Roger and Old Nurse

I told my nurse I had a pain;
She wondered on the price of pickled beets in Spain.

I told my nurse I'd hurt my head;
She wondered if she would ever wed.

I told my nurse my noggin ached;
She wondered if the buns were baked.

I told my nurse my neck was sore;
She wondered who was at the door.

I told my nurse my heart was fast;
She took a bun--it was the last.

I told my nurse my tum was queasy;
She asked the dog to play parcheesi.

I told my nurse my knees were quaking;
She said the lawn--it needed raking.

I told my nurse my toes were numb;
She looked at me and sucked her thumb.

In despair, I climbed the chair
And whacked her with my cricket bat--
It toppled Nurse's feathered hat.

My nurse told me she had a pain;
I wondered on the price of pickled beets in Spain.

My mother and I wrote this in 2006, totally spur of the moment nursery rhyming. The phrase "The price of pickled beets in Spain" came up (yes, phrases like this just happen in my world), and we thought it sounded like a nursery rhyme, so we wrote one. I found it in a notebook while cleaning, and thought it deserved resurrection.

Silly poetry is my anti-Koran burning.

Fading summer

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.

Lay your long shadows on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go free.

Yesterday was Labor Day, which is kind of the traditional end of summer hurrah holiday, and tomorrow the Seattle public schools start, so this seems like an appropriate moment to wrap up the summer, even if I'm hoping September will be warm and sunny and I don't start school for another three weeks.

Wrapping up, for the moment, is a matter of looking back. I know a lot of people are looking forward to cooler weather and the associated cosy sweaters and hot tea, but I'm not quite ready to let go of my summer yet. I've had a pleasant summer, though I still feel rather destined to have imperfect summers. But I have got a lot done--remodeled a dress and a skirt and a t-shirt, made a blouse and a purse and a lot of jewellery, with pants and another blouse in progress. One of my goals for this summer was to steer my wardrobe to a more cohesive place, and I'm definitely getting there. I've also done a lot of reading and blogging, which is always satisfying. So it's been a pretty good summer.

Yesterday we made my favourite summer food, blackberry pie, with the blackberries we picked at my grandparents' house on Vashon Island. Blackberry is the best kind of pie. I can't imagine living somewhere that doesn't have blackberries.

The poetry, by the way, is "Autumn Day" by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from German by Edward Snow.

Cheeses

There were round cheeses
and green cheeses,
brown cheeses.
Ones with seeds in between cheeses.
There were new cheeses,
blue cheeses.
There were strong cheeses,
long cheeses.
There were cream cheeses,
and dream cheeses.
There were even the English stuffy cheeses.
There were the white feathered fluffy cheeses.
There were goat, cow and ewe cheeses;
There were old, very old and new cheeses,
Cheeses with soft rinds and hard rinds,
Cheeses with holes in the middle kinds,
Cheese that could be eaten by cats,
Cheese that could be nibbled by rats,
Some to be eaten with ladles,
Some to be given to babies in their cradles.
There were cheeses from the North.
There were cheeses from the South.
There were dozens of ones which
Melted in the Mouth.
There were cheeses which were abominably smelly,
Fromage de Régime, that is 'good for the belly.'
Cheeses some too good for mortals,
Cheeses to be taken to the portals of heaven
And offered to the gods.

- T.A. Layton

I've typed "cheeses" so many times I couldn't tell you how to spell it any more. I found this typed out on a slip of paper in my room, probably a relic from the year I made cheese for the science fair (which I won).

Poetic results of my adventures through the dust

I've been slowly cleaning my room, more extensively than I've ever cleaned before. I've got scary amounts of papers stacked up, from as far back as elementary school. I was going through a folder full of papers from 7th grade, and found a poem photocopied from a book, with a title--"Red Brocade"--but no author listed. I had to google it to find out who wrote it, but somehow I think this poem has been lurking in my brain since I first read it, though I have no memory of reading it, or any idea why we were reading it.

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be such good friends
you don’t care.

Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine Nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Holiday

Happy Valentine's Day, Singles Awareness Day, Day Before Presidents' Day, and/or Sunday! I haven't got any sort of exciting plans for the day; I'm just sitting here reading love stories in my pajamas, which looks and sounds a little pathetic, but is, I suppose, my own quiet way of celebrating. Have some poetry.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Inspiration

Apart from Victorian poetry, The Children's Book is also making me want to draw. I was sitting in a study/lounge room downstairs reading the book, and I kept having visions of giant (probably too ambitious for my abilities) pencil drawings, and being completely distracted from the book by the compulsive urge to go start drawing them.

Combine this with the urges I'm having to sew, make jewellery, make Ukrainian eggs, decorate for Christmas, and bake things, none of which I'm really able to do in a dorm room, I'm getting very distracted both from schoolwork and from my other reading.

I'm still quite wrapped up in The Children's Book, despite this. It's a book that needs to be savoured, and I am duly savouring it, but this is a problem given that it's due back at the library next Tuesday, and can't be renewed. I may have to just let it go overdue (sorry, waiting people), and hope I have time to finish it over the Thanksgiving break.

There's something special about a book that inspires you to other things. This book both to read poetry and to create things, for me. Tam Lin, of course, is my classic poetry and Shakespeare inspiration. I love reading poetry, so it's always nice to have this boost, and I never have the urge to draw unless something in particular inspires me to it. There's also an element wherein this allows you to draw out the experience of reading the inspiration book. You have to pause and indulge your inspiration, even if you want to keep reading.

I don't know if I can think of any other books I've read that particularly inspire me to things (though I'm sure there are some that make me want to write). What books have this effect on you?

Maids heard the goblins cry:

Congratulations those who guessed! The illustration was from "Goblin Market," by Christina Rossetti.

A.S. Byatt's books always seems to inspire me to read Victorian poetry. The Children's Book is no different, and this time the poetry in question is "Goblin Market." I'm fairly sure the book mentions it and that's why I thought of it, but I might have done anyway. It's one I always meant to read. And it fits very nicely with themes in The Children's Book, with much of the mood.

Backwards up the mossy glen
Turned and trooped the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
"Come buy, come buy."
When they reached where Laura was
They stood stock still upon the moss,
Leering at each other,
Brother with queer brother;
Signalling each other,
Brother with sly brother.
One set his basket down,
One reared his plate;
One began to weave a crown
Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown
(Men sell not such in any town);
One heaved the golden weight
Of dish and fruit to offer her:
"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry.

I've always loved depictions of a sinister kind of Fairyland, or Elfland. They're so thoroughly rooted in mythology and history, and like the fruits of Elfland, "Plump unpecked cherries-- Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches," colourful and enticing and thoroughly dangerous.

You can read the entire poem here.

Oops. And Homer.

I missed the last Friday Ephemera, didn't I? Sorry! Got distracted what with having to write a three page essay (the one on Pirandello) in about four hours. And Monday is just too late to do it belatedly. If it were still the weekend, sure, but we'll all just have to wait until this Friday. When I will hopefully not forget.

Reading the Odyssey has me thinking about epic poetry in general. I've loved epic poetry for a long time, probably inspired by Tolkien, I suppose. I've read Beowulf twice. There's just something about the combination of a good story and the lovely way the poetry rolls. I've never read Homer before, except for an aborted attempt at The Iliad last year. We're not reading the whole Odyssey in this class, which I'm rather sorry about, but maybe I'll just go and read it all myself when I get the chance. I have the Robert Fitzgerald translation, which seems to be one of the most read.

"The minstrel stirred, murmuring to the god, and soon
clear words and notes came one by one, a vision
of the Akhaians in their graceful ships
drawing away from shore: the torches flung
and shelters flaring: Argive soldiers crouched
in the close dark around Odysseus: and
the horse, tall on the assembly ground of Troy....

The splendid minstrel sang it."

That's from Book VIII of the Odyssey.

Have you ever read an epic poem? Ancient Greek, Old English, Finnish, Irish, Mesopotamian, no doubt lots of others, there is a lot of variation in these poems but they all have a unifying quality.

