Category Archives: Poetry

A poem’s origins: Robert Burns, ‘A Red, Red Rose’

O my luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June:
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
And I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!

*****

January 25th being the birthday of Robert Burns (and the opportunity for a Burns Night celebration), it seems the right day to post an interesting fact that I was unfamiliar with until reading a 1964 Canadian high school poetry text book: ‘A Red, Red Rose’ was fashioned from three distinct songs that Burns had heard in the Highlands of Scotland. Part of each song was reworked by him into a single poem:

(Song 1)
Her cheeks are like the roses
That blossom fresh in June;
O, she’s like a new-strung instrument
That’s newly put in tune.

(Song 2)
The seas they shall run dry,
And rocks melt into sands
Then I’ll love you still, my dear,
When all these things are done.

(Song 3)
Altho’ I go a thousand miles
I vow thy face to see,
Altho’ I go ten thousand miles,
I’ll come again to thee, dear love,
I’ll come again to thee.

Wikipedia (as often) is a good place to look for more information, and here is an extensive quotation from its article on the poem:

Sources
Burns is best understood as a compiler or a redactor of “A Red, Red Rose” rather than its author. F.B. Snyder wrote that Burns could take “childish, inept” sources and turn them into magic, “The electric magnet is not more unerring in selecting iron from a pile of trash than was Burns in culling the inevitable phrase or haunting cadence from the thousands of mediocre possibilities.”

One source that is often cited for the song is a Lieutenant Hinches’ farewell to his sweetheart, which Ernest Rhys asserts is the source for the central metaphor and some of its best lines. Hinches’ poem, “O fare thee well, my dearest dear”, bears a striking similarity to Burns’s verse, notably the lines which refer to “ten thousand miles” and “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear”.

A ballad originating from the same period entitled “The Turtle Dove” also contains similar lines, such as “Though I go ten thousand mile, my dear” and “Oh, the stars will never fall down from the sky/Nor the rocks never melt with the sun”. Of particular note is a collection of verse dating from around 1770, The Horn Fair Garland, which Burns inscribed, “Robine Burns aught this buik and no other”. A poem in this collection, “The loyal Lover’s faithful promise to his Sweet-heart on his going on a long journey” also contains similar verses such as “Althou’ I go a thousand miles” and “The day shall turn to night, dear love/And the rocks melt in the sun”.

An even earlier source is the broadside ballad “The Wanton Wife of Castle-Gate: Or, The Boat-mans Delight”, which dates to the 1690s. Midway through the ballad, Burns’ first stanza can be found almost verbatim: “Her Cheeks are like the Roses, that blossoms fresh in June; O shes like some new-strung Instrument thats newly put in tune.” The provenance for such a song is likely medieval.

Thank you, Wikipedia! Love you!

And everyone: Have a good Rabbie Burns Day!

“O my Luve’s like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June” by Cait Clerin is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. The work is ‘A Summer Bouquet’ by George Elgar Hicks, 1878.

Using form: Parody with a message: Marcus Bales, ‘The Easy Way Taken’

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Two friends diverged in a yelling mood
And sorry I could not keep them both
And still maintain one attitude,
I scrolled down through one’s page, and viewed
Some green and gold of writing growth.

Then saw the other was just as good,
With maybe even a better claim
Because so well misunderstood
Within the writing neighborhood,
Though as for that they’re much the same.

And each that morning equally laid
The blame upon the other’s back.
I had no way to tell who’d made
The first or worst move; I’m afraid
I have no feel for clique or claque.

Online I have too many friends
To keep good track, so, nothing loath
To making enemies or ends
Where there are no real dividends,
I shook my head – and blocked them both.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Most of the fraught relationships online are due to people not being able to write very well on one end, or read very well on the other. Stuff that in in-person conversation would go completely unnoticed is taken up as deliberate slighting. Mostly its merely awkward phrasing, or one interlocutor is already two comments past when the reply to the third interaction scrolls by and it’s misinterpreted as an instant response to the most recent reply when it was really intended to answer something two or three comments back.

