During most of my college years, the Physics department was run by Dr. Don Roiseland, a guy who was frankly beloved on campus. He was a big, tall goofy guy, bald, with facial features that famously (at least to everyone in the student body) looked like Yoda. During the autumn, when the leaves fell, he would never stay on the sidewalks, preferring to scuff his feet in the leaves as he went; he would even castigate students for not doing the same. In his high-pitched yelp of a voice he’d exhort us to scuff leaves along with him. I had only a bit of direct contact with Dr. Roiseland, when he taught a few sessions of the Astronomy class I took as one of my science electives. He loved just winging it when he had an audience in the school’s planetarium, and his love of the universe was well-known around campus.

Sadly, Dr. Roiseland got sick with some kind of cancer and died during my senior year. I attended his memorial service, which was held in the school’s main auditorium; he packed the place, one last time. Various professors stepped up to give tribute, including one who read this poem by Walt Whitman.

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—

There’s a problem, though. I sat there that day, listening to those lines, and I thought, “I’m not sure that means what the prof seems to think it means.” Because the poem refers to a person listening to a boring lecture that is reducing the universe to numbers and equations and charts and diagrams, with no wonder that one feels when one simply goes out and looks in silence at the stars. I thought the prof who read that missed the meaning.

Now, I’m not so sure. I think that the prof read that as something of a cautionary warning to those following in Dr. Roiseland’s footsteps, because Dr. Roiseland never did lose sight of how wondrous it is to look in silence at the stars. No matter how brilliantly he could run down the equations and the numbers and the diagrams and the charts, he could also just talk with amazement about how big Betelgeuse is, or hold forth on the beauty of a comet in the night sky.

You don’t have to lose the wonder to be a learn’d astronomer.

Sheila O’Malley marks the occasion of Billie Holiday’s birth date with a poem by Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”. Like many of the people Sheila writes about, I know entirely too little about Mr. O’Hara, who was a prominent voice and presence in the New York literary and art worlds until his death at age 40, when he was hit by a jeep on a Long Island beach. I was just thumbing through my copy of The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology, and there’s Mr. O’Hara, with a poem that would have been very useful a week ago, titled “Rachmaninoff’s Birthday”. Oh well, I’ll just use that one next year when I spend April 2023 honoring the composer’s 150th.

In the meantime, O’Hara wrote this poem on the occasion of Billie Holiday’s death, and what a vivid sense of time and place and mood O’Hara creates, a life bound by time and obligation and places to be and the time it takes to get there and the general discomfort with everything at all, a discomfort that fades–or is replaced–by something new, a remembrance of a single moment of song that he remembers, a moment that he had to squeeze himself into a gin joint to hear just a whisper.

Amazing.

“The Day Lady Died”, by Frank O’Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

When I was in 7th grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Havers, required us to memorize and recite a poem.

That was bad enough. I’ve never really understood the pedagogical value of this exercise, but my teachers were all deeply conservative in their approaches to teaching that they literally handed out the same tests each and every year (which led to another teacher having to scramble one year when we protested that we hadn’t actually covered what was on the test she handed out).

Even worse was that Mrs. Havers required us all to memorize and recite the same poem. So there we were, spending an entire class session, maybe two, listening to the same damned poem, over and over again, twenty-five times or however many times it took to get through each kid in the class.

We did this twice, that I recall. The second time was “The Night Before Christmas”, but the first was…oh look, I’m not gonna be nice here, OK? I hate this poem. I hated from the first second Mrs. Havers recited it to us, and I hated it through all the time I spent learning it and the time I sat in class listening to it over and over again.

It’s a poem by James Whitcomb Riley, a prolific poet who apparently wrote a great deal of sentimental poetry that was usually cast in some kind of dialect. This poem is no different. It’s got a kind of cornpone charm, I suppose. I know, I’m not being fair to this poem. It’s probably perfectly fine, but the circumstances with which I came to it beat it into my head and I formed a dislike to it that deepened to the point of being instinctive. At least I’ve driven all of it from my mind since fall of 1983…except for the first line. That ain’t goin’ anywhere, and believe me, I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried, and I’ve got the empty bottles to prove it.

Here it is: “When the Frost is On the Punkin”:

OK, wait a minute.

Obviously, I didn’t just copy-and-paste the poem here. I mean, I did do that, but I didn’t do it without reading the damned thing through once, just to see if I remembered anything other than the first line. And I honestly did not…but damned if I didn’t find this poem’s rhythm again. It’s very insistent, the rhythm here. You can’t avoid it.

I also found something else. I started hearing a voice as I read this thing. But it wasn’t my voice, and it wasn’t Mrs. Havers’s. It was…John Denver’s.

I’m serious.

As I read this, prepared to mock anew the bumpkin dialect Mr. Riley used, I found myself remembering a couple of John Denver songs in which he, too, sang in this kind of way: “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” and “Grandma’s Feather Bed”.

Thing is…I love those songs, partly because of their country wisdom, their illustration of a particular kind of life sketched perfectly in few words, and their infectious rhythm.

And I started to wonder if…maybe…this was another instance of my seventh-grade self having been full of crap, and my failure over all the years since then to really interrogate those beliefs.

Maybe.

Just maybe.

Here’s the poem, “When the Frost is On the Punkin”.

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,

And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,

And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,

And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;

O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,

With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,

As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere

When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—

Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees,

And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees;

But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze

Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days

Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock—

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,

And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;

The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still

A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;

The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;

The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover over-head!—

O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock,

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps

Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;

And your cider-makin’ ’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through

With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too! …

I don’t know how to tell it—but ef sich a thing could be

As the Angels wantin’ boardin’, and they’d call around on me—

I’d want to ’commodate ’em—all the whole-indurin’ flock—

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

Sigh.

I may owe Mrs. Havers an apology on this one.

Maybe.

One of the best ways to build a poetry collection is to frequent used-book sales at local libraries. You can almost always find something good at those, and for my money, the real treasure is always the really old stuff, like this:

That’s a volume of English and Scottish ballads, printed in 1904. It’s in a bit of rough shape, but it’s still a joy to own. I’ve picked up a bunch of other old poetry collections in this way. Not only are books like this a pleasure since they just don’t make ’em like this anymore, they’re also nice because–in the case of collections like, say, old editions of The Oxford Book of English Verse–the contents will vary wildly with the contemporary editions, the farther back you go. Very old anthologies of poetry will include poets who are almost (or entirely) forgotten today, and I’m always a big fan of keeping artists of yesteryear from vanishing into total obscurity as much as I can.

Lots of times these old collections were schoolbooks, and the students of the past signed them. I looked this man up, and all I was able to find out was that he graduated high school in Abingdon, PA in 1921. A young man was reading from this book over a hundred years ago…and now it’s on my shelf.

And here’s the man who assembled this collection. This volume appears to be a reissue, and it notes that this editor had already died by this point.

This particular book obviously features ballads, the narrative poems of English and the Scottish tongues, which were a prime medium for storytelling several hundred years ago. As such, a lot of these ballads were kept alive in oral traditions and authorial information, to the extent there ever were any actual “authors”, is long gone. Many of the poems in this book unfold over quite a few pages, but here’s a single short one, with no author given. It’s a grim tale with a sad end…but there’s never any guarantee with these things, is there? I imagine this tale is sadly realistic for its time.

Additional information on this ballad, with one of many alternates, here.

She-Hulk has a joke for you!

Original art by John Byrne, tweaked a bit by me.

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:

Yes, I could have just posted this all by itself, but I always like dusting off the She-Hulk pie-in-the-face cartoon, so.

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.