attendance and television viewership of all sports in Australia, while the Australian Football League (AFL) is the nation’s wealthiest sporting body.  The AFL Grand Final, held annually at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), is the second-highest-attended club championship event in the world (just behind cricket’s Indian Premier League).

Damian Balassone’s father became a regular follower of Collingwood Football Club. The young Damian attended footy matches as a boy in the 1980’s, often sitting on his father’s shoulders in the outer of Victoria Park as he began to follow enthusiastically, recognising a hero of sorts in a player named after the Marvel Comics character The Hulk. (He discusses his love of football in an interview with Barbie Robinson.) His second collection, Strange Game in a Strange Land, subtitled A Poetic Celebration of Australian Rules Football is a poetic response to Australian Rules Football in all its glorious incarnations, from the tip of Tasmania to the Tiwi Islands, from the opening bounce of the season through to the seagulls descending onto the G at the conclusion of the Big Dance in a quirky collection of quatrains and couplets.

Brief Poems by Damian Balassone

FOOTY POEMS

My Nonna

When I started playing Aussie Rules,
my nonna’s face turned red.
I asked her what the problem was,
and this is what she said:
‘An oval ball, an oval ground,
for men with oval heads.’

***

Retrieving the Footy from the Tree

I climb the neighbour’s back veranda
and shake their precious jacaranda
until I hear the thrilling sound
of leather landing on the ground.

***

The Half-Back Flankers

We strive to run the lines until 
the opposition breaks.
Imagination is the name 
we give to our mistakes.

***

All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

HOLLYWOOD POEMS

Hollywood Hair Cycle

I once had hair like Moses,
but now my mop is thinner.
I once was Charlton Heston,
but now I am Yul Brynner.

***

Airbrushed

The biopic refused to show
the mole of Marilyn Monroe.

***

At a Restaurant in Berlin, 1936

You asked the famous leader
to autograph your napkin.
You thought that he was Hitler.
He signed it ‘Charlie Chaplin’.

***

Antipodean Romeo

As stars light up the jacaranda,
he’s climbing up the back veranda.

***

Greta Garbo

Because you’ve been dehumanised by fame
you wanna go where no one knows your name.

***

These “Hollywood Poems” first appeared in the magazine Eureka Street.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

HEBREW COUPLETS

The Fall of Nebuchadnezzar

He once was king of Babylon…but now
he’s drenched in dew and frolics like a cow.

***

David and Bathsheba

He watched her bathe.
‘She’s mine,’ said Dave.

***

Jacob’s Lament

‘The problem with my brother Esau:
his friggin’ mood is like a seesaw.’

***

Samson On Delilah

‘Delilah took me by the hand
and led me to the Promised Land.
With just a wiggle of her hips,
she triggered my apocalypse.’

***

Advice from Jonah

‘If God is calling and you bail,
you might end up inside a whale.’

***

Garden of Eden

A multitude of monsters will be on the loose
if man and woman work out how to reproduce.

***

These “Hebrew Couplets” first appeared in the magazine The Footy Almanac.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From THE ASSES OF PARNASSUS

Lord Byron on Twitter

I awoke one morning
and found myself cancelled.

***

The iMirror

To google
yourself
is the gravest of errors,
your screen is
replaced
by the mirror of terrors.

***

The Gambler

The gambler knows that if he somehow wins
it covers up a multitude of sins.

***

On Grandma’s 107th Birthday

I wonder if she’ll ever meet
her maker in the sky.
This lady just keeps keeping on.
She’s lost the will to die.

***

Carnival of Colours

At the carnival of colours
(though they’re trying not to show it)
all the poets want to be singers
and the singers want to be poets. 

***

These poems were first published on The Asses of Parnassus blog.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From LIGHT POETRY

The Housewife’s Dream

Each day she craves
a different sin.
Today she dreamt
that she was in

The House of Mirth
in no apparel
with Colin Firth
and Colin Farrell.

***

Defrocked

I once abstained from sin,
but now I’ve had my fill.
I once was Benny Hinn,
but now I’m Benny Hill.

***

Papal Nation

Italians are a people of integrity
who celebrate a celibate celebrity.

***

Phrases

The phrase ‘white men can’t dance’ is harsh but fair
…unless of course your name is Fred Astaire.

***

The Christian Suitor

‘The sacred Song of Songs –
the Abrahamic Cupid –
decrees that you and I
should shag each other stupid.’

***

These poems were first published on the Light Poetry site.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From LOVE IS A WEIRD CAT

Final year assembly

The children gather in the gym
to hear the last goodbye,
and through the skylight high above
they glimpse the summer sky.

***

Blind boy dreaming

A clique of corporate men
prepare to raid the earth again.

Despite their schemes,
the blind boy of the village dreams.

***

Love is a Weird Cat

Love is a weird cat
that sneaks up on you
when you’re lying on the couch
and brushes its soft fur
against your cold cheek,
before disappearing without a trace.

***

Cleopatra

She’s put an end to all my grand endeavours
and now my dreams are mummified forever.

***

Our Marriage Soundtrack

I think of our marriage quite often.
I think of the music as well.
It started with ‘Stairway to Heaven’
and ended with ‘Highway to Hell’.

***

Bathroom Wars

While stationed on the toilet seat of life, 
I’m told to get a move on by my wife.

***

The Old Preacher Retires

I leave the pulpit
with nothing left to prove.
I once moved mountains,
but now I cannot move.

***

The Bureaucrat

He served the republic with utter distinction.
His days in the office were memorable ones:
he covered the monsters with insect repellent
and shot the mosquitos with elephant guns. 

***

The Importance of Religion

Those who loathe religion 
are slow to contemplate 
that Lennon met McCartney 
at the church fête.

***

These poems are from Damian Balassone’s forthcoming collection, Love is a Weird Cat.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

LINKS

Chime

Strange Game in a Strange Land

Love is a Weird Cat

The Twitter (X) account of Damian Balassone

Damian Balassone’s website

Five longer poems by Damian Balassone on the Footy Almanac site

Links to poems and articles by Damian Balassone on the Muck Rack website

Barbie Robinson talks to Damian Balassone about Strange Game in a Strange Land for Living Arts Canberra

Children’s poetry video of Damian Balassone reading his poem “The Sportsman or the Scientist?”

All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Dial Tone- Brief Poems by Peter Vertacnik

Peter Vertacnik was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He holds degrees in creative writing and English from The University of Florida, Texas Tech University and Penn State University. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in 32 Poems, Bad Lilies, The Cortland Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, The New Criterion, Phoebe, Plume, The Spectator (World), THINK, and Water~Stone Review. He was a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize in 2021.

His debut poetry collection, The Nature of Things Fragile, (Criterion Books, 2024) was the winner of the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize, judged by George Bradley, Roger Kimball and Adam Kirsch. Established in 2000, the New Criterion Poetry Prize is awarded each year to a book-length manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form. The poems in this collection depict a world fraught with vulnerability and loss. Utilizing a wide range of  traditional and inventive poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina, epigrams, blank verse, and word-count, he confronts the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, the memories of old houses and towns left behind, and the vanishing of once-ubiquitous household items. It is a book of elegies, but also one of celebration.

He now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, where he works as an English instructor at the local Episcopal School, a co-educational college-preparatory school.

FORGOTTEN GOOD POEMS

Peter Vertacnik has curated Forgotten Good Poems on the Twitter (X) platform for many years. Calling it Just good poems the world seems to have forgotten (and should read) he has managed to introduce followers of the site to a very wide variety of poems that have, through time, slipped under the radar of many poetry readers. It has been a cosmopolitan selection, accompanied by clear images of individual poems by writers from a variety of backgrounds. He has done much to reignite an interest in poets who he feels, and I mostly agree with him, deserve a wider audience.

These poets come from a variety of backgrounds. There are American poets whose audience deserves to be wider, such as Fred Chappell, N. Scott Momaday and William H. Dickey. Canadian poets featured include Steven Heighton, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Charles Bruce. Irish poets Tom Duddy, John Hewitt and Gerard Fanning share a space with English poets Vernon Scannell, E. J. Scovell and Lawrence Sail. There are poets from Scotland (Maurice Lindsay) and Wales (Paul Henry and R. S. Thomas) as well as Australian poets (David Malouf and James McAuley) and the Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill.

An anthology winnowed from these selections would make an enticing collection.

ASSES OF PARNASSUS

All of the poems below first appeared in the Asses of Parnassus, a Tumblr-based blog devoted to short poems and edited by Canadian poet, Brooke Clark whose own collection of poems Ubanities (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2020) also contains many brief poems. These are poems, as Reader’s Guide below puts it, in the tradition of Martial, Herrick, Nims, Cope, Cunningham, a tradition that merges formal exactitude with concision and wit. The work of Martial, Herrick and Cunningham is featured in distinct posts on this site. The humorous and irreverent approach of the Asses of Parnassus site is illustrated with the Tumblr avatar (see image right), a detail of an etching – originally entitled Hasta su abuelo (And so was his grandfather) – from Los caprichos (The Caprices), a set of prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797–1798. The poems chosen reflect, in a contemporary manner, Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foibles of the Spanish society in which he lived.

The Asses of Parnassus not only features a multitude of translations (in rhyme) from Greek and Latin authors, in particular plenty of rude, witty and scurrilous barbs from Martial and Catullus, but also promotes the work of many of the finest practitioners of the art of the epigram today, writers as diverse as Jerome Betts, Robin Helweg-Larsen, Bruce Bennett, David and Daniel Galef, Damian Balassone, Susan McLean, Alexandra Oliver and, of course, Peter Vertacnik.

Brief Poems by Peter Vertacnik

Conscience

Though you don’t hear me with your ears,
I speak as lucidly as mirrors.
My voice maintains a constant call,
Which most obey, but never all.

