And, by extension, Western literature. These are the only good poems that I know of. If you know of any better ones, kindly keep them to yourself.
***
“When Cynthia smiles,” said young Bingo, “the skies are blue; the world takes on a roseate hue; birds in the garden trill and sing, and Joy is king of everything, when Cynthia smiles.” He coughed, changing gears. “When Cynthia frowns – ”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“I’m reading you my poem. The one I wrote to Cynthia last night. I’ll go on, shall I?”
“No!”
“No?”
“No. I haven’t had my tea.”
***
I didn’t know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don’t shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things once. It began:
Be!
Be!
The past is dead.
To-morrow is not born.
Be to-day!
To-day!
Be with every nerve,
With every muscle,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!
It was printed opposite the frontispiece of a magazine with a sort of scroll round it, and a picture in the middle of a fairly-nude chappie, with bulging muscles, giving the rising sun the glad eye. Rocky said they gave him a hundred dollars for it, and he stayed in bed till four in the afternoon for over a month.
***
“Across the pale parabola of joy…”
***
When cares attack and life seems black,
How sweet it is to pot a yak,
Or puncture hares and grizzly bears,
And others I could mention;
But in my Animals “Who’s Who”
No name stands higher than the Gnu;
And each new gnu that comes in view
Receives my prompt attention.
When Afric’s sun is sinking low,
And shadows wander to and fro,
And everywhere there’s in the air
A hush that’s deep and solemn;
Then is the time good men and true
With View Halloo pursue the gnu;
(The safest spot to put your shot
is through the spinal column).
To take the creature by surprise
We must adopt some rude disguise,
Although deceit is never sweet,
And falsehoods don’t attract us;
So, as with gun in hand you wait,
Remember to impersonate
A tuft of grass, a mountain-pass,
A kopje or a cactus.
A brief suspense, and then at last
The waiting’s o’er, the vigil past;
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.
It’s done. You’ve pulled the trigger,
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,
Has handed in its dinner-pail;
(The females all are rather small,
The males are somewhat bigger).
***
In life I was the village smith,
I worked all day
But
I retained the delicacy of my complexion
Because
I worked in the shade of the chestnut tree
Instead of in the sun
Like Nicholas Blodgett, the expressman.
I was large and strong
Because
I went in for physical culture
And deep breathing
And all those stunts.
I had the biggest biceps in Spoon River.
***
“I wouldn’t go as far as to say she actually writes poetry, but when a girl suddenly asks you out of a clear blue sky if you don’t think that the stars are “God’s daisy chain,” well, I mean, you do begin to wonder.”
***
“Well, I hadn’t expected to be. Nevertheless, I was conscious of a pang.
‘We part, then, for the nonce, do we?’
‘I fear so, sir.’
‘You take the high road, and self taking the low road, as it were?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I shall miss you, Jeeves.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Who was that chap who was always beefing about gazelles?’
‘The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well, it was sure to die.’
‘It’s the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don’t mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?’
‘Not at all, sir.’”
***
‘Streets!
Grim, relentless, sordid streets!
Miles of poignant streets,
East, West, North,
And stretching starkly South;
Sad, hopeless, dismal, cheerless, chilling
Streets!‘
***
“To the thinking man there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets. In the good old days poets were for the most part confined to garrets, which they left only for the purpose of being ejected from the offices of magazines and papers to which they attempted to sell their wares. Nobody ever thought of reading a book of poems unless accompanied by a guarantee from the publisher that the author had been dead at least a hundred years. Poetry, like wine, certain brands of cheese, and public buildings, was rightly considered to improve with age; and no connoisseur could have dreamed of filling himself with raw, indigestible verse, warm from the maker.”
Tags: a fairly nude chappie, p.g. wodehouse, poetry
Related Posts
Robots That Remind Me of the Work of T.S. Eliot
Arthur Rimbaud, Dirtbag Laureate
Dorothy Parker Swipes Left: A Poem
David Brooks Writes a Sestina About Poverty
“The Spinster’s Almanac”: Poetic Advice for Creating Art in Small Spaces
“The Spinster’s Almanac”: Poetic Advice for Finding a Different Story
Love Jeeves, love Wodehouse, love this, etc., etc., obviously. What I’ve really come to say is:
I SINCERELY hope that this is not the last time “A Fairly Nude Chappie” appears as the tag to a Toast article.
