THREE NEW PUBLICATIONS, AND MORE ON SIR JOHN . . . .

Three new pamphlets are cooked to a turn for July reading, but also read on for a post script to last week’s J C Squire entry.

Three new pamphlets are cooked to a turn for July reading, but also read on for a post script to last week’s J C Squire entry.

Lydia Fulleylove’s Notes on Sea and Land really does have a lot of sea in it, in the best possible sense. And the sea is subtle, personable and female: “I wait for her, stroked by early heat, / an arrow dance of seagull feet.”

Crossing the Ellipsis, by Lorna Dowell, stretches the boundaries. Do you, like me, ever swim in your local pool? If so, you mustn’t miss the vicious early-morning swimmer in ‘Measures’. There’s preoccupation with communication, and the lack of it in most of these poems: “you lie in your sleep / in a speech bubble / it’s too dark to read.”

And then there’s Michael Loveday, editor of 14 Magazine, who presents his first collection: He said / She said. The tension of opposites is at the forefront: male/female, English/Polish, secret/public, forgetting/remembering: “have you got / the can’t forget / don’t forget / the can’t forget.”

So don’t . . . forget. You’ll find these in the online shop (with sample poems), or send for all or any by post if you prefer, enclosing a cheque (they are £4.00 each):

HappenStance
21 Hatton Green
Glenrothes
Fife
Scotland
KY7 4SD

And on another tack – the J C Squire blog entry last week produced some lovely responses, D A Prince pointed out that the ‘one liner’ I mentioned is in fact a line from a whole comic poem, The Ballade of Soporific Absorption, which happily can be found on line, because I can’t find it in any of my Squire volumes. Wonderful.

Another response was from George Simmers quoting ‘If Gray had had to write his elegy in the cemetery of Spoon River instead of in that of Stoke Poges’. It’s originally from the volume Tricks of the Trade, a satirical collection in which 10 poems are grouped under the title ‘How they would have done it’.

The poem George quotes (thank you, George!) is also titled ‘If Gray had written Spoon River Anthology’, and like all parodies, it partly depends not only on your knowledge of Gray (which is probable, since the elegy is still widely anthologized) but also on your acquaintance with the American poet Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915) – perhaps fairly unlikely. Squire almost certaintly didn’t think much of Spoon River (though parody can be a form of compliment), and you may note he has a passing swipe at Masefield, whom he also held in dubious regard, see his parody of ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ in the same volume (it’s actually a parody of how Masefleld would have written Dorothy Heman’s poem, often known as ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’).

It’s a sad (to me, anyway) thought that Squire, who was a brilliant parodist, could write in the style of practically anybody, and produce huge mirth. Now it’s hard to believe a) anybody could do this and b) readers would be sufficiently well-read to get the joke.

In any case, Hemans’ poem celebrates the tale of young Giocante, son of the French commander Casabianca, who heroically remained at his post on deck of the French ship Orient, during the Battle of the Nile in 1798, as his father had instructed him, until the ship blew up.

Here’s a bit of Hemans:

The flames rolled on he would not go
Without his Father’s word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

 

He called aloud ‘Say, Father, say
If yet my task is done?’
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.

 

‘Speak, father!’ once again he cried,
‘If I may yet be gone!’
And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.

 

And here’s a bit of Masefield:

Up go the winders, out come heads,
I heard the springs go creak in beds;
But still I heave and sweat and tire,
And still the clang goes “Fire, Fire!”
“Where is it, then? Who is it, there?
You ringer, stop, and tell us where.”
“Run round and let the Captain know.”
“It must be bad, he’s ringing so,”
“It’s in the town, I see the flame;
Look there! Look there, how red it came.”
“Where is it, then? O stop the bell.”
I stopped and called: “It’s fire of hell;
And this is Sodom and Gomorrah,
And now I’ll burn you up, begorra.”

And finally, here’s Squire doing Hemans in the style of Masefield:

Dogs barked, owls hooted, cockerels crew,
As in my works they often do
When, flagging with my main design,
I pad with a descriptive line.
Young Cassy cried again: “Oh damn!
What an unhappy put I am!
Will nobody go out and search
For dad, who’s left me in the lurch?
For dad, who’s left me on the poop,
For dad, who’s left me in the soup,
For dad who’s left me on the deck.
Perhaps it’s what I should expeck
Considerin’ ’ow he treated me
Before I came away to sea.