***

Concerning Pedestals

Our would-be leaders shift and whisper, nervous,
As their dead forebears topple in the street:
“Surely we’ve done nothing to deserve this.
Everyone’s free to grovel at our feet.”

***

Reader’s Guide

Some lines illuminate, dissect, or slam
(See Martial, Herrick, Nims, Cope, Cunningham).
Each forged for you—old, middle-aged, and younger—
In sharp, recurrent verse. Like pangs of hunger.

***

Standardized

Numb hours of teaching to the test,
And hours more of silent filling,
Filling of bubbles. A bored unrest
Of minds, compliant though not willing.

Seasonal Change

Each autumn now feels warmer,
And our maple’s leaves less bright
On the branch that scrapes the dormer,
Keeping me up at night.

***

Hyperopia

Youth’s hard to see, until we’ve seen it through.
Only old eyes can recognize what’s new.

***

“Why Are We Doing This?”

for my students

Each day you’ll grasp a little more,
Something you haven’t seen before.
And as new skills and knowledge link,
You’ll learn not what but how to think.

***

Accolade

What is the most sought poet’s prize?
That what you scan now with your eyes
Tomorrow you may memorize.

***

Dial Tone

Seems strange to miss this barren baritone
Once known to all, and by all overthrown;
To miss, whenever I pick up my phone
And make a call, the barely noticed drone
That spoke of reaching out, of being alone.

Final Illness

The medicines have ceased to make him stronger;
He takes them to stay weak a little longer.

***

Malpractice

“Of course one must be cleansed of mortal sin
In order to receive the Eucharist.”
Yet what humane physician would insist
Only the healed ingest his medicine?

***

Nomenclature

Though names may alter—graveyards, cemeteries,
Memorial parks—the function never varies.

***

Patient

He wasn’t dead; nor was he tougher.
What hadn’t killed him made him suffer.

***

American Medicine

Another pill: devised to heal,
Or coddle those afraid to feel?

***

All poems © Peter Vertacnik. Reprinted by permission of the author.
All poems first published on the Asses of Parnassus blog.

LINKS

The Peter Vertacnik website.

The Twitter (X) account of Peter Vertacnik.

Forgotten Good Poems.

The Asses of Parnassus blog.

Peter Vertacnik wins the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize.

The Amazon page for The Nature of Things Fragile.

The Encounter Books page for The Nature of Things Fragile.

All poems © Peter Vertacnik. Reprinted by permission of the author.
All poems first published on the Asses of Parnassus blog.

Jaffa Cakes – Brief Poems by Nic Aubury

Nic Aubury was born in Watford in 1974 and grew up in the Midlands. He studied Latin, English Literature and French at secondary school and then read Classics at Oxford University. He worked for a few years in advertising before becoming a teacher of Latin and Greek. He had a chapbook, Small Talk, published by the now defunct Nasty Little Press in 2011, a book which was named by Sophie Hannah in the Sunday Express as one of her books of the year for 2011. His first full collection, Cold Soup, was also published by Nasty Little Press in 2013. Some of his poems were included in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries VI (2015) edited by Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey. His poems also appeared in the Penguin anthology The Poetry of Sex (2014) edited by Sophie Hannah. His most recent collection Ignore It All and Hope It Goes Away: Poems forModern Life (2022) is published by David Fickling Books and is accompanied by illustrations from popular comic artist Moose Allain. The poem Decline and Fall was chosen as a Poem of the Week in the Guardian newspaper in 2015. He has performed his poetry at various festivals including Port Eliot, Latitude, the Cheltenham Poetry Festival and the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Recently he began producing a weekly four-line poem for the New European, a weekly, liberal, explicitly pro-EU political and cultural newspaper and website, formed in the wake of the Brexit referendum.

Nic Aubury lives in the English Midlands with his wife and three teenage sons.

ON THE BRIEF POEMS OF NIC AUBURY

I first came across the poetry of Nic Aubury in Sophie Hannah’s anthology The Poetry of Sex. His two poems included there (see the first two poems below) were among the briefest poems in the book, but they were also among the most incisive. I was intrigued, so I sought out more. I discovered he posted some of his brief poems on his Twitter account. Although they may owe their provenance to other more renowned light poets – my formative poetry experiences were (inspired by) two gifts from two different girlfriends: Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope and Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash – they have an original, peculiarly English touch. Like Wendy Cope, he has an assured and ironic sense of social niceties. And like Ogden Nash, he has a wonderful sense of the peculiarities of language. (See, for example, Otherwise and Rhyme Nor Reason below). He has, also, an assured sense of the manner in which social media can effect and sometimes infect the language of communication and the language of poetry. Writing a weekly 4-line poem for the New European, he can compress as much into one brief witty sentence as other contributors cram into a lengthy article. Concision is all.

While he has written some longer poems, he is at his best when he is most compressed, often using formal conventions of poetry to undermine formal conventions of society. I am very interested in metre and form. I have found most success I think in seeking to exploit the comic tension between formality of structure and informality of language. I try to pare ideas and jokes down to their simplest, sparest expression, which is why I write so many short poems. Like a Jaffa Cake, a tasty morsel of orange jam on a sponge base covered in a hard chocolate shell, the poems of Nic Aubury have a tasty morsel of truth on a moral and social base in a hard shell of metrical, rhythmic and rhyming language. Whether a Jaffa Cake is a cake or a biscuit is debatable, subject to tax conditions. And whether the pieces I have posted below are poems or epigrams may be equally debatable. Whatever they are, however, they are as pithy, as palatable, and as pleasurable as a packet of Jaffa Cakes. Taste and see.

ILLUSTRATING THE POEMS – MOOSE ALLAIN

Alexander Allain, known professionally as Moose Allain, is a British illustrator who lives and works in Devon with his wife, Karen. He used to work in London as an architect specialising in urban regeneration until he moved from a traditional job to the seaside to make a living from his creativity. He and his wife run a thriving business based on Moose Allain’s world of playful, off-beat cartoons, crazy puns and reflections on what’s going on in his life and the world. Having once contributed to the UK’s successful Olympic bid and designed murals for a beauty salon in Mexico City, he has since created animations for the BBC, illustrated the Pointless quiz show book and had cartoons published in Private Eye and The Literary Review. He helped to co-produce the video for Lost Worker Bee, a song by the band Elbow. He has built his Twitter community to over 78 thousand followers and made it the core of his business. He has provided the illustrations, some of which are featured below, to Nic Aubury’s full length collection Ignore It All and Hope It Goes Away: Poems for Modern Life (2022) published by David Fickling Books. Describing his work, he says it’s about playing around with lines. They may be drawn lines or they may be written lines. The poet writes lines; the artist draws lines. In this book they reach a comic concordance.

Brief Poems by Nic Aubury

Casanever

To most men, the notion
of ‘romance and mystery’
means clearing the porn from
their internet history.

***

The Couple Upstairs

Their bed springs start to creak; 
their ardour has awoken. 
That’s twice at least this week; 
their telly must be broken.

***

The Level

We must have trust and honesty,
So look me squarely in the eye
And be completely straight with me, 
Unless it’s bad, in which case, lie.

Nic Aubury discusses his poem and the benefits of grudge-holding with Sophie Hannah. The transcript of their podcast is here.

***

Otherwise

The owl is not the wisest bird,
in spite of what you might have heard,
for, if he were, I think – don’t you? – 
he’d say ‘Too whoom’ and not ‘Too whoo’.

***

Rhyme Nor Reason

You can’t rhyme “plough” with “cough” or “rough”,
Or “thorough”, “through” or “though”;
Hough foreigners can learn this stough
I troughly wouldn’t knough.

***

Ode to Joy  

The pleasure of one’s own success 
could never quite transcend
that higher form of happiness:
the failure of a friend.

***

XXX
Written to mark the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web

The sum of all the Posts and Tweets and Comments there have been
since nineteen eighty-nine has categorically dispelled
the notion that there might be some relationship between
the truth of our opinions and the zeal with which they’re held.

***

The Jaffa Cake Temperance Paradox

I’ve eaten far too many; I should stop. 
I’d have to stop if all of them were gone.
They’d all be gone if someone ate them up.
So probably I ought to carry on.

***

Honesty

By a low cottage wall that was bordered with phlox
On an old garden table with rickety legs
Was some produce for sale, and an honesty box,
So I posted a note: ‘I have stolen your eggs’.

***

Opinion Piece

We nowadays accept as true 
that, never mind its merit,
the fact we have a point of view
obliges us to share it.

***

Creation Theory

Whoever thought a baby’s head 
would fit through a vagina
Does not deserve the epithet 
‘intelligent designer’.

COUPLETS

Cold Calling

The poet never used his two-bar heater;
there wasn’t any money in the metre.

***

cogito ergo … hmm

I’m in a philosophic traffic jam:
I overthink, therefore I under-am.

***

midnight rumbler

If snacks aren’t meant for eating in the middle of the night,
then tell me why the fridge has got that helpful little light.

***

Thx & rgds

However important you are, or how stressed,
you’re never too busy for vowels, I’d suggest.

***

Emoticon

Semi-colon, right-hand bracket.
Smiley face? I’d like to smack it. 😉

***

Depending

The seventeen-to-twenty-fives
are grown-ups ’til the bill arrives

***

The Joneses

For middle-class people, contentment depends
On securing the envy of middle-class friends.

***

On Wooing

Correcting her grammar
Will rarely enamour.

HAIKU

doomsday haiku

our digital world 
will end in mutually 
assured distraction

***

0° haiku

The present is the
point at which liquid future
freezes into past.

***

Haiku for an ex

Every day since you
left, I have missed you – but my
aim is improving.

***

Granny’s Advice Haiku

If you haven’t got
Anything nice to say then
Post it on Twitter.