There's many a man hath more hair than wit

And here's proof of what Tam Lin does to my reading--not just Euripides but Shakespeare, E.R. Eddison, and a smattering of poets. I finished Tam Lin, promptly got out the Norton Anthology and just as promptly gave this over for my Complete Works of Shakespeare, and read Comedy of Errors. I've never seen this play, and not read it before. Shakespeare in the park was doing it this summer, and I did very much mean to go see it but with one thing and another never did. It's a very interesting play though in some ways distinguishes itself from the others, and I begin to see how greatly varied Shakespeare's plays can be. There's less of romance than most of the comedies I'm familiar with. By the formula of those I've read before, the comedy and the errors should be in mistaken identity which turns out funny situations between lovers, but not one of these characters is really much of a lover. It's a very funny play. I noticed far more couplets than seems usual, and is it just me or is this rather a shorter play? But I liked it. It's more symmetrical and better tied off than Twelfth Night.

Having finished both Tam Lin and Comedy or Errors, I then got the great joy of choosing a new book off the stack. I'm still reading The Mother Tongue, mind you, but slowly, and I like to have a novel on the go at the same time. So I picked The Worm Ouroboros, which I've already started and put aside twice, and which is a Tam Lin-associated book so hopefully that particular wave of reading inspiration will last me the book, at least until it begins to carry its own weight.

This evening, the lasting effects of Tam Lin in combination with watching History Boys produced a desire for some poetry, so I hauled out another literature textbook I for unknown reasons possess, and read a bit. For some reason Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" is at present particularly in my mind (maybe because Homer is), despite a little whirlwind tour of modern poetry (which according to this book begins with Hardy). I still associate "silent, upon a peak in Darien." with Swallows and Amazons. The poem in general I associate with Tam Lin, but the bit about Darien is all Swallows and Amazons.

Had I read something out of the 18th century and something medieval, I'd have sort of done a stop on my tour in at least one bit of every age, and I did do drama, novel, and poetry, which is rather a lot for one day, really. I have to confess I have gotten pretty much nothing done but reading.

Going back a couple thousand years...

Here are the books I bought for one of my classes, Gender and Sexuality in Greek and Roman Lit. I'm really very excited for this. In case you can't read the titles well, we have...

Metamorphoses by Ovid, Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, The Odyssey by Homer, Women on the Edge: four plays by Euripides, and Games of Venus compiled by Peter Bing.

I'm pretty excited for all of them. I've read a play by Euripides, but not one of the ones in this collection. I'm sorry I haven't read The Illiad before reading Odyssey. I started it but got distracted, though I was quite enjoying it. Games of Venus is an anthology of Greek and Roman erotic poetry, which will no doubt be fascinating (isn't this exactly the sort of thing one is supposed to read the first quarter of college?).

Notice the yellow "used" stickers. I got there early enough to get them used, but they were still somewhere around 80 dollars all together. That's only one class. Oh, textbooks, putting fear in the heart of my wallet.

I've always wanted to read some of the classics (meaning the classical classics, not the English classics), so I'm glad I'm finally getting to.

War poetry (which seems a little like a contradiction)

I like to read books of poetry via DailyLit, since often with novels in my email I wind up not reading them, and so I've been reading Poems by Wilfred Owen. He was a poet in World War I, writing about the war, and he died a week before the war ended, still pretty much entirely unknown. It was not till after the war that his poetry was published. None of it is the sort of grand poetry about heroic war, it's all mud and bombs and people who have lost limbs, all the horrible bits and no gloss. I rather wish I'd read this around the time I was reading Johnny Got His Gun; it would have been nice to have a book and poetry about the same thing at the same time. It's the sort of thing though, that it doesn't matter the timing as long as you read it at some point.

Apart from the content of his poetry, I quite like Owen's style, and he made me like partial rhyme which is always a bit of an accomplishment. This is from "A Terre":

A short life and a merry one, my brick!
We used to say we'd hate to live dead old, --
Yet now . . . I'd willingly be puffy, bald,
And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys
At least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose
Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting,
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.
Well, that's what I learnt, -- that, and making money.

Heat Wave

This has been the craziest year for weather ever. Oh, climate change. We had snow for a week in December, and now we've had a week of ridiculously hot weather. And by ridiculous, I mean record breaking. I live in Seattle. We are known for rain. We do not have extreme weather. And yet, it has been hovering around the 100 degrees mark. Wednesday, it got the hottest it ever has, at 103.

I've been swimming every day (sometimes twice), been to five different beaches, hung out in a friend's basement, eaten a lot of popsicles and ice cream, and in general managed to stay surprisingly cool. Still, one should not be able to walk around in shorts and t-shirt in the middle of the night.

