Tuesday
My University of Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake sent me a smart poem about Covid quarantining, author unknown, that has been circulating through social media. Not only does it capture our frustration at our restricted movement, but it works as a literature quiz.
I’ve counted 11 poetic allusions, beginning with William Butler Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” All the poems long for wider horizons, which means that the poets feel stuck in an unsatisfactory present. Yeats is standing on “pavements grey,” Wordsworth is lying depressed on his couch…but I won’t go on as you may want to make the identifications on your own. I’ll just note that such longing is a common theme in British literature, expressed nowhere more clearly than in Wind in the Willows.
The three major animal characters, at one time or another, feel the urge to throw over domestic life and follow their longings. Toad is intoxicated by the open road, and Ratty at one point is utterly entranced by the tales of a seafaring rat. Mole must apply force to prevent Ratty from running off to join him:
Poor Ratty did his best, by degrees, to explain things; but how could he put into cold words what had mostly been suggestion? How recall, for another’s benefit, the haunting sea voices that had sung to him, how reproduce at second-hand the magic of the Seafarer’s hundred reminiscences? Even to himself, now the spell was broken and the glamour gone, he found it difficult to account for what had seemed, some hours ago, the inevitable and only thing. It is not surprising, then, that he failed to convey to the Mole any clear idea of what he had been through that day.
Then Ratty does what British poets have been doing for centuries: he articulates his longings through verse:
Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.
“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” he remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening, instead of—well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down—if it’s only just the rhymes.”
The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.
I’ve identified seven of the poems alluded to but had to google the other four. You can find an answer key at the end. Let me know if I’ve missed any:
I won’t arise and go now, and go to Innisfree (1)
I’ll sanitize the doorknob and make a cup of tea.
I won’t go down to the sea again (2); I won’t go out at all,
I’ll wander lonely as a cloud (3) from the kitchen to the hall.
There’s a green-eyed yellow monster to the North of Kathmandu (4)
But I shan’t be seeing him just yet, and nor, I think will you.
While the dawn comes up like thunder on the road to Mandalay (5)
I’ll make my bit of supper and eat it off a tray.
I shall not speed my bonnie boat across the sea to Skye (6),
Or take the rolling English road from Birmingham to Rye. (7)
About the woodland, just right now, I am not free to go
To see the Keep Out posters or the cherry hung with snow (8).
And no, I won’t be traveling much, within the realms of gold (9),
Or get me to Milford Haven (10). All that’s been put on hold.
Give me your hands, I shan’t request, albeit we are friends (11)
Nor come within a mile of you, until this virus ends.
1. In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Yeats dreams of an idyllic rural setting from his vantage point of urban grayness.
2. In John Masefield’s “Sea Fever,” maybe England’s most popular poem, the land-bound speaker feels the sea’s call, which “may not be denied.” I feel certain that Masefield’s 1902 poem influenced the seafaring chapter in Wind in the Willows (1908).
3. In Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the speaker recalls a field of daffodils as he lies on his couch “in vacant or in pensive mood.” He elaborates on his couch state in Tintern Abbey when he writes of living “in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din/ Of towns and cities.”
4. I didn’t know the poet J. Milton Hayes or his poem “The Green Eye of the Yellow God” until I googled them. Sounding very Kiplingesque, the poem is an instance of the British exoticizing the East. Mad Carew, smitten with “the Colonel’s daughter,” steals the gem from an idol’s eye to win her favor, only to be rejected and then mysteriously murdered. (“’Twas the “Vengeance of the Little Yellow God,” we are informed.) The poem begins and ends with the following stanza:
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
5. I wrote recently about an episode of The Crown in which Lord Mountbatten uses Kipling’s “Mandalay” (1890) to capture British nostalgia for the dwindling empire at a time of economic upheaval. In the series he contemplates a coup until the queen talks him out of it.
6. Those who have watched the television series Outlanders have encountered “The Skye Boat Song,” which opens every episode. Composing lyrics for an old Scottish tune in the late 19th century, Sir Henry Boulton celebrates the escape of Bonnie Prince Charles, the “lad that’s born to be King,” following the disastrous Battle of Culloden. While Charles’s defeat ended Scottish hopes of restoring the Stuarts to the throne, and while he did not in the least deserve the legendary status that was accorded him, it fits our theme of frustrated dreaming:
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing
Onward! the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye
Loud the wind howls, loud the waves roar
Thunderclaps rend the air
Baffled, our foes stand on the shore
Follow they will not dare
Revising the lyrics, Sir Robert Louis Stevenson stripped out Charles but kept the longing. Outlanders, incidentally, uses the first and last stanzas of the Stevenson version but changes “lad” to “lass”:
Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye….Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.
7. G.K. Chesterton’s “The Rolling English Road” goes even further back in British history, to a time before “the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode.” The speaker informs us that, in the days before order was imposed on Britain, “the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.”
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
8. A. E. Housman’s beloved “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” like many of the poems in Shropshire Lad, captures the wistful longing for “the land of lost content” (to quote another nostalgic poem from the collection). The speaker may be only 20, but he has a vivid sense that the cherry blossoms will soon be gone:
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
9. I think the Keats reference is the only allusion the poem gets wrong, largely because one can in fact travel to the “realms of gold” during the pandemic. That’s because the “goodly states and kingdoms” are not geographical but literary. In “Upon First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” the poet is excited to be encountering The Iliad for the first time.
Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
If nothing else, the pandemic has offered us golden opportunities to lose ourselves in books. Some of us may have discovered Homer and felt like a watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into its ken.
10. The pandemic is also keeping us from Milford Haven, the Welsh seaport that Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton says surpasses any to be found on the Spanish or French coasts. “So highly Milford is in every mouth renowned,” Drayton tells us, that “there was not a port the prize durst undertake.” Who knew?
11. Puck’s farewell concludes Shakespeare’s well-known play about dreaming from Midsummer Night’s Dream:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
Given how much we have all been offended this past year, we can only wish that this past year had been but a dream.
That being said, Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about dreaming beyond one’s dreary present, with Bottom leading the charge. Covid is giving us more incentive to dream.
