I am elated. I’ve written a poem! Yes, I have, a real poem that rhymes and everything. At the moment I feel like someone waking up after a bang on the head and finding they had acquired the ability to play the piano. After all these years, I’m a poet!
I know virtually nothing about poetry but I’ve been on the Internet all morning and so now I am an expert. The Internet’s great, isn’t it? I think I’m going to set myself the task of becoming an expert on a different topic every day before lunch.
On April 4th in Poetry in the raw, I quoted something written by WH Auden.
“A bit pretentious,” I expect you were thinking. “What’s a Philistine like Wilton doing quoting a poet?”
I’m going to tell you about someone who dwarfs Auden, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats and perhaps even, Pam Ayres.
This is the opening verse to The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a song written in 1931, with lyrics by Desmond Carter and performed by Al Bowlly.
Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick.
Brunswick is in Germany.
Long ago, seemed as though
The town was getting verminy.
Desmond Carter is largely forgotten now and was never classified as a poet but his lyrics in this song and in those he wrote for many of the songs composed by George Gershwin, are sheer poetry. Al Bowlly was a jazz singer and crooner who is mostly forgotten now too.
Okay, so Carter used Robert Browning’s opening line of The Pied Piper of Hamelin but look what he did with it! He turned it into a thing of joy. Fantastic! If you can’t think of a rhyme, make up a word. Can you think of a word to rhyme with Germany? I can’t.
Carter did what Shakespeare did but Shakespeare’s inventions were necessary for the narrative and not for rhyme. Desmond Carter was certainly no Shakespeare but he couldn’t half put a few words together.
Shakespeare has been credited with inventing more than three thousand words and many may surprise you: blanket, generous, critic, educate, worthless, exposure, investment, noiseless, arouse, obscene. Shakespeare even invented the word ‘torture’. Hard to believe it - but he did. (Don’t argue. It says so on the Internet.)
The Spanish Inquisition was in its full throes during Shakespeare’s time. It is possible that one day, guards walked into the cell of an accused man and said something like,
“Enough pussyfooting around. We’re going to try something we’ve heard about from England. It’s called torture.”
Except, they wouldn’t have said, “pussyfooting” because that word wasn’t created until the early 20th Century. (The Internet again)
The World Champion at creating and inventing words has to be Robert Burns. In some of his poems, he made up a word at the end of a line for no reason at all and then had to create another word just to get a rhyme. Just because he put an apostrophe in front of, in the middle of, or after a word doesn’t make it Scottish dialect! There you are - I’ve said it - Burns’ poems are gibberish.
Their sarks, instead o’ creeshie flainen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!
If those two lines from ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ aren’t total tosh, what is? Burns’ apologists will try and tell you that ‘creeshie’is dialect for ‘greasy’, that ‘flainen’ is ‘flannel cap’ and that ‘hunder’ is ‘hundred’. That means that as well as being a rubbish poet, Burns was also dyslexic. He couldn’t spell ‘snow’ or ‘hundred’ but he could spell ‘white’ and ‘seventeen’? Do me a favour!
Ah, that’s better. I feel like the little boy who shouted out that the Emperor was naked. Maybe it’s time for a complete reappraisal of Burns’ work and worth.
I will be seeing Dugald and Joyce in a couple of hours and I will ask them what a ‘sark’ is. Dugald wears a kilt occasionally and plays the bagpipes, often at the same time. If they don’t know what a ‘sark’ is, I shall rest my case.
I know that William Topaz McGonagall, derided today as the worst published poet there has ever been, would never have written nonsense like that. To deride McGonagall’s poems as the worst ever, is a dreadful slur. His poems are all (unintentionally) entertaining.
What is the point of poetry? It is not just for words to have the beauty and capacity to move us to deep feelings and emotion. Poets are not solely charged with forming beautiful structures with words. Another function of poetry is to entertain and that is exactly what the poems of William Topaz McGonagall do for whatever reason. “The phrase “It’s so bad it’s good” was made for McGonagall.
I defy you to read any of his poems without smiling or maybe, sniggering more than once. This is a verse from ‘Beautiful Torquay’:
There is also a fine bathing establishment near the pier,
Where the tourist can bathe without any fear;
And as the tourists there together doth stroll,
I advise them to visit a deep chasm called Daddy’s Hole.
Or this, from ‘Descriptive Jottings of London’:
St Paul’s Cathedral is the finest building that I ever did see;
There’s nothing can surpass it in the city of Dundee
Wonderful! If I had to spend ten minutes in a dentist’s waiting room, I’d rather read a couple of McGonagall’s poems than anything by Burns. McGonagall also came up with this striking moral couplet:
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
You can’t argue with that. An MP, intent on standing out from the crowd, could use it during questions to the Prime Minister:
“Would my Right Honourable friend agree with me, that the stronger we our houses do build, the less chance we have of being killed?”
Barratts, the house builders, should adopt it as their motto.
