Light chick lit might as well be verse, since verse shows off imagery and zingers and what else does one read this stuff for? Robbins adds a discernible plot, with dating and religion and a bit of a nervous breakdown, but the fun is the rhythm and the rhyme:
Ancient Greeks, with nine to choose from,
sipped their ouzo, heard their muse.
Suzy wonders, was that real, or
was it maybe just the booze?
Suzy hears a thought. His roommate
isn't just his roommate, Suze.
Is it a trend? Is it a Movement? Another three of the books I've blogged in Poetry are this-sort-of-thing, especially The Beauty of the Husband; then two of them are antiquarian (The Emperor's Babe, The Penelopeia) where 'Zeus' in this title is oblique. Definitely a trend.
Of the Nine, none were devoted
To shopping, chocolate or shoes.
Later: That was too cheap a shot. I should have remembered one of the sweeter poems from the tenth muse:
I have no embroidered headband to give you, Cleis, such as I wore
and in my mother's day a purple ribbon was the height of fashion
but we were dark; a girl as fair as sunshine
should only wear flowers.
Fashion; wedding (?) worries; generational saga... it's not the plot that makes great literature.
The above is my memory of, almost certainly, 's translation of . Since Barnard mostly had memory-jogger-size scraps to translate, it's hard to quote her in proportions small enough to be definitely fair use...
Find in a Library from Worldcat
Mostly mild and Cantabrigian (sp?) comedy, but it all scans, and there's a little of anything.
There's a page on an old copyfight, Dicken's outrage at US unauthorized reprints. From The American's Apostrophe to Boz, Aytoun & Martin, both dead by 1909:
That, I s'pose, you call free trading,—I pronounce it utter gammon.
No, my lad, a 'cuter vision than your own might soon have seen
The a true Colombian eagle carries little that is green;
The we never will surrender useful privateering rights,
Stoutly won at glorious Bunker's Hill, and other famous fights;
That we keep our native dollars for our native scribbling gents,
And on British manufacture only waste our straggling cents;
Quite enough we pay, I reckon, when we stump of these a few
For the voyages and travels of a freshman such as you.
This was, I gather, the basis of our official position at WIPO, except that we feel everyone else ought also to spend dollars on US productions and cents on their own.
ISBN: 0192832077
There are lofty reasons to enjoy reading old books, but it's also nice to run across yet another of the minor allusions made by . (I realize there are annotated anthologies, but I feel it only counts when I meet something on, as it were, its own terms in the wild. It's like a birder's life-list.) For instance, in The Parent's Assistant:
Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,--
To teach the young idea how to shoot,--
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,--
To breathe th' enlivening spirit,--and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast.
THOMSON.
I can't remember when Wimsey quotes that, but it will come to me. More from the same poem:
An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
Ease and alternate labour, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven!
The Seasons. Spring. Line 1158.
Thomson is compared to , although comes to my mind. Thomson wrote poems of Gothic gloom in modern setting, including The City of Dreadful Night, which is gloriously purple prose, roiled and shot with black and curdled red:
We bow down to the universal laws,
Which never had for man a special clause
Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
If tigers burn with beauty and with might,
Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
And Thomson lived 1834-1882, note you; that's out of a mechanistic, very faintly evolutionary, probably shocking run of stanzas.
The Castle of Indolence has a modernism of its own: there was a 19th c. solitaire card game with the same name. The game version of the poem, ha. Maybe Studio Foglio will put out a deck.
"The City of Dreadful Night" is Project Gutenberg etext #1238; more poems are kindly provided by the Vasthead.
Rewriting the past as the present is irresistible, however dubious in scholarship and dangerous in politics; good for romances and poetry, then. This is both, the raucus, she-lad autobiography of a woman who grows up poor in Roman London, marries money, seduces an emperor, and dies for it. It balances the Penelopeia. This puts the least socially acceptable enthusiasms into rough, silly, vulgar, broken verse in several forms; that hid not just the unpopular but the confusing urges of Penelope, and smoothed it all into imitation Lattimore.
I like Evaristo's book a lot better, of course. The most startling subject is the visit to a gladiator fight, which heroine Zuleika has no anachronistic objections to. It's not that she doesn't think about the horror, but there's no Victorian in her at all, it is not her duty to be good. Slower, and less considered, and more smoothly jointed to modern behavior, is her attitude towards her slaves; not intentionally cruel, but completely selfish.
The macaroni combination of Latin and modern London-melting-pot White Teeth urban slang and proper academic freeform verse works better than I expected it to.
ISBN: 0142001716
An oddity - a domestic feminist sequel to the Odyssey, told in the first person by Penelope, who takes her daughters to visit several respectable queens around the wine-dark seas, comparing weaving and medicinal gardens with them all.
It should, alas, have had a lot more conflict in it. Everyone - including Helen - has decided that the whole aberration of the elopement is best forgiven and forgotten. Arete is a respected wife and co-ruler, the Pythia is a besieged by a city gone lawless but is not herself terrifying.
But no gods, scant enchantments, and no sorceresses! (Possibly one god, who behaves rationally - out of character, that. Mentor appears, but not as Athene.) And really, if Penelope has a bone to pick with the the wider world, or a yen for powerful women's knowledge, Circe and Calypso and Medea would have been the people to visit. Instead we get an unlikely Penthesilea (not even properly dead although the dead do speak in the originals).
