Dancing by the Light of the Moon Page 31

  4 Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II. Shelley began writing this sonnet in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum’s acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Rameses II from the thirteenth century BC.

  5 Keats wrote this sonnet in 1819, revising it in 1820, possibly on his final trip to Italy, where he hoped to find a cure for his tuberculosis. Aware that he was dying, the poem contrasts the transience of human life with the steadfast eternity of the bright star in the heavens. Some critics interpret the poem as a love sonnet addressed to Keats’s fiancée, Fanny Brawne. An ‘eremite’ was a hermit or recluse; ‘pure ablution’ was ritual cleansing.

  6 The relationship between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning is one of the great love stories of literary history. In the 1840s, Elizabeth Barrett, already known as a poet, lived as an invalid in London with her father, who supported her writing but did not want her to marry. Robert Browning, five years her junior and less successful, admired her poetry, as she admired his. ‘I love your verse with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,’ he wrote in January 1845, ‘and I love you too.’ In September 1846 they eloped to Italy, where they lived until her death in 1861. Over the twenty months of their secret courtship, Elizabeth and Robert wrote some six hundred letters to one another. Elizabeth also began a series of sonnets under the title Sonnets from the Portuguese – so called to give the impression they were merely translations. In fact, they were original, though loosely inspired by the love sonnets of a Portuguese poet, Luís de Camões.

  7 Intriguingly, this celebrated sonnet of remembrance was written when Christina Rossetti was still a teenager. Her claims to fame include being the model for the Virgin Mary in the first completed oil painting by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, the first work to be inscribed with the initials ‘PRB’, standing for the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’. She also wrote the poem ‘In the bleak mid-winter’, which, more than once, has been voted ‘the world’s best-loved Christmas carol’.

  8 This is a tough one to learn and to perform – but do both and you will feel good. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest (hence the poem’s dedication) and a lover of nature: ‘windhover’ is another name for a kestrel and the last six lines of the sonnet liken the bird’s majesty to Christ’s. Hopkins was a Victorian, but his way with the sonnet broke the mould and his genius was only fully recognized posthumously. This is a Petrarchan sonnet, with (if you look for it) a definite abba abba cdcdcd rhyming scheme, but to achieve the effect of the swooping windhover Hopkins does amazing things with his vocabulary and the length of his lines.

  9 Désespoir is French for ‘despair’. Two other fine Wilde sonnets to learn by heart are ‘Hélas’ and ‘On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters’. ‘A great poet, a really great poet,’ wrote Wilde, ‘is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets make a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.’

  10 The American poet, playwright and feminist, Edna St Vincent Millay, is reckoned by some the greatest sonneteer of the twentieth century. The English novelist Thomas Hardy said that America had two great attractions: ‘the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay’.

  11 Countee LeRoy Porter’s first years are shrouded in mystery. What we do know is that he was brought to Harlem, New York, by his grandmother, who cared for him until her death in 1917. He was then adopted by the Reverend Frederick Cullen, pastor of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, who later became president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Countee, who was gay, published his first collection of poems, Color, in 1925. ‘Yet Do I Marvel’ is a traditional sonnet (with classical references to Tantalus and Sisyphus) in which Cullen questions the challenges God presents to a black poet. Color became a key publication in what is known as the Harlem Renaissance.

  12 Magee was an Anglo-American Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot and poet, who was killed in an accidental mid-air collision over England in 1941.

  Chapter Six: A Lot of Nonsense

  1 My mother met Dr Seuss (aka Theodor Seuss Geisel) once in a bookshop in La Jolla, California. She found him delightful. I met Roald Dahl on a number of occasions. Once we travelled together on a train from London to Cornwall. I found him as dark as some of his stories.

