good news
i have written you another poem
is it –
don’t worry
it’s VERY long and EXTREMELY unfinished
oh good
it’s about what if a woman saw another woman take her coat off
and it’s 9000 lines
wow
it’s so great that i can still write when i’m high and it doesn’t affect my work
I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature
do you
Owls I respect
Jack Asses I love
that’s
okay
are you going to just list all of the animals you like
Alderman & Hogs, Bishops & Royston Crows are my Cousins
at least by Courtesy
But Kings, Wolves, Tygers, Generals, Ministers, & Hyaenas, I renounce them all
okay
okay I’ll be sure to remember that
a lime tree can be a prison you know
I’m sure it can
if your friends go take a walk and they make you stay behind at a lime tree and they get to go on a walk and you don’t get to go
then that lime tree is really a prison
isn’t it
I suppose it does
especially if that friend is Charles Lamb
which I would never make Charles Lamb sit under a lime tree if I wanted to go walking and he couldn’t
but I guess that’s why neither kind of Lambs are my friends
WAKE UP
what
GET UP GET UP
what is it
LAST NIGHT I WENT TO PARADISE IN A DREAM
people go to a lot of places in dreams
NAY BUT LISTEN
I CAN PROVE IT
how
I HAVE A FLOWER
OHO
SUDDENLY WE’RE NOT SO SKEPTICAL, ARE WE
are you still up
can i read my poem to you
that depends
is it full of
i don’t know
melted time and upside-down architecture and sweating convicts
i don’t know how to answer that question
like okay
most time is upside down
and eventually all architecture melts when the Abyssinian maid plays the enchanted lute
i don’t really see how you can put that on me
a lime tree can be a prison you know
I am dead.
“Lime-Tree Bower” always makes me think of that episode of The Office when Michael hurt his foot by stepping on the George Foreman Grill. Sammy Coleridge basically has that same level of self-pity in the poem, when he can’t play with his friends because he hurt his foot. (I love Coleridge)
I will forever be picturing Coleridge as Michael Scott now.
are you still up
can i read my poem to you
did you mean my life for a solid month a few years back when my brother’s friend from grade school meant to stay with us for a week but it turned into many weeks and he was going through a creative writing phase
Oh, Jesus God. I’m so sorry that happened to you. Once, I sat next to a chatty Englishman on a flight and somehow ended up reading his draft of a children’s novel and explaining the concept of s’mores. It was the worst.
he left some balloons in our garage for the whole month and we were never quite sure what their original intent was, it was a strange time for us all.
what is so hard to get about s’mores dude why are men like this
There were s’mores at a recent family gathering and the men were all, “Someone needs to google how to make s’mores” ( none of them, y’know, actually doing it themselves). The womenfolk just rolled their eyes. I mean, I don’t even like s’mores, and I still don’t need the internet to figure out how to make one.
Had they not seen The Sandlot?
Ugh. Ban men.
We don’t have s’mores in the UK.
but I guess that’s why neither kind of Lambs are my friends
I read this with Lady Caroline Lamb being the other ‘kind’, and was all “yeah she crazy dude.” She does whatever she wants!
But Charles Lamb would be a dream of a friend. And I want to bring Mary forward in time to better mental health care. I AM friends with both kinds of Lambs.
i couldn’t but think “what about the kind of lamb that sells condos?”
why cannot i upvote more than once
Oh, Sam. I didn’t know I’ve been waiting for these texts all along.
My dad, when I was very small, used to say goodnight to me by doing the typical tuck-in, give-a-kiss routine, then pause on his way out of my room to DECLAIM from the doorway: “Oh SLEEP! It is a gentle thing, belov’d from pole to pole!”
God damnit, your dad is the BEST.
different dead white dude, but my mother and I could never try to encourage one another to get a move on with out saying “let us go then, you and I as the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table” because that’s kinda silly. the evening looks nothing like a sick person. what?
When I was in high school I really didn’t know how to talk to babies and, when presented with a baby, would just default to quoting wide swaths of “J. Alfred” at them. Let me tell you: babies LOVED it.
Flash forward to about a year ago when I texted a friend of mine and said “Oh no, I forgot to recite ‘J. Alfred’ at my baby and he’s not a baby anymore and now he knows English is it TOO LATE”
I have never tried this and my baby is now too old as well. Alas!
Still plenty of time for “you grow old, you grow old, you will wear your trousers rolled”.
I once calmed a crying baby by walking the floor with her and reciting Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. It was the only thing that worked. Babies love them some poetry.
I love your Dad so much.
I didn’t realize how much I grew up quoting the Ancient Mariner until I got to university & actually read Coleridge.
On winter days: “the ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around”
When you’re thirsty: “water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”
When a kid’s moping about being lonely: “alone, alone, all all alone”
And now we’ve even got my husband quoting Coleridge & he’s never even heard of him.
Throughout my childhood, my mother’s family’s way of offering more food at meals was by saying “here, have some more. You have a lean and hungry look.” Years later I realized that was a line from Julius Caesar.
Obligatory Kate Beaton link: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=307
My mum’s good night routine when I was a kid involved standing in the doorway and dramatically declaring “Parting is such sweet sorrow!” which is totes Romeo and Juliet.
This is definitely the way to introduce your kids to cultcha.
My dad used to say “Fancy that, Hedda!” when I was tiny and it wasn’t until I was in college that I realized it was from Ibsen.
I will be doing this from now on for my wee ones. A+
My father wasn’t much for goodnights, but he often greeted me at the breakfast table with this: “It’s Susie Q The Alligator Girl! She walks! She talks! She crawls on her belly!” All with a deep, resonant declaiming voice.
