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sherlock60Welcome once again to my poetry page!
I hope each week you will read Dr. Watson’s delightful narrative and then go on to write a poem related to it in some way. All forms of poetry are permitted, and further down the page there is a selection you might like to consider using over the coming weeks.
And here, courtesy of my housemaid Rachel, is this week’s suggested poem to read—a suggestion inspired by the themes and subjects in this week's story. Hopefully you will enjoy the poem, and perhaps it may give you some ideas for a poem of your own or allow you to look at Dr. Watson's story in a new way.
N.B. Rachel has chosen to do something a little different this week. As the poem is a long one and not all of its lines relevant to Mr. Holmes and this story, she has edited the poem to produce an abridged version.
You will find Rachel’s version posted below, and underneath that there is a link to the full poem, if you wish to read that too.
Note from Rachel: This poem reminded me of the good Inspector Lestrade, who seems to look upon Mr. Holmes rather as Shakespeare's literary rivals might have looked upon the Bard: with respect for his genius, affection for his idiosyncratic character, and professional jealousy now conquered and put aside. Yet the speaker also expresses a certain inescapable bafflement about this strange man and concern for his well-being.
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford by Edwin Arlington Robinson (abridged version)
You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare
….And you have known him from his origin,
You tell me; and a most uncommon urchin
He must have been to the few seeing ones —
A trifle terrifying, I dare say,
Discovering a world with his man's eyes,
Quite as another lad might see some finches,
If he looked hard and had an eye for nature.
But this one had his eyes and their foretelling,
And he had you to fare with, and what else?
He must have had a father and a mother —
In fact I've heard him say so — and a dog,
As a boy should, I venture; and the dog,
Most likely, was the only man who knew him.
….He treads along through Time's old wilderness
As if the tramp of all the centuries
Had left no roads — and there are none, for him;
He doesn't see them, even with those eyes, —
And that's a pity, or I say it is.
Accordingly we have him as we have him —
Going his way, the way that he goes best,
A pleasant animal with no great noise
Or nonsense anywhere to set him off —
Save only diverse and inclement devils
Have made of late his heart their dwelling place.
A flame half ready to fly out sometimes
At some annoyance may be fanned up in him,
But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out;
He knows how little room there is in there
For crude and futile animosities,
And how much for the joy of being whole,
And how much for long sorrow and old pain.
On our side there are some who may be given
To grow old wondering what he thinks of us
….I'll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday,
Trim, rather spruce, and quite the gentleman.
"What ho, my lord!" say I. He doesn't hear me;
Wherefore I have to pause and look at him.
He's not enormous, but one looks at him.
A little on the round if you insist,
For now, God save the mark, he's growing old;
He's five and forty, and to hear him talk
These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add
More years to that. He's old enough to be
The father of a world, and so he is.
"Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?"
Says he; and there shines out of him again
An aged light that has no age or station —
The mystery that's his — a mischievous
Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame
For being won so easy…
By which you see we're all a little jealous ...
….Yes, he'll go back to Stratford. And we'll miss him?
Dear sir, there'll be no London here without him.
….Lord! how I see him now,
Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us.
Whatever he may have meant, we never had him;
He failed us, or escaped, or what you will, —
And there was that about him (God knows what, —
We'd flayed another had he tried it on us)
That made as many of us as had wits
More fond of all his easy distances
Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder.
But think you not, my friend, he'd never talk!
Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened —
Thereby acquiring much we knew before
About ourselves, and hitherto had held
Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose.
….Yet, for all his engines,
You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon
Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em
A world made out of more that has a reason
Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;
….To me it looks as if the power that made him,
For fear of giving all things to one creature,
Left out the first, — faith, innocence, illusion,
Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam, —
And thereby, for his too consuming vision,
Empowered him out of nature; though to see him,
You'd never guess what's going on inside him.
He'll break out some day like a keg of ale
With too much independent frenzy in it;
And all for collaring what he knows won't keep,
And what he'd best forget — but that he can't.
