by John Lithgow
And seeks the rocks where billows roll.
Fortune! Take back these cultured lands,
Take back this name of splendid sound!
I hate the touch of servile hands,
I hate the slaves that cringe around.
Place me among the rocks I love,
Which sound to Ocean’s wildest roar;
I ask but this—again to rove
Through scenes my youth hath known before.
Few are my years, and yet I feel
The world was ne’er designed for me:
Ah! Why do dark’ning shades conceal
The hour when man must cease to be?
Once I beheld a splendid dream,
A visionary scene of bliss:
Truth!—wherefore did thy hated beam
Awake me to a world like this?
I loved—but those I loved are gone;
Had friends—my early friends are fled:
How cheerless feels the heart alone
When all its former hopes are dead!
Though gay companions o’er the bowl
Dispel awhile the sense of ill;
Though pleasure stirs the maddening soul,
The heart—the heart—is lonely still.
How dull! to hear the voice of those
Whom rank or chance, whom wealth or power,
Have made, though neither friends nor foes,
Associates of the festive hour.
Give me again a faithful few,
In years and feelings still the same,
And I will fly the midnight crew,
Where boist’rous joy is but a name.
And woman, lovely woman! thou,
My hope, my comforter, and my all!
How cold must be my bosom now,
When e’en thy smiles begin to pall!
Without a sigh I would resign
This busy scene of splendid woe,
To make that calm contentment mine,
Which virtue knows, or seems to know.
Fain would I fly the haunts of men—
I seek to shun, not hate mankind;
My breast requires the sullen glen,
Whose gloom may suit a darken’d mind.
Oh! that to me the wings were given
Which bear the turtle to her nest!
Then would I cleave the vault of heaven,
To flee away and be at rest.
What a painful longing to be a child again, carefree and without adult concerns. Not long before my own dad died, he would share vivid, fleeting memories of perfect moments from his childhood, say, standing atop a snowy hill on a perfect winter day before heading down the hill on a sled. I understand how captivating these childhood memories can be when recalled in later years, as you face the whole big snowball of your life—where you’ve been, what you’ve done, whom you’ve known. These moments seem clear and true and they’re like bright little beacons of light that keep you going. But this poem was written early in Byron’s life (“Few are my years”), so I wonder, why would such a young man pine for his carefree childhood?
For one thing, he seems weary of the trappings of his class—the “cultured lands,” the “servile hands.” He complains, “How dull!” to listen to the chatter of wealthy or powerful people who aren’t really his friends, but with whom he must attend parties and dinners. Byron thinks of himself as a “freeborn soul” who relates more to the wild and craggy mountainside. And though he has friends around the world, he feels lonely for the pure love and friendships he enjoyed in his youth, the “faithful few.”
Favorite Poems
“Prometheus” “So we’ll go no more a-roving”
“When we two parted” “Love’s Last Adieu” from Don Juan, Canto I
If Byron complained of the stiff reality of his aristocratic existence, he more than made up for it with bohemian escapades that took him around the globe. Byron was a poet who lived his life unapologetically with the pedal to the metal—the English tabloids would have loved him.
She walks in beauty
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Lewis Carroll
The Storyteller
(1832–1898)
One lazy summer day, on a rowing trip from Folly Bridge to Godstow, England, Lewis Carroll began telling a story to amuse three bored little girls—Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell. He started by tossing “my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” It was July 4, 1862, and the story would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass.
Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is entirely and abundantly imagined. Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a deacon in the Anglican Church, a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford, and an experimental portrait photographer, and he used all of his varied talents to conjure up a complete and completely madcap world for his heroine. It is a bright place filled with gryphons, croquet played with flamingos, sleepy dormice, grinning Cheshire cats, and rabbits wearing pocket-watches. In Victorian England, children were warned against idleness and mischief, but Carroll cheerfully encouraged daydreaming and childlike curiosity—he liked the idea of the kind of kid who would peer down a rabbit-hole and chat with a bespectacled caterpillar. Carroll had a rebellious streak that is reflected in his language: words are not proper and never trustworthy; they are constantly slipping and shape-shifting into nonsense verse and puns. In “Jabberwocky,” he revels in his mathematician’s fondness for puzzles and word games and his defense of creativity above all else.
“Jabberwocky” is from Through the Looking-Glass. Alice picks up a book but cannot read the language, until she realizes, “Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And, if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.”
Favorite Poems
From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “You are old, Father William”
From Through the Looking-Glass, Epilogue
“The Mad Gardener’s Song” “Phantasmagoria”
The Hunting of the Snark
Jabberwocky
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carroll kindly provided a note on pronunciation for “Jabberwocky”: “The ‘i’ in ‘slithy’ is long, as in ‘writhe’; and ‘toves’ is pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘groves.’ Again, the first ‘o’ in ‘borogroves’ is pronounced like the ‘o’ in ‘borrow.’ I have heard people try to give it the sound of the ‘o’ in ‘worry.’ Such is Human Perversity.”
What took Tolkien four fat books to tell, all happens within the bookends of this one short poem. A satire of a heroic, epic story, it’s a fabulous combination of serious high adventure and the completely ridiculous. The poem is silly and goofy, but Carroll seems to be winking at you a little. He knows that silliness, in a world so focused on strict practicality, is no trifling matter. It’s as if he set out to use the most delicious words, relishing them and making us love every one. He challenges us to throw out the dictionary and make up our own words. What kind of awful monster is a Jabberwock? And the Jubjub bird or the frumious Bandersnatch? Carroll uses familiar sounds that trick you into thinking, just for a minute, that you have heard the word before and know what it means. If you think of it, when you’re four years old, half the words you hear you don’t understand anyway. So it’s how they sound that leaves an impression.
