Very Bad Poetry (4 page)
Authors: Kathryn Petras
Their Wedding Journey
Dear Mother,
When the coach rolled off
From dear old Battery Place,
I hid my face within my hands—
That is, I hid my face.
(1865-1901)
“P
oems Written While You Wait” was the sign on J. Gordon Coogler’s print shop in Charleston, South Carolina. This prolific author of “Purely Original Verse” enjoyed an ambiguous popularity in his brief career as a poet, selling thousands of copies of his first two books, and living to see many fan clubs formed. In many cases his following was not so much due to the merits of his poetry but rather the reverse.
Reviews of his poetry may be politely termed “mixed,” but that would be stretching the truth. “Wretched taste,” said
Puck
in 1894; on the other hand, the
Atlanta Constitution
said that “there must be something in the writings of a man who can attract attention and win applause when corn is thirty cents a bushel and potato bugs have become a burden.”
Coogler seemed blissfully convinced of his own brilliance. A Methodist Sunday school teacher who often wrote of “the gentler sex and their temptations,” Coogler was a straitlaced gentleman of the old school. As he put it: “You’ll never see this form clad in gaudy apparel, nor these feet playing the ‘dude’ in patent leather shoes.”
Alas! Carolina! Carolina! Fair land of my birth,
Thy fame will be wafted from the mountain to the sea
As being the greatest educational centre on earth.
At the cost of men’s blood thro’ thy “one X” whiskey.
Two very large elephants
*
thou has lately installed,
Where thy sons and daughters are invited to come,
And learn to be physically fit and mentally strong,
By the solemn proceeds of thy “innocent rum.”
Here Coogler puts his own modern twist on the damsel in distress theme. A pretty woman of “dove-like form” is about to fall from her bicycle.
The Lover’s Return on a Bicycle
Admitted, but not accepted
Her charming steel-horse could not miss
A steep and dangerous precipice
By the river’s bank;
Along she flew—a fearful sight—
Like a bird wounded in its flight
She downward sank
Many an anxious eye drew near,
And gazing with a sense of fear,
Looked here and there;
No wounded form could there be found,
Nor trace of blood seen on the ground,
Of the maiden fair.
For safe below the rough incline
She passed beneath the Southern pine—
Her charming wheel
Never faltering, stood it all,
Thus saving her from a fatal fall
By its perfect steel.
O that the lilies and roses were mine
Instead of the oak and ivy of life.
How Strange Are Dreams!
How strange are dreams! I dreamed the other night
A dream that made me tremble,
Not with fear, but with a kind of strange reality;
My supper, though late, consisted of no cheese.
Coogler’s enigmatic hatred of Byron’s mother was noted by contemporaries, who, like us, have no explanations.
Oh, thou immortal bard!
Men may condemn the song
That issued from thy heart sublime,
Yet alas! its music sweet
Has left an echo that will sound
Thro’ the lone corridors of Time.
Thou immortal Byron!
Thy inspired genius
Let no man attempt to smother—
May all that was good within thee
Be attributed to Heaven,
All that was evil—to thy mother.
On her beautiful face there are smiles of grace
That linger in beauty serene,
And there are no pimples encircling her dimples,
As ever, as yet, I have seen.
Fair lady, on that snowy neck and half-clad bosom
Which you so publicly reveal to man,
There’s not a single outward stain or speck;
Would that you had given but half the care
To the training of your intellect and heart
As you have given to that spotless neck.
For Time, alas! must touch with cold unerring hand,
That fair bosom’s soft, untarnished hue,
Staining that lily-leaf of your sweet sex;
Then in ignorance you will journey here below,
Hiding that once fair bosom ’neath a veil,
With a standing collar ’round your wrinkled neck.
The man who thinks God is too kind
To punish actions vile,
Is bad at heart, of unsound mind
Or very juvenile.
The Poem Showing the Most Mathematical Genius
L
ittle is known of the poet who wrote the following, Frederick B. Needham, except that he lived in the mid-1800s—and, as the following lines show, that he could count.
from
The Round of the Clock
by
Frederick B
.
Needham
“One!” strikes the clock in the belfry tower,
Which but sixty minutes ago
Sounded twelve for the midnight hour.
*
Winthrop and Clemson colleges.
(1818-1889)
E
liza Cook burst onto the literary scene with her poem “I’m Afloat!” A succession of verse works followed. Later the successful poet was even asked to edit her own periodical:
Eliza Cook’s Journal.
Her middle-class public adored her, and critics praised her “sympathy with all that is good and true.”
The poet’s truth-telling Muse extended to topics such as household furniture. Her poem “The Old Armchair” was one of her most beloved poems. It included the opening lines
I love it, I love it; and who shall dare
To chide me for loving that old Arm-chair?
But usually Cook concentrated on naturalistic and heroic themes, sometimes with a touch of the macabre. Her book
Melaia, and Other Poems
went into three editions and was also published in New York. Its title poem, about the loyalty of a dog to its master, spawned a hot literary debate: was the dog a retriever or another breed?
Cook had a strong Victorian sense of mission. “I am anxious,” she once said, “to give my feeble aid to the titanic struggle for intellectual elevation now going on.”
