"There stretches the Oak from the loftiest ledges/...the Pine-tree looks down on his rival the Palm"

Wednesday, surfacing from grinding work deadlines to do the reading meme thing:

One again my brain turned from fiction, but this time to poetry: partly piecewise from The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900 edition) and The Home Book of Verse, but mostly Poems of Places -- specifically, the rest of volume 29, covering the western United States (which from the point of view of the very New England Longfellow means "west of the Appalachians").

This means I have finally, finally finished reading this monumental anthology of 4200-odd poems: I first noted it almost four years ago, and hardly touched it this past year and a half. A lot of really good stuff in here, well worth the undertaking, despite some of the glories of very bad poetry also herein.

Speaking of which last, one final example: behold "The Little Lone Grave on the Plains" by John Brayshaw Kaye, which starts off:

Two days had the train been waiting,
Laid off from the forward tramp,
    When the sick child drooped
    And died, and they scooped
Out a little grave near camp.

Its Victorian sentimentality of a dying child is bad enough, but what little affect it might otherwise have gets squeezed out by the limerick stanzas -- slightly hobbled limericks, no less. Also, vultures don't "caw."

---L.

Subject quote from "Kilimandjaro," Bayard Taylor.