***

 doomsday haiku

our digital world 
will end in mutually 
assured distraction

***

 Country Gent Haiku

The meaning of some
Phrases is unaffected
By spoonerism.

***

 Equinox

Not what you get when
You cross a horse with a cow,
Disappointingly

***

Imitation haiku 

The sincerest form
Of flattery is, of course,
Your friends’ resentment.

***

Poets Haiku

If all the poets 
were laid out, end-to-end, it
wouldn’t matter much.

THE NEW EUROPEAN POEMS

Tomb Of The Keyboard Warrior

O, here lies here a hero of online debate!
He fearlessly made up his mind in a second 
and, quoting some facts that he’d heard from his mate,
he died on the hill of the stuff that he reckoned.

***

Post Mortem

When scientists compile the latest list
of species now extinct, their grim report
will surely mention something sadly missed
but quite died out, alas: the unshared thought.

***

Hot Or Not

When choosing an outfit, our offspring pay heed
to the stuff that they’ve seen on their Instagram feed,
to advice from their friends, to their own inhibitions,
but not to observable weather conditions.

***

The Hardest Word

The usual English way of saying “no”
is saying “yes”, not sleeping for the next
however long in fear you’ll have to go
then pulling out courageously by text.

***

Same Difference

Determined to avoid the fate of waking up dismayed
to find that we’ve become our dad or mum,
we make ourselves the people who our kids will be afraid
of waking up to find that they’ve become.

ILLUSTRATED POEMS (Illustrations by Moose Allain)

***

***

***

***

***

All poems © Nic Aubury. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Illustrations © Moose Allain. Reprinted by permission of the illustrator.

***

LINKS

Nic Aubury regularly posts his poems on his Twitter account

Reviews of Small Talk on Sphinx Review

Reactions to Cold Soup on Goodreads

Reactions to Ignore it All and Hope it Goes Away on Goodreads

Nic Aubury discusses one of his poems with Sophie Hannah

Ignore it All and Hope it all Goes Away on the David Fickling Books site

The website of artist, cartoonist and prolific tweeter Moose Allain

The Twitter site of Moose Allain

The New European

All poems © Nic Aubury. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Illustrations © Moose Allain. Reprinted by permission of the illustrator

Dancing Feet – Brief Poems by Sir John Davies

Sir John Davies (1569 – 1626) not to be confused with his contemporaneous poet and namesake, John Davies of Hereford, was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who was appointed Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire.  He was baptised at Tisbury in Wiltshire. His father, Edward, was of Welsh descent, and his mother, Mary, came from a Wiltshire landed family. He was educated at Winchester College for four years, during which he developed an interest in literature. At the age of sixteen he attended Queen’s College, Oxford, where he stayed for just eighteen months, with most historians questioning whether he received a degree. He seems to have sown some wild oats there. As his nineteenth century biographer and editor, Alexander Grosart puts it, I fear that with the death of his lady-mother there ensued a full plunge into the frivolities and gaities of the University and Inns of Court society… He was fast of tongue and ribald of wit, with a dash of provocative sarcasm. Davies spent some time at New Inn after his departure from Oxford and it was at this point that he decided to pursue a career in law.

In 1588 he enrolled in the Middle Temple, where he did well academically, although suffering constant reprimands for his behaviour which eventually cost him his enrolment. In 1594 Davies’s poetry was admired by Queen Elizabeth who wished him to continue his study of law at the Middle Temple. In the following year, his poem, Orchestra, was published. He was called to the bar in July 1595.

In February, 1598, he was disbarred for the offence of entering the dining hall of the Inns in the company of two swordsmen and striking one Richard Martin (a noted wit who had insulted him in public) with a cudgel. Again, Grosart relates  Davies came into the Hall with his hat on, armed with a dagger, and attended by two persons with swords. Master Martin was seated at dinner at the Barristers’ Table. Davies pulling a bastinado or cudgel from under his gown, went up to his insulter and struck him repeatedly over the head. The chastisement must have been given with a will; for the bastinado was shivered to pieces—arguing either its softness or the head’s asinine thickness. Having “avenged” himself, Davies returned to the bottom of the Hall, drew one of the swords belonging to his attendants, and flourished it repeatedly over his head, turning his face towards Martin, and then hurrying down the water-steps of the Temple, threw himself into a boat.  This extraordinary occurrence happened at the close of 1597 or January of 1598. Davies retired to Oxford where he chose to write poetry, including his first significant longer poem, Nosce Teipsum (Know Thyself). In 1601 he was readmitted to the bar, having made a public apology to Martin, and in the same year served as the member of Parliament for Corfe Castle. In 1603, he was part of the deputation sent to bring King James VI of Scotland to London as the new monarch. Like Queen Elizabeth, the new king was also an admirer of Davies’s poetry, and rewarded him with a knighthood and appointments, first as Solicitor-general for Ireland and, later as the Attorney-general in Ireland. Davies was to be a central figure in the drive to ‘complete’ the conquest by the consolidation of a kingdom of Ireland, on the English model, across the island as a whole, through the extension of royal power, common law authority, and English ‘civility’.

Davies was the crown’s candidate for speaker of the commons in the Irish Parliament in 1613. After the 1605 Gunpowder plot and the Plantation of Ulster in 1613–15, the constituencies for the Irish House of Commons were changed to give Protestants a majority. While the vote for speaker was being taken, Catholic MPs, angered at what they considered to be the unjustified creation of these new parliamentary boroughs to ensure an artificial Protestant majority, placed a Catholic candidate, Sir John Everard, in the speaker’s chair. In the ensuing tussle divers knights and gentlemen of the best quality took Sir John Davies by both his arms and lifted him from the ground and placed him upon Sir John Everard’s lap. Everard was subsequently removed from the chair, prompting Catholic MPs to walk out of the commons in protest. Undeterred, Davies proceeded with his acceptance speech. That ludicrous image of the portly, corpulent, rotund and weighty English politician being hoisted by his compatriots onto the lap of an Irishman in an Irish Parliament is an apt metaphor for British colonial activity in Ireland. (Pardon my politics.)

During one of his circuits in Ireland, in March 1609, Davies married Eleanor Touchet, daughter of Lord Audley (afterwards Earl of Castlehaven). According to Grosart in his introduction to The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, Her later years were darkened with insanity of a strangely voluble type. It is to be feared she was an ill “help-meet” for her husband. This chauvinistic comment hides an intriguing tale. His wife, one of the most prolific women writing at the time, was the author of numerous pamphlets and prophecies. These writings were a source of conflict in the marriage and Davies burned a set of the prophecies that Eleanor had been writing. According to scholar Dianne Watt, she responded by dressing in widow’s weeds and predicting that he would die in less than three years. One day in December of the following year, she began to weep uncontrollably during dinner, and three days later her husband died. Three days before he died, it is related, she gave him pass to take his long sleep.

In 1626 he had been named chief justice of king’s bench in England, but on the day set for his installation (usually given as 8 December), he was found dead of apoplexy following a convivial gathering the previous evening. His funeral sermon was preached by fellow poet, John Donne, and he was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.

.

THE POETRY OF SIR JOHN DAVIES

The earliest poems for which Sir John Davies became known were his epigrams, published with other poems of his in a collection entitled Epigrammes and Elegies by J.D. and C.M containing both Davies’ work and posthumous works by Christopher Marlowe who died violently at the age of 29 in 1593. The book was reprinted twice and, despite the admiration of Queen Elizabeth, to whom he addressed his work Hymns of Astraea, was included in a list of published works that the state ordered to be confiscated and burned.

Despite his admiration for Davies, Grosart admits the epigrams have limited value. It must be conceded that the Epigrams have dashes of the roughness, even coarseness, of the age.…They self-revealingly belong to the wild-oats sowing of the Poet’s youthful period. Nevertheless, I have ventured their reproduction in integrity for four reasons:—

(a) These Epigrams, from their subjects and style, are valuable, as expressing the tone of society at the time.

(b) It would be suppressio veri to withhold them, toward an accurate estimate of their Author. They furnish elements of judgment.

(c) They were what gained the Poet ‘a name’: even when tartly spoken of by Guilpin he is called the ‘English Martial’ from them.

(d) These Epigrams belong to a section of our early Literature that contemporaneously was abundant; and it were advantageous if characteristics of particular periods were more recognised in literary criticism.

Accepting point (d) above, I include the epigrams below as an example of the style of epigram popular at the time. I prefer the Latin epigrams of Thomas Campion, the epigrams, also in Latin, of the Welsh poet, John Owen and the briefer but more incisive epigrams of Ben Jonson. The few epigrams of John Donne, who conducted the funeral service for Sir John Davies, display a far superior sense of style. While the influence of Martial is evident – point (c) above – they lack the eloquent resonance of the Latin poet. Judge for yourself.

In 1593 his poem “Orchestra, or a Poeme of Dauncing was “licensed to Iohn Harison”. The earliest known published edition is that of July, 1596 when Davies was a twenty seven year old student at the Inns of Court . The title-page of this edition is followed by a dedicatory sonnet To his very friend, Ma. Rich. Martin who, we are informed, was the first mouer and sole cause of it, and that he was the Poet’s “owne selues better halfe,” and “deerest friend.” Ironically, this is the same Richard Martin he was later to attack with a cudgel after a deadly quarrel and estrangement. (See above.) The poem, written in rhyme royal, uses dancing as a metaphor to understand the relationship between the natural order and human activity. Invoking Homer, it describes the attempts of the suitor Antinous to persuade Penelope, chaste and patient wife to the long-meandering Odysseus, to dance with him, while it details, at great length, the antiquity and universality of dancing. Although elegant and enjoyable in parts, the poem is over-extended and over written with an excess of courtly love conceits. There are, however, interesting stanzas such as this one from early in the poem

Since when, they still are carried in a round,
And changing, come one in another’s place;
Yet doe they neither mingle nor confound,
But euery one doth keepe the bounded space
Wherein the Daunce doth bid it turne or trace;
This wondrous myracle did Loue deuise,
For Dauncing is Love’s proper exercise.

and this one from later in the poem

Learne then to daunce, you that are Princes borne,
And lawfull lords of earthly creatures all;
Imitate them, and thereof take no scorne,
For this new art to them is naturall—
And imitate the starres cælestiall:
For when pale Death your vital twist shall seuer,
Your better parts must daunce, with them for euer.

