Sitting around at Mum n Dad's

 

Dad got his penknife and fixed the top of the water bottle I'd brought from Somerset and couldn't unscrew.

We were discussing school meals. My mum had bought this tart at Blackbrooks for us to share, but my dad didn't fancy the custard. I used to loathe custard at school too, but now I've dealt with the issue by simply calling it vaniljsås, and then I like it.

My mum went to högskolan in Sundsvall. She was a shy eater and didn't have school dinners. She went home in the lunch hour instead (though she didn't necessarily eat much at home either).

Once when she was going home she was followed by Tok-Bertil ("Mad Bertil") and had to take refuge in a shop. The shopkeeper had to call for her mum to come and get her. 

Tok-Bertil was the well-known local idiot. He may easily have been harmless, or he may not. No-one knew, but you didn't want to be followed by him.

My mum has been friends with Berit since they were 11. (She has an even older friend, Bo.)  

*

Dad said that when he was at school in Penrith they used to bait the village idiot. Shocking, but it was just what schoolboys did, in those days. (c. 1945).

Once, in the 1970s, my Dad was in the Penrith area and decided to visit his old school. He sauntered in to what was now a police HQ and began taking photos. 

Security descended. It was at the height of IRA activity on what was then called "the mainland". My dad was questioned at length by an unsmiling intelligence officer. When he recounts this story he makes himself sound like a slightly hysterical Bertie Wooster, prattling away nervously about his schooldays. 

Eventually the intelligence officer decided my dad actually was as oblivious as he sounded. He ordered him to walk to his car without looking to left or right, get in, drive away, and never come back. 

*

My mum did national service. She was a "Lotta". She did it with some other girls from her school. Her best friend Anna-Greta, Birgitta Pettersson and Margareta Alvar. 

She learned how to spot planes and to radio in the details. She had a muster point with instructions to assemble if the sirens went, meaning Sweden was at war. They also sold hot drinks at ski events, wearing their smart uniforms. 

Portrait of Ptolemy I (on a coin by a later Ptolemy).  

From my dad's collection of ancient coins. I spent an hour chatting with him about them, and took numerous photos, most of which were total failures. 

Portrait of Alexander the Great bearing the horns of Ammon, on a Thracian coin from the reign of Lysimachus. 

Lysimachus, like Ptolemy I, had been one of Alexander's generals.

Ptolemy wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns. It's lost, but it was one of Arrian's main sources. 

The books you live with. My mum is reading Lilla Marilla for the hundredth time. 

This is one of the Anne of Green Gables books by the Canadian author L. M. Montgomery; the final one, in terms of the narrative sequence, though not the last to be written. In English it's called Rilla of Ingleside. It was written soon after WW1, which plays a big part in the story. 

Annika shares mum's passion for the Anne of Green Gables books. My dad considers them too sentimental; the only L.M. Montgomery book he has any time for is The Blue Castle.

Along the line of smoky hills / The crimson forest stands,

The Arcturus model was (is?) inexpensive books reaching an unpretentious audience via its enviable distribution to gift shops, service stations, outlets like The Works, and so on. There's something pleasing about seeing a front cover so unadorned with inducements to purchase. Arcturus books are never reviewed, they aren't for the kind of audience that cares about reviews. You might say they bear a similar relation to literary books as "novelette" does to "novel": it connotes a type of book you know exists but never read yourself. Anyway, that was the message I felt I defied, doggedly reading through the 600 pages of Best-Loved Poems.

Maybe (I fancied) this substantial volume mainly caught the eye of hasty gift-buyers who suddenly thought they remembered that auntie Jim or uncle Pat liked a bit of poetry. But my fancy is fairly obtuse on this topic. Despite its unassuming appearance, this was evidently a publication with eyes to markets right across the globe, readerships that I probably know nothing about. 

Obviously what is not like a novelette is that Best-Loved Poems contains a fair amount of the greatest literature you could ever aspire to read: Shakespeare or Blake or Marvell or Donne or Wordsworth or Keats or Dickinson or Whitman (all with plenty of poems here) blaze out thrillingly as I read through it. The effect is enhanced because their poems are all mixed in with the others. The anthology is organized by topics like "Irreverence and Satire" or "Nature and the Seasons" and avoids chronology or grouping by author. Poems are presented here stripped of history and context: the emphasis is on their living and eternal core. Every poem has a title and is presented as a complete and single entity. There is no acknowledgement if a poem originally formed part of a larger structure (e.g. a Shakespeare sonnet, a Blake song of innocence or experience). There are no extracts, which means that poets who wrote their most characteristic work in larger forms are represented by untypical poems or not much at all (e.g. Spenser, Milton, Pope).