Good old Plum! I love him so.
Timothy Bobbin has ten little toes.
He takes them out walking wherever he goes.
And if Timothy gets a cold in the head,
His ten little toes stay with him in bed.
can I be Rocky when I grow up
I have always aspired to be Rocky, selling awful poetry for obscene sums of money, staying in bed until four in the afternoon, making strong valets weak with my willingness to wear pajamas wherever I go
“The subject of bereavement is one that has often been treated powerfully by poets, who have run the whole gamut of the emotions while laying bare for us the agony of those who have lost parents, wives, children, gazelles, money, fame, dogs, cats, doves, sweethearts, horses, and even collar-studs. But no poet has yet treated of the most poignant bereavement of all – that of the man half-way through a detective story who finds himself at bedtime without the book.” – Strychnine in the Soup ‘Mulliner Nights’
The pale parabola of joy quickly transforms into the dark hyperbola of rage when your wife gives all the giblets to the guests, even though she knows they’re your favourite.
I have a pathological inability to read poetry (or even scene-setting couplets or whatever it is called that get jammed in after chapter numbers) when it appears amidst prose, it’s like the change of format is a black hole that my eyes just glide over because there’s nothing to actually see (and I blame it on stupid pointless poetry in children’s books and also Anne Shirley).
I guess if I ever get around to reading Wodehouse instead of just watching the BBC productions, I’ll have to not skip the poetical bits. Good stuff!
Yeah, I have to make SUCH AN EFFORT to read poetry in verse. It literally took me three attempts to read everything in this post.
I have trouble, too, with using ereader apps on my phone in portrait mode. I think it’s something about the length of the lines jarring my eye so that the reading doesn’t flow easily?
But IDK because at the same time, once you get me started reading a Shakespeare play, I can go at a pretty good clip. Also Wordsworth and so on (even if secondary meanings/metaphorical imagery tends to be beyond my ken), when it’s in isolation.
I don’t know how I survived English Majoring so well, tbh.
I have the same problem! About the only way I can combat it is reading the poetry part aloud, which of course is not appropriate in all circumstances (i.e. when reading The Lord of the Rings in the breakroom at work).
I can’t even read it out loud. It’s like my brain turns off: NOPE, BORING and skips ahead.
Imagine my embarrassment when the long poetical part in some Ann Radcliffe novel (The Italian, I think? it’s the story of the Wandering Jew or something) ended up being relevant to the plot and I had no idea what was going on.
For if you can nurse me (Come quickly, come now),
If you but administer balm,
And press at my bidding my feverish brow
With a cool but affectionate palm;
If you’ll sit by my side, it is possible, quite,
That I may be induced to review
With a feeling more nearly akin to delight
The day I played hockey with you.
SPEAKING OF SPORTS! And poets. The other day, in a column in Time magazine, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar actually quoted the badass poet Brenda Shaughnessy, which startled the heck out of me. It’s in the 5th paragraph: http://time.com/3551772/kareem-abdul-jabbar-ameri…
Some quarter of a century before the period with which this story deals, a certain rich and misanthropic man was seized with a bright idea for perpetuating his memory after death, and at the same time harassing a certain section of mankind. So in his will he set aside a portion of his income to be spent on an annual prize for the best poem submitted by a member of the Sixth Form of St Austin’s College, on a subject to be selected by the Headmaster. And, he added–one seems to hear him chuckling to himself–every member of the form must compete. Then he died. But the evil that men do lives after them, and each year saw a fresh band of unwilling bards goaded to despair by his bequest. True, there were always one or two who hailed this ready market for their sonnets and odes with joy. But the majority, being barely able to rhyme ‘dove’ with ‘love’, regarded the annual announcement of the subject chosen with feelings of the deepest disgust.
