Larry Hammer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
larryhammer) wrote2014-12-19 02:28 pm
larryhammer) wrote2014-12-19 02:28 pm
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"And the pines, -- dreamy Titans roused from sleep, -- / Answer with mighty voices, deep on deep"
Some more poem-like thingies I've poked at lately:
"Godiva -- A Tale" is the work of John Moultrie, a Cambridge undergraduate at the time -- and his age shows. The poem shows great promise for a writer in the manner of Whistlecraft and Byron's "Beppo," but the satire is neither incisive nor systematic enough, but rather random potshots -- in other words, amusing but thin. Also, it takes a dozen-odd stanzas (after an introduction and invocation) to settle down to said manner. The tale itself is a straight-up telling of the standard Godiva story enlivened by the narrator's digressions. Not great literature but entertaining enough.
I do not know why I keep returning to Robert Southey, given how little I've liked anything he's written. Thalaba the Destroyer is a hot mess, and not in a good way, Madoc is turgid and dull, The Curse of Kehama just plain dull, and "What Are Little Boys Made Of?"* is just plain offensive. This time, I bonked my head on A Tale of Paraguay, the story of the last two survivors of a Guaraní tribe wiped out by smallpox as recorded by a Jesuit missionary. The Spenserian stanzas are handled with more grace and ease than anyone I've read, used to convey a story whose telling is as unappealing as half-frozen mud, and nearly as cold despite repeated appeals to sentimentalism. If you want to study a masterful handling of the form, this may be required sampling, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else. DNF.
In progress is Psyche by Mary Tighe, an Irish poet of the generation before Keats who, like him, also died young of TB. I mention him because she is SO obviously an influence on his style -- this reads very much like the Keats of Endymion, with many of the same virtues and flaws (including langorous narrative). If she had lived longer, one wonders how close to the Keats of "St. Agnes Eve" she would have become. Anyway, Tighe follows the classical tale closely till the Big Mistake, but Psyche's trials are redone as allegorical chivalric romance a la Spenser -- for she has taken on not just Spenser's stanza here but much of his method. Or so per commentary -- I haven't reached that yet.
* Yes, Southey is apparently credited with congealing the canonical form of this: see Wikipedia. He also wrote "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."
---L.
Subject quote from "Forest Pictures: Morning," Paul Hamilton Hayne.
"Godiva -- A Tale" is the work of John Moultrie, a Cambridge undergraduate at the time -- and his age shows. The poem shows great promise for a writer in the manner of Whistlecraft and Byron's "Beppo," but the satire is neither incisive nor systematic enough, but rather random potshots -- in other words, amusing but thin. Also, it takes a dozen-odd stanzas (after an introduction and invocation) to settle down to said manner. The tale itself is a straight-up telling of the standard Godiva story enlivened by the narrator's digressions. Not great literature but entertaining enough.
I do not know why I keep returning to Robert Southey, given how little I've liked anything he's written. Thalaba the Destroyer is a hot mess, and not in a good way, Madoc is turgid and dull, The Curse of Kehama just plain dull, and "What Are Little Boys Made Of?"* is just plain offensive. This time, I bonked my head on A Tale of Paraguay, the story of the last two survivors of a Guaraní tribe wiped out by smallpox as recorded by a Jesuit missionary. The Spenserian stanzas are handled with more grace and ease than anyone I've read, used to convey a story whose telling is as unappealing as half-frozen mud, and nearly as cold despite repeated appeals to sentimentalism. If you want to study a masterful handling of the form, this may be required sampling, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else. DNF.
In progress is Psyche by Mary Tighe, an Irish poet of the generation before Keats who, like him, also died young of TB. I mention him because she is SO obviously an influence on his style -- this reads very much like the Keats of Endymion, with many of the same virtues and flaws (including langorous narrative). If she had lived longer, one wonders how close to the Keats of "St. Agnes Eve" she would have become. Anyway, Tighe follows the classical tale closely till the Big Mistake, but Psyche's trials are redone as allegorical chivalric romance a la Spenser -- for she has taken on not just Spenser's stanza here but much of his method. Or so per commentary -- I haven't reached that yet.
* Yes, Southey is apparently credited with congealing the canonical form of this: see Wikipedia. He also wrote "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."
---L.
Subject quote from "Forest Pictures: Morning," Paul Hamilton Hayne.