On Elves and a Botched Love Letter

arielSince I’ve been writing a lot about the longing for lost innocence in the past few weeks, I’ll share a couple of personal stories about the subject.  Included are a traumatic creative writing experience that drove me away forever from writing serious poetry again and a very strange moment in my courtship of the woman that I have been married to for the past 36 years.  Both involved poems about elves.

The inspiration for the poem I wrote in high school was The Tempest.  I’ve long ago forgotten (or repressed) exactly how it went, but I think it involved seeing the world through elfin eyes and capturing the fragile and evanescent nature of beauty.  A number of my fellow students from the Sewanee Military Academy and the senior English teacher had gathered for a creative writing workshop.  The teacher read our poems aloud anonymously.

I don’t know if the poem was any good—it probably wasn’t much better or much worse than most high school poetry—but I wasn’t expecting the response it got.  The students burst into loud jeering guffaws.  So did the teacher.

 But that’s not the part that I remember the most.  What haunts me is that I laughed along with them so that they wouldn’t think the poem was mine (but it could only have been mine).  And as I laughed, I felt a sense of self-betrayal.   Something in me turned.  At the time I fancied myself a poet but I’ve never written serious poetry since, limiting myself to light comic verse for weddings and other special occasions.  Serious poetry feels too revealing.

What if I had been a young William Shakespeare and I had submitted Ariel’s song from The Tempest, which was probably the inspiration for my effort:


Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip’s bell I lie; 

There I couch when owls do cry. 

On the bat’s back I do fly 

After summer merrily. 

Merrily, merrily shall I live now 

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

The bard might not have gotten much further than “suck.”


 It is not that high school boys are insensitive, even if they are boys who have been sent to a military school to be disciplined or toughened up.  If anything, they are overly sensitive.  As a result, shows of tenderness can act as blood in the water around sharks.  If you don’t attack, people might think that you have some of those feelings yourself.  If you don’t laugh at a poem, people might think you wrote it.

Now jump ahead three or four years ahead.  I am in love with an Iowa farm girl, who is also a fellow Carleton student.  We have met at the end of our junior year and now it is summer.  We are writing passionate love letters.  One of them contains a poem by Morris Bishop, also inspired by Ariel’s song (or perhaps Midsummer Night’s Dream).  In it, the poet queries a little elf man about what he does all day.  The poem ends with a twist.  Here are the final two stanzas:

“‘N then I play with the baby chicks,
I call them, chick chick chick!
‘N what do you think of that?” said he.
I said, “It makes me sick. 

“It gives me sharp and shooting pains
To listen to such drool.”
I lifted up my foot, and squashed
The God damn little fool. 

To put it mildly I flunked courtship 101 with that poem.  Luckily, Julia had already gathered that social grace was not my strong suit, and she had seen other attributes that she liked, so the relationship continued.  We got married a year later.

Looking back, I realize that the poem actually was, for me, a love poem.  The poem was about how Julia had opened me up and how scared I was as a result.  I think I sent her Bishop’s dark humor to tell her this but also to tell her, and perhaps more to tell myself, that I had black comedy to fall back on should things go wrong.  I had learned my high school lesson well: if all around were laughing at me for revealing tenderness, I could join them and laugh at tenderness myself.

I am much more comfortable with my feelings now than I was then.  I have moved beyond some of the emotional reserve that the Bates family inherited from its British heritage.  Also,  America itself has changed.  But I still don’t write serious poetry.

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