There are interesting lines such as

My feet, which onely Nature taught to goe,
Did neuer yet the art of footing know.

and

For all the words that from our lips repaire
Are nought but tricks and turnings of the ayre.

The original publication was described on the title page as Not Finished. But, even with stanzas restored in a later edition, it still fails to cohere. As Grosart notes, these added stanzas show that the Poet had intended to pursue his subject further; even the hitherto omitted stanzas reading more like a fresh ‘invocation’ than a ‘conclusion.’

Theodore Roethke was an admirer. Stanley Kunitz introduced his friend to this poem by Davies. He recalls that Roethke responded to its “clear-voiced music” with “excitement and “joy” and composed a sequence entitled Four for Sir John Davies. The opening lines of Roethke’s poem contemplate the energetic cosmos depicted in Davies’s poem: “Is that dance slowing in the mind of man / That made him think the universe could hum?” Roethke sees this cosmic dance as a projection of the “mind of man,” not as a feature of the natural world. Roethke, like Davies, considers the role that the human mind plays in producing the cosmic hum. Although the ideas explored are those of Davies translated, as it were, to a twentieth century environment, the language, the syntax, the questioning mode, the sway and the cadences owe more to Yeats than to the Elizabethan poet. “I take this cadence from a man named Yeats; / I take it, and I give it back again.” If I prefer Roethke’s poem to that of Sir John Davies, it is because I see it as more polished, more concise and more musical.

T. S. Eliot was also an admirer. A essay simply entitled Sir John Davies, published in the Times Literary Supplement, (9 Dec 1926) and reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, (1957) did much to bring the Elizabethan poet to a wider audience. He begins by elevating the poet’s worth, Davies is a poet of fine lines, but he is more than that. For Eliot, the key poem is Nosce Teipsum… the plan, the versification, and the content of Nosce Teipsum are, in that age, highly original …  In a language of remarkable clarity and austerity Davies succeeds in maintaining the poem consistently on the level of poetry; he never flies to hyperbole or bombast, and he never descends, as he easily might, to the pedestrian and ludicrous. Eliot admits that the philosophy behind the poem is neither original nor profound. He also admits that Davies has not had the credit for great felicity of phrase. Yet he even goes so far as to compare him, not unfavourably, with Dante. Unfortunately, I cannot agree. While the poem is not exactly ludicrous, I do find it pedestrian and overlong.

Three Elizabethan poets had a role in establishing English colonialism in Ireland: Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir John Davies. Of the three, Davies was the most influential politically but the least accomplished poetically. He lacks the mellifluous eloquence of Spenser and the acerbic insights of Raleigh. Although Eliot praises the concision in his lines, he is not a concise poet. There are close on one hundred stanzas in Orchestra, yet Roethke can, in four poems of four stanzas apiece, deal with the issues in a more melodic and more concise fashion. There are close on five hundred stanzas in Nosce Teipsum, yet W. B. Yeats can, in Sailing to Byzantium, deal with the body and soul conundrum far more eloquently and far more concisely. (Even his longer two-part poem, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, with its wonderful line – Who can distinguish darkness from the soul? – is far more imaginative and far more emotional than the tepid stanzas of Sir John Davies.)

There is no doubting the skill that Davies brought to his poetry. In his Hymnes of Astræa in acrosticke verse (1599) a homage to Queen Elizabeth, he devised an ingenious form with two stanzas of five lines and a concluding stanza of six lines with the first letters of each line spelling ELISABETHA REGINA. To compose one of these may be ingenious, but to publish twenty-six is overkill. Davies was also an accomplished sonneteer. In his Gullinge Sonnets (1594) he was able to satirise writers of bad Elizabethan sonnets by imitating and mocking the style and substance of such sonnets. (Carol Rumens has an interesting take on one such sonnet.) However, it takes him nine sonnets to do what Shakespeare can do, with far more panache, in one, his sonnet 130. As for the epigrams (below) they are longer than would fit in to a pre-2017 tweet. They also have less bite than many epigrams of his contemporaries. But they are interesting examples of the style of the times.

JOHN DAVIES AND JOHN DAVIES

Two poets with the same name co-existed in Elizabethan England. John Davies (c. 1565– 1618), a writing-master and an Anglo-Welsh poet, referred to himself as John Davies of Hereford (after the city where he was born) in order to distinguish himself from Sir John Davies (1569–1626). John Davies of Hereford was one of the most prolific poets of his age. He maintained a successful career as a writing-master and, at Oxford, instructed scholars in the art of writing, though he was not a university scholar himself. Alhough his poems were published in some dozen large volumes, only one reached a second edition. His literary ambitions far out-stripped his talent. He later moved to London, where he mingled with gifted poets whom he addresses in great profusion in The Scourge of Folly (1611). Among these were Francis Bacon, Sir John Davies, Fulke Greville, Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, John Marston, Joseph Hall, Herbert of Cherbury, Francis Beaumont, Michael Drayton, and George Chapman. 

The Scottish scholar and clergyman, Alexander Balloch Grosart chiefly remembered for reprinting much rare Elizabethan literature, provided two-volume editions of both poets. Comparing the two, he wrote I have no thought of claiming for John Davies of Hereford the many-sided genius of Sir John Davies. The point I am alone anxious to establish is, that as having occupied himself with these lofty metaphysical-ethical problems, his intellect had affinities thereto declarative of brain whilst his poetic interpretation, if not in the large utterance of the early gods and without the grandeur of Nosce Teipsum has distinctive worth — together sufficient to vindicate the recognition I ask for him. That is no doubt a just assessment, although Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, in their anthology The School Bag, reproduced an amusing, intriguing and very readable sonnet called ‘If there were, oh! an Hellespont of cream’.

John Davies of Hereford was certainly aware of his more illustrious compatriot. He wrote a lengthy commendatory poem with this fawning salutation: Jn loue and affection of Master lohn Davies, mine approved good friend, and admiration of his excellence in the Arte of Writing. He also wrote this amusing sonnet on his namesake – To my right worthilyt-beloued Sr John Dauies Knight. Attumey generall of Ireland. (I am indebted to Shakespearean scholar Bastian Conrad for alerting me on his Twitter feed to this poem reproduced directly below.)

Brief Poems by Sir John Davies

IN QUINTUM . 

Quintus the dancer useth euermore ,
His feet in measure and in rule to moue 
Yet on a time he call’d his Mistresse, “‘whore”
And thought with that sweet word to win her loue:
Oh had his tongue like to his feet beene taught
It neuer would haue uttered such a thought.

***

IN GELLAM . 

Gella, if thou dost loue thy selfe, take heed,
Lest thou my rimes unto thy louer read;
For straight thou grin’st, and then thy louer seeth 
Thy canker-eaten gums and rotten teeth. 

***

IN FAUSTUM

“That youth,” saith Faustus, “hath a lyon seene,
Who from a dicing-house comes money-lesse ” : 
But when he lost his haire, where had he beene?
I doubt me he had seene a Lyonesse? 

***

IN DECIUM 

Audacious painters have Nine Worthies made;
But poet Decius, more audacious farre,
Making his mistris march with men of warre,
With title of “Tenth Worthy” doth her lade.
Me thinks that gull did use his tearmes as fit,
Which tearm’d his loue “a gyant for her wit.” 

***

IN HAYWODUM

Haywood, that did in Epigrams excell, 
Is now put downe since my light Muse arose; 
As buckets are put downe into a well, 
Or as a schoole-boy putteth downe his hose.

***

IN CASTOREM

Of speaking well why doe we learne the skill,
Hoping thereby honour and wealth to gaine;
Sith rayling Castor doth, by speaking ill,
Opinion of much wit and gold obtaine? 

***

IN LICUM

Lycus, which lately is to Venice gone,
Shall if he doe returne, gaine three for one:
But ten to one, his knowledge and his wit
Will not be bettered or increas’d a whit. 

***

IN DACUM

Dacus with some good colour and pretence,
Tearmes his love’s beauty “silent eloquence:”
For she doth lay more colour on her face
Than ever Tully us’d his speech to grace.

LINKS

Robert Armstrong’s biographical notes in the Dictionary of Irish Biography

The Britannica page on Sir John Davies

The Wikipedia page on Sir John Davies

The Wikipedia page on Eleanor Davies (née Touchet) the wife of Sir John Davies

The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies Volume One

The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies Volume Two

Alexander Hutchison on ‘Orchestra

T. S. Eliot essay on Sir John Davies

Four for Sir John Davies – a poem by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke reads his poem, Four for Sir John Davies

Garlands – Brief Poems by Meleager of Gadara

Meleager the poet (Μελέαγρος), not to be confused with Meleager the Greek mythological hero, lived during the first century BC (c. 140 BC.-c. 70 BC). He was born in the city of Gadara, now known as Umm Qays in modern Jordan. He was raised and educated in Tyre and, later, lived on the Aegean island of Cos where he died, it is believed at the age of seventy. He claimed to speak Greek, Syrian and Phoenician. His satirical and philosophical essays, based on the beliefs of the Greek Cynics, have not survived. However his sensual poetry, in the form of 134 epigrams, continues to find new translators and new readers. He is famous for an anthology of poetry entitled The Garland, the first anthology of epigrammatic poems written over the previous two centuries. In the preface he names all his contributors and assigns each one the name of a flower, shrub or herb –  hence the title. This work was subsumed into what has become known as The Greek Anthology.