Good gods, that is the best troll. I love it.
Imposing pile! rear’d up ‘midst pleasant grounds …
My god, I hadn’t thought of that story in years before reading this, and now it turns out that Reynolds’ bloody poem is still stuck in my head. The evil that men do lives after them, indeed.
You could make cricket rhyme with wicket!
I have never read anything by P.G. Wodehouse, a grievous oversight in my education. I have an English degree! From a reputable institution! How did this happen?! Tell me where to begin, Toast – the possibilities overwhelm.
I think vol. 1 of the Jeeves Omnibus is a good place to start. When you finish one book, you’ll be glad that you need only flip a page to begin the next one. And oh my god, the early Jeeves books are the funniest books you’ll ever read.
You can basically start anywhere and be delighted and learn all the jokes, but I recommend Code of the Woosters or Right Ho, Jeeves (the latter is in the public domain in the U.S. and probably other places too) as great starting places.
I second this recommendation and agree you can start anywhere without worrying about it, but suggest you read Right Ho, Jeeves first, then The Code of the Woosters as they do follow on from each other.
Wodehouse’s Blandings stories are equally sublime. Try Summer Lightning or the (mostly) Blandings-based collection, Blandings Castle and Elsewhere, which includes the lovely story Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend.
My only caveat to endorsing the “all of them are equally the best thing that is or ever has been!” is the golf stories. As I refuse to believe that anything by Wodehouse is anything less than perfect, I will say this: some disreputable publishers are marketing some writing of dubious provenance as being written by Wodehouse. Although similar in tone, whimsy, and authorship as Real Wodehouse Stories, they are base imposters.
You can tell this by the fact that I love everything by Wodehouse and I don’t like the golf stories. Ergo, they are not by Wodehouse regardless of who wrote them.
I would personally recommend starting with “The Mating Season”, but I concur with the folks below that you can start almost anywhere and it’ll be great.
Mulliner Nights. Every story is a jewel, but I particularly recommend “The Smile That Wins” and “Strychnine in the Soup.”
I’ve been meaning to read Wodehouse for YEARS and YEARS but was always waiting for the omnibus with the best cover, which I kept not being able to find, and somehow never got around to it, and then I forgot which omnibus set was the one to start with and it’s all such a mess such a mess.
I think I’ll rectify it now, since Omnibus 1 is like $3 in the Amazon marketplace (boo hiss amazon, but I accidentally bought regular -price prime last april by not cancelling the renewal in time after trying to cut it close with a final order on my student level and now I’m trying to make it worth it)
“Miss Peavey is a poetess, and she waylaid me the other morning while I was having a most important conference with McAllister on the subject of bulbs and asked me if I didn’t think that it was fairies’ teardrops that made the dew. Did you ever hear such dashed nonsense?”
You will no doubt recall Keats’s poem about stout Cortez staring with eagle eyes at the Pacific while all his men gazed at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Precisely so did Peter Willard and James Todd stare with eagle eyes at the second lake hole, and gaze at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a tee in Woodhaven.
NB my favorite part about this passage is when PG Wodehouse addresses it in the preface-
“You big stiff, it wasn’t Cortez, it was Balboa.” This, I believe, is historically accurate. On the other hand, if Cortez was good enough for Keats, he is good enough for me. Besides, even if it was Balboa, the Pacific was open for being stared at about that time, and I see no reason why Cortez should not have had a look at it as well.
POETIC LICENSE FOREVER, the end.
RIGHT THERE WITH YOU.
Balboa didn’t scan, says The Ghost of John Keats.
Meter is truth, truth meter!
“‘Jeeves,’ I recollect saying, on returning to the apartment, ‘who was the fellow who on looking at something felt like somebody looking at something? I learned the passage at school, but it has escaped me.’
‘I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the poet Keats.'”