[You might want to know that Masefield shocked readers when ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ was published because it contained words like ‘Damn’ and ‘Bloody’, as well as passages in the vernacular. And though I am a Masefield supporter, Squire has a point. Several, actually.]

ps For your homework this week, rewrite the first section of In Memoriam in the style of one of the following:

UNDER

I woke up thinking about a poem. For some reason, it isn’t well known, though I can’t think why not.

The author is J C Squire, Sir John Collings Squire, a trouble-maker of superior order in his day. An anti-modernist. A ‘Georgian’. A heavy drinker.

His own band of followers were known as ‘the Squirearchy’. They sat, in metaphorical terms, on the opposite bank to the Bloomsbury group, although he certainly published some of them in The London Mercury, during his 15 years of editorship.

You can see some lovely photographs of him in the online collection of the National Portrait Gallery. He was clearly fond of stripey blazers. He was known for his antagonism towards current trends in poetry and he was enthusiastic about cricket.

His Wikipedia entry is dodgy. Obviously nobody has taken sufficient interest in him to do it well, though under ‘Reputation’ it does tell us ‘he is generally credited with the one-liner I am not so think as you drunk I am‘. It is all a long time ago. The literary squabbles of those days (in which JCS certainly played his role) are largely forgotten, just as the literary squabbles of today will be.

Knighted in 1933 (I don’t know why — perhaps services to literature?), he loved poetry and knew a lot about it. He wrote several volumes of poems himself, most of them forgettable, as is true for most of us. He also penned some extremely clever parodies – and given that he’s credited with being ‘Georgian’, he’s remarkably good at mocking some of the features of that period, and indeed the features of any period.

He was astute, witty and . . . wrote one poem at least I shan’t forget. Technically, this is in copyright but I feel the dead Sir John would sit up in his grave cheerfully at the thought of being read.

So what do you make of this? It is from Poems, First Series published by Martin Secker in 1918, when the author would have been only 34, but feeling much older. Thanks to his poor eye-sight, he had survived the Great War. Many of his contemporaries had not.

UNDER

In this house, she said, in this high second storey,
In this room where we sit, over the midnight street,
There runs a rivulet, narrow but very rapid,
Under the still floor and your unconscious feet.

The lamp on the table made a cone of light
That spread to the base of the walls: above was in gloom.
I heard her words with surprise; had I worked here so long,
And never divined the secret of the room?

‘But how,’ I asked, ‘does the water climb so high?’
‘I do not know,’ she said, ‘but the thing is there;
Pull up the boards while I go and fetch you a rod.’
She passed, and I heard her creaking descend the stair.

And I rose and rolled the Turkey carpet back
From the two broad boards by the north wall she had named,
And, hearing already the crumple of water, I knelt
And lifted the first of them up; and the water gleamed,

Bordered with little frosted heaps of ice,
And, as she came back with a rod and a line that swung,
I moved the other board; in the yellow light
The water trickled frostily, slackly along.

I took the tackle, a stiff black rubber worm,
That stuck out its pointed tail from a cumbrous hook.
‘But there can’t be fishing in water like this,’ I said,
And she, with weariness, ‘There is no ice there. Look.’

And I stood there, gazing down at a stream in spate,
Holding the rod in my undecided hand . . .
Till it all in a moment grew smooth and still and clear,
And along its deep bottom of slaty grey sand

Three scattered little trout, as black as tadpoles,
Came waggling slowly along the glass-dark lake,
And I swung my arm to drop my pointing worm in,
And then I stopped again with a little shake.

For I heard the thin gnat-like voices of the trout
—My body felt woolly and sick and astray and cold—
Crying with mockery in them: ‘You are not allowed
To take us, you know, under ten years old.’

And the room swam, the calm woman and the yellow lamp,
The table, and the dim-glistering walls, and the floor
And the stream sank away, and all whirled dizzily,
And I moaned, and the pain at my heart grew more and more,

And I fainted away, utterly miserable,
Falling in a place where there was nothing to pass,
Knowing all sorrows and the mothers and sisters of sorrows,
And the pain of the darkness before anything ever was.