Meleager included his own poems in the anthology. These are primarily erotic epigrams, often written in the first person, dealing with his own experience and emotion. Most of the experiences and much of the emotion derives from the difficulties and distractions of love, sometimes concerning a woman, sometimes concerning a young boy. These brief poems are neatly constructed in a strict metre with a tone varying from the affectionate to the cynical and a language, at times simple, and at times imbued with the traditional imagery of bows, torches, cupids, thunderbolts, honey, light flowers and insects (in one epigram he asks a mosquito to be the messenger to his unfaithful beloved). His poems influenced he epigrammatic tradition which flourished during the Roman Empire and they continue to be translated today. In the 1830’s, J. H. Merivale, in an edition of The Greek Anthology, wrote of Meleager that “as a … composer of epigrams he was very far superior” to the authors he included in The Garland. Some 140 years later, scholar and translator Peter Jay stated, Meleager’s poetic authenticity lies in the mastery of every aspect of his medium.

TRANSLATING MELEAGER

The epigrams of Meleager have been extensively rendered in English and continue to inspire translations. Walter Headlam brought out Fifty Poems of Meleager (1890); W. R Paton translated them in The Greek Anthology (1916); Richard Aldington translated 128 of them in The Poems of Meleager of Gadara (1920): F. A. Wright translated The Complete Poems of Meleager of Gadara (1924); Peter Whigham produced verse translations of the poems along with prose translations by Peter Jay in The Poems of Meleager (1975); Baron Frederick Corvo (aka Frederick Rolfe) produced The Songs of Meleager (1984). However all the translations below are taken from one source: Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology edited by Daryl Hine (Princeton University Press, 2001) which translates most of the twelfth book of The Greek Anthology. That book, the so-called Musa Puerilis, is given its first complete verse version in English by the Canadian-born poet. Richard Howard had this to say of these translations: Daryl Hine’s translations from The Greek Anthology are the liveliest, frequently loveliest, and certainly the most libidinous versions of these celebrated texts that I’ve ever seen. I know from years of teaching that American students, even of the Classics, are quite vague about what The Greek Anthology was really like—particularly the salacious aspect of those poems. Hine alone gives a fair (or is that foul) sample.

DARYL HINE

Daryl Hine (1936 – 2012), a Canadian poet and translator, was born in Burnaby and grew up in New Westminster, British Columbia. Having attended McGill University in Montreal, he then went to Europe on a Canada Council scholarship, where he lived for three years. He moved to New York in 1962 and to Chicago in 1963 where he taught courses in poetry and comparative literature at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He was the editor of Poetry from 1968 to 1978. Hine was a highly regarded translator of classical writers such as Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, among others. His translation of Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns (2005) won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He was also  the recipient of a Canada Foundation-Rockefeller fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy and Institution of Arts and Letters Award and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He was the author of fifteen books of poetry and six works of verse translation. Following the death of his partner of more than 30 years, the philosopher Samuel Todes, Hine lived in semi-retirement in Evanston, Illinois. In 2012 Daryl Hine died of complications of a blood disorder at the age of 76.

 

Brief Poems by Meleager of Gadara

TRANSLATED BY DARYL HINE

Ἠγρεύθην ὁ πρόσθεν ἐγώ ποτε τοῖς δυσέρωσι 
κώμοις ἠιθέων πολλάκις ἐγγελάσας: 
καὶ μ᾽ ἐπὶ σοῖς ὁ πτανὸς Ἔρως προθύροισι, Μυΐσκε, 
στῆσεν ἐπιγράψας ‘ σκῦλ᾽ ἀπὸ Σωφροσύνης.’

I used to laugh at young men who were not 
Successful in their wooing. Now I’m caught; 
Myiscus, on your gate winged Love has placed 
Me, labelled as, “A Trophy of the Chaste.” 

***

ἦν καλὸς Ἡράκλειτος, ὅτ᾽ ἦν ποτε: νῦν δὲ παρ᾽ ἥβην 
κηρύσσει πόλεμον δέρρις ὀπισθοβάταις. 
ἀλλά, Πολυξενίδη, τάδ᾽ ὁρῶν, μὴ γαῦρα φρυάσσου: 
ἔστι καὶ ἐν γλουτοῖς φυομένη Νέμεσις.

A peach was Heraclitus when — don’t scoff! — 
Still Heraclitus; now he’s past his prime 
His hairy hide puts all assailants off. 
On your cheeks too the curse will come in time. 

***

οὐκέτι μοι Θήρων γράφεται καλός, οὐδ᾽ ὁ πυραυγὴς 
πρίν ποτε, νῦν δ᾽ ἤδη δαλός, Ἀπολλόδοτος. 
στέργω θῆλυν ἔρωτα: δασυτρώγλων δὲ πίεσμα 
λασταύρων μελέτω ποιμέσιν αἰγοβάταις.

No, Theron’s beauty does no longer please 
Me, nor Apollodotus’ burnt-out charms. 
I like cunt. Let bestial goatherds squeeze 
Their hairy little bumboys in their arms! 

***

κεῖμαι: λὰξ ἐπίβαινε κατ᾽ αὐχένος, ἄγριε δαῖμον. 
οἶδά σε, ναὶ μὰ θεούς, καὶ ^ βαρὺν ὄντα φέρειν 
οἶδα καὶ ἔμπυρα τόξα. βαλὼν δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐμὴν φρένα πυρσούς, 
οὐ φλέξεις: ἤδη πᾶσα γάρ ἐστι τέφρη.

Yes, kick me when I’m down, you spiteful sprite! 
I feel your weight, I feel your fiery dart. 
But if you try to set fire to my heart, 
You can’t: it is incinerated quite. 

***

ἢν ἐνίδω Θήρωνα, τὰ πάνθ᾽ ὁρῶ: ἢν δὲ τὰ πάντα 
βλέψω, τόνδε δὲ μή, τἄμπαλιν οὐδὲν ὁρῶ.

When I see Thero I see everything; 
But when he’s absent I can’t see a thing. 

***

ἤν τι πάθω, Κλεόβουλε, ῾τὸ γὰρ πλέον ἐν πυρὶ παίδων 
βαλλόμενος κεῖμαι λείψανον ἐν σποδιῇ:᾿ 
λίσσομαι, ἀκρήτῳ μέθυσον, πρὶν ὑπὸ χθόνα θέσθαι, 
κάλπιν, ἐπιγράψας ‘ δῶρον Ἔρως Ἀίδῃ.’

If, Cleobulus, I should expire 
Being cast on the juvenile pyre, 
As to ashes I burn 
Sprinkle wine on my urn 
And inscribe it, “ To Death from Desire.” 

***

εἰ μὴ τόξον Ἔρως, μηδὲ πτερά, μηδὲ φαρέτραν,
μηδὲ πυριβλήτους εἶχε πόθων ἀκίδας,
οὐκ, αὐτὸν τὸν πτανὸν ἐπόμνυμαι, οὔποτ᾽ ἂν ἔγνως
ἐκ μορφᾶς τίς ἔφυ Ζωίλος ἢ τίς Ἔρως.

If Cupid had no bow, no wings, and no 
Quiver filled with fiery arrows of 
Desire, by looks alone you’d never know 
Zoilus from the winged god of love. 

***

ἁ Κύπρις θήλεια γυναικομανῆ] φλόγα βάλλει: 
ἄρσενα δ᾽ αὐτὸς Ἔρως ἵμερον ἁνιοχεῖ. 
ποῖ ῥέψω; ποτὶ παῖδ᾽ ἢ ματέρα; φαμὶ δὲ καὐτὰν 
Κύπριν ἐρεῖν: ‘νικᾷ τὸ θρασὺ παιδάριον

Lady Venus generates our lust 
For females; Cupid pricks desire for males. 
Which shall I turn to? Even Venus must 
Admit her cheeky little brat prevails. 

***

ἠοῦς ἄγγελε, χαῖρε, Φαεσφόρε, καὶ ταχὺς ἔλθοις 
ἕσπερος, ἣν ἀπάγεις, λάθριος αὖθις ἄγων.

Hail, morning star, fair messenger of dawn! 
As evening star, bring back the sweet cheat gone. 

***

Κύπρις ἐμοὶ ναύκληρος, Ἔρως δ᾽ οἴακα φυλάσσει 
ἄκρον ἔχων ψυχῆς ἐν χερὶ πηδάλιον 
χειμαίνει δ᾽ ὁ βαρὺς πνεύσας Πόθος, οὕνεκα δὴ νῦν 
παμφύλῳ παίδων νήχομαι ἐν πελάγει.

My skipper’s Venus, Cupid mans the helm, 
Holding my spirit’s rudder in his hand; 
Desire blows hard enough to overwhelm 
Me, breasting a sea of boys from every land. 

***

χειμέριον μὲν πνεῦμα: φέρει δ᾽ ἐπὶ σοί με, Μυΐσκε, 
ἁρπαστὸν κώμοις ὁ γλυκύδακρυς Ἔρως. 
χειμαίνει δὲ βαρὺς πνεύσας Πόθος, ἀλλὰ μ᾽ ἐς ὅρμον 
δέξαι, τὸν ναύτην Κύπριδος ἐν πελάγει.

Myiscus, despite this wintry wind I’m swept 
Away by Love’s sweet tears to pay you court. 
Desire is like a hurricane. Accept 
This loving mariner into your port. 

 

LINKS

All of the epigrams of Meleager in a prose translation by W. R. Paton.

Ten of the poems translated by Thomas McEvilley.

