Dancing by the Light of the Moon Read online

  Haikus are easy

  But sometimes they don’t make sense

  Refrigerator

  The haiku is limited to three lines. The clerihew is limited to four. Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) invented the form in 1905 as a whimsical slice of biography in verse. This was his first effort:

  Sir Humphrey Davy

  Abominated gravy.

  He lived in the odium

  Of having invented sodium.

  These are four of his most famous:

  Edward the Confessor

  Slept under the dresser.

  When that began to pall,

  He slept in the hall.

  Sir Christopher Wren

  Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men.

  ‘If anyone calls

  ‘Say I am designing St. Paul’s.’

  George the Third

  Ought never to have occurred.

  One can only wonder

  At so grotesque a blunder.

  John Stuart Mill,

  By a mighty effort of will,

  Overcame his natural bonhomie

  And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy.’

  The poet W. H. Auden (1907–83) loved clerihews and liked to compose them in bed when sleep eluded him. Here are three of my Auden favourites:

  Lord Byron

  Once succumbed to a Siren:

  His flesh was weak,

  Hers Greek.

  Oscar Wilde

  Was greatly beguiled,

  When into the Café Royal walked Bosie

  Wearing a tea-cosy.

  Sir Henry Rider Haggard

  Was completely staggered

  When his bride-to-be

  Announced, ‘I am She!’

  I like this one by Louis Phillips (born 1942):

  Robert de Niro

  Is a screen hero.

  Only a slob

  Would call him Bob.

  And this, by Michael Shepherd, is pretty neat:

  Mick Jagger a-

  pparently doesn’t need Viagra

  and might view as malice

  an Xmas gift of Cialis …

  As a schoolboy, I listened to The Goon Show on the radio, but I did not find it very funny. That said, in 1963, for two shillings, I bought a book, The Little Pot Boiler, by the principal Goon, Spike Milligan (1918–2002), and committed a number of his short poems to memory:

  The Herring is a lucky fish,

  From all disease inured.

  Should he be ill when caught at sea;

  Immediately – he’s cured!

  Things that go bump in the night

  Should not really give one a fright.

  It’s the hole in each ear

  That lets in the fear,

  That, and the absence of light!

  This was my Milligan favourite:

  Return to Sorrento (3rd Class)

  I must go down to the sea again,

  To the lonely sea and sky,

  I left my vest and socks there,

  I wonder if they’re dry?

  In my book, the modern mistress of short, memorable poetry is Wendy Cope (born 1945):

  Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

  It was a dream I had last week

  And some kind of record seemed vital.

  I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem

  But I love the title.

  And the modern master is Roger McGough (born 1937):

  Survivor

  Everyday

  I think about dying.

  About disease, starvation,

  violence, terrorism, war,

  the end of the world.

  It helps keep my mind off things.

  In the late 1960s, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University was Roy Fuller (1912–91). He was a serious poet, though he did not always write serious poems, nor take himself too seriously:

  In the Bathroom

  What is that blood-stained thing –

  Hairy, as if it were frayed –

  Stretching itself along

  The slippery bath’s steep side?

  I approach it, ready to kill,

  Or run away, aghast;

  And find I have to deal

  With a used elastoplast.

  Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was also a serious poet – and actor, director, playwright and Nobel Laureate – and he did seem to take himself and his poetry quite seriously. Famously a cricket enthusiast, he was especially proud of this two-line effort:

  I saw Len Hutton in his prime

  Another time, another time

  Having completed the poem, and rather pleased with it, Pinter sent it by fax and post to an assortment of his friends. A while later, not having had any response, he rang one of them, the playwright Simon Gray, to ask what he thought of it. Gray’s reply? ‘Sorry, Harold, I haven’t finished it yet.’

  Another actor and playwright is my friend Simon Williams (born 1946). This short verse is about the challenge facing the actor who is cast as a corpse.

  Lying doggo

  Actors have a dread

  Of having to play dead.

  If you are poisoned, stabbed or shot,

  You’d better find a comfy spot.

  What’s really best to go for

  Is a death behind the sofa,

  Where you can blink,

  Or breathe or think,

  Hidden from the stalls,

  At least until the curtain falls.