I had forgotten this passage, which is appalling, because that is a PERFECT joke! I will permanently amend my mental title of that poem to be “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer I Felt Like Somebody Looking at Something”
Gosh darn if there isn’t a single poem that can’t be improved by referencing Spoon River at the end (or, as I like to call it, tying it into the canon of the “River-verse”)
“I remember at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the girl what a hell of a time he’d been having among the cannibals and what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had described some particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for the awestruck “Oh-h! Not really?”, she had said that the whole thing had no doubt been greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably really been a prominent local vegetarian.”
I had a terrible day today. I came home soaked to the skin with rain and this post has actually warmed me up. I genuinely feel cozier now.
The world is a wonderful place, and here is why: the gazelle poem is real. People used to just write poems about any old thing I guess. GAZELLES. Dickens made fun of it too in possibly my favorite line of a spurned lover EVER:
‘It has always been the same with me,’ said Mr Swiveller, ‘always. ‘Twas ever thus—from childhood’s hour I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay, I never loved a tree or flower but ‘twas the first to fade away; I never nursed a dear Gazelle, to glad me with its soft black eye, but when it came to know me well, and love me, it was sure to marry a market-gardener.’
“I am a gazelle short” is a ne plus ultra moment in the English language.
Mallory, I may come and shower you with Wodehouse books at one of your upcoming appearances…
My wife and her friends have often maintained that the most honest expression of frustration ever uttered was on the Amazing Race: “MY OX IS BROKEN.” Pairing it with “I’m a gazelle short” makes it even better.
Note: the ox guy was a douche, but it was a moment of realness. And hilarity.
That would indeed make a perfect couplet.
“I take it you know that Orange number at the Palace. It goes:
Oh won’t you something something oranges,
My something oranges,
My something oranges;
Oh, won’t you something something something I forget,
Something something something tumty tumty yet:
Oh –
or words to that effect. It’s a dashed clever lyric, and the tune’s good, too…”
I genuinely get this song (such as it is) stuck in my head all the time. (From “The Metropolitan Touch.”)
Just be careful when you’re singing it if there are any Tough Eggs around!
STEGGLES.
ugh FUCK Steggles.
Seriously though, being a “friend” of Bertie Wooster sounds like a great way to make an easy buck, as long as you can steer clear of Jeeves.
I think Jeeves allows a certain level of friend graft as a baseline: if you need to flee to the country or pay a fine, Jeeves is cool with that. It’s when the expenditures edge into the hundreds that he steps in.
Daaang, Bertie gives Bingo and his cousins 5-10 pounds on several occasions, and most stories close with Jeeves 10-30 pounds richer (and with Bertie less some offensively bright socks or a unwise cummerbund.) I looked this up on a inflation calculator and got a… a very through calculator.
Five pounds is equivalent to 250 pounds (in terms of what it could purchase) or, relative to the total economy, about 1,750 pounds. Bertie: trickle down economy at its best.
This could be a long conversation (or series of essays), but on the subject of Bertie’s largesse and impotence it’s often amusing to find oneself jolted back into “wait a minute, Bertie is a member of a useless idle class that the people at large have spent most of the last century getting out from under the yoke of – the people who probably have views closest to the ones we have today are the likes of the execrable Comrade Butt.” I get the same feeling with Downton Abbey.
Ok you caught me – this comment was just an excuse to say the name “Comrade Butt.”
I get this stuck in my head too! Particularly a very abbreviated version of “something something I forget/ something tumty tumty yet” followed by a self-satisfied “dashed clever lyric” before I collapse into internal laughter.
Yes! Exactly.
You guys, the old “Wodehouse Playhouse” series with Pauline Collins, John Alderton, and a stock company of supporting players, is wonderful. And Wodehouse himself does the intros!
And you know he was also a lyricist and wrote a bunch of elegant and zany musicals with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, right? And these shows were a big influence on Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Harburg, Dorothy Fields and the Gershwin brothers? No Plum=no Great American Songbook, or one that is a shadow of itself.
My favorite:
Caliban at Sunset
I stood with a man
Watching the sun go down.
The air was full of murmurous summer scents
And a brave breeze sang like a bugle
From a sky that smouldered in the west,
A sky of crimson, amethyst, gold and sepia
And blue as blue were the eyes of Helen
When she sat
Gazing from some high tower in Ilium
Upon the Grecian tents darkling below.