A large selection of the poems in the original Greek from Maleager: The Poems edited by Jerry Clack.

The Poems of Maleager: Verse Translations by Peter Whigham; Introduction and literal translations by Peter Jay.

Full text of Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology Translated by Daryl Hine.

A review of Puerilities by Otto Steinmayer.

The Canadian Encyclopaedia page on Daryl Hine.

Vintage Wine – Brief poems by Thomas Campion

Thomas Campion (1567-1620) was born in London in 1567 “upon Ash Wednesday, and christened at St. Andrews Church in Holbourne.” His father John was a clerk of the Court of Chancery and a vestryman of St. Andrew’s. He died in 1576 and the sum of £50 was spent on his funeral. The following year Thomas’s mother, Lucy, remarried. In 1580 she, too, died. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, he was sent by his stepfather to Peterhouse as a “gentleman pensioner” and at seventeen he left Cambridge University without taking a degree. A year later he entered Gray’s Inn; it is presumed to follow in his father’s profession. However, there is no evidence of his ever practising law. (His distaste for the profession is evident in his Latin epigrams.)  At Gray’s Inn he made many artistic friends and performed in plays and masques.

By 1597 Campion had associated with the chief players in the development of the English lute song. He contributed a dedicatory poem to John Dowland’s  First Book of Songs or Ayres. This was Dowland’s first collection and also the first English publication in a new genre. Along with  Dowland (ca. 1563-1626), Campion was one of the most prolific composers of English lute songs, or Ayres. Unlike most composers of songs, he wrote all of the poems he set to music himself. In 1601 he was significantly involved in the publication of Philip Rosseter’s Book of Ayres. By 1604 Rosseter was the king’s lutenist and remained active in court entertainment throughout most of King James’s reign. He was Campion’s best friend. Their book was presented for publication by Rosseter, and it was he who wrote the dedication to Campion’s friend and supporter Sir Thomas Monson, but Campion contributed the first twenty-one songs and is almost certainly the author of the brief but groundbreaking treatise on song presented as an address “To the Reader.”

Further biographical details are scant. On 10 February 1605, Thomas Campion received his medical degree from the University of Caen. While in France, he may have participated in the siege of Rouen with Lord Essex in 1591. He returned to London where he began practicing as a doctor at the age of forty. The most dramatic event of his life was his involvement in the death in the Tower of London of Sir Thomas Overbury. Campion confessed to having received the sum of £1,400 as an intermediary for his patron, Sir Thomas Monson. However, it was accepted that he was unaware “for what consideration it was paid” and he was exonerated.

Campion is thought to have lived in London until his death, at the age of fifty-three, on March 1st, 1620.  He is reputed to have been treating the sick during the outbreak of the plague. He was apparently unmarried and had no children. He was buried the same day at St Dunstan-in-the-West in Fleet Street. His will, made on the day of his death, bequeathed “all that he had” to his friend, the lutenist, Philip Rosseter, with whom he had produced his first Booke Of Ayres in 1601. He “wished that his estate had bin farr more.” It amounted to £22.

 

THOMAS CAMPION ON PROSODY AND RHYME

There are constant battles among poets and critics over what is proper and poetic in matters of prosody. An intriguing recent book by James Matthew Wilson,  The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking, looks at such matters in contemporary American poetry. In Campion’s time the question of prosody and rhyme became pertinent. Various Elizabethan writers had addressed the problem – Ascham, Gascoigne, Harvey, Spenser, Sidney and, in 1602, Thomas Campion in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie “wherein it is demonstratively prooved, and by example confirmed, that the English toong will receive eight severall kind of numbers, proper to it selfe, which are all in this booke set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted.” While others had shown that English poetry could stand on its own feet (pardon the pun) Campion sought to revive “classical numbers” or a quantitative versification where the syllables are arranged according to their length and duration rather than according to accent or stress, as was common in the poetry of his contemporaries. The practice of writing in Latin, as well as his musical interests, had, no doubt, coloured his views of how to arrange his words metrically.

His views on rhyme were also controversial at the time, although John Milton, at a later time, would endorse them in his own fashion, and they would meet with much greater agreement today. Campion believed rhyme to be a rhetorical figure which ought “sparingly to be used, lest it should offend the ear with tedious affectation.” He argued that the search for rhyming words “enforceth a man oftentimes to abjure his matter and extend a short conceit beyond all bounds of art.” These views, allied to his attempts to blend English poetry with classical metrics, led Samuel Daniel, in 1603, to compose his reply, A Defence of Rhyme.

I side with Daniel.

 

THE LATIN EPIGRAMS OF THOMAS CAMPION

In common wth many poets of his age, (see my post on the brief poems of John Owen) Campion wrote Latin epigrams. These enjoyed an enormous vogue in Elizabethan times. He wrote almost 500 of the brief poems. His 1595 collection, Poemata,  contained 129 epigrams. A second edition of his poetry in 1619 consisted of two books of epigrams: the first book consisted of 225 new epigrams; the second book consisted of 228 epigrams of which almost a hundred were reprinted, some with revision, from the earlier book. (The 1595 edition was printed by Richard Field of Stratford-on-Avon, who also printed Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, the 1619 one by E. Griffin.)

Campion defined the epigram in the preface to his A Book of Ayres (1601): What Epigrams are in Poetrie, the same are Ayres in musicke, then in their chiefe perfection when they are short and well seasoned.  The seasoning he mentions in one epigram (see Epigram 1.34 below) is pepper. The influence of Catullus and Martial is acknowledged. Their subject matter includes lusus…mollis…iocos…levis (pleasant mockery, lighthearted joking). Campion’s approach is light-hearted as he explains, I haur written diuers light Poemes in this kinde which, for the better satisfaction of the reader I thought conuenient here in way of example to publish. They were popular in his day. In 1598 Francis Meres placed him among those who have attained good report and honourable advancement in the Latin empyre.  His friend, Charles Fitzgeffrey, considered him second only to Sir Thomas More as an English writer of Latin epigrams. However, in 1595, William Covell, while praising the epigrams, disliked their extreme licentiousness.

They are still worth reading today.

 

TRANSLATING THE EPIGRAMS OF THOMAS CAMPION

I have not been able to discover many translations of the epigrams so I took the liberty of translating them myself. I took other liberties too. These translations differ in three major respects from the originals.

Metrics: While Campion used classical metrics in his Latin poems, I have confined myself to the classic English couplet using iambic pentameters.

Rhyme: While Campion disdained rhyme, as mentioned above, I have used it throughout these translations.

Proper nouns: While Campion uses common Roman names, I have used contemporary Christian names.

Forgive me.

Brief Poems by Thomas Campion

TRANSLATIONS BY CONOR KELLY

From The First Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams

8  IN VILLUM 

Discursus cur te bibulum iam musaque fallit?
Humectas mentis lampada, Ville, nimis.

To Vincent

Good talk, good verse elude you when you’re pissed.
And why? It is your lightning mind you’ve dissed.

***

10. IN MATHONEM

Ebrius uxorem duxit Matho, sobrius horret,
Eui nunc in sola est ebrietate salus.

About Matthew

When he was drunk, Matthew married with speed.
Sober, he saw his wife; now drink’s his need.

***

40. DE HENRICO 4 FRANCORUM REGE 

Henricum gladio qui non occidere posset,
Cultello potuit: parva timere bonum est.

On Henry IV, King of France

He who could not kill the king with a sword
Used a dagger. Small things have their own reward.

(Ravaillac assassinated Henri IV in 1610. Campion writes about this event at greater length at de Pulverea Coniuratione.)

***

51. IN TABACCAM 

Cum cerebro inducat fumo hausta tabacca stuporem,
Nonne putem stupidos quos vapor iste capit?

On Marijuana

Since dope induces stupor in the brain
Can I not call these dopeheads dumb, insane?

***

63. AD LAURAM 

Egregie canis, in solis sed, Laura, tenebris;
Nil bene fortassis non facis in tenebris.

To Laura

You sing with beauty, Laura, in the dark.
You have another aura in the dark.

***

74. DE SENECTUTE 

Est instar vini generosi docta senectus;
Quo magis annosa est, acrior esse solet.

On Old Age

Old age is like those famous vintage wines
that turn to Vinegar. Age has its signs.

***

113. AD PONTICUM 

Suspecto quid fure canes cum, Pontice, latrent
Dixissent melius, si potuere loqui?

To Pat

Dogs bark, Pat, when they think someone’s a thief.
What could they say of you, if they could speak?

***

139. IN POETASTROS 

Sulphure vicenda est prurigo poetica nullo;
Sed neque Mercurio, quem fugat illa deum.

On an Amateur Poet

Neither sulphur nor mercury can cure
Your wild poetic itch. It is impure.

(Mercury was already employed as a supposed remedy for syphilis, especially by Paracelsus and his followers.)

***

149. AD ARETHUSAM

Cernitur in nivea cito, si fit, sindone labes;
Formosis eadem lex, Arethusa, datur.

To Arianna

A stain on fine white linen is quite plain.
The same is true of women. Be not vain.

***

159. AD EURUM

Qui compotorem sibimet proponit amicum,
Compos propositi non erit, Eure, sui.

To Eugene

To think the man you drink with is a friend,
Eugene, is folly you should apprehend.

***

183. IN GAURUM

Perpetuo loqueris, nec desinis; idque molestum
Omnibus est, et scis; sed tibi, Gaure, places.

To Gar

You’re always talking, Gar, you never stop.
It bothers others, but it is your prop.

***

206. IN HEBRAM

Difficilis non est, nec amantem respuit unum;
Unum vero unum vix amat Hebra diem.

About Hermione

She never turns a single man away.
She loves them all, but hardly for a day.

