SINCERE (IF UNINTENTIONAL) PARODY (8)
04-22-2011
Some years ago, I decided to read through the entire works of the poets who wrote in English, right down to their juvenilia and the poems they themselves had rejected,--- if such existed.
Henry David Thoreau
I grew up in a rural setting and loved nature. I thought I thus had something special in common with Thoreau. I admired his strong mind and independence. Further, I thought his selected poems were inadequate, and that perhaps I could find unacknowledged gems in his collected poems. (I was young then.)
So eventually I picked up a book of his poems: Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau, Enlarged Edition, edited by Carl Bode. I was reading along with appreciation and expectation but not really getting that much out of it, when I came to the poem entitled “The River Swelleth More And More.” It is a poem of 31 lines with a few stanza breaks. I read to lines 5 and 6 at the rhymes of “Ararat” and “water-rat.” I thought these rhymes were fairly funny. Then I read the next coupIet on lines 7 and 8 that take up the poem after the stanza break, and read the rhymes “Musketaquid” and “e’en is hid,” and thought that it was a good try. Those tongue-tying Native American names that are found everywhere in New England provide a challenge for rhymes. I continued to lines 21 and 22, and saw
“Our village shows a rural Venice,
Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;”
I guffawed at the rhyme of “Venice” and “fen is.” It tickled me totally. It was more than funny. It was funny with a combination of bathos and naiveté.
At that point, I had had it with reading the collected poems of Henry Thoreau. And the rhymes in the next couplet did not help, as Thoreau rhymed “Naples” and “maples.” I concluded that I would not get anything new and startling out of a serious perusal of Thoreau’s collected poems. I did read through the book, though, skimming and scanning. The poems are not bad. They are quiet, sober and somber reflections on every day, rural New England about Boston. At least, Thoreau had the talent of versification, which I doubt is true for most poets these days. (Versification and the skill to do it were discarded.)
I could never, though, forget the unique (I guess I would say) rhymes of “Venice” and “fen is.” It rings even now in my mind.
That was fun.
William Wordsworth
I decided to read Wordsworth by happenstance. I went to a book sale at a local public library and found his complete poetic works in ten volumes. (Phew!) I bought the whole box of them for a few bucks. It is the Grasmere Edition and in very good condition complete with illustrations in sepia tint. Wordsworth had a tremendous output, but I am not so sure that it was good for him. It might be better for a poet to write a few slim volumes that people might actually read. To face the immensity of Wordsworth’s oeuvre is fearsome. Lord Byron, his contemporary, called him “wordswords,” with reason.
I will not claim that I read all of Wordsworth’s poems. I read some old favorites, especially “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality,” and then flipped and skimmed through the rest. (There may be unrecognized gems that I did not pick up on, but to read every line of every poem that Wordsworth wrote is a daunting task and one for when I have finished other tasks in my life.)
Along in Volume V I made a rediscovery. It was Wordsworth’s sonnet entitled “The World Is Too Much With Us; Late And Soon,” penned in 1806-07.
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --- Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
It is a noble poem, an Italian or a Petrarchian sonnet: octet: abbaabba, sestet cdcdcd. It is a true, sincere poem. I loved it when I was a youth, instantly and instinctively. I memorized it and would rehearse it in mind with relish and pleasure, though some lines fell out of memory over the years.
Why, then, would I consider this sonnet of Wordsworth to be parodic? The reason is history, or time, that makes a ridiculous shambles of everything. (In this context, the sentence attributed to Nennius, an early historian of Britain comes to mind: “I have made a heap of all that I could find.”) The attitudes displayed in the poem are obsolete. It has become a parody. No one now would write a poem that displayed such attitudes. We no longer care about the world being too much with us. Rather, we want the world to be more with us, to fill us with its fatuousness. We get and spend more than we earn relentlessly on credit. Nor do we care for nature. Nature is thought of as a park, either cute or spiritual. It is neither, but is reality, the Real. That is why Triton carries a trident, a pitchfork --- and why those Asians who are Taoists and Buddhists know it and love it. (I would, too, if I could see nature in its profundity.)
Thus Wordsworth’s sonnet has been cast into the midden of time. When I laugh at it, I laugh at the naïveté of my youth, and the youth of our civilization, or whatever it is.
S. T. Coleridge
Soon enough I picked up the collected works of S. T. Coleridge. I have always liked Coleridge, especially for his ballad The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. It is an all-time masterpiece, and will forever be in the English canon. It was part of my artistic development.
I was reading along appreciatively when I came to the poem: The Alienated Mistress that is described as a madrigal from an unfinished melodrama.
“Lady: If love be dead (and you aver it),
Tell me, bard! where love lies buried.
Poet: Love lies buried where ‘twas born:
Ah, faithless nymph! think it no scorn
If in my fancy I presume
To name thy bosom poor Love’s tomb.
And on that tomb to read the line, ---
‘Here lies a love that once was mine,
But took a chill, as I divine,
And died at length of a decline.’”
This poetic fragment of Coleridge tickled my funny bone so much that I rolled off the couch where I was reading. Its bathos was unendurable. I laughed so thoroughly that I was impelled to write a parody of the fragment. I give it as follows.
To His Alienated Mistress (To Whom Love Died Also), a burlesque.
“Lady: If love be dead (and you aver it!),
Tell me: where love lies buried, poet?
Poet: Love lies buried where ‘twas hatched:
Ah, faithless nymph! I think you’re matched
If in my fancy I presume
To name your snatch as poor Love’s tomb.
And on that tomb to read the scores, ---
‘Here lies a love that once was yours,
But took a chill, the risk of whores,
And died at length of other tours!’”
Ah, ----Ha! Ha! Ha! Dear reader, I ask your forgiveness for my lapse of gentlemanliness. There is something in Coleridge’s poetic fragment that reminds me of Freud’s upward misdirection of sexual interest that I may have restored in my parody of it. It was the devil in poets that made me do it. But my parody is sure funny, and something I do not think you ever see in poetry these days.
Denouement
I soon gave up my reading scheme of all the poets who wrote in English, as a disciplined routine. I still pick up the complete poems of a poet, though, now and then, to see what I can see.
I make some conclusion from my specialized reading.
1- Even the greatest of writers make boners. It humanizes them.
2- The works of a major poet have been culled, over time, for their significant poems. You do not have to parse them anew, though it would not hurt to try. That is, unless the criteria of literature undergo a thoroughgoing revision. This is likely to happen simply to allow critics to say something new.
3- Time in its engorgement makes a heap of all things, including poems.
T. R. CATANZARITE