History is in a sense laid on one side. A cavalier lyric may sit next to Longfellow or Hardy or Edward Lear: it's here because it still says something now, not because of what it tells us about the 1640s. And after all that's one of the most important things about a poem. 

Yet history washes back in various ways. This is, centrally, a nineteenth-century collection; there must be as many poems from that century as from all the others put together. A volume that truly reflected the best-loved poems of 2014 would no doubt contain many more twentieth-century poems, if only because of school curriculums. In this case the reason is simple: it was evidently a requirement of the publishers that all the contents must be in the public domain.  From the 20th century's first three decades we have lots of Wilfred Owen and Hart Crane and Sara Teasdale and Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence, authors who died young, but no Yeats or Graves or Eliot or Joyce or Frost. (I must say I found this enforced selection quite illuminating.) So, among the well-loved poems about snow, there's no place for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". Nor for Robert Bridges' "London Snow". Bridges would have qualified by UK copyright laws (he died in 1930), but perhaps not by US laws -- or maybe the editor just forgot about him. 

And though what was most intriguing and new to me was all the Canadian poems (the compiler, John Boyes, is from Montreal), there isn't anything here by Charles G.D. Roberts, presumably for the same reason (he died in 1943). 

Given the centrality of the nineteenth century in the anthology, it's something of a paradox that it entirely excludes what many have considered the most characteristic form of Victorian poetry, the dramatic monologue. Browning is here as the author of "Prospice" and "Meeting at Night" and "Oh, to be in England", but there's no place for "My Last Duchess" or "Porphyria's Lover". 

Linked to this, I think, are some other surprising exclusions. For instance, there's a distinct lack of narrative poetry: the only real stories are nonsense ones like the Jumblies and Jabberwocky. And there are no folk ballads (surely a well-loved kind of poem, you might think); though there is "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "The Lady of Shalott", two rather ballad-like poems that, now I come to think of it, are both notable for failing to tell much of a story. (What between the absence of narrative and the absence of folk ballads, there's no place here for that once well-loved poet Walter Scott.)

The well-loved poem, we understand, is one whose words we can make ours, a poem whose voice, if we think about it at all, can be reckoned the poet's own. 

Maybe the presiding deities of this or any similar anthology, for me,  are a bunch of authors that I only ever seem to read in anthologies, though always with a passing impulse to read more of them: Thomas Hood, Thomas Moore, William Cullen Bryant, the Rossettis, Poe, Lear, Hardy, and above all Burns. 

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
          Thou thought to dwell --
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
          Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
          But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
          An’ cranreuch cauld!

(from "To A Mouse, On Turning Up Her Nest With The Plough" by Robert Burns)

 

How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,

Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;

There oft, as mild ev'ning weeps over the lea,

The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me.

(from "Sweet Afton" by Robert Burns)

It's remarkable how easily Whitman seats himself in such company (though he makes the chair creak with his energy and horizons), and this 600-page journey through well-loved poems ends triumphantly with his "Song of the Open Road".

O highway I travel! O public road! do you say to me,

   Do not leave me?

Do you say, Venture not? If you leave me, you are lost?

Do you say, I am already prepared -- I am well-beaten and

   undenied -- adhere to me?

O public road! I say back, I am not afraid to leave you -- yet I

   love you;

You express me better than I can express myself;

You shall be more to me than my poem.

I think heroic deeds were all conceiv'd in the open air,

   and all great poems also;

I think I could stop here myself, and do miracles;

(My judgments, thoughts, I henceforth try by the open 

   air, the road;)

I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like,

   and whoever beholds me shall like me;

I think whoever I see must be happy.

(from "Song of the Open Road", section 4, by Walt Whitman)

*

John Boyes edited several volumes published by Arcturus: Best-Loved Poems (2014) was preceded by Great Speeches: Words That Shaped The World (2009), Poems That Will Save Your Life (2010) and Poetry of the Civil War (2012). A note on Amazon says: "John Boyes has written for television, radio and several British, American and Canadian periodicals. His most recent titles are Character Parts, a study of characters in Canadian literature, and a children's book on Canada. He is the editor of six previous literary anthologies. A Montrealer, he lives with his wife and daughter in Vancouver."

