Author: ksedinger

She-Hulk has a joke for you!

With apologies to Marvel and John Byrne, I’ve stolen this joke from a postcard that I remember reading about when I was a kid, in, of all places, The Guinness Book of World Records. According to the Guinness folks, this postcard was actually the best-selling postcard of all time:

The postcard was created by illustrator Donald McGill, but he didn’t even originate the joke! It goes back farther, as early as 1907. Which means that the joke was around during Kipling’s lifetime!

Rudyard Kipling lived 1865 to 1936, and he was a prolific writer and journalist who wrote short stories, novels, and poetry in addition to his journalism. Kipling’s legacy is complicated, or even controversial, given his reputation as being a chief voice of the high point in British Empire colonialism. There is a certain stuffy feeling to reading Kipling now; even in his lyric descriptions of far-off lands he feels like the kind of poet one reads in an oak-paneled study with a fire in the hearth, a clock ticking on the mantel, and perhaps a smoldering pipe in the hand that’s not holding the book. Kipling really does seem to be the voice of the “stiff upper lip, lads!” era of Proper Britain. In a large way, Kipling seems to occupy a similar space in his writing that Edward Elgar does in his music. (Hence my choice for today’s Tone Poem Tuesday, coming up later!)

All that is a bit simplistic, though, because Kipling is still a fine poet, with a keen command on how to deploy rhythm, meter, and rhyme to the emotions he wants to illustrate in his work. These two poems illustrate this particular well, in the service of two common themes: love, and death.

First, love. The Lovers’ Litany is a catalog of failed loves and a hope of more to come. “Love like ours can never die!” says the narrator, but he says it of four different loves, each one gone into memory. But even though he has been “bankrupt in quadruplicate”, he would endure the same fate a full forty more times if he could.

Eyes of brown—a dusty plain
Split and parched with heat of June
Flying hoof and tightened rein;
Hearts that beat the old old tune.
Side by side the horses fly,
Frame we now the old reply
Of the Lovers’ Litany:—
“Love like ours can never die.”

Eyes of blue—the Simla Hills
Silvered with the moonlight hoar;
Pleading of the waltz that thrills,
Dies and echoes round Benmore.
“Mabel,” “Officers,” “Goodbye,”
Glamour, wine and witchery—
On my soul’s sincerity,
“Love like ours can never die.”

And then, death. Here, in Possibilities, Kipling ruminates on how those who die are mourned all too briefly before their places are taken again amongst the living by someone else, so that the ghosts who gather to cavort when the living have retired must disperse again by sunrise. The thing that catches me in this poem is in the second stanza, when Kipling describes death as “the Great Perhaps”; this is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country”.

“Possibilities”, Rudyard Kipling

Ay, lay him ‘neath the Simla pine —
A fortnight fully to be missed,
Behold, we lose our fourth at whist,
A chair is vacant where we dine.

His place forgets him; other men
Have bought his ponies, guns, and traps.
His fortune is the Great Perhaps
And that cool rest-house down the glen,

Whence he shall hear, as spirits may,
Our mundane revel on the height,
Shall watch each flashing ‘rickshaw-light
Sweep on to dinner, dance, and play.

Benmore shall woo him to the ball
With lighted rooms and braying band,
And he shall hear and understand
“Dream Faces” better than us all.

For, think you, as the vapours flee
Across Sanjaolie after rain,
His soul may climb the hill again
To each of field of victory.

Unseen, who women held so dear,
The strong man’s yearning to his kind
Shall shake at most the window-blind,
Or dull awhile the card-room’s cheer.

In his own place of power unkown,
His Light o’ Love another’s flame,
His dearest pony galloped lame,
And he an alien and alone.

Yet may he meet with many a friend —
Shrewd shadows, lingering long unseen
Among us when “God save the Queen”
Shows even “extras” have an end.

And, when we leave the heated room,
And, when at four the lights expire,
The crew shall gather round the fire
And mock our laughter in the gloom.

Talk as we talked, and they ere death —
Flirt wanly, dance in ghostly-wise,
With ghosts of tunes for melodies,
And vanish at the morning’s breath.

Two geographical notes: Simla is a city and region in Northern India, where Kipling spent most of his time when was in that country (it is called Shimla today), and Benmore was a mansion with a ballroom that was a hub of social activity in the Simla region.

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An odd road to this one: my last two years of college, I lived in a rented house with a roommate, and thus I was off the campus meal plan as well. This meant cooking. As a college student with little income (OK, let’s be honest, outside of what my parents were graciously willing to send me despite my frankly not-especially-good habits of showing gratitude for it, no income), “cooking” generally meant things like Kraft Mac-and-Cheese, Ramen noodles, PB&J or bologna sandwiches, and the like. But I did start learning to do more actual cooking during those years, with a big way of learning my way about a kitchen coming from Jeff Smith, the “Frugal Gourmet”, who at the time was still a big name. I bought a number of his cookbooks and I enjoyed watching his shows, which just happened for one year to run in the afternoons in Iowa during a period when I had no classes.

(I know, I know, all about what happened to Smith’s career, and I’m not relitigating any of that in this space. It’s not the point.)

My favorite of Smith’s cookbooks, which in addition to having a lot of great information in the recipes were just good food writing in general, is The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American, in which Smith focused heavily on foods native to America, or reflective of American history. He believed that food and memory–i.e., history in the personal sense as well as the larger, collective sense–were intertwined, and that foods that were enjoyed by our ancestors should still be enjoyed, even if our associations with them weren’t always positive. Hence a story he told about his father one day cooking cornmeal mush in the kitchen, and young Jeff’s confusion at this when his father had told him once that he’d had many mornings as a poor kid when all they’d had to eat was cornmeal mush.