The Surgeon’s Knife
There are hearts—stout hearts,—that own no fear
At the whirling sword or the darting spear,—
that are ready alike to bleed in the dust,
’Neath the sabre’s cut or the bayonet’s thrust;
They heed not the blows that Fate may deal,
From the murderer’s dirk or the soldier’s steel:
But lips that laugh at the dagger of strife
Turn silent and white from the surgeon’s knife.
… It shines in the grasp—’tis no weapon for play,
A shudder betrays it is speeding its way;
While the quivering muscle and severing joint
Are gashed by the keen edge and probed by the point.
… Dripping it comes from the cells of life,
While glazing eyes turn from the surgeon’s knife.
Here the author takes us inside the mind of a crow that feeds on dead humans.
The Carrion Crow
I plunged my beak in the marbling cheek,
I perched on the clammy brow:
And a dainty treat was that fresh meat
To the greedy Carrion Crow.
….
And quickly his breast had a table guest,
In the hungry Carrion Crow.
Lines Among the Leaves
A varied theme it utters,
Where the glossy date-leaf flutters;
A loud and lightsome chant it yieldeth there;
And the quiet, listening dreamer,
May believe that many a streamer
Flaps the air.
It is sad and dreary hearing
Where the giant pine is rearing
A lone head, like a hearse plume waved about;
And it lurketh melancholy
where the thick and somber holly
Bristles out.
The following passage from a longer poem concerns the horrible trials of a ship becalmed in the tropics.
Song of the Sea Weed
Many a lip is gaping for drink,
And madly calling for rain;
And some hot brains are beginning to think
Of a messmate’s opened vein.
(On people visiting a castle to find its owner away and no food set out for visitors)
The castle was nigh, with its towers so high
And the flag mast poking its nose to the sky;
The walls were as grey as the farewell of day,
When the muffin-boy goes on his wandering way.
The ivy was green in the Midsummer sheen,
With as noble a watch dog as ever was seen;
All things were enriching the prospect bewitching
Expecting a little black smoke from the kitchen.
We had conjured up dreams of rare Burgundy streams,
Of terrestrial cake and ethereal creams;
With the zeal of a Milton our fancies had built on
The hopes of some precious old port with ripe Stilton.
The soul-stirring line may be all very fine,
Provided the minstrel can manage to dine;
But to stand ’neath a portal where the commons are short all,
Takes a great deal of sentiment out of the mortal.
We sat in despair, with a starvation stare,—
Not a plate, not a dish, not a cover was there;
Not the chink of a fork nor the creak of a cork,
To announce that the butler was doing his work.
(fl. 1870s)
L
illian Curtis was a native of Chicago best known for writing sentimental verse on the banal, the bathetic, and, often, the bleak. Her first book,
Forget-Me-Not,
published in 1872, contained such uplifting and educational poems as “We All Must Pass Away” and “An Inventory,” which itemizes the contents of “a drunkard’s hut,” complete with the sorry hut owner himself, described as “a haggard man … uttering wild and piercing cries.”
Forget-Me-Not
“paved the way to a castle of literary hopes for the future,” as Curtis wrote in the introduction to her second book,
Patchwork.
She explained that she had actually intended to publish
another book,
The Casket,
but since the manuscript was destroyed in the fire of July 14, 1874, she hastily cobbled together “a patched-up substitute.” Ever the moralizer, Curtis closed by pointing out that had it not been for the fire,
Patchwork
would never have been published, “but, alas, on just such slender threads hang even the greatest of life’s events.”
Oh! she was a lovely girl,
So pretty and so fair,
With gentle, lovelit eyes,
And wavy, dark-brown hair.
I loved the gentle girl,
But oh! I heaved a sigh,
When first she told me she could see
Out of only one eye.
But soon I thought within myself,
I’d better save my tear and sigh,
To bestow upon some I know,
Who has
more
than one eye.
She is brave and intelligent,
Too she is witty and wise,
She’ll accomplish more now, than many,
Who have two eyes.
Ah! you need not pity her,
She needs not your tear and sigh,
She makes good use, I tell you,
Of her one remaining eye.
In the home where we are hastening,
In our eternal Home on High,
See that you be not rivaled,
By the girl with only
one
eye.
What on this wide earth,
That is made, or does by nature grow,
Is more homely, yet more beautiful,
Than the useful Potato?
What would this world full of people do,
Rich and poor, high and low,
Were it not for this little-thought-of
But very necessary Potato?
True ’tis homely to look on,
Nothing pretty in even its blow,
But it will bear acquaintance,
This useful Potato.
For when it is cooked and opened,
It’s so white and mellow,
You forget it ever was homely,
This useful Potato.
On the whole it is a very plain plant,
Makes no conspicuous show.
But the internal appearance is lovely,
Of the unostentatious Potato.
The useful and the beautiful
Are not far apart we know.
And thus the beautiful are glad to have,
The homely looking Potato.
On the land, or on the sea,
Wherever we may go,
We are always glad to welcome
The homely Potato.
A practical and moral lesson
This may plainly show,
That though homely, our heart
can be
Like that of the homely Potato.