No idea where that came from. My name is not Susie, but it is true that Morniing has never been my friend.
Will I warp my children if I quote Macbeth at bedtime? “Sleep, that knits up the raveled sleeve of care/The death of each day’s life/Sore labor’s bath/balm of hurt minds/great nature’s second course” (It’s from the scene where he’s truly beginning to go around the bend.)
it’s so great that i can still write when i’m high and it doesn’t affect my work
ok sam you keep on believing that
Well did you ever read anything he wrote NOT high? It might be the same!
honestly I wasn’t aware he’d ever written anything sober
If he has, I sure never heard of it either!
Possibly it was worse, then, and so his drug habit was the only reason he’s famous. Thank goodness for opium, eh?
I hadn’t realized this was the one I was waiting for until this morning. (If Texts from Coleridge come, can Dirtbag Wordsworth be far behind?)
Sara Hutchinson is the recipient of many of these texts, I presume.
Sara?
Sara?
SARA?
Sara are you there?
Hey Sara
aSra
Hey that sounds pretty good
Asra.
Maybe I’ll call you that now.
It’s a good thing my wife has the same name as you but Asra can be your special name in poems.
Of course I love you, Hartley, I wrote you mnemonic poems demonstrating different metrical feet!
No one will ever figure that one out. … Asra is the perfect code.
Wait, has Mallory not already written Dirtbag Wordsworth?! Now I want this very much. I would also take Dirtbag Carlyle. I frittered too much time in college on Victorians. I’m still kicking myself for passing up Tudor-Stuart Drama!
Wordsworth IS “lol you could just put in the regular things he did you didn’t have to make him a dirtbag.”
(I would also watch a trashy drama series about the Romantic poets.)
Look, listing animals is a sparkling and vivacious conversational gambit.
Hedgehogs, snails with mottled green shells, whippoorwills, octopi yet not squids. Puppies!
And the stork, and the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.
(I was a very snarky, very a-religious teenager in the Bible Belt, and I used to tell people my favorite Bible verse was Lev 11:19.)
I don’t know the Bible at all. But I think you’ve just identified my favorite verse, too.
Well now you know not to feed bats and lapwings to people who keep kosher! Just think of the hosting blunders I have saved you!
Because, as we all know, bats are the birds you should NEVER eat.
My 5-year-old uses this gambit all the time to (withering sigh) just great effect. It never gets boring.
ETA: NEVER. Gets. Boring.
There is a person on Twitter who periodically lists insects, fungi, etc. I will never unfollow him.
There are few things worse than getting trapped into listening to a friend’s poetry when you absolutely are not in the mood for it.
I don’t even have anything witty, just love. So much love.
This was just so perfect.
Coleridge would be that guy at open mic nights that you start checking your watch when he appears, shuffling stacks of paper: ‘he’s going spend 25 minutes rambling about water and feeling thirsty, isn’t he?”
“…I guess I’ll just sit here and hum the Gilligan’s Island theme for those 25 minutes, then.”
“… anyway, here’s Wonderwall.”
“I don’t really see how you can put that on me”
Oh, but we do, Sam. We can and we do.
Never have I felt so keenly for the one the mariner stoppeth.
I bet the other two were so grateful that they had escaped.
Charles
Gentle-hearted Charles
ugh
I asked you not to call me that
You put that in your poem didn’t you
No
I mean
Only like four times, you don’t mind
I do mind
You don’t get to say whether I mind or not
But you will be immortal in my verses
Not like me pouting here about that scalding milk
Because ow
And you get all that nature while all I get
Is to sit here blessing you
That’s fine but
You can bless me without infantilizing me
If I have to be immortal can I at least choose my own adjectives
You are gentle-hearted
What with all that strange calamity
And how you treat your sister like a person
Keep it up and you’ll see how gentle my heart is not
That’s not Charles
It just looks like him
*wild applause*
If I could pick favorites of this series, this might be my favorite. But I don’t know if I can.
I’m impressed that this goes into some of his letters (about Pantisocracy) and translates one of this aphorisms into a poem of sorts. Maybe I’ll tip.
Very useful for high school English teaching though. Walk in & say “Hello teenagers, today we are studying Coleridge. Yes, he is yet another dead white dude, however this poems are trippy as fuck because he was whacked out on opium all the time. Opium’s like old school heroin. OK, let’s read.” and most of the teenagers will pay attention after that!
Note: I am not an English teacher, just the daughter of one. I did have her as a teacher once (small rural school), but I might not exactly remember her words.
I did exactly this in high school after our English teacher told us that sometimes Coleridge was so desperate for a fix he would smoke melon rinds. That got my attention.
While studying Coleridge for English A Level (which did not endear the Romantic poets to me) we watched a video which was a BBC dramatisation (or similar) of the life of Coleridge, Wordsworth and their social group. My favourite bit was when they were excitedly talking about how they were all like aspects of a scientific experiement (“you are the crucible which brings us all together!” “you are the catalyst which sparks things into happening!”) and Coleridge’s wife (I think) asks what she is, as they have left her out. “…you are the sturdy table, my love, who supports us all!”. Shut up, Coleridge.
It also taught me how to pronounce Southey (“rhymes with mouthy”).
Yeah, but they're not hard to figure out! I've figured them out while simultaneously being British.
Gonna ask my dad to do this next time I visit my parents.
Please tell us that one of the three things he has actually literally said to you is this:
but I guess that’s why neither kind of Lambs are my friends