“Now in the case of political disagreements where the polarized sides are already firmly established and one side or the other or both are determined to fight that’s a whole other thing. There it’s got nothing to do with how well or ill something is read or written and everything to do with the sport of online woofing.

“It’s one of those things where over the years people block and get blocked and complain to their friends about either end of it and then it all goes away pretty fast as the opportunity to be triggered — again at either end — fades with the blocking.”

(The original poem on which this parody is based, for those not familiar with it, is Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken‘. – RHL)

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Yotsuba & Tech Support” by Liberty Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Rondeau: J.D. Smith, ‘Sans Issue’

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What ends with me? A set of genes,
The notion that my slender means
Might turn into a son’s estate,
The hope that, at some distant date,
Beside my grave, my line convenes

To recollect my days’ routines,
My counsels, and the vanished scenes
Whose witnesses would recreate
What ends with me:

The consciousness that struts and preens
In holding that its passing means
An altering of our species’ fate,
My thought possessed of untold weight.
Yet, on that thought, the question leans–
What ends with me?

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “After reaching a certain age and making certain commitments, I found myself coming to grips with never being a parent. As in other instances of following form, the repetitions of the rondeau gave me a way to enclose and develop my response to the situation.”

J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals.
X: @Smitroverse

Photo: “Creating a meaningful and fulfilling life without children #sketchnotes #gatewaywomen #jodyday” by etcher67 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Shakespearean sonnet: Susan McLean, ‘Foreshadowing’

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You’re a holiday.
—”Holiday,” The Bee Gees

One month from when you met me, when you brought
the first of many gifts, a 45
of plaintive praise and longing, who’d have thought
that forty-five years later we’d survive
on weekends, holidays, and summer breaks,
a foretaste of the end in every start,
anticipation ballasted with aches
as we put love on hold and live apart?

You are a holiday. The working week
unspools like toilet paper from a roll.
My attitude goes airborne when we speak,
and when we meet, my heart swoops like a shoal
of fish. Would we have lost this giddy glow,
living together? Better not to know.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “It makes me feel ancient to realize that for younger readers I will have to explain that a 45 was a record with one song on each side, which played on a record player at 45 revolutions per minute. Love poems themselves tend to feel old-fashioned these days, though this one is about a relatively modern problem, the long-term, long-distance relationship in which both people are employed full time at jobs far apart from one another. The form, a Shakespearean sonnet, mirrors the content, in that the rhymes are separated from one another until the end, when they are reunited. The poem was originally published in the online journal of female formalist poets Mezzo Cammin, and it later appeared in my second book of poetry, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.

Photo: “File:45 record.png” by laurianne is marked with CC0 1.0.

Weekend read: George Simmers, ‘Hymn’

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All things dull and ugly, all creatures gross and squat,
All things vile and tedious, the Lord God made the lot.

He made the sly hyena, the hookworm and the slug,
Your moaning Auntie Margaret and pervy Uncle Doug.

He made that dreary Welshman who so often reads the news,
And he made us, the ragtag lot who worship at St. Hugh’s.

We’re far from high achievers, we don’t have gorgeous bods;
At best you’d call us humdrum, a group of odds and sods.

We’re verging on the useless and we have got a hunch
No deity could think we were a preposessing bunch.

That’s why we’re rarely cheerful, but feel a bit less blue
When thinking how the mighty Lord can be ham-fisted too.

‘Cause frankly we’d be daunted by a more efficient chap.
We feel a lot more comfy with a God who’s slightly crap.

