Frances Cornwell was the daughter of Charles Darwin. I am posting her heavy-handed poem only for the fun of sharing G. K. Chesterton’s devastating rejoinder.
Women have a special beauty who experience joy throughout their lives, but more beautiful still is the woman who emerges serene from trial and tribulation.
And these three played, and playing grew more fain
Of mirth and music; till the heathen came
And the King slept beside the northern sea.
After W.B. Yeats.
Of an old King in a story
From the grey sea-folk I have heard
Whose heart was no more broken
Than the wings of a bird.
As soon as the moon was silver
And the thin stars began,
He took his pipe and his tankard,
Like an old peasant man.
And three tall shadows were with him
And came at his command;
And played before him for ever
The fiddles of fairyland.
And he died in the young summer
Of the world’s desire;
Before our hearts were broken
Like sticks in a fire.
After Robert Browning.
Who smoke-snorts toasts o’ My Lady Nicotine,
Kicks stuffing out of Pussyfoot, bids his trio
Stick up their Stradivarii (that’s the plural
Or near enough, my fatheads, nimium
Vicina Cremonæ; that’s a bit too near.)
Is there some stockfish fails to understand?
Catch hold o’ the notion, bellow and blurt back “Cole”?
Must I bawl lessons from a hornbook, howl,
Cat-call the cat-gut “fiddles”? Fiddlestick!
After Walt Whitman.
Me clairvoyant,
Me conscious of you, old camarado,
Needing no telescope, lorgnette, field-glass, opera-glass, myopic pince-nez,
Me piercing two thousand years with eye naked and not ashamed;
The crown cannot hide you from me,
Musty old feudal-heraldic trappings cannot hide you from me,
I perceive that you drink.
(I am drinking with you. I am as drunk as you are.)
I see you are inhaling tobacco, puffing, smoking, spitting
(I do not object to your spitting),
You prophetic of American largeness,
You anticipating the broad masculine manners of these States;
I see in you also there are movements, tremors, tears, desire for the melodious,
I salute your three violinists, endlessly making vibrations,
Rigid, relentless, capable of going on for ever;
They play my accompaniment; but I shall take no notice of any accompaniment;
I myself am a complete orchestra.
So long.
After Swinburne.
In the time of old sin without sadness
And golden with wastage of gold
Like the gods that grow old in their gladness
Was the king that was glad, growing old:
And with sound of loud lyres from his palace
The voice of his oracles spoke,
And the lips that were red from his chalice
Were splendid with smoke.
When the weed was as flame for a token
And the wine was as blood for a sign;
And upheld in his hands and unbroken
The fountains of fire and of wine.
And a song without speech, without singer,
Stung the soul of a thousand in three
As the flesh of the earth has to sting her,
The soul of the sea.
Chesterton notes this series was “Composed on Having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole.” The familiar, solid simplicity of the original rhyme is reworked in the styles of five popular poets. Chesterton’s parodies are devastatingly humorous in their imitation of each poet’s style, perspective, and ego. This irreverent exercise reminds me of Chesterton’s remark about “higher culture”: “It means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do.”
Anatomical Studies of the Shoulder. Leonard da Vinci. 1510.
The Sword of Surprise
G. K. Chesterton
Sunder me from my bones, O sword of God
Till they stand stark and strange as do the trees;
That I whose heart goes up with the soaring woods
May marvel as much at these.
Sunder me from my blood that in the dark
I hear that red ancestral river run
Like branching buried floods that find the sea
But never see the sun.
Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes
Those rolling mirrors made alive in me,
Terrible crystals more incredible
Than all the things they see.
Sunder me from my soul, that I may see
The sins like streaming wounds, the life’s brave beat
Till I shall save myself as I would save
A stranger in the street.
“Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.” —Saint Augustine of Hippo
“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” Psalm 139:14
“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intent of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” Hebrews 4:12-13
A Little Poetry—The English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton did much to reveal the delightful strangeness of things we find too ordinary. “We are perishing for want of wonder,” he wrote, “not for wonders.”
Goethe said that everyone should read a little poetry and see a fine picture every day, to prevent worldly cares from overcoming our sense of the beautiful. Get your daily dose of beauty at Wrestle with the Angel.