***

209. AD PHILOCHERMUM

Quaeris tu quare tibi musica nulla placeret;
Quaero ego, cur nulli tu, Philocherme, places?

To Phil

You wonder why no music pleases you.
Do you please someone, Phil? I wonder who.

***

221. AD MARIANUM 

Prudens pharmacopola saepe vendit
Quid pro quo, Mariane, quod reprendis. 
Hoc tu sed facis, oenopola, semper.

To a Patient

A careful chemist sometimes cures your ills,
But a wine-merchant’s produce beats all pills.

 

From The Second Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams

65A. IN COTTUS

Ille miser Cottus quid agit nisi cassa canendo
Ut placeat nulli dum placet ipse sibi?

About Conor

What can poor Conor do but sing in vain.
Who is there, but himself, to entertain?

***

82. AD CASPIAM

Nescio quid aure dum susurras, Caspia,
Latus sinistrum intabuit totum mihi.

To Cameron

What you whisper in my ear is so dumb
the left side of my body has grown numb.

***

129. IN GELLAM

Tactam te ad vivum sed nunquam, Galla, fateris,
Vah, quota pars carnis mortua, Galla, tuae est!

About Julie

Julie, you claim that you’ve never been laid.
Part of your body has thereby decayed.

***

180. IN MARCELLINAM

Larvas Marcellina horret, lemuresque, sed illa
Nil timet in tenebris si comitata viro est.

About Marcella

Marcella fears ghosts, goblins and the night;
but when she’s with a man, she’s not uptight.

***

208. IN LIBRARIOS

Impressionum plurium librum laudat
Librarius; scortum nec non minus leno.

On Booksellers

Booksellers praise books for new editions
as pimps praise whores for new positions.

***

220. IN LIGONEM

Funerea vix conspicimus sine veste Ligonem:
An quia tam crebri funeris author erat?

About Lawrence

Lawrence, the doctor, often wears black clothes.
Is it because his patients now repose?

 

OTHER TRANSLATIONS BY STEPHEN RATCLIFFE

From The First Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams

34. DE EPIGRAMMATE

Sicut ex acre piper mordax epigramma palato
Non omni gratum est: utile nemo negat.

Concerning the epigram

Like sharp pepper, the epigram refuses
To please all palates: none deny its uses.

***

58. IN NERVAM

Dissecto Nervae capite, haud (chirurge) cerebrum
Conspicis; eia, alibi quaere; ubi? Ventriculo.

On Nerve

Nerve’s head dissected (Surgeon) seems to lack
A brain; so look again; where? his stomach.

***

95. IN MORACHUM

Mors nox perpetua est; mori proinde
Non suadet sibi nyctalops Morachus,
In solis titubans ne eat tenebris.

On Morachus

Death is perpetual night; half blind
Morachus is thus disinclined
To die, in lonely shadows twined.

(The first words of this epigram of course echo Catullus v.6, nox est perpetua una dormienda. The first song in A Booke of Ayres (1601) is an expanded translation of this poem.)

***
97. DE FRANISCO DRACO

Nomine Dracus erat signatus ut incolat undas;
Dracum namque anatem lingua Britanna vocat.

Concerning Francis Drake

By name inhabitant of oceans, Drake:
Because a duck in English is a drake.

***

131. AD CHLOEN

Mortales tua forma quod misellos
Multos illaqueet, Chloe, superbis:
Hoc sed nomine carnifex triumphet.

To Chloe

Chloe, for your beauty’s pride
Many wretched men have died;
Hangman be now satisfied.

***

From The Second Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams

18. TO MELLEA

Anxia dum natura nimis tibi, Mellea, formam
Finxit, fidem oblita est dare.

On Mella

While nature – anxious – made Mella too
Beautiful, She forgot to make her true.

***

(These translations – first published in Poetry magazine May 1977)

 

ANOTHER TRANSLATION BY RAYMOND OLIVER

From The Second Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams

93. IN BRETONEM

Carmine defunctum, Breto, caute inducis Amorem;
Nam numeris nunquam viveret ille tuis.

On (Nicholas) Breton

You truly write of Love “killed by a song”.
(Love, in your verse, could not have lived for long.)

 

 

LINKS

Thomas Campion’s Latin Poetry.

The First Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams (Latin).

The First Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams (English Translations).

The Second Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams (Latin).

The Second Book of Thomas Campion’s Epigrams (English Translations).

A large selection of Thomas Campion’s poems, masques and criticism.

Extracts from The Latin Poetry of English Poets by J. W. Binns.

The Poetry Foundation page on Thomas Campion.

 

Flushed Words – Brief Poems by Sir John Harington

Sir John Harington  (1560 – 1612) of Kelston was an English courtier, author and translator popularly known as the inventor of the flush toilet. Harington’s father enriched the family by marrying an illegitimate daughter of King Henry VIII; his second wife, and John’s mother, was a gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber of Queen Elizabeth I, who stood as godmother for John. The young man was educated at Eton, Cambridge, and Lincoln’s Inn, London. He became a prominent member of Queen Elizabeth I’s court, and was known as her “saucy Godson”. But because of his poetry and other writings, he fell in and out of favour with the Queen. For translating and circulating among the ladies a wanton tale from the 16th-century Italian poet Ariosto, he was banished from court until he should translate the whole of Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso. As it is 38,736 lines long, one of the longest poems in European literature, Queen Elizabeth thought she was rid of him. Much to everyone’s surprise, he returned in 1591 with the entire epic translated into English. He was praised, first for completing the task, and then for the quality of his translation which is still read and still popular today. As he complied with the queen’s command, he was back in good standing in the royal court.

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603. During what would prove to be the her last Christmas, he tried to lighten her increasingly frequent moods of melancholy by reading her some of his comic verses. The Queen thanked him for his efforts but said sadly: “When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries shall please thee less – I am past relish for such matters.”  She was succeeded by James VI of Scotland who claimed the English throne as James I of England. Harington was not as successful in the court of her successor. His cousin, Sir Griffin Markham, had become involved in 1603 in two plots to kidnap or depose James I. This led to his being arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. His execution was waived in return for a massive fine of £4000 and exile. Markham left for exile in Europe and his cousin, Sir John Harington was stuck with paying his fine. He could not pay the fine without selling his own property, which he did not want to do. He escaped custody in October of 1603, but James I had already created him a Knight of the Bath in recognition of his loyalty to the English throne, and also transferred all of cousin Markham’s property to him, so Harington once again managed to stay out of trouble. He  later became the tutor to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, the older son of King James and Anne of Denmark.

Sir John Harington  fell ill in May 1612 and died on 20 November 1612, at the age of 52, soon after the death of his pupil Henry Frederick who died of typhoid fever at the age of 18.  He was buried in Kelston.

 

FLUSHED TURDS

Sir John Harington has become historically associated with the invention of Britain’s first flushing toilet. It involved flushing with water from a cistern and utilised a stopper that prevented smells from rising from the storage below. He called it the Ajax (i.e., a “jakes“,  being an old slang word for toilet; the American slang term “john” is thought by some to be a reference to its inventor). He installed one at his manor in Kelston. In 1596, Harington wrote a book called A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax about his invention.He published it under the pseudonym of Misacmos (translated as hater of filthiness). This was the pseudonym he also used for his epigrams. (See FLUSHED WORDS below). The book made political allusions to the Earl of Leicester that angered the Queen. It was a coded attack on the stercus or excrement that was poisoning society with torture and state-sponsored “libels” against his relatives Thomas Markham and Ralph Sheldon. According to his biographer, D. H. Craig, “readers were to be repelled initially by all the talk of urine and ordure but then reminded that vice (however painted and perfumed) was a far more serious offense against moral sensibilities.” Filled with characters drawn from family and friends along with veiled representations of his enemies, the work also makes common use of biblical characters and classical writers. Many considered the whole subject a breach of common decency, and Harington had difficulty finding a printer. Eventually, Richard Field agreed to serve as the publisher, and it was released in 1596. After publication, Harington was banished from the court. The Queen’s mixed feelings for him may have been the only thing that saved him from being tried at Star Chamber. The work itself enjoyed considerable popularity on its publication.

Eventually Queen Elizabeth forgave him, and visited his house at Kelston in 1592. Harrington proudly showed off his new invention, and the Queen herself tried it out. She was so impressed it seems, that she ordered one for herself,  installing Harington’s “water closet” in Richmond Palace, making it the first indoor plumbing of its type. Her enthusiasm did not last. She may not have been impressed by Harington’s invention, but then, like other rich people, she did not have to empty her own close-stool.

Before his invention, the public was used to the chamber pot. These were usually emptied from an upstairs window into the street below, and in
France, the cry ‘gardez-l’eau‘ gave warning to the people below to take evasive action. This phrase may have been the origin of the English nickname for the toilet, the ‘loo’. Wealthy households might have a close-stool, which had a padded seat with a metal or porcelain container beneath it. But it still had to be emptied. Harington’s  water-closet had a pan with an opening at the bottom, sealed with a leather -faced valve. A system of handles, levers and weights poured in water from a cistern, and opened the valve. There was a picture of it in his book (see the image on the right) and he proclaimed that it ‘would make unsavoury Places sweet, noisome Places wholesome and filthy Places cleanly’. His flush toilet did not catch on and serious improvement of toilets in England had to wait for the 18th century and the coming of the S-bend.

 

 

FLUSHED WORDS

Sir John Harington’s family were old friends of Queen Elizabeth and the queen was Harington’s godmother. She seems to have been fond of him, but he was often in trouble for circulating lewd verses and translations among the court ladies. His attempt at a translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso caused his banishment from Queen Elizabeth’s court for some years. Angered by its racy content, the Queen told Harington that he was to leave and not return until he had translated the entire poem. She chose this punishment rather than actually banishing him, but she considered the task so difficult that it was assumed Harington would not bother to comply. He, however, chose to follow through with the request and completed the translation in 1591. That translation received great praise, and is still read by English speakers today. The more than 30,000 lines of Orlando Furioso took at least five years to compose and set to print.

