[New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman

[Linda Sue Grimes]

"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."

By taking literally the final line, "To see the cherry hung with snow," you eliminate this problem.  

lsg

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: jforjames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 6:44 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman


  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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