  2 In nineteenth-century America, Field was known as ‘the poet of childhood’. There is a statue of Wynken, Blynken and Nod in Washington Park, near Field’s home in Denver, Colorado. Posthumously, he gained notoriety for a bit of nonsense of a different sort: a story he had written called ‘Only a Boy’, a vivid account of a twelve-year-old schoolboy being seduced by a woman in her thirties. Issued anonymously in his lifetime, it was published by the Grove Press in 1968 under Field’s own name.

  3 This piece of nonsense was written by the distinguished British actress, Dame Celia Johnson (best remembered for the 1945 film, Brief Encounter) and performed by her at a house party given by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in March 1982, only a few weeks before Dame Celia died. According to Sir Roy Strong, who was there, the ‘wonderfully silly readings’ stole the show.

  4 John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman created Monty Python’s Flying Circus for BBC television in 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. ‘Horace’ appeared in Monty Python’s Big Red Book, published by Methuen in 1971. To sell the book the publishers took the Pythons on a promotional bus tour around the UK. Jilly Cooper, Leslie Thomas and I went, too, because we also had books published by Methuen that year. I remember Michael Palin telling us that the title they had thought of for the series was A Horse, a Spoon and a Bucket, but the BBC suggested John Cleese’s Flying Circus. The team agreed to the Flying Circus bit, but wanted a made-up name to go with it. As a group they came up with ‘Mr Python’; Eric Idle came up with ‘Monty’.

  5 No it isn’t. Haggis is a kind of stuffed black pudding eaten by the Scots and considered by them to be not only a delicacy but fit for human consumption. The minced heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, calf or other animal’s inner organs are mixed with oatmeal, sealed and boiled in maw in the sheep’s intestinal stomach-bag and … Excuse me a minute. (Ed.)

  Chapter Seven: Animal Magic

  1 Gray was a classical scholar, a don at Cambridge, and a popular poet, although he only published thirteen poems during his lifetime and declined the invitation to become Poet Laureate in 1857. (William Whitehead got the gig instead. Indeed, who he?) This playful elegy (telling the reverse of the story that led to my own brief ode featured on page 61) commemorates the passing of Selima, the cat of Horace Walpole, the writer best remembered for saying, ‘The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.’ Walpole later displayed the fatal china vase on a pedestal at his house, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham.

  2 Why did Blake spell his ‘Tyger’ with a y? It was a less archaic spelling of the word then than it is now, but it was still an old-style spelling even in 1794 when the poem was first published. Perhaps Blake wanted to give his Tyger a measure of mystery and felt the y helped with that. Perhaps he liked the y in ‘Tyger’ because it chimed with the double y in ‘symmetry’. Today, with Shakespeare and Milton, for example, editors usually modernize the spelling and punctuation. Not so with Blake in this instance, not only because the y feels integral to the poem, but also because Blake was an artist and engraver and published many of his poems, including this one, as visual compositions. The y in ‘Tyger’ is there in Blake’s original artwork and, consequently, for ever.

  3 Like so many of the greatest poets – Edward Lear, Edgar Allan Poe, W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath – and so many of the giants of literature – Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens,
Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith – Thomas Stearns Eliot loved cats. In the 1930s, as ‘Old Possum’, he wrote a series of amusing poems about cats and sent them to his godchildren. They were collected and published in 1939, with Eliot’s own cover illustrations, and then republished in 1940, illustrated in full by Nicolas Bentley, son of Eric Bentley, the man who invented the clerihew. In the 1950s, as a small boy, I was a server at St Stephen’s, a High Anglican church, in London’s Gloucester Road, which is where I met Eliot, who worshipped at the church and had been a churchwarden there. One Christmas, I was chosen to given a reading at the St Stephen’s carol service. Mr Eliot generously congratulated me afterwards and inspired me to learn ‘Macavity’ by heart and perform it for him.

  4 The American poet Frederic Ogden Nash wrote scores of terse verses celebrating the animal kingdom and even produced a little book called Ogden Nash’s Zoo. In my view, someone needs to do for Nash’s Zoo what Andrew Lloyd Webber did for T. S. Eliot’s Cats.