*****

George Simmers writes: “This is a poem that would never have existed had it not been for the Spectator magazine, which each week sets a challenge to its readers, demanding produce a short piece of writing (it might be 16 lines of verse or 150 words of prose) on a particular theme. The task is often a silly one. A couple of years ago the demand was for a hymn beginning ‘All things dull and ugly…’

“Competitive light verse is a tradition that stretches back a long way in Britain. In the early years of the twentieth century Naomi Royde-Smith of the Saturday Westminster Gazette set challenges that were responded to by up-and-coming writers like Rupert Brooke and Rose Macaulay, among others. In the thirties the Weekend Review was notable for its literary competitions, and when that magzine was incorporated into the New Statesman, the comp came with it.

“Those New Statesman competitions became a notable feature of English literary life, producing star writers such as Allan M. Laing, Stanley J. Sharpless, Roger Woddis, E.O. Parrott, Martin Fagg, Bill Greenwell and Basil Ransome-Davies.. look in any good anthology of light verse, and you’ll find glittering examples of some of their work. The Spectator and Punch were later in running competitions that attracted many of the same writers.

“I first entered a New Statesman competition in 1981, earning a pound for a one-line joke. Easy money! I entered a few more, mostly prose, and it was a while before I had a verse winner. Before that my verse writing had been a bit modernist and self-indulgent; no more. To succeed in the comps you need to master rhyme and metre. It’s a great training ground. Wendy Cope, one of the best writers of neat epigrammatic verse today began in New Statesman competitions (Much of her first, and arguably best, book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, is made up of her competition winners.) At about the same time, D.A. Prince began her competition career, which continues in the Spectator today (and I’m proud to have her as regular poet in Snakeskin.)

“From the thirties to the seventies, the New Statesman was a crucial publication in British culture, with a left-wing front-end but back half that was welcoming to all sorts of attitudes and points of view. A couple of dull editors diminished its appeal and importance in the eighties, but the comps continued to flourish, though in the twenty-first century they mostly seemed to welcome only rather predictable political humour. A few years ago the editor, Jason Cowley arbitrarily cancelled them. I’ve not looked at the magazine since then, but I’m told that it has gone from bad to worse.

“The Spectator, meanwhile, has flourished. My first Spectator winner (which imagined Wordsworth doing a snooker commentary) was in 1983. It was the top winner that week, and in addition to a small cash prize I was sent a very good bottle of wine. Those were the days. At that time the competition was run by James Michie, himself a good poet notable for his translations of Horace and Catullus. His was a generous welcoming personality, and many talents flowered under his watch.

“After him, Lucy Vickery ran the comp for many years, showing good judgement Though when she went away on maternity leave for a while, a substitute was brought in who gave prizes to some very inept stuff. It’s not an easy job. At present Victoria Lane is the adjudicator. I like her, because she has awarded me a good few prizes. Others may have grumbled.

“The Spectator competition is today just about the only forum for light verse in Britain. While the respectable poetry outlets have mostly given up on traditional rhyme and metre (Have you ever tried to read the stuff printed in the heavily subsidised Poetry Review?) the Spectator comp still demands well-formed and witty verse. Bill Greenwell and Basil Ransome-Davies are still star turns, and they have been joined by Adrian Fry, Janine Beacham, Sylvia Fairley, Chris O’Carroll and others.

” ‘All things dull and ugly…’ was a task that appealed to me, because I’ve always been struck by the way church congregations can make even sprightly tunes like ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ sound really drab and tedious. The ‘dreary Welshman’ is Huw Edwards, a BBC news-reader whom I had always found obnoxious, especially when toadying to the Royals. I’m rather proud of having had a dig at him in this poem, which pre-dates his fall from grace when he was dismissed after his appalling taste in pornography was discovered.”

George Simmers used to be a teacher; when he retired he then amused himself by researching a Ph.D. on the prose literature of the Great War. He now spends his time pottering about, walking his dog and writing a fair bit of verse. He is currently obsessed by the poetry of Catullus, and may be issuing a volume of translations within the next year or so. He has edited Snakeskin since 1995. It is probably the oldest-established poetry zine on the Internet. His work appears in several Potcake Chapbooks, and his recent diverse collection is ‘Old and Bookish‘. ‘

Photo: “Mother Spider” by agelakis is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet variation: J.D. Smith, ‘Lullaby for the Bereaved’

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Your hours of tears won’t let you follow
Those who’ve left you alone.
Tonight your head lies on a pillow,
Not beneath earth and stone.