….What he does
Is more to you than how it is he does it, —
….He knows how much of what men paint themselves
Would blister in the light of what they are;
He sees how much of what was great now shares
An eminence transformed and ordinary;
He knows too much of what the world has hushed
In others, to be loud now for himself;
He knows now at what height low enemies
May reach his heart, and high friends let him fall;
….To-day the clouds are with him, but anon
He'll out of 'em enough to shake the tree
Of life itself and bring down fruit unheard-of, —
And, throwing in the bruised and whole together,
Prepare a wine to make us drunk with wonder;
And if he live, there'll be a sunset spell
Thrown over him as over a glassed lake
That yesterday was all a black wild water.
…. but there's a reckoning;
The sessions that are now too much his own,
The roiling inward of a stilled outside,
The churning out of all those blood-fed lines,
The nights of many schemes and little sleep,
The full brain hammered hot with too much thinking,
The vexed heart over-worn with too much aching, —
This weary jangling of conjoined affairs
Made out of elements that have no end,
And all confused at once, I understand,
Is not what makes a man to live forever.
O no, not now! He'll not be going now:
There'll be time yet for God knows what explosions
Before he goes. He'll stay awhile.
….He'll not be going yet. There's too much yet
Unsung within the man.
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford By Edwin Arlington Robinson (full version)
Thank you so much to Rachel. We are always so grateful for your hard work for our little community. And here is my suggested poetry form to revisit this week: Parallelismus Membrorum. (The link takes you back to a previous poetry page.)
But you do not have to use that form. Any form of poetry is welcome this week—and every week! Here are a few suggestions for you:
221B verselet, abecedarian poetry, acrostic poetry, alexandrine, ballad, beeswing, blackout poetry, blues stanza, bref double, Burns stanza, call and response, chastushka, cinquain, circular poetry, clerihew, colour poems, concrete poetry, Cornish verse, curtal sonnet, diamante, doggerel, double dactyl, ekphrasis, elegiac couplet, elegiac stanza, elfje, englyn, epigram, epitaph, epulaeryu, Etheree, fable, Fib, florette, found poetry, free verse, ghazal, haiku, In Memoriam stanza, Italian sonnet, jueju, kennings poem, lanturne, limerick, line messaging, lyric poetry, mathnawī, micropoetry, mini-monoverse, musette, palindrome poetry, pantoum, Parallelismus Membrorum, poem cycle, quintilla, renga, riddle, rime couée, Schüttelreim, sedoka, septet, sestina, sonnet, tanka, tercet, terza rima, tongue twister poetry, triangular triplet, triolet, Tyburn, villanelle
Please leave all your poems inspired by The Six Napoleons in the comments on this post. I look forward to seeing them!
Warm regards,
Mrs. Hudson
I hope each week you will read Dr. Watson’s delightful narrative and then go on to write a poem related to it in some way. All forms of poetry are permitted, and further down the page there is a selection you might like to consider using over the coming weeks.
And here, courtesy of my housemaid Rachel, is this week’s suggested poem to read—a suggestion inspired by the themes and subjects in this week's story. Hopefully you will enjoy the poem, and perhaps it may give you some ideas for a poem of your own or allow you to look at Dr. Watson's story in a new way.
N.B. Rachel has chosen to do something a little different this week. As the poem is a long one and not all of its lines relevant to Mr. Holmes and this story, she has edited the poem to produce an abridged version.
You will find Rachel’s version posted below, and underneath that there is a link to the full poem, if you wish to read that too.
Note from Rachel: This poem reminded me of the good Inspector Lestrade, who seems to look upon Mr. Holmes rather as Shakespeare's literary rivals might have looked upon the Bard: with respect for his genius, affection for his idiosyncratic character, and professional jealousy now conquered and put aside. Yet the speaker also expresses a certain inescapable bafflement about this strange man and concern for his well-being.
You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare
….And you have known him from his origin,
You tell me; and a most uncommon urchin
He must have been to the few seeing ones —
A trifle terrifying, I dare say,
Discovering a world with his man's eyes,
Quite as another lad might see some finches,
If he looked hard and had an eye for nature.
But this one had his eyes and their foretelling,
And he had you to fare with, and what else?