  5 Flanders and Swann were a British musical double-act. They went to the same school (Westminster) and university college (Christ Church, Oxford), and wrote more than a hundred comic songs together. In 1956 they performed At the Drop of a Hat, the first of their two long-running shows. The Suez Crisis that same year, sparked by President Nasser of Egypt’s decision to nationalize the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company to pay for the construction of the Aswan High Dam, prompted the addition of the extra verse to this, probably their most popular song.

  Chapter Nine: The Seven Ages

  1 What May was doing in Rouen: May spent a month in 1915 working – as a volunteer – in a canteen known as The Coffee Shop, which had been set up in a large shed at Rouen railway station, providing coffee and sandwiches for soldiers who had arrived in France and were going by train to the front.

  Chapter Ten: Year In, Year Out

  1 After Robert Frost, Edward Estlin Cummings was the most-read poet in America in the twentieth century. He wrote some 2,900 poems, four plays, two autobiographical novels, and much besides. Many of his poems feature idiosyncratic presentation and syntax and required lower-case spellings, but it is a myth that he insisted on avoiding capital letters at all times. Sometimes he signed his name ‘e e cummings’; sometimes he signed it ‘E. E. Cummings’. The challenge with his poetry is to speak it as he wrote it: as you learn it and recite it, visualize how he has presented it on the page and speak it exactly as you see it. ‘see i will comfort you’ does sound different from ‘See, I will comfort you’.

  2 Benjamin Zephaniah, the son of a Barbadian postman and a Jamaican nurse, was born and brought up in the Handsworth area of Birmingham, which he once called the ‘Jamaican capital of Europe’. He is a Rastafari and dyslexic, but you don’t need to be either to learn and speak this poem. Just memorize and speak what you see on the page.

  3 George R. Sims was a journalist, poet, playwright, novelist, social reformer, celebrity, and Victorian and Edwardian man-about-town. He was also my paternal grandmother’s first cousin and, when I was growing up, the most famous member of our family. I still have a bottle of the patent hair restorer ‘Tatcho’ which he promoted in his heyday. (Sadly, it appears to have lost its efficacy.) For a while, around the turn of the twentieth century, the highest paid writer in the land, he is now remembered for the melodramatic ballads he wrote depicting the dark and tragic lives of the downtrodden and the poor – of which the most famous is the one that begins ‘It is Christmas Day in the workhouse’. The ballad was performed in public music halls and private parlours for many years, and much parodied from the time of its publication in 1877 onwards. When I first met the actor, writer and entertainer, Ronnie Barker, in the 1970s, he was intrigued to discover that I was a kinsman of George R. Sims and presented me with these edited highlights of his hilarious parody of Sims’s haunting ballad.

  Chapter Twelve: Come Live with Me, and Be My Love

  1 Cole Porter’s song was first performed in the 1936 musical movie, Born to Dance. Just occasionally, the lyrics of a song work wonderfully when spoken rather than sung. Give this a go and you will see what I mean.

  2 George Mpanga, known as ‘George the Poet’, performed ‘The Beauty of Union’ as part of the BBC’s coverage of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018 – a broadcast that attracted a worldwide audience approaching two billion. No other love poem in history has been heard by so many people simultaneously. George has an association with Prince Harry as an ambassador for Sentebale, one of the prince’s charitable foundations, which supports the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people affected by HIV in Lesotho and Botswana.

  Chapter Thirteen: The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck

  1 ‘Phonaesthetics’: the study of the aesthetic properties of speech sound, in particular the study of sound sequences.

  2 First published in August 1826, the poem tells the story of Captain Louis de Casabianca and his twelve-year-old son, Giocante, who both perished on board the ship Orient during the Battle of the Nile in 1798. The poem was hugely popular throughout the Victorian era and learnt by schoolchildren in their thousands. Hemans’s first poems, dedicated to the Prince of Wales, were published in her home city of Liverpool in 1808, when she was only fourteen, and were admired by, among others, Percy Bysshe Shelley. When she died of the dropsy in her early forties, William Wordsworth composed a memorial poem in her honour. Although she is mostly forgotten now, in one of her poems she coined the phrase ‘the stately homes of England’ which has become part of the language.

