[New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman

[jforjames at aol.com]

Bob, by mental math, the reader should get to 50 by the first two lines of the second stanza. Then he does it again for us to get to 50
in the third and fourth lines of the same stanza. And then in the final stanza he gives us 50 years again. So that's thrice! (once implicit, twice explicit), three references to what 'may' be 50 more years for the speaker on earth. And it's all?only suppostional, because none of knows the length of our time on earth. 

Finnegan

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
Sent: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 7:58 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Rating the Housman


> (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...)?
Haw, James, I consider the second stanza to be what makes this poem great. Pretty much for the reasons you find it poor, although I don't think it fills things out for the sake of the rhyme scheme. The first two lines tell us the speaker is 20. It doesn't tell us that leaves him 50 more. We can do the arithmetic, yes, but the poet is directing us from the age of the poet to how many years he has left. He's making that the subject.?
?
--Bob?
?
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