He must have had a father and a mother —
In fact I've heard him say so — and a dog,
As a boy should, I venture; and the dog,
Most likely, was the only man who knew him.
….He treads along through Time's old wilderness
As if the tramp of all the centuries
Had left no roads — and there are none, for him;
He doesn't see them, even with those eyes, —
And that's a pity, or I say it is.
Accordingly we have him as we have him —
Going his way, the way that he goes best,
A pleasant animal with no great noise
Or nonsense anywhere to set him off —
Save only diverse and inclement devils
Have made of late his heart their dwelling place.
A flame half ready to fly out sometimes
At some annoyance may be fanned up in him,
But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out;
He knows how little room there is in there
For crude and futile animosities,
And how much for the joy of being whole,
And how much for long sorrow and old pain.
On our side there are some who may be given
To grow old wondering what he thinks of us
….I'll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday,
Trim, rather spruce, and quite the gentleman.
"What ho, my lord!" say I. He doesn't hear me;
Wherefore I have to pause and look at him.
He's not enormous, but one looks at him.
A little on the round if you insist,
For now, God save the mark, he's growing old;
He's five and forty, and to hear him talk
These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add
More years to that. He's old enough to be
The father of a world, and so he is.
"Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?"
Says he; and there shines out of him again
An aged light that has no age or station —
The mystery that's his — a mischievous
Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame
For being won so easy…
By which you see we're all a little jealous ...
….Yes, he'll go back to Stratford. And we'll miss him?
Dear sir, there'll be no London here without him.
….Lord! how I see him now,
Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us.
Whatever he may have meant, we never had him;
He failed us, or escaped, or what you will, —
And there was that about him (God knows what, —
We'd flayed another had he tried it on us)
That made as many of us as had wits
More fond of all his easy distances
Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder.
But think you not, my friend, he'd never talk!
Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened —
Thereby acquiring much we knew before
About ourselves, and hitherto had held
Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose.
….Yet, for all his engines,
You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon
Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em
A world made out of more that has a reason
Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;
….To me it looks as if the power that made him,
For fear of giving all things to one creature,
Left out the first, — faith, innocence, illusion,
Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam, —
And thereby, for his too consuming vision,
Empowered him out of nature; though to see him,
You'd never guess what's going on inside him.
He'll break out some day like a keg of ale
With too much independent frenzy in it;
And all for collaring what he knows won't keep,
And what he'd best forget — but that he can't.
….What he does
Is more to you than how it is he does it, —
….He knows how much of what men paint themselves
Would blister in the light of what they are;
He sees how much of what was great now shares
An eminence transformed and ordinary;
He knows too much of what the world has hushed
In others, to be loud now for himself;
He knows now at what height low enemies
May reach his heart, and high friends let him fall;
….To-day the clouds are with him, but anon
He'll out of 'em enough to shake the tree
Of life itself and bring down fruit unheard-of, —
And, throwing in the bruised and whole together,
Prepare a wine to make us drunk with wonder;
And if he live, there'll be a sunset spell
Thrown over him as over a glassed lake
That yesterday was all a black wild water.
…. but there's a reckoning;
The sessions that are now too much his own,
The roiling inward of a stilled outside,
The churning out of all those blood-fed lines,
The nights of many schemes and little sleep,
The full brain hammered hot with too much thinking,
The vexed heart over-worn with too much aching, —
This weary jangling of conjoined affairs
Made out of elements that have no end,
And all confused at once, I understand,
Is not what makes a man to live forever.
O no, not now! He'll not be going now:
There'll be time yet for God knows what explosions
Before he goes. He'll stay awhile.
….He'll not be going yet. There's too much yet
Unsung within the man.
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford By Edwin Arlington Robinson (full version)
Thank you so much to Rachel. We are always so grateful for your hard work for our little community. And here is my suggested poetry form to revisit this week: Parallelismus Membrorum. (The link takes you back to a previous poetry page.)