*

I mentioned those Canadian poems. Here are some tiny samples, mostly from the section on "Nature and the Seasons".

Under the glimmer of stars and the purple of sunsets dying,

  Wan and waste and white, stretch the great lakes away.

from "The Winter Lakes" by Wilfred Campbell (1858 - 1918)

Lo, the clouds break, and gradually more wide

Morn openeth her bright, rejoicing gates;

And ever, as the orient valves divide,

A costlier aspect on their breadth awaits.

from "The Coming of Morn" by Charles Heavysege (1816 - 1876)

From out the landscape lying 'neath the sun

   The last sea-smelling, cloud-like mists arise;

The smoky woods grow clear and, one by one,

   The meadow blossoms open their winking eyes.

from "The Morning Land" by Charles Mair (1838 - 1927)

              and as the glory dies,

Throbbing thro' changeful rose to silver mist,

Laden with souls of flowers wooed abroad

From painted petals by the ardent Night,

Possess the heavens for one short splendid hour --

Sole jewel on the Egypt brow of Night,

Who steals, dark giant, to caress the Earth,

And gathers from the glassy mere and sea

The silver foldings of his misty robe,

And hangs upon the air with brooding wings

Of shadow, shadow, stretching everywhere.

from "The Vesper Star" by Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850 - 1887)

Go, be their little brother,

As humble as the grass,

And lean upon the hill-wind,

And watch the shadows pass.

from "Marigolds" by Bliss Carman (1861 - 1929)

See, rising from out of that copse, dark and damp,

   The fire-flies, each bearing a flickering lamp!

Like meteors, gleaming and streaming, they pass

O'er hillside and meadow, and dew-laden grass,

from "A Canadian Summer Evening" by Rosanna Leprohon (1829 - 1879)

The leaves hang still. Above the weird twilight

The hurrying centres of the storm unite,

And spreading with huge trunk and rolling fringe,

Each wheeled upon its own tremendous hinge,

Tower darkening on. And now from heaven's height, 

With the long roar of elm-trees swept and swayed,

And pelted waters, on the vanished plain

Plunges the blast.

from "A Thunderstorm" by Archibald Lampman (1861 - 1899)

But all the winnowed eastern sky

Is flushed with many a tender hue,

And spears of light are smiting through

The ranks where huddled sea-mists fly.

from "Sunrise Along the Shore" by L. M. Montgomery (1874 - 1942)

Row and row of waves ever

In the breaking;

Ever in arching and convulsed

Immanence;

Roll of muddy sea between;

Low clouds down-pressing

And pallid and streaming rain.

from "Reverie: The Orchard on the Slope" by Raymond Knister (1899 - 1932)

O! Soft responsive voices of the night

I join your minstrelsy,

And call across the fading silver light

As something calls to me;

I may not all your meaning understand,

But I have touched your soul in shadow-land.

from "Moonset" by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1861 - 1914)

When all the lovely wayside things

    Their white-winged seeds are sowing,

And in the fields, still green and fair,

    Late aftermaths are growing;

from "October's Bright Blue Weather" by Helen Hunt Jackson (1831 - 1885)

And the sun is scarcely gleaming

   Through the cloudlets, snowy white, --

Winter's lovely herald greets us,

from "Indian Summer" by Susanna Moodie (1803 - 1885)

Here, on this slope that yet hath known no plough,

The cattle wander homeward slowly now;

In shapeless clumps the ferns are brown and dead.

Among the fir-trees dusk is swiftly born;

The maples will be desolate by morn.

The last word of the summer hath been said.

from "October" by Francis Sherman (1871 - 1926)

The woods that summer loved are grey and bare;

The sombre trees stretch up their arms on high,

In mute appeal, against the leaden sky;

A flurry faint of snow is in the air.

All day the clouds have hung in heavy fold

Above the valley, where grey shadows steal;

from "December" by Stuart Livingstone (his only known poem, published in 1910)

[Apparently I can't resist making assemblages of Canadian poetry, enchanted by my ignorance of it; here's another one, from 2008: "Intercapillary Space": 2-page anthology of Canadian poetry .]