It was all right as a story of motherly midlife crisis, which is a good solid subject. But the logical universe it's in is a plains-easy version of the rocky, stormy, Classical Mediterranean, and that's a pity. I would have loved a big mess of the Women's Mysteries - I adore 's reworkings, and the techne of women's crafts. Aga Saga of the Aegean doesn't do justice to either the wild or the domestic.
The blank verse is recognizably in the style of . There are irruptions of modernity, especially in the interactions between characters; they're more reasonable and less emotional than 's characters, which leaves fewer places for rhetoric and poetry.
ISBN: 1-56792-206-6
It's a commodus vicus of recirculation that puts pre-1923 books on my PDA, so that I am continually reading the books that my grandparents thought of as foundational, cliché, or passé, depending on their tastes for the past. Occasionally I recognize something that I first read on vacation at my grandparent's in a turn-of-the-century prize book - that is, a collection of uplifting literature in a nicer binding than children usually got, printed expressly to be a reward for school achievement. I think these survived on the upper shelves for two reasons. One, they were probably chosen for their appeal to teachers' theoretical tastes. The children who got them didn't haul them around and read them. On the other hand, they are pretty, and they were trophies. Parent and child and grown child protected them. I recognized three or four quotations from Marmion.
As an amusement in itself, as something I would recommend to a modern reader, Marmion does well. First, it has a fine plot, in broad strokes: the manly, courageous villain; the suffering hero; two lovely maidens, one something of a Villainess, one a Damsel in Distress. Battles! visions! tournament in a fairy ring! and it has great visual scene-setting.
Second, although it is entirely in verse, it's easy to read. It bangs along in simple rhyming, with a comma or stop falling naturally at the end of each line. This is unsubtle to the ear, but no barrier to comprehension.
Third, there are those several bits good enough to be still repeated out of context. One is the little song "Lochinvar", also satisfactory in plot:
For a laggard in love and a dastard in war
Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.
Another is in the eulogy to Admiral Nelson:
To him, as to the burning levin,
Short, bright, resistless course was given.
Where'er his country's foes were found
Was heard the fated thunder's sound,
Till burst the bolt on yonder shore,
Roll'd, blazed, destroy'd—and was no more.
And finally, there's the bit that can be used in domestic travail, and therefore made into common quotation; I'm pretty sure 's characters use it. It's completely unfair to the character it seems to describe, who is shown with none of the faults but all these virtues:
O woman! in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!
As a historical object, Marmion isn't bad. Scott was in the wave of popularizing romantic Scotland, just as it was safely conquered¹. He commits roll-calls of the outlandish names of picturesque Scottish places. The villain is English and virile. The costume-party medieval setting, with Gothic(k) gloom, was similarly collecting its head of steam to power Victorian sentimentality and lithography.
The political introductions and the six interspersed dedications to his friends are also modestly interesting as types of early-nineteenth-century manly ideal.
The one historical fact you might want in advance is that the battle of Flodden was tremendously damaging, maybe decisively weakening, for Scotland against England. One of the editors of the poem points out that Scott was in a cavalry troop himself, and his description of the tactical stupidity of the King of Scotland is that of someone who could imagine being in that kind of battle. ( also fought on horseback, if I remember correctly, so Scott is not the last survival.)
URI: http://www.gutenberg.net/etext03/marmn10.txt
¹ Less of this, for instance:
On active steed, with lance and blade,
The light-arm'd pricker plied his trade,--
Let nobles fight for fame;
Let vassals follow where they lead,
Burghers, to guard their townships, bleed,
But war's the Borderer's game.
Their gain, their glory, their delight,
To sleep the day, maraud the night,
O'er mountain, moss, and moor;
Joyful to fight they took their way,
Scarce caring who might win the day,
Their booty was secure.
Subtitle: For my love, in sickness and health.
Formality makes it easier to talk about some things. That is, I think, the strength of this book. The sonnets were written in the course of her husband's radiotherapy, mostly speaking to him.
A little distance, and it occurs to me that I can think of great sonnet sequences of courtship (successful and unsuccessful) and some on ending a relationship, but no others from inside a happy marriage.
ISBN: 1-56512-402-2
Spring Scene in Time of War
The state lies ruined; hills and streams survive.
Spring in the city; grass and leaves now thrive.
Moved by the times the flowers shed their dew.
The birds seem startled; they hate parting too.
The steady beacon fires are three months old.
A word from home is worth a ton of gold.
I scratch my white hair, which has grown so thin
It soon won't let me stick my hatpin in.
--Du Fu, tr. Vikram SethThe poets , , and were contemporaries in the eighth century C.E.; they were born in a golden age of culture and good government that ripped itself and China apart before they died. Seth gives more historical detail, and also describes the original forms he was trying to live up to. Seth likes good old rhyme and meter - his Golden Gate is a novel written entirely in sonnets, and is easy to read withal - but was aiming for translations, not new invocations of the muse: he remarks
"The famous translations of , compounded as they are of ignorance of Chinese and valiant self-indulgence have remained before me as a warning of what to shun."
Well, I am ignorant of Chinese, and never mind self-indulgence, but I like these translations enough to learn some by heart - the rhyme & meter help - and like the poems well enough that I'm glad to have them.
ISBN: 1-85799-780-8
Praying may help us - who can tell?
But they, of course, have gods as well.
I would endeavor to maintain
Our plans on a terrestrial plane.