  3 Watts was a prolific British poet and journalist whose oeuvre is almost entirely forgotten, apart from this alliterative epic that tells the story of the siege of Belgrade of 1789 in twenty-six lines running from A to Z to A again. Google the history of the siege if you are intrigued. It was a complicated business in which a Habsburg Austrian army besieged an Ottoman Turkish force at the fortress of Belgrade and the Cossacks under the great Russia general, Alexander Suvorov (referred to in the poem as ‘Suwarrow’), got involved. Never mind the military detail: enjoy the ingenuity of the alliteration.

  4 The great American poet, Walt Whitman, wrote this in the summer of 1861, shortly after the Battle of Bull Run, during the American Civil War, at a time when the start of every battle was marked with the beating of drums and the blowing of bugles.

  5 William Schwenck Gilbert was a British playwright, poet and illustrator, who first found fame in the 1860s with his comic ‘Bab Ballads’, originally written for the popular magazine, Fun. ‘The Yarn of the “Nancy Bell”’ was one of the most popular. Between 1871 and 1896, he collaborated with the composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) on fourteen hugely successful light operas. The seventh of these, Iolanthe (1882), features one of his most celebrated ‘patter songs’, in which the character of the Lord Chancellor reveals how ‘love unrequited’ has robbed him of his rest. Learning these lyrics will test your memory: performing them will test your diction. Good luck.

  6 This is what is known as a ‘curtal sonnet’, a shortened sonnet of eleven lines, and Hopkins’s extraordinary way with words makes this a beautiful piece of poetry to perform. Hopkins converted to Catholicism in 1866 and went on to become a Jesuit priest and teacher. He wrote poems as a young man, but burnt most of them when his calling came. It was only in 1875 that he returned to verse. ‘Pied Beauty’ was written in the summer of 1877 and inspired by the Welsh countryside – and God.

  7 In 1895, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois became the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard University. A sociologist, historian, poet and civil rights pioneer, he published the ground-breaking black anthem, ‘The Song of the Smoke’ in 1907, using rhyme, rhythm, assonance and alliteration to powerful effect. In 1909, he became one of the founders of the NAACP: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  8 In 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested, charged with indecent behaviour, tried twice and eventually imprisoned for two years. The arrest
took place at the Cadogan Hotel in Pont Street, Chelsea. ‘Robbie’ is Wilde’s friend, Robbie Ross. The Yellow Book was a literary quarterly enjoyed by Wilde and his circle. ‘Buchan’ is John Buchan, the novelist, who was just twenty at the time. Willis’s was one of Wilde’s favourite restaurants and the Savoy one of his favourite hotels. A ‘hansom’ was a horse-drawn carriage used as a cab and designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom.

  9 In 1954 a British professor of linguistics, Alan Ross, triggered a national debate when he coined the terms ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ English in an article exploring how language reflected social class. The ‘U’ (representing the upper classes) would speak of ‘napkins’, ‘the lavatory’, ‘the drawing room’, ‘the hallway’ and ‘the sofa’, while the aspiring middle class (the ‘Non-U’ folk) would speak of ‘serviettes’, ‘the toilet’, ‘the lounge’, ‘the vestibule’ and ‘the couch’. Lots of people contributed to the debate – and still do. Should ‘scone’ rhyme with ‘gone’ or with ‘bone’? Do you go ‘riding’ or ‘horse-riding’? Do you say ‘Pardon?’ or ‘What?’ or ‘Excuse me?’ In England in the mid-1950s, John Betjeman (later Poet Laureate) joined in the fun. This is an easy one to learn – and a fun one to perform.