[New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman

[jforjames at aol.com]

Pardon again, my errant reply...Here's what I meant to chime in with:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.


(Nice clean pastoral start. A sauntering diction like a horse-drawn carriage ride. And the hint of the death/ressurection dyad?as the stanza?the end.)



Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.


(The second stanza may be a classic example of filling things out?for sake of rime scheme. The information is all given in first two lines,?but then is?restated by reversing the mental math. It begins to sound a bit like one of those math word?problems you were tested with in grade school: "If one train traveling west left Cleveland at 10 o'clock, traveling 100 miles per hour, and twenty minutes later another train left Chicago traveling east...)


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.


(In the end, the?great failure?of the poem is that something conventially seen as beautiful by about 99.9% of the population--cherry trees in 
bloom--is seen as beautiful and worth experiencing over and over by the poet. The great poets tend to?see as beautiful the things that other's might overlook. A haiku poet would have done this poem in three lines, and saved us 9 more, pace the logic of?the second stanza.)


Finnegan
-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Spacks <barry.spacks at verizon.net>
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 3:51 pm
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman


Applying the Check List to such a canonical piece is difficult.
Here's one I've always read and loved as a key carpe diem poem that clearly
falls flat (as Judy notes) in terms of innovation-areas of the Famous List
TO ITS BETTERMENT, I will claim below.


I take it that to give a work a Prix d'Or one remains free to assume that Excellence
in this game doesn't mean that all list-categories must yield enthusiastic response.
Keep them all in mind, sure, but ignore those irrelevant (how much more so,
I'd guess, with "Bananas..." (?) )


That said, my case for excellence: 


Telling start with an alternate foot, refreshing mastery, authority in gentle assertiveness
of tone; 2nd line's alliteration pleasing, and also forwards in its simplicity the asserted loveliness of
the blooming; connection to Easter in l.4 a powerful ideological note with its
death & resurrection associations; I'd add, softie that I am, the sense of whiteness
in the blooms (and later in "snow" as evoked) offers an additive to the emotion of
perceived innocence, purity, in the affection for natural beauty.




???????????? II



Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.


?????? Then we run into Biblical phrasing for the rather touchingly ironic feature that the speaker is so young,
?????? yet concerned with last things. A bit of an air of comedy added by "only fifty more" where by tradition
????? this subject would demand a setting close to the end of partaking, that "grab what you still can while still around" motif.
?????? I'd add (forgive me) that even the obvious rhymes throughout support the "simplicity" that charms me in the poem.




Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.



????? I love the unpressured, quiet way the logic of the concluding statement works: given that the lovely tree is blooming
????? in the season of pain that turns to hope, and that I, the speaker, am mortal with limited days, it follows that...
???? I will go and partake. Anything more grand in the way of device or experiement -- their lack here lowering for
???? some the poem's "score"? -- would take away from the spell of innocent affirmation (with subterrainian death-dread)
???? that the work enforces.?? 


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.



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