But you do not have to use that form. Any form of poetry is welcome this week—and every week! Here are a few suggestions for you:
221B verselet, abecedarian poetry, acrostic poetry, alexandrine, ballad, beeswing, blackout poetry, blues stanza, bref double, Burns stanza, call and response, chastushka, cinquain, circular poetry, clerihew, colour poems, concrete poetry, Cornish verse, curtal sonnet, diamante, doggerel, double dactyl, ekphrasis, elegiac couplet, elegiac stanza, elfje, englyn, epigram, epitaph, epulaeryu, Etheree, fable, Fib, florette, found poetry, free verse, ghazal, haiku, In Memoriam stanza, Italian sonnet, jueju, kennings poem, lanturne, limerick, line messaging, lyric poetry, mathnawī, micropoetry, mini-monoverse, musette, palindrome poetry, pantoum, Parallelismus Membrorum, poem cycle, quintilla, renga, riddle, rime couée, Schüttelreim, sedoka, septet, sestina, sonnet, tanka, tercet, terza rima, tongue twister poetry, triangular triplet, triolet, Tyburn, villanelle
Please leave all your poems inspired by The Six Napoleons in the comments on this post. I look forward to seeing them!
Mrs. Hudson
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Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 08:42 am (UTC)For news a story barker
But missed the very biggest scoop
That bled to death on his own stoop
Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 12:26 pm (UTC)To dominate Italy was what they had planned
But then hereâs a thing
Napoleon made himself king
And his bust hid their pearl through Beppoâs hand
Re: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 01:36 pm (UTC)and flush like plum preserves,
when steel fails to reason
at praise warm, like treason,
when fleeing publicâs light
is bowing in friendsâ sight,
a great mind shatters
for a pearl-heart that matters.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 02:49 pm (UTC)RE: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 02:50 pm (UTC)RE: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 02:50 pm (UTC)Re: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 04:05 pm (UTC)'Story barker' is such a neat choice of rhyme for Harker ^_^
ÿEA@P¯ò ½ý?±(J?ÐÄõËÌð9-2С7Ç&²¯¸,©j.D´ð©Îc÷j R?zbÎÃ
Date: 2017-01-22 04:24 pm (UTC)Urban hymn London
Vesper smoked London
Water webbed London
Xenial London
Yellow fog London
Zephyr-brushed London
A-bridged town London
Bespoke suit London
City centre London
Doctors walk London
Even-tide London
Flower girl London
Gaslamp lit London
Hansom cab London
Intrigue home London
Journeyman London
Kingâs, queenâs manned London
Legs weary London
Maid-made, run London
Newspaper London
Opium den London
Peacock cry London
Quartered, drawn London
Regents Park London
Savile Row London
To each, their own London
Re: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 06:01 pm (UTC)I particularly like flush like plum preserves - that's so gorgeous. And those last four lines ^_^
Re: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, e
Date: 2017-01-22 06:09 pm (UTC)Water webbed London
Xenial London (had to look up that one ^^")
A-bridged town London
Doctors walk London
Intrigue home London
Quartered, drawn London
Re: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 06:23 pm (UTC)Re: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 06:24 pm (UTC)Re: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, e
Date: 2017-01-22 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 06:46 pm (UTC)Thank you. It's a great scene in all of canon. Very worth of verse.
Re: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, e
Date: 2017-01-22 06:46 pm (UTC)Re: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, e
Date: 2017-01-22 06:49 pm (UTC)Thank you, thank you. I liked abridged town and quartered, drawn, too.
RE: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, e
Date: 2017-01-22 07:06 pm (UTC)Great word choice.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 07:12 pm (UTC)RE: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 07:13 pm (UTC)RE: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 07:13 pm (UTC)Re: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 08:52 pm (UTC)Re: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, e
Date: 2017-01-22 08:54 pm (UTC)Re: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 10:39 pm (UTC)Re: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 10:43 pm (UTC)Re: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 10:45 pm (UTC)Re: Clerihew
Date: 2017-01-22 10:49 pm (UTC)Re: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 10:52 pm (UTC)Re: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, e
Date: 2017-01-22 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 11:07 pm (UTC)RE: Re: London A to Z [in keeping with the line...fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical Londo
Date: 2017-01-22 11:08 pm (UTC)RE: Re: Limerick
Date: 2017-01-22 11:17 pm (UTC)