After reading the poem, Alice turns to Humpty Dumpty (of course!) to ask what it all means. Humpty Dumpty explains,
“ ‘Brillig’ means four o’clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin broiling things for dinner . . . ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word . . . ‘toves’ are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews . . . also they make their nests under sundials—and they live on cheese . . . ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ . . . and a ‘borogove’ is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop . . . ‘mome’ I’m not certain about. I think it’s short for ‘from home’—meaning that they’d lost their way, you know.”
Humpty’s not a bad translator, but these words are only from the first stanza—what do you suppose the others mean? What exactly is a beamish boy or a frabjous day or a manxome foe? Have you ever been lost in uffish thought or wanted to gyre and gimble down the street? Would a vorpal sword stand you in good stead in a battle with a Jabberwock? I’d say Dr. Seuss owes a lot to Lewis Carroll.
Carroll’s work is bittersweet. His beloved children cannot stay young forever, and he feels gloomy that they will one day give up their daydreams and fancies. Still, he writes hopefully to a young friend, “Some children have a most disagreeable way of getting grown-up. I hope you won’t do anything of that sort before we meet again.”
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Knight Poet
(circa 1342–1400)
Chaucer was born sometime around 1342 in London. The son of a vintner, he was sent as a teenager to be a page for the Countess of Ulster. Chaucer was bright and capable and made friends with his noble employers. He was sent into France in 1359 on one of the many expeditions of the Hundred Years’ War, and was captured while fighting. King Edward III paid a part of his ransom in 1360 to get him safely back to England. Being a prisoner of war was not all bad, though—it was in France that Chaucer began to appreciate poetry. He was smitten with the poems of amour courtois, or courtly love, which is the idealized ardor of a man for an unattainable maiden. When he returned to England, he translated the Roman de la Rose, the bible of courtly love. Although Chaucer’s own relationships were far more run-of-the-mill (he married Philippa de Roet, a lady in attendance for the queen, in what seemed to have been an ordinary and comfortable union), every one of his heroes sees love as an exquisite calamity.
The job of the poet in the 1300s was not to invent stories: it was to find stories, borrow them, and twist them into new and entertaining shapes. Chaucer purloined stories everywhere, from the fabliaux, which were common yarns that traveled around town, to ancient classical myths, to the lives of saints, to tales from the Orient. He found stories that were spellbinding and that often had a moral buried in their ending, then spun them into pure gold.
Chaucer’s epic poem The Canterbury Tales is unlike anything that came before it—or after it, for that matter. It is rowdy and funny and raunchy— fart jokes and snappy insults abound. It is also one of the most lyrical and lovely poems in the English language. The poem rollicks through a pilgrimage to Canterbury in which thirty pilgrims are to entertain one another by telling tales. Chaucer never finished The Canterbury Tales, so vast was the undertaking. After his death, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first of the literary luminaries laid to rest in what’s now known as “Poets’ Corner.”
Geoffrey Chaucer is often referred to as the “father of English literature,” as he is considered the first to legitimize the use of the ordinary spoken style of English in writing, rather than formal Latin or French, which had previously been used. In popularizing what is now known as Middle English, Chaucer is credited with introducing hundreds, if not thousands, of now-common words to the English language.
from The General Prologue
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
And wel we weren esed atte beste.
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon
That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse.
But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,
Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun
To telle yow al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,
And whiche they weren, and of what degree,
And eek in what array that they were inne;
And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.
Favorite Poems
From The Legend of Good Women, “Balade”
From The Canterbury Tales, “The Knight’s Tale”
From The Legend of Good Women, “The Legend of Cleopatra”
“Merciles Beaute” “Lak of Stedfastnesse”
I think of this poem as a fantastic piece of time travel. It sort of hurls you back across generations and continents—we don�
�t really know exactly how the language sounded because the accents were different. My father often explained to his students the mystery of how language evolves using Chaucer and other writers of that period. He’d teach a brief history of the evolution of the English language simply by showing how a simple phrase from Middle English turned into plain modern English. For example, he would declaim a phrase that sounded like, “Tess fahss a koat kyningen!” He would say it about eight times and every time the sounds would change slightly until he ended up with the phrase, “This was a good king!”
The “Prologue” is utterly unique, both for its time and even now, some 600 years later. It has a wonderful innocence to it and a compelling directness and simplicity. It sets us down in the month of April, with its fruit and flowers, very much an example of the reverdie poetic tradition—reverdie means “regreening,” and is a kind of poem that celebrates spring and all that comes with it.
The first lines of the “Prologue” are a perfect setup for the tales to follow. Using lush words of spring, it describes the coming of Zephyrus, the west wind, the “tender shoots and buds” and the “young sun.” The narrator and twenty-nine others are crowded into an inn, all of them on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, quickly getting to know each other, and the narrator eager to describe every one of them. So begins the introduction to one of the all-time great poems in the English language. It grabs you and makes you as impatient to hear the pilgrims’ stories as they are to share them. How ready are we to meet the Knight?
Like many people of my generation, I had to memorize the first eighteen lines of the “Prologue.” I still find myself saying bits of it—but I can’t think of anything wrong with a little Chaucer rattling around inside my head!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Imagineer
(1772–1834)
Coleridge, Wordsworth. Wordsworth, Coleridge. You hardly hear of one of these British Romantic poets without mention of the other. They were great friends and giants among poets of this period, and perhaps did as much to define Romanticism as any artists of the time. The Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris of the Romantic period, they enjoyed five intense years of friendship and an incredible creative collaboration that produced Lyrical Ballads, a collection of both of their poems, which are some of the finest in the English language. They inspired each other to greater poetic feats, Coleridge inventing the conversational poem, which Wordsworth famously adopted and refined, Wordsworth’s friendship giving Coleridge the confidence and security he needed to write.