  Here, arranged in chronological order, are fourteen short poems by serious poets. None is longer than a dozen lines. The first one isn’t even a poem. It’s a prose meditation, but so poetic and so memorable it’s often presented as a piece of poetry. This is the work of a variety of British, American and Canadian poets, born across four centuries. I reckon the pieces are deeper than they look, but learning them should be easy. You can master the four-liners in a couple of days. At two lines a day, you could have the John Donne – some of the most powerful words in the English language – off by heart in under a week.

  Meditation XVII

  by John Donne

  (1572–1631)

  No man is an island,

  Entire of itself;

  Every man is a piece of the continent,

  A part of the main;

  If a clod be washed away by the sea,

  Europe is the less,

  As well as if a promontory were,

  As well as if a manor of thy friend’s,

  Or of thine own were;

  Any man’s death diminishes me,

  Because I am involved in mankind;

  And therefore never send to know

  For whom the bell tolls;

  It tolls for thee.

  Rondeau

  by Leigh Hunt

  (1784–1859)

  Jenny kissed me when we met,

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

  Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in:

  Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

  Say that health and wealth have missed me,

  Say I’m growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.

  Pippa’s Song from Pippa Passes

  by Robert Browning

  (1812–89)

  The year’s at the spring

  And day’s at the morn;

  Morning’s at seven;

  The hill-side’s dew-pearled;

  The lark’s on the wing;

  The snail’s on the thorn;

  God’s in his heaven –

  All’s right with the world!

  I’m Nobody! Who Are You?

  by Emily Dickinson

  (1830–86)

  I’m nobody! Who are you?

  Are you nobody, too?

  Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!

  They’d banish us, you know.

  How dreary to be somebody!

  How public, like a frog

  To tell your name the livelong dayr />
  To an admiring bog!

  If I can stop one heart from breaking

  by Emily Dickinson

  If I can stop one heart from breaking,

  I shall not live in vain;

  If I can ease one life the aching,

  Or cool one pain,

  Or help one fainting robin

  Unto his nest again,

  I shall not live in vain

  I stood upon a high place

  by Stephen Crane

  (1871–1900)

  I stood upon a high place,

  And saw, below, many devils

  Running, leaping,

  and carousing in sin.

  One looked up, grinning,

  And said, ‘Comrade! Brother!’

  This Is Just to Say

  by William Carlos Williams

  (1883–1963)

  I have eaten

  the plums

  that were in

  the icebox

  and which

  you were probably

  saving

  for breakfast

  Forgive me

  they were delicious

  so sweet

  and so cold

  The Optimist

  by D. H. Lawrence

  (1885–1930)

  The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell

  and paints the inside walls sky-blue

  and blocks up the door

  and says he’s in heaven.

  And the days are not full enough

  by Ezra Pound

  (1885–1972)

  And the days are not full enough

  And the nights are not full enough

  And life slips by like a field mouse

  Not shaking the grass.

  Trees

  by (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer

  (1886–1918)

  I think that I shall never see

  A poem lovely as a tree.

  A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

  Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

  A tree that looks at God all day,

  And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

  A tree that may in Summer wear

  A nest of robins in her hair;

  Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

  Who intimately lives with rain.

  Poems are made by fools like me,

  But only God can make a tree.

  First Fig

  by Edna St Vincent Millay

  (1892–1950)

  My candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –

  It gives a lovely light!

  J. P. Donleavy’s Dublin

  by Derek Mahon

  (born 1941)

  ‘When you stop to consider

  the days spent dreaming of a future

  and say then, that was my life’ –

  for the days are long:

  from the first milk van

  to the last shout in the night

  an eternity. But the weeks go by

  like birds; and the years, the years

  fly past anticlockwise

  like clock hands in a bar mirror.

  Who’s Who

  by Benjamin Zephaniah

  (born 1958)

  I used to think nurses

  Were women,

  I used to think police

  Were men,

  I used to think poets

  Were boring,

  Until I became one of them.

  And, finally, a little gem from the millennial phenomenon that is Rupi Kaur (born 1992), the Indian-born Canadian poet whose first collection, Milk and Honey, sold more than three million copies around the world and spent more than a year on the New York Times best-seller list:

  loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On Westminster BridgeSeventeen sonnets

  The Italian word sonetto means ‘little song’, as in:

  Just one sonetto,

  Give it to me:

  Delicious poetry

  From Italy!

  The sonnet form was pioneered by the Italian scholar Petrarch (known locally as Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74) and fellow Italian Renaissance poets, and adopted and developed by the English from the 1500s onwards. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is rightly regarded as the Elizabethan sonnet maestro.

