The Lives of the Poets: Clerihews after Auden

“ . . . to stink of Poetry / is unbecoming, and never / to be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerick / ought to be something a man of / honor, awaiting death . . . / could read without contempt . . .”

—W. H. Auden, “The Cave of Making”

William Blake

took the cake

playing at Adam and Eve in the nude.

Said Catherine Sophia: But isn’t it rude!?

Robert Browning,

not given to clowning,

instead of a risqué anthology,

contrived Bishop Blougram’s Apology.

George Gordon, Lord Byron,

never slept with a Siren.

He would’ve if he could’ve.

Which is not to say he should’ve!

Arthur Hugh Clough

wasn’t all that tough.

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

he was heard to complaineth.

George Herbert

denied himself a second scoop of sherbert,

fearing such indulgence

would mess up his metaphysical refulgence.

Edward Lear,

that owlish old dear,

kept a cat called Foss.

Who was clearly the boss.

John Milton

never raised a toast at the Paris Hilton

but enjoyed a festive trinque

at the Four Seasons Hotel George V.

Alexander Pope,

no kind of dope,

would not have wanted just any old motto

in his personal grotto!

Thomas the Rhymer,

that street-smart old timer,

was disturbed by the implications

of The Gotham Review of Revelations.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

(on the quiet)

took Noli me tangere

for a come-hither query.

Auden’s clerihews are neat,*

Just as witty perhaps as sweet

—he was not too grand to think

up metaphors teetering on the brink.

*W. H. Auden, “Academic Graffiti,” in Collected Poems (Vintage International, 1991), 676–86.

Previously published in the New English Review, November 2023.

Ouk epistato pheugein: Two Greek fragments

I

An epitaph at Uzun Karalar (the ancient Kieri) reveals the place to be Pyrrhiades' tomb; "not knowing how to take to his heels," he died there "fighting most courageously."

He "knew not how to flee"--

ouk epistato pheugein--

but no one knows how, don't you see?

That's the kind of state we're in!

II

To bury the poet Giorgos Seferis.

ten thousand of us marched through the streets to the Proto Nekrotapheion ("First Cemetery") that autumn. Jumping on a mound of earth, a young man yelled:

“Athánatos!” (in English, "Deathless!").

I don't begrudge the poet that title,

but immortality has a deadly defect--it's endless.

Envoi

Despite synaptic links galore

My 100 billion-neuron brain

Seems quite unable to explain

Exactly what it is I’m for!

Note: This poem borrows its title, Pyrrhiades' epitaph, from Giorgos Ioannou’s short story "Ouk epistato pheugein," published in Omphalos (Athens) 1, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 19–28, translated from the Greek by the late Peter Mackridge and the author, marchers in Seferis’s funeral procession in 1971.

Seferis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963.

As translated, Ioannou's modern Greek rendering of Pyrrhiades' epitaph reads:

“I am the tomb of Pyrrhiades, who didn’t know how to take to his heels, but here on this spot was killed fighting with great courage.”

Schnorrerhoffnungen

In Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, C. C. Baxter, the main character, played by Jack Lemmon, works for an insurance company in New York. The date is November 1, 1959, and Dwight David Eisenhower is president of the United States.

   His take-home pay is $94.70 a week, Baxter tells us. It’s not much, but it’s a living wage. He lives in the West sixties, half a block from Central Park. The rent of his batchelor apartment, modest but comfortable, is $85 a month.  

  Baxter falls in love with Fran Kubelik, a uniformed elevator girl, played by the young Shirley MacLaine. What more could he (or you) ask for? It’s a wonderful, silly uplifting movie. I recommend it highly.

    Back in 1959, I too worked in an insurance company, although in a much smaller office, and had a desk outfitted with a massive IBM® calculator just like Baxter’s. My office was at Westerford in the Cape Town suburb of Newlands. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was the prime minister of what was then still the Union of South Africa—it only became a republic in 1961. I can’t for the life of me recall what I earned, but it was a living wage (i.e., I lived on it), or what rent I paid at Grassy Corners, the house I shared with a bunch of like-minded folk—four young men (including me) and two young women (not including my girl, Marijke, who had a place of her own). It was just half a block or so from the main offices of the Southern Life Association. I could walk to work in five minutes.

    So I too had met my Fran Kubelik (but Marijke was a student at UCT, not an elevator girl). We were together for about twelve years. (I doubt Fran Kubelik and C. C. Baxter would have lasted either. How long could she have stood his silly laugh!) I lost Marijke during the sexual revolution, at which point we lived in Athens, Greece. She stayed there after I was expelled from the country by the military regime that seized power in a coup in 1967. She’s buried in a grave in the Peloponnese with a view of the Taygetos Mountains.

Note: Sigmund Freud uses the term Schnorrerhoffnungen to describe his hopes as “a poor, young human being tormented by burning wishes and gloomy sorrows” (Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time [New York: Norton, 1998], 50). Gay translates the Yiddish term as “scrounger's hopes."

“A schnorrer is distinguished from an ordinary beggar by dint of his boundless chutzpah,” Wikipedia claims.

Jerry Seinfeld says a schnorrer is “someone who picks the cashews out of the mixed nuts.”

   When I came to America in 1972,

Richard Milhous Nixon was president. It seemed like a hopeful country. And it was, for me.

Halloween 2023