“If all you had to eat was cornmeal mush, and you got sick of it, why are you cooking it now?” Jeff asked.

“Because I have to taste it again,” said Jeff’s father.

But anyway, onto poetry. There’s a section in The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American about New England’s food heritage, going all the way back to the first Pilgrim colonists. (Again, this was written in the 1980s. Smith was a lot more acknowledging of what European colonists had done to the native populations than most, but he was still very much “of his time”.) At the end of a brief introductory essay, Smith closes with this bit of verse:

All the fine old frugal ways
Of the early Pilgrim years
Have the power to wake in me
A deep and sober ecstasy
Close akin to tears.

I’ve always rather liked that little bit. Problem is, Smith doesn’t credit it! I have never been able to figure out where it came from, and I wondered if Jeff Smith wrote it himself.

He did not.

I’ve searched that verse online every once in a while over the years, and never found a source for it…until just the other day.

The author is one Christine Turner Curtis, a writer about whom almost no information exists online, as far as I can find. All I know is that Curtis was born in 1891, she was a New England poet and writer, and her most notable work is apparently a novel called Amarilis. I also found, in a collection of verse written by poets connected to Wellesley College over fifty years, from 1875 to 1925. The book is digitized into Google Books, and as the book was probably out of print more than fifty years before Jeff Smith ever started researching his American cookbook, I’d be interested to know exactly how he came across this terrifically obscure bit of verse.

Anyway, here is the entire poem.

“The Strain”, by Christine Turner Curtis

The Old New England soul of me
Loves all sleek and hearty things;
Wide-roofed barns and stuffed haymows,
Fat white goslings, leaf-brown cows,
Autumns and harvestings,

And the bulging orange cheeks
Of ripe pumpkins in the sun;
Seed-corn hanging by the door,
Melons on the woodshed floor,
Clapp’s Favorites, one by one,

Dropping from the loaded trees,
And the copper Seckel pear,–
Loves the crowded apple bin
And the red fruit rumbling in;
Grandfather’s spindle chair

Standing by the kitchen blaze,
The deep chimney and the clock
And the blackened old firedogs
Under the huge twisted logs,
New butter in a crock

And great foaming jars of milk,
Yellow loaves of citron cake,
Currant jellies, clear and red,
And the brown domes of the bread,
Fresh from the morning bake.

All the fine old frugal ways
Of those gallant Pilgrim years
Have the power to wake in me
That deep sober ecstasy,
Close akin to tears.

A great poem? Enh, maybe not. But maybe not deserving of complete obscurity outside of a brief quote, with the wording changed, and the author uncredited in a nearly forty-year-old cookbook, either.

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From a collection of love poetry that I own, an offering by John Donne.

“The Good-Morrow”, by John Donne

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,

Which watch not one another out of fear;

For love, all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room an everywhere.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres,

Without sharp north, without declining west?

Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

There’s a lot going on in this poem–I had to look up the reference to the “Seven Sleepers”, which turns out to be a pretty interesting bit of mythology on its own–but what caught my eye, just briefly, is the question Donne asks in the very first two lines and explores over the course of the first stanza. It’s certainly my experience that once love is found, it gets harder and harder to remember what it felt like before it was found, and it’s easy to ask the question Donne is exploring: If our two lives are one now, how were our two lives two before we found each other? Were we really living, or were we just sleeping through life?

But when we do find love, it’s a melding of worlds into one, and our worlds become each other, don’t they? Hence the cartographic references in the third stanza, which are interesting metaphors for a love poem, aren’t they?

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A poem about yesterday’s birthday composer:

“Rachmaninoff” by Peter Halstead

On top of fluted spines
Between the massing pools
Of dark chromatic lines

And using blood for fuel
Follow all the signs
And signatures

Read the fine print
On the flapping label
In the search for love

So the incidentals
Of the dim rule
On the page above

Take the clouded hint
Or later on you’ll
Tend to bluff

In the no man’s land
Of the intellectual
Handcuffed to chance

And lost in jewels:
A dream of hell
With inhuman hands.

Source. Peter Halstead is a poet, pianist, and photographer who with his wife Cathy founded the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana.

I love the hints of musical terminology in this poem, and I assume the “inhuman hands” of the last line belong to Rachmaninoff himself, who had famously enormous hands, which enabled him to span gigantic chords at the keyboard (and which led him to unapologetically write gigantic chords in his own piano music). When he was on his deathbed, Rachmaninoff is reported to have bid farewell to his hands.

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I want to post a poem each day this month! Here is the first, a poem about writing poetry, by Seamus Heaney. Note how he compares his own work–writing, with the pen as his tool–with that of his father, who is digging up potatoes in the garden. It’s a metaphor that works in a lot of ways: if one characterizes writing as “digging”, then one sees writing as a way of delving deep into the regions of the mind as digging is a way of delving deep into the regions of the world.

But Heaney also sees a disconnect between the work that he does, the work with which he is accustomed and comfortable and skilled at doing, and the work that his father and his grandfather did with such strength and skill, stopping only to drain an offered bottle of milk. How vivid the details: the smell of the potato plants and their fungi, the sound the peat makes as one digs, the sharpness of the lines left by the men doing the digging. A tone of possible regret creeps in as Heaney notes that he has no spade to take up of his own. He cannot dig in the earth as his forebears did.

But he can dig with the “squat pen”.

“Digging”, by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

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