  The traditional sonnet:

  has 14 lines

  is written in iambic pentameters

  has a set rhyming scheme

  To give you the jargon, an iambic ‘foot’ is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable:

  da DUM

  That ‘da DUM’ is the rhythm of the human heartbeat, which is why babies and toddlers respond well to Shakespeare and why Shakespearean verse is easy to learn at any age.

  ‘Penta’ means ‘five’ in Greek and ‘meter’ comes from the Greek for ‘measure’. A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

  da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

  You can hear the beat clearly in any number of Shakespeare’s opening lines:

  When I do count the clock that tells the time

  Sonnet 12

  In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes

  Sonnet 141

  If music be the food of love, play on

  Twelfth Night

  Two households both alike in dignity

  Romeo and Juliet

  As Franco Zeffirelli (who directed the young Judi Dench in Romeo and Juliet in 1960) put it: ‘Shakespeare’s verse goes with the beat of your heart – no wonder he’s captured the hearts of all mankind.’

  With the Shakespearean sonnet the rhyming pattern is: abab cdcd efef gg. With the Petrarchan sonnet it is: abba abba cdecde or abba abba cdcdcd.

  In the Petrarchan sonnet the sections are broken up into an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). In the Shakespearean sonnet there are three quatrains (three four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet.

  In both forms of sonnet there is something known as a volta that marks the transition to the final section of the poem. The original volta was an Italian dance that involved a sudden, quick twist or move. In a sonnet the volta is the turn of thought or argument that comes before the poem ends. In Petrarchan sonnets the volta comes between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean sonnets it comes before the final couplet.

  I don’t think you need more of the poetic science than that, but that much should be helpful. For example, it should make it easier to memorize your Shakespeare sonnet if you do your learning bit by bit: first one quatrain, then the next, then the next, then the pay-off in the final couplet.

  Given that sonnets always run to fourteen lines, a trick to help trigger each line in your memory is to attach each line to a room in your Memory Palace if you have one (see page 55–6), or do as I did when I was a romantic adolescent living in London and trying to learn Shakespearean sonnets by heart – connect each line of the sonnet with a particular place: it could be a stop on a bus route you know well or, as in my case, a London underground station.

  As a teenager, I did the revision for my A-levels travelling round and round the Circle Line. I found the train juddering to a halt every two or three minutes kept me awake and every time the train reached Paddington I got off and allowed myself the treat of a cup of tea and a bun on the station concourse. When learning the sonnets, I travelled on the Bakerloo Line between Waterloo and Queen’s Park. There are fourteen stations along that stretch of underground line and I would associate one line of the sonnet with each station in turn: when the train doors opened at the station, I would start the line and repeat it again and again until I reached the next station, when the doors opening would have me starting off on the next line. And so on.

  It worked.

  At least, it’s how I learnt Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

  Let me not
to the marriage of true minds

  – Waterloo

  Admit impediments; love is not love

  – Embankment

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  – Charing Cross

  Or bends with the remover to remove.

  – Piccadilly

  O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

  – Oxford Circus

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  – Regent’s Park

  It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

  – Baker Street

  Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.

  – Marylebone

  Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

  – Edgware Road

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

  – Paddington

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  – Warwick Avenue

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  – Maida Vale

  If this be error and upon me proved,

  – Kilburn Park

  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  – Queen’s Park

  I created additional memory triggers for myself as well. For example, with line three, Charing Cross station was once known as ‘Trafalgar Square’, and the alteration in name reminds me instantly of the line ‘which alters when it alteration finds’; and, in line seven of the sonnet, ‘wand’ring bark’ is almost a classic crossword puzzle clue for ‘Baker Street’ – the b, a, r and k ‘wand’ring’ off to form ‘Baker’, the apostrophe in ‘wand’ring’ indicating the e that will be missing from ‘Baker’ when it becomes ‘bark’.

  You may find it simpler simply to memorise the lines two-by-two or four-by-four, but over the years my Bakerloo Line mnemonic has reaped its rewards. Not long ago, I took part in an episode of the television programme, Pointless Celebrities, with Susan Calman as my partner. We won the trophy on the final question because I was able to name a station on the Bakerloo Line that nobody else had thought of: Queen’s Park. As I murmured to Susan at the time: ‘If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.’