Hilaire Belloc

Ballade of Hell and Mrs. Roebuck

I'm going out to dine at Gray's

  With Bertie Morden, Charles, and Kit,

And Manderley, who never pays,

 And Jane who wins in spite of it,

 And Algernon who won't admit

The truth about his curious hair

  And teeth that very nearly fit:--

And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

And then tomorrow someone says

  That someone else has made a hit

In one of Mister Twister's plays,

  And off we go to yawn at it;

  And when it's petered out we quit

For number 20, Taunton Square,

  And smoke, and drink, and dance a bit:--

And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

And through each declining phase

  Of emptied effort, jaded wit,

And day by day of London days,

  Obscurely, more obscurely, lit;

  Until the uncertain shadows flit

Announcing to the shuddering air

  A darkening, and the end of it:--

And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

Envoi

 

Prince, on their iron thrones they sit,

  Impassable to our despair,

The dreadful guardians of the pit:--

  And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

-Hilaire Belloc

 

 

Ooh. That awful Mrs. Roebuck. One wonders what she's actually done.

 

Fortunately I'm not often forced into proximity with high society--and this week, when this post appears, least of all. We're off to the Internet-free zone and it's more likely Mrs. Beaver than Mrs. Roebuck. Should we see any species of deer, it will be white-tailed rather than red.

 

I do like Hilaire Belloc's light verse as well as the ballade form. 

 

Pretty off-topic, but thoughts of High Society always remind me of:

 

Rivier-eh and Missour-eh is such a great rhyme. The original Tammy Wynette and George Jones version is pretty good, too, but since I've seen both John Prine and Iris DeMent live...

And while I have the Belloc volume in my hand:

Habitations

Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties,

And Youth in Expectation. Youth is wise.

 

-Hilaire Belloc

 

Matthew Hollis

Beck

The brim that broke the river came on land.

Its skirts were vast from so much rain and made

the grass beneath it dance, wild hair of the drowned.

We trailed it to the road, where a cattle grid

gulped it down, and where a hedgehog whirled

it its mitten of thorns. Back then, we sought

such life, and found a plank and edged it in

but the urchin would not climb to his escape.

 

By morning the grid had emptied, the wood

had snapped clean in two. You suppose a fox

or brock had dug the creature out.

I wanted to believe he'd made it home.

But faith in faith is not enough.

We go on love alone.

 

-Matthew Hollis

 

I was reading a review of Matthew Hollis' most recent book, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, and it sounded interesting, but I wasn't quite sure I was prepared to read a 500 page book about 'The Waste Land'. 😉But in looking up who this Matthew Hollis was, I found a couple of his poems, and decided he was worth reading, so I got hold of and read his two volumes of poetry. I especially liked his second one, Earth House, from 2023, which this poem is from, but his earlier volume, Ground Water, of 2004, was also good.

 

His two non-fiction books are about the poets T. S. Eliot and Edward Thomas. I felt T. S. Eliot strongly present in Earth House, but I would have said he was reading The Four Quartets more than A Waste Land and Other Poems. 'Beck' is sonnet-ish, depending on how strongly typed you like your sonnets. It's fourteen lines, with a clear turn after the eighth line, but it goes from pentameters at the beginning to a trimeter at the end, and if you were to say it rhymes at all, they slant a whole lot. Though I did find the 'made it home/love alone' near-rhyme to be pretty effective myself.

 

'Brock' is derived from the Celtic word for badger, and means badger--I had to look that up. A 'beck' is a North of England word for a small stream, particularly one in a valley. He gives notes about the places the poems represent at the end of the volume. Of this one he says, 'Pelter Bridge, Under Loughrigg, River Rothay, Cumbrae, 13 October 2005.' I suppose the Rothay was in flood on that day, but I didn't look it up. 

 

 

The Old Philosopher

The Old Philosopher

Sixty-seven years now I've banged my hard-thinking brains

  'round the world. So, still a kid in the pink?

Meh, maybe. In truth there were those first twenty-five years

  when I did not even bother to think.

 

-Reese Warner (after Xenophanes)

 

This poem of mine came out at the webzine The Asses of Parnassus recently. It's an adaptation (not really a translation) of a short poem by the philosopher Xenophanes, who was born in Asia Minor (the west coast of Turkey) and died in Syracuse. His years are approximately 570 - 478 B.C. The poem was preserved as evidence that Xenophanes lived to be at least 92 years old.

 

The Greek original:

ἤδη δ᾽ἐπτα τ´ἔασι και ἐξήκοντ᾽ενιαυτοί
  βληστρίζοντες ἐμὴν φροντίδ᾽άν Ὲλλάδα γῆν
έκ γενετῆς δὲ τότ᾽ἦσαν έείκοσι πέντε τε πρὸς τοῖς
  εἴπερ ἐγω περὶ τῶνδε οἶδα λέγειν έτυμως.

The fun word in this is blastrizontes (the word that begins with a B at the beginning of the second line). It's an unusual word and  means something like to toss and turn, and is usually used of someone suffering from a fever. I didn't exactly preserve that metaphor.

 

The poem shows up in Diogenes Laertius' brief biography of Xenophanes in The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Here's Pamela Mensch's more literal translation:

 

Seven and sixty years have by now been

  Buffeting my thought up and down the land of Greece;

And since my birth there have been twenty-five more,

  If I may speak truly about these matters.

 

-Xenophanes (tr. Pamela Mensch)

 

Not much is actually known about his philosophy.

"When Empedocles said to him that the wise man remained undiscovered, he replied, 'As one might expect, since it takes one to find one.'"

I don't know that Gumby is actually an eminent philosopher, but still he managed to photobomb my picture.

The old philosopher shown above is from Raphael's 'School of Athens' in the Vatican, reproduced on the cover of my copy of Diogenes Laertius. He's usually identified with Carneades, and not Xenophanes