"while I paced/With heart that trembled towards the south/Through London's coiled and stony waste"

[larryhammer]

Longfellow's Poems of Places continues to amuse -- I've now read all of Switzerland, Australia & Oceania, and Italy, in addition to hopping around the rest of the world like a poetic jet-setter. Previous posts notwithstanding, the quality of the verse remains generally pretty high, and the thematic conceit focuses the selection away from the more tedious forms of Victorian sentimentality, leaving only the swamps of nostalgia to wade through, so to speak. The best parts are those swaths of continental Europe just beyond immediate contact with England.

Its holes are especially interesting: only four samples of Swinburne in the entire thing, and Rossettis only as translator. And only two extracts from Amours de Voyage for all three volumes of Italy? -- that's rather thin. In contrast, Byron is ALL OVER those volumes, with at least half of book IV of Childe Harold showing up in snippets, with Shelley almost as frequent.

Coverage of Asia, especially east Asia, is as bad as you might expect. OTOH, the Japan section is actually more translations from Japanese than poems by westerners -- pretty bad translations,* but Longfellow did try. Indeed, except for the Levant and Africa, there's consistent attempts to sample local poets including in translation if need be -- something conspicuously absent from other traveling anthologies of the time that I've seen.

All that said, Longfellow did let through some stinkers. Here, for example, is one from Alfred Austin, who in a few decades would become one of the worst poet laureates, which I select especially for mme_hardy and movingfinger:

There is a little city in the South,
A silent little city by the sea,
Where a stilled Alpine torrent finds its mouth,
And billowy mountains subside smilingly.
It knows nor weeping skies nor dewless drouth,
No seasons, save when April’s glancing glee
Slow steadies unto Summer’s still-poised wing,
Or mimic Winter lifts the mask from Spring.

My current theory is that Austin never read any of his drafts out loud, and so didn't notice that they are literally unspeakable.


* The presence of "Ashibiki Hill" is particularly telling, as the supposed name is a stock epithet meaning something like "foot-weary."

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Any decent poems about Scandinavia?

[larryhammer]

I haven't poked much through that region beyond the (very few) Iceland poems -- the TOC relevant volume is here (search on "Introductory to Denmark" to find the start).

---L.