What does one choose to read in weather this crazy? I've found watching TV makes it feel hotter, and I've no doubt some choice of books would have the same effect. Do you read books set in cold climates, or books set in the desert? Last summer I read The English Patient, and was glad I'd read it in summer, with its settings of Italy and North African desert. I'm inclined to think hot books are better for hot weather, especially if it's hotter there than it is here. Cold books just make you envious.

Of course, my current reading is England in fall and winter (Diary of a Provincial Lady and Marking Time), so I've not exactly chosen hot books. Diary of a Provincial Lady is at least rather short and sweet, which I am inclined to think is better for this weather. You don't really want page-long paragraphs, which leave you sweaty and gasping for breath at the end. Anything with short chapters, short diary entries, short sentences, seems preferable. Poetry, too, is good hot weather reading. I am inclined, again to turn to Michael Ondaatje, and read his poems. The Cinnamon Peeler is a book I've been halfway through for ages, and as it's poetry I could pick it up again at any time. The idea is very much starting to appeal.

Look at all the poor dead grass in my back yard. It's like straw on the ground, it's so flat. The grape vine, tomatoes, and flowers are all flourishing, though.

Poetry worth quoting

I'm reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Here is Sonnet VI:

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

In other news, there is enough snow outside that the bottom step of the porch has disappeared.

On Michael Ondaatje

So, every once in a while I have a day where I can't for the life of me decide what to read next--I want to read it all, and I don't want to read any of it, and I can't remember what all the books I've been meaning to read for ages are. I always wind up turning to my parents, who have read a great many good books in their time, and they will pull all sorts of books off the shelves, and stack them up in front of me, and then eventually I'll probably walk up to a shelf and pull something off and start reading it, or pick up the very first book they recommended which I originally scoffed at. It is all very trying.

Anyway, that is how I came to pick up The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. I suppose it's one I always figured I'd read eventually. I have read some of his poetry in The Cinnamon Peeler, which I should finish, and I love in that the "Elimination Game," which has such gems as,

"Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor.

Those who have accidentally stapled themselves.

Anyone who has been hired as a 'professional beater' and frightened grouse in the direction of the Queen Mother.

Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail.

Anyone with pain."

And my favourite...

"Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs."

It's not exactly poetry--I'm not sure what it is. A bit of a dedication, I suppose.

Anyway, I have so far read the first chapter of The English Patient, and hearing that the movie was terrible I see why it was, because I can't imagine how you could make a film out of this. It reminds me of The Thirteenth Tale in an odd manner, and it almost serves that desire I had for World War II novels, and it satisfies my fondness for books involving crumbling houses. There are books I've read (not that I can think of an example) where my favourite character is the house they all live in. Anyway, it's lovely, and I am definitely continuing.

A little bit of poetry

I sometimes think I like reading about books better than I like reading the books themselves. Among book blogs, I have for quite a while been particularly partial to Stuck in a Book, and yesterday discovered Oxford reader, which I am liking.

Yesterday I picked up again after two years C.S. Lewis's Narrative Poems, which I bought at a lovely little antique shop on Vashon Island 4th of July two years ago. The place didn't have a lot of books, but it had a fabulous collection of all the Inklings' work. Tolkien, Lewis, Charles Williams. So I went for the Narrative Poems, which I like very much and shall endeavour to finish this time. I got through Dymer (which was terribly confusing, though very lovely--I don't know if it would have been less confusing had I not read it in chunks two years apart), and Launcelot. I am now on The Nameless Isle, which I think I like best so far of these, at least in style. Though I was rather taken with the style of Dymer. But I can't help loving that rolling Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, with the profusion of alliteration. What could be better than this?

Then came a turn of luck.
On the tenth evening too soon the light
Over working seas went beneath the sky line,
Darkness came dripping and the deafening storm
Upon wild waters, wet days and long,
Carried us, and caverned clouds immeasurable
Harried and hunted like a hare that ship
Too many days. Men were weary.

Try reading it out loud. That may not be the best example, but it's pretty good.

Here's the beginning of Dymer:

You stranger, long before your glance can light
Upon these words, time will have washed away
The moment when I first took pen to write
With all my road before me--yet to-day,
Here if at all, we meet; the unfashioned clay
Ready to both our hands; both hushed to see
That which is nowhere yet come forth and be.