Hail Pythagoras!

Fyodor Bronnikov, Pythagoreans Greeting the Rising Sun (1869). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper,

    The proper instrument on which to pay

My compliments, but I should come a cropper;

    Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.

—W. H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron (1937)

Think five syllables

And not the rounder six,

Move up to sublime seven

And not eight’s bag of old-time tricks,

Then nine, close-fitting buttered bricks,

Odd numbers made in Grecian heaven.

Don’t go past the boundary of eleven,

Where thirteen bloviates on an unhallowed shore,

Where even Byron stumbles, not saying any more.

The fat Fourteener crashed and broke on Missolonghi’s beach.

The ripples of that breakup may be what wrecks one's reach.

If reach there be in Quantum’s Pickup Sticks,

Another bunch of specious tricky tricks.

Hail Pythagoras!

He knew what stops are best

limitations, and the rest—

Beastly death is just a hill of beans,

poetry and life not being what they seems.

Note: Wikipedia says,

“The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the ABABABCC rhyme scheme.”

“The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is ABABBCC.”

“A fourteener is a line consisting of 14 syllables, which are usually made of seven iambic feet, for which the style is also called iambic heptameter.”

These rules might be fun to play around with, but I’m not bothered myself!

Rowse, His Cat

For A. L. Rowse

Proving that Emilia Bassano

was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets,

beyond reasonable shadow of doubt,

Rowse next eulogized his white tom cat.*

"Then let us have our Liberty again,"

Emilia, herself a poet, said.

"Your fault being greater, why should you disdain

Our being equals, free from tyranny?"†

"My cat and I grow old together," Rowse sigh'd,

he who'd left Tommer in Trenarren

as the guardian of his Cornish domain,

gone Stateside as gainer of what gain?

Such are the quiddities of man and mouse

-r. My cat and I grow old together, too!

* A. L. Rowse, "The White Cat of Trenarren," in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, chosen by Philip Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 351–52. The cat's name was actually Peter, but that might be puzzling, and Tommer—the name of another of Rowse's cats—fits better here.

† Æmelia Lanyer (née Bassano), Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), quoted in Rowse, Discovering Shakespeare: A Chapter in Literary History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 51–52.

The Progress of Poetry

Third-century BCE papyrus fragments of Sappho's "Tithonus" poem

"I saw a Gardener with a watering can

Sprinkling dejectedly the heads of men

Buried up to their necks in the wet clay."

—Christopher Caudwell (Christopher St. John Sprigg), “The Progress of Poetry”

Caudwell's Wikipedia page lists his occupations: "Journalist, author, machine gunner.”

He perished in Spain fighting Francisco Franco's Falangists,

in “the year of ’37,”

when what they call the Yezhovshchina

raged in the USSR,

Stalin wiping out his buddies the Old Bolsheviks one by one,

then going on, it seemed, for, could it be? everyone—681,692 executions,

okay, give or take a few.

Yezhov himself, top killer that year,

got his own Genickschuss too.*

Defending his post to shield the retreat of the British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Jarama River Valley

Caudwell, “a leftist poet of the comfortable classes,”† and member of the CPGB,‡

fought bravely to the death,

but should have saved his breath:

today, in 2O24, eighty-seven years on,

Franco and the Falangists are long gone;

it's the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE)

that rags Catalonia now, you see,

as Madrid all these many years has done

while in Russia, Stalin the Little spills blood.

The dejected Gardener still waters human heads stuck in the mud.

Poetry does not progress,

but streaks eternal, old and new,

assuaging, as it might hope to do,

clingy lichen’s sapient screams.

Its honeyed words soothe doggy Cerberus, pay for boatman Charon’s hire, and lobby Hell's King Rhadamanthus'

for royal mitigation.**

Immortal Sappho sings sweet as ever

behind the veils that language dreams

up, accessorizing taboo conversation.

* Genickschuss, a shot in the nape of the neck, the Stalinist preferred method of execution.

† Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Duncan Glen (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 90.

‡ Communist Party of Great Britain.

** Cf. Christopher Caudwell, “Classic Encounter,” in The Oxford Book of

Twentieth-Century English Verse, chosen by Philip Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), where his “The Progress of Poetry” can also be found.