It took him over ten years to compose and circulate more than four hundred epigrams, organised into four books, a brief selection of which I have included below. The influence of Martial is evident. Not only has he translated the Latin poet (see the Brief Poems post on Martial) but some of the poems below are virtual copies of Martial originals. During his lifetime, the Epigrams, written under his pseudonym, ‘Misacmos’, meaning ‘a hater of filthiness’, had the widest manuscript circulation among his contemporaries. Copies of individual epigrams or groups of them, evidently circulated within the Court, within the Inns of Court, and elsewhere, and they were frequently recopied in 17th-century miscellanies. Harington made numerous revisions when preparing fair copies of large numbers of epigrams from his ‘scatterd papers’, and it was revised versions that were posthumously published in 1615 and 1618. Some eighty or more epigrams found in his own manuscript collections were not published until the twentieth century. I have taken some limited liberties with the text and modernised the spelling.

 

Brief Poems by Sir John Harington

Against writers that carp at other men’s books 

The readers, and the hearers like my books,
But yet some writers cannot them digest.
But what care I? For when I make a feast,
I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks.

***

Of writing with a double meaning 

A certain man was to a judge complaining,
How one had written with a double meaning.
Fool, said the judge, no man deserveth trouble,
For double meaning, so he deal not double.

***

The author, of his own fortune 

Take fortune as it falls, as one adviseth:
Yet Heywood bids me take it as it riseth:
And while I think to do as both do teach,
It falls and riseth quite beside my reach.

***

Misacmos against his book

The writer and the matter well might meet,
Were he as eloquent, as it is sweet.

***

To Faustus 

Faustus finds fault, my epigrams are short,
Because to read them, he doth make some sport:
I thank thee, Faustus, though thou judgest wrong,
Ere long I’ll make thee swear they be too long.

***

Of mis-conceiving

Ladies you blame my verses of scurrility,
While with the double sense you were deceived.
Now you confess them free from incivility,
Take heed henceforth you be not misconceived.

***

Of plain dealing

My writings oft displease you: what’s the matter?
You love not to hear truth, nor I to flatter.

***

Against Itis a poet

Itis with leaden sword doth wound my Muse,
Itis whose Muse in uncouth terms doth swagger,
What should I wish Itis for this abuse,
But to his leaden sword, a wooden dagger.

***

Of reversing an error 

I did you wrong, at least you did suppose,
For taxing certain faults of yours in prose:
But now I have the same in rhyme rehearsed,
My error, nay your error is reversed.

***

To an ill reader

The verses, Sextus, thou dost read, are mine;
But with bad reading thou wilt make them thine.

 

In lectorem inuidum 

Who reads our verse, with visage sour and grim,
I wish him envy me, none envy him.

****

Of treason 

Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

***

A rule to play

Lay down your stake at play, lay down your passion:
A greedy gamester still hath some mis-hap.
To chafe at luck proceeds of foolish fashion.
No man throws still the dice in fortune’s lap.

***

Of a fair shrew 

Faire, rich, and young? How rare is her perfection,
Were it not mingled with one foul infection?
I mean, so proud a heart, so cursed a tongue,
As makes her seem, nor faire, nor rich, nor young.

***

Of Cinna 

Five years hath Cinna studied Genesis,
And knows not yet what in Principio is ;
And grieved that he is gravelled thus, he skips,
O’er all the Bible, to th’ Apocalypse.

***

Of Friendship 

New friends are no friends; how can that be true?
The oldest friends that are, were sometimes new.

***

Of Fortune

Fortune, men say, doth give too much to many:
But yet she never gave enough to any.

***

In Philautum

Your verses please your reader oft, you vaunt it:
If you your self do read them oft, I grant it.

***

To an old bachelor 

You praise all women: well, let you alone,
Who speaks so well of all, think well of none.

***

Of Sextus’ s wit 

To have good wit is Sextus thought by many;
But sure he hides it all; he shows not any.

***

Of Lynus

Poor Lynus ‘plains that I of late forget him,
And says he’ll be my guest if I will let him.
But I so liked him last time I met him
That he be sure do all I can to let him.

 

LINKS

Full text of Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, together with Prayse of Private Life.

An account of Sir John Harington and his invention on the Toilet Guru site.

The Wikipedia page on Sir John Harington.

Biographical details on the NNDB site.

Further biographical details by Gerard Kilroy.

Even further biographical details on the Your Dictionary site.

 

 

Mists and Wisps – Brief Poems by Hildebrand Jacob

by Jacobus Houbraken, after George Knapton, line engraving, 1735

Hildebrand Jacob (1693–1739) was a British poet and playwright, whose major works include the epic poem Brutus the Trojan and the tragic verse drama The Fatal Constancy. His collected works were published in 1735. His father was Sir John Jacob, third baronet of Bromley, Middlesex (c.1665–1740) and his mother was Dorothy (c.1662–1749). Sir John served in the army from 1685 to 1702, seeing action at the Battle of Killiecrankie and in Ireland. Hildebrand Jacob was named after his mother’s brother, Hildebrand Alington, fourth lord Alington (d. 1722). During 1728 and 1729 he visited Paris, Vienna, and the chief towns of Italy. Following his father, Hildebrand served in the army until at least 1715, then in 1717 he married Meriel, daughter of another baronet, Sir John Bland of Kippax-Park, Yorkshire. They had a son, also Hildebrand, and a daughter, Anne. They made their home at West Wratting, Cambridgeshire. He died, in the lifetime of his father, on 25 May 1739.

Jacob published anonymously in 1720–1 a clever but indelicate poem, ‘The Curious Maid,’ which was frequently imitated and parodied. ‘The Fatal Constancy,’ a tragedy, acted five times at Drury Lane, was published in 1723. ‘Bedlam: a Poem,’ and ‘Chiron to Achilles: a Poem,’ appeared in 1732.  His scattered writings were collected, with large additions, in 1735 as ‘The Works of Hildebrand Jacob, Esq., containing Poems on various Subjects and Occasions, with the “Fatal Constancy,” a Tragedy, and several Pieces in Prose. The greatest Part never before publish’d.’ In the dedicatory epistle to James, earl of Waldegrave, ambassador extraordinary at the court of France, Jacob states that he published the book because incorrect copies had been circulated, and because he wished to convince his friends that he was not the author of ‘some, perhaps, less pardonable Productions that were laid to my charge here at home while I had the advantage of living under your Lordship’s protection abroad.’  In the essay, ‘How the Mind is rais’d to the Sublime,’ Jacob shows himself to have been an enthusiastic admirer of Milton. The National Portrait Gallery in London has an engraving of him by Jacobus Houbraken after George Knapton (see image above).

 

 

 

MISTS AND WISPS

“The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.” That was Yeats commenting on his companions, other poets, in the Rhymers’ Club. While Yeats has survived, most of his companions are now forgotten. It was ever thus. Like most poets, Hildebrand Jacob has disappeared into the mists of time. There is no mention of him in the more than one thousand pages of Margaret Drabble’s The Oxford Companion to English Literature and he has no representation, either, in the six volumes of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. Like a wisp, the odd poem comes out of the mist. I first encountered his work in a couplet (epigram XV below) included in The Faber Book of Comic Verse, edited by Michael Roberts. Slightly intrigued I searched for further epigrams and found them in The Works of Hildebrand Jacob, Esq. (W. Lewis, 1735). These epigrams may lack the classicism of Ben Jonson, the balance of John Donne, the power of Alexander Pope or the imaginative scope of William Blake. But, in their old-fashioned wit, they may repay a second, even a third reading. I have included the briefest and the best of the thirty-four epigrams below.

 

Brief Poems by Hildebrand Jacob

Epigram I

O Love! what pains do I endure?
Have patience, Swain, they’ll soon be passed,
Your very passion brings its cure,
Since all philosophers assure,
Nothing that’s violent, can last.

Epigram IV

Corinna dies for grief; but still
She frets, her weeds are made so ill.

Epigram VII

Phillis, I a plot discover!
You have taken a new lover:
For his comfort I can tell,
Let him use you ne’er so well,
You will change him for another.

Epigram VIII

Collin, for love expiring, cries,
To see the Nymph, before he dies.
She went in pity, ’tis confessed
She went; but decked in all her best.

Epigram XV

Titus reads neither prose, nor rhyme,
He writes himself; he has no time.

Epigram XVII

Hamor in six months time, no more,
Has almost travelled Europe o’er:
Hamor must be changed, no doubt?
No; he’s come home, as he went out.

Epigram XX

Why weary of a single Life?
I would advise you, Charles, to stay,
Friend Limber married th’ other day;
You like his table, and his wife.

Epigram XXV

Sly keeps a mistress of his own.
You jest, she’s kept for half the town.

Epigram XXVI

Geron at four score married! ’tis too late.
No; but he wants an heir to his estate.

Epigram XXVII

Why all this stir at Myra’s house?
She took last night a second spouse.
Then why that hatchment, Friend, I pray?
Her first was buried but today.

Epigram XXXII

‘Tis strange, Prudilla, you accuse
Of too much warmth my wanton Muse,
While you read on with all your spite,
And practice, what I only write.

Epigram XXXIV

Poetic Works, you say, are vain,
Infants of a distempered brain,
What then? My verses still you read;
And I my labouring mind have freed.

 

LINKS

Biographical details from The Dictionary of National Biography.

The Wikipedia entry on Hildebrand Jacob.

The Works of Hildebrand Jacob, Esq.

 

by Jacobus Houbraken, after George Knapton, line engraving, 1735