All Burns has left us with really, is a dreary old song that is only ever sung when people are rolling around drunk at midnight on New Year’s Eve. I have warmed to him a little recently upon discovering that he did write a couple of poems that contain very strong language indeed. The first one that I came across is composed of two verses with four short lines per verse. In that limited space, he has managed to include the ‘C’ word twice.
Here is my poem. I knocked out this ode to Caroline. It took me nearly five minutes. Do you think she’ll like it?
This morning when I spake with thee,
Your face and laughter seemed to be,
A glimpse of temp’ry ecstasy.
Your mind and being, called to me
In affirmation of our love.
It matters not when melody,
Doth changeth into rhapsody,
And plays with sense as remedy;
Will increased vibrant hesperody
Outwing a soaring, joyous dove?
I’m impressed with my first ever poem for these reasons:
1) | It looks like a poem. |
2) | Five lines to a verse – much classier than four. |
3) | It has the random and exotic punctuation that always occurs in proper poems. |
4) | There is a pretentious contraction that an established poet might use, ‘temp’ry’, |
5) | It sort of rhymes. |
6) | It’s got a couple of archaic words. |
7) | There is a kind of flow to it. |
8) | It contains an invented word (hesperody). |
9) | The second verse appears to everyone to be unintelligible bollocks but most really good poems are, aren’t they? |
10) | There should never an odd number in a list. |
However, the second verse is not unintelligible bollocks. It all hinges on the meaning of ‘hesperody’ (pronounced, I have decided, “Ess-per-dee”) and as I invented it, ‘hesperody’ can either mean what I say it means, or it may mean whatever the reader wants it to mean. I’ve decided to allow that too. Consequently, it is now the most versatile word in the English language.
It’s a Humpty Dumpty word.
“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
My “poem” will have different meanings depending upon the mood you are in when you read it. To some people, ‘hesperody’ could be a feeling similar to the bitterness, anger and resentment felt when you were kept waiting for over FOUR minutes standing in the POURING RAIN in a supermarket car park because your wife, who had the car keys, had stopped UNDER COVER to gossip with a friend she met on her way out – (possibly).
Alternatively, you might interpret ‘hesperody’ as the feelings you have from glimpsing an object such as a delicate crystal glass bowl, loosely filled with wild flowers picked alongside a dusty rural lane in late summer, while walking through the Suffolk countryside among the ripened, swirling, golden wheat fields and with the sound of a solitary skylark touching you to your very soul, trilling in the sky above.
Actually, my inspiration as I wrote it, was a neighbour’s car alarm going off.
My first and only other poem was written in March 1966 when I was a student in my first year at Durham. When founded in 1832, Durham University only had Cambridge and Oxford as models and so copied most of their practices. I lived in college and we all had rooms on a staircase. I and about 20 other first year students, including five friends whom I still have to this day, lived on B Stairs in Hatfield College.
There were two doors to every room and the outer door, The Oak, was closed when the person inside was not, under any circumstance, to be disturbed. Anyone in this situation was said to, “Have his Oak up.” (No! Stop it! Behave yourself.)
I used to put my Oak up every Saturday night at about 3:00 a.m. when I went to bed. I could sleep all Sunday morning. Up at 11:00, Ryvita and marmite for breakfast and then walk down to The Shakespeare for a couple of pints before Sunday lunch back in college.
The Bedder on B Stairs of Hatfield College was Susan Dinsdale-Davis. She would begin work at around eight on a Sunday morning, go into every one of the twelve rooms on our Staircase, clean, tidy, wash up cups and plates and make the bed. Yes, we were spoilt.
Mrs D-D used to get very pissed off with those of us who still had our Oaks up at 11:00 a.m. because obviously, she couldn’t come in to do her work. She wasn’t even allowed to knock on the door if the Oak was up.
She was a lovely lady and I felt very bad at the way we took her for granted. I wrote her a poem to try and make her feel better and also in lieu of an apology. I think it reads now like a rip-off of someone, possibly A A Milne.
Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea
With all her friends and her family.
They sat in rows of ascending height
And everything was perfectly right,
That memorable day, now when would it be
Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea?
It wasn’t a Monday or Thursday they came.
They couldn’t come Tuesday and that was a shame,
As Tuesday’s teas are often auspicious
And the scones on a Friday are always delicious.
But it wasn’t a Friday, so when would it be
Mrs Dinsdale Davies came to tea?
Billy and Jamie and Annie were sick
When Mister D showed them a conjuring trick.
It wasn’t real magic but kids are naïve.
They didn’t see teaspoons stuffed up his sleeve.
But, oh how they cheered, now when would it be
Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea?
Was it on Saturday? Couldn’t have been.
Nor on a Wednesday, as then our routine
Is off to play rugby, so all that remain
Is one day a week when I can entertain;
So, it was a SUNDAY! That’s when it would be
Mrs Dinsdale-Davis came to tea.
And very nice it was too.
Dugald will probably tell me that it is closer to something by McGonagall than anything by Burns. It was the best I could do but I suppose that McGonagall used that excuse too.
Bugger! It’s seven hours later. Dugald and Joyce have just left. They did know what a ‘sark’ is and described it in rather more detail than I thought was really necessary.
Show offs!