The dead won’t be returning,
Not for all of your pleas,
Not for all your candles burning.
Get up off your knees.

The deceased, removed from their rest
Can take up all your hours
Until your mind, denied a fair rest,
Is deprived of its powers.

The road set before you is rocky and steep,
So seize the night’s respite and drift off to sleep.

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “Though I do not sing, play an instrument or read music, I had Brahms’ Lullaby in the back of my mind while attempting to deal with various losses, and the poem roughly follows its tune. In adjusting to a new reality (I hesitate to say “move on” or “get over,” phrases that smack of empathic failure), sometimes all one can do is rest.”

Photo: “Grief” by That One Chick Mary is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Poem on poetry: Sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘White Water’

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A poem is so obdurate and small
Compared to what you wanted it to say
And sometimes isn’t even close at all.
For instance, this. I’ve worked on it all day,
A metaphor for all of love’s affairs.
I failed to ride the energy it gave,
My form and balance gone. Nothing prepares
You for the wildness of the standing wave.
Possessing and possessed and then propelled
Abruptly past the point of no control
To merely peril, having once beheld
The moving stillness of it all, all whole.
Your head’s what every poem wants to split,
While you stroke hard to stay ahead of it.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “My online pal, the poet Liam Guilar, was a kayak adventurer, sneaking across borders to paddle the most dangerous rivers in the world. I went white water rafting once. You’re stuck in cold, wet, awkward positions that often turn suddenly painful. Why people do it over and over seems not just unreasonable but cold, wet, and painful. There are exhilarating moments, but you’re still cold, wet, and out of control. I could feel in my one experience that the out of controlness might be the point. Still, it was wet and cold. Very wet. Very cold.

“The confluence of Liam’s many tales, my paltry experience, and he and I both struggling to write poems is the impetus for this poem. I’ve often thought that maybe what it needs is a bucket of ice water suspended over the reader like a, well, like a bucket of Damocles, that sloshes over the head and down the back of the neck in order to make it work.”

Photo: “Kayaking through the white waters of the Gorge” by Grand River Conservation Authority is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: William Trowbridge, ‘Song of the Black Hole’

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radially extracted by NASA

You can almost see Vincent Price, black-robed,
hunched above the console of a jumbo organ
in the bowels of his creaky haunted manse; or
maybe a stadium of damned souls, strobed
in lurid red and howling nettle-robed
as they plummet into Pandemonium, pore
and pith aflame. It’s no troubadour,
undoubtedly, this vast atonal gob.

As with the Roach Motel, we’d check in,
but never out—us or anything, since
it can swallow errant planets whole, and still,
however much the mass, can’t eat its fill.
Though it’s larger far than Jupiter or Mars,
we can barely see it, thank our lucky stars.

*****

William Trowbridge writes in Rattle, where this poem was published: “I’ve spent most of my years as a poet writing free verse, though lately I find myself turning toward form. Unlike those who see formalist verse as dry and effete, I find it can generate power by means of barriers to play against—‘the net’ as Frost put it, by which he also meant boundary lines. If you pour gunpowder in a pile and light it, a mere flash occurs. But pack it tightly into a container, and you can get something more powerful. And, as opposed to the notion that form is restrictive, I agree with Richard Wilbur that it often liberates one from choosing the easy word in order to discover the better, surprising one. I haven’t moved into this part of town yet, but I stop there more and more.”

William Trowbridge’s tenth poetry collection, Father and Son, was published by Wayne
State College Press Press in April. His poems have appeared in more than 45
anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer’s Almanac, AnAmerican Life in
Poetry, and in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review,
The Southern Review, Plume, Rattle, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and
New Letters. He is a mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA
in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more
information, see his website, williamtrowbridge.net.

