The Man in Motley

The man in motley
dances there
up and down a tilted stair,
lightly.

He does not show
us where
(unless it is the stair)
nor why, but only how to go.

He dances lightly there,
first up, then down;
he dances in the air,
he dances on the ground.

His grace is learned,
his smile a powdered face:
he turns to counterturn,
to dance in place.

Is it enought to follow
a dancer in the air,
a motley man on a tilted stair,
no matter how he goes?

The man in motley
dances there
up and down a tilted stair,
lightly.

-Bill K. Boydstun

The Man in Motley is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

authorship redux

Based on the following two sonnets, Royall Tyler is credited as the second American sonneteer. The two sonnets are found in The Spirit of the Farmers' Museum and the Lay Preacher's Gazette, Walpole, N.H., 1801, under the caption "From the Shop of Messrs. Colon & Spondee." Colon & Spondee was evidently the pseudonym used for the prose of Joseph Dennie and the poetry, chiefly satire and parody, of Royall Tyler.

On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country

And this reft house is that the which he built,
Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil'd,
Cautious in vain! These rats that squeak so wild,
Squeak, not unconscious of their father's guilt.
Did ye not see her gleaming through the glade!
Belike, 't was she, the maiden all forlorn.
What tho' she, the maiden all forlorn.
What tho' she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet, aye, she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd;
And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white;
As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full orb'd harvest moon.


Sonnet to an Old Mouser

Child of lubricious art, of sanguine sport!
Of pangful mirth! sweet ermin'd sprite!
Who lov'st, with silent, velvet step, to court
The bashful bosom of the night.
Whose elfin eyes can pierce night's sable gloom,
And witch her fairy prey with guile,
Who sports fell frolic o'er the grisly tomb,
And gracest death with dimpling smile!
Daughter of ireful mirth, sportive in rage,
Whose joy should shine in sculptur'd bas relief
Like Patience, in rapt Shakespeare's deathless page,
Smiling in marble at wan grief.
Oh, come, and teach me all thy barb'rous joy,
To sport with sorrow first, and then destroy.

It seems doubtful that Royall Tyler is really the author of the first of these two sonnets.

Here is Coleridge's accompanying note when he republished his poem "On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country" in his Biographia Literaria:

Under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious. The second was on low creeping language and thoughts under the pretence of simplicity. The third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. ... So general at the time and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style that a celebrated physician (now alas ! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman who was about to meet me at a dinner-party could not, however, resist giving him a hint not to mention The House that Jack Built in my presence, for that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet, he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.

Here is Royall Tyler's introduction to his two sonnets published in The Spirit of the Farmers' Museum and the Lay Preacher's Gazette:

The plaintive and affected style of Charlotte Smith is familiar, it is supposed, to most readers. Criticism has frowned upon the verbose grief of a sobbing poetess. . . . We insert the following as a pleasant introduction to an attack soon to be made upon the above sighing sonneteer from the Shop of Colon and Spondee.

They are evidently talking about the same sonnet ("On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country").

If you google "On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country" you will find the poem listed and talked about several places, most often as a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem but sometimes as a Royall Tyler poem. For instance here and here.

A Guest in All Your Houses

Peter Ludwin’s new book of poems, A Guest in All Your Houses, is now available from Word Walker Press and, shortly, from Amazon.com.

A good review of the book is online here.

I've just finished reading the book and expect to do a review shortly. Clue to review: it's a terrific collection of poems covering the geography of much of my own earlier peripatetic musings.

If you'll be in the Seattle area, I see online that Peter will be reading from his book on Thursday, May 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Open Books, 2414 N 45th St., Seattle.

in memoriam

I salute our brothers and sisters in uniform and will light a special candle tomorrow for those who lost their lives while serving in the armed forces of the United States of America. This is doubtless not different from what most American will be thinking tomorrow. I take a certain pride, as an American veteran, that we recognize those who put themselves at risk for all of us.

Dulce et Decorum est

-Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Diamondback

Down the back steps -
warned by the cadence of his tail
I retreat
then reappear
through the door
jerkily, an imperfect harbinger

I measure time down a smooth barrel

an infinity
of brotherhood between us
even after
there is nothing more
than shattered rubies
and grisled diamonds
scattered
among blades of grass.

-Bill K. Boydstun

Diamondback is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

3 tenors

are old jokes best?

I've been reading reviews of the new Star Trek for a couple of weeks. I thought Lance Mannion's "Not my review . . . " was the best of the lot. Informative, critical, supportive of some of the basic concepts of the original; it was 'top of the heap" - and it may be yet . . . but (there it is, the big BUT), I must confess to being completely bowled over by (Anthony Lane's) the Highly Illogical review in The New Yorker's current edition (turns out, it is also online). Read them both - compare them - these are two reviewers with (axes to grind, perhaps) no guile, allowing that some of us have finite resources (and choices to be made) in our approach to possibilities of infinity.

I wish I could sit down, sharing a pitcher of St. Arnold's wheat ale, and discuss Mr. Lane's take on the exhaustion "for comic value" of Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers" with Mr. Mannion.

On an Excess of Passion

We strummed so many strings
and sang so many songs

that I've forgotten
what we may have meant.

Rosehip tea
to an afternoon.

(Promises
of seaweed.)

We must have said
"thank-you for the tea" etc

or "you have nice eyes" etc
but I remember nothing.

No moon
to break and reshape

on the waters near the shore.
No silver swan

to sing the silence.
Only tea and seaweed:

an evening of strings
and butterfly wings.

-Bill K. Boydstun

On an Excess of Passion is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

Juan Diego Florez - La donna e mobile

Stevens' Picasso

Did you learn this in school,
this blue on blue
of blindness and guitar,

or was it what you saw
bent through your eyes:
that jangled empty sky

of fancy: that blue note
of light below
the shadow of the truth,

and was it always new,
intentional,
bending the strings to fill

our dreams with things that truly are
when played upon your blue guitar?

-Bill K. Boydstun

Stevens' Picasso is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

La Donna È Mobile Redux

poem

On Hearing Belatedly of a Friends Death
for Ruth Weisner

We grab death at awkward moments,
our friends a thousand miles away:
pictures and old poems in the mail,
a posthumous volume,
bitter sweet in its delay.

Byron's Grotto, Portovenere,
an Italian Summer,
8 August 1979,
a clipped clear photograph -
you, brown dress, brown skin, demure.

A heap of broken images,
bits and bits of desultory things:
February 19, 1981,
your shadow in the morning,
in the evening, the rush of wings.

-Bill Boydstun

how i used to be

Elegy

We talked before: she knew
how to construct rainbows -
bits of bible and super-glue:
she had God by the big toe.

Her plaster mask so clean, pure -
the sun has not triumphed here:
one side in shade, the other obscure:
the moon limp as a hound's ear.

Dismiss these scattered dreams -
who can decipher the voices of trees?
such namby noises as they seem:
embrace the stinging sea.

She culled bells in her mouth,
hard vapored sounds of youth -
mockingbirds portending truth:
crystal wings whispered south.

We talked after: as cool as stone -
"It's hard. I can't come back again."
She bent, cupped the baby's chin,
smiled, and was slowly gone.

-Bill Boydstun

Elegy is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in The Sandstorm, the literary journal of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

10 things I hate about you