And he,
This man who stood beside me,
Gaped like some dull, half-witted animal
And said,
“I say,
Doesn’t that sunset remind you
Of a slice
Of underdone roast beef?”
I was just coming here with this, what a perfect poem.
So glad Mallory’s feminist stance is “Ban All Men Except P.G. Wodehouse.”
Wodehouse lampoons everything that is foolish and unnecessary in men.
No arguments here, I’ve got a dumb but sweet cat named Wooster.
there are so MANY fucking Spodes in the world who need a Plum to poke fun at them
It appears that I know Bingo’s ode to Cynthia by heart, and possibly believed it to be a real piece of purple verse.
This has only the most tangential relationship to the subject, but I can’t miss the opportunity to quote one of my favourite exchanges in the Wodehouse canon (from The Code of the Woosters):
“A sensitive plant, what?”
“Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
“Oh, am I?”
Truly, Jeeves exemplifies that translational ability to which all literature students should aspire.
EDIT: response to pantone292. IntenseDebate, what are you doing.
One more:
“‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean–the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare.'”
The late William Shakespeare.
Printer’s Error! (full thing here http://wrecktangle.blogspot.co.uk/2004/08/printer…
On murder in the first degree
The Law, I knew, is rigid:
Its attitude, if A kills B,
To A is always frigid.
It counts it not a trivial slip
If on behalf of authorship
You liquidate compositors-
This kind of conduct it abhors
And seldom will allow.
Nevertheless, I deemed it best
And in the public interest
To buy a gun, to oil it well,
Inserting what is called a shell,
And go and pot
With sudden shot
This printer who had printed ‘not’
When I had written ‘now’.
The Lost Repartee
Oh! bitter the grief that it causes to me,
The thought of that wonderful, lost repartee.
In its youth and its beauty it fled from my brain,
And never, I fear me, ah! never again,
If I wait all my life, from today till I die,
Shall I find such a chance for a crushing reply.
Its wording was mild, but that rendered it worse.
It was crisply satirical, bitterly terse.
And it fled! Yes it fled! In my hour of need
From my agonised brain did it coyly recede,
Returning no more with its luminous ray
Till the critical moment had perished for aye.
Oh! let lovers lament of love’s terrible pangs,
Let hunters talk darkly of tigers and fangs,
Let the gambler repine o’er the loss of his cash
Let the banker hold forth on the woes of a crash,
Let the penniless debtor dilate on how ill
He feels, when a dun ambles in with a bill.
Let the footpad explain all the feelings that gnaw
His heart, when he’s safe in the hands of the Law,
Let ministers prate of the worries of state,
But none of these woes – though they’re all of them great –
Can compare with the grief that is harassing me
For the loss of that priceless, superb repartee.
Fun Magazine, January 5, 1901.
One is hard pressed to say which is one’s favorite Wodehouse poem. But, after Good Gnus, Printer’s Error is second only by a short trope. Thanks, Mallory and Jen.
I love how Jeeves is basically a walking Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Oxford Dictionary of Quotations rolled into one, at all times. I could never attain Jeeves’s unflappability or his skill at saving the day, but he’s my role model in the art of having the useful quotation at the ready.
Belated, but I loved this very much and it was badly needed today.
For me, it’s about the diction of a lot of poetry, unorthodox grammar structure and subjects/verbs often split several lines apart, with clauses in between — it’s hard to focus on it, to puzzle it out. Unless it’s super straightforward, like Billy Collins. I memorized “Aristotle” in college, and it’s really easy because just about every line is a complete thought, contained in itself.
Lol, I don’t know how I got my English degree with a minor in Literature, either, considering how much doesn’t agree with me and I was only a mediocre essayist (with a couple brief exceptions, when I got to work in feminism).
(dammit, this is in response to keristars)
She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said
‘Oh, woman in our hours of ease
turn tumty tiddly something please,
something something something brow,
a something something something thou.’