YouTube: Data Sonification: Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster (X-ray), NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Stephen Kampa, ‘Someone Else’s Gift’

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Always to long for someone else’s gift—
To blow that blistering alto sax, to lift
Into the flash-bulbed air

For a reverse slam dunk while stunned guards gawk,
To have a punster’s cheek or porn star’s cock,
To capture, share by share,

Gold-plated Wall Street fame, to meditate
Beyond nirvanic depths or radiate
Beatitudes of prayer

Like any frescoed saint, even to make
A perfect triple-decker dark-fudge cake
Or master the éclair—

Means answering a roguish shout we follow
Down some smashed-bottle alley to a hollow
Recess, a doorway, where

If luck has tailed us on that lonely walk,
When we knock, because we have to knock,
No one will be there.

*****

‘Someone Else’s Gift’ was first published in Literary Matters, and then in Best American Poetry 2024. As I was unable to capture the original indentation, I have taken the liberty of introducing line spaces as an alternative way of clarifying the structure; it will sound the same when read aloud… – RHL

Stephen Kampa has three books of poems: Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), Bachelor Pad (Waywiser Press, 2014), Articulate as Rain (Waywiser Press, 2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (Able Muse Press, 2023). He teaches at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL and works as a musician.

Photos: “Dreams” by яғ ★ design is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
“Dark Alley #2 [Explored]” by _Franck Michel_ is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Weekend read: Maryann Corbett, ‘A Valediction: of Maintenance Work’

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Time was, we spent our muscle and our nous
propping an aging house
against the pummeling of its hundred years.
Clean paint, neat gardens, upkeep rarely in arrears,
sober as Donne. Yet now each year afresh
burdens us with new failings of the flesh:

Legs that once mounted ladders without qualm
tremble. Nor are we calm
confronting pipework; torsos will not shrink,
backs bend, or shoulders fold to grope below a sink.
Hands shake; eyeballs glaze over. What appalls
is that our bodies buckle like our walls:

plaque in arteries, soot in chimney stacks,
stubborn and troublous cracks
in teeth, in plaster. House! Ought we to call
ourselves—and you—new poster children for the Fall,
for that hard doctrine grumbling down the ages
that Sin’s to blame, with Death and Rot its wages?

Entropy as theology—would Donne
jape at it? Wink and pun
as in his randy youth? Or solemnly
robed in his winding sheet, sing Mutability,
spinning into the praise of God in Art
the fact that all things earthly fall apart?

Or pull from air some bit of modern science,
yoking (even by violence)
thermodynamics, shortened telomeres,
transplants, genetics, sex, the music of the spheres?
Strange physics and wild metaphors—all grand,
but Rot and Death, plain woes we understand,

are better fought with checkbooks than with verse.
We’ll sit, these days. We’ll nurse
our beers, while able bodies stir their dust.
A distant siren whines—we sigh; it whines for us.
Let plumbers, painters, carpenters begin
this season’s round of battling Death and Sin.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “Last summer, Clarence Caddell was just beginning work on a new magazine, The Borough, and was planning a second issue while the first came together. He had in mind an issue centered on Donne, and he commissioned me to contribute a poem. I’d read the wonderful biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell not many months before, so a lot of the life was fresh in my mind–but it was also the season of endless repair that is the eternal truth of owning a house that’s 113 years old. It wasn’t hard to pull together a poem about the woes of home ownership with tidbits that “everyone knows” about Donne–his worldly-to-holy conversion, the familiar line about his yoked-by-violence metaphors–under an allusive title, and in a stanza form a bit like one of his. (Alas, this blog can’t show you the indents that would best imitate Donne’s way of laying out a poem. You’ll have to imagine all the trimeter second lines indented and the hexameter fourth lines hanging out farther left.) In the end, Clarence had to use the poem to fill out his first issue, so it sat alone, unassisted by an issue theme.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Photo: “House Repairs” by JessNityaJess is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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