REELY'S POETRY BLOG

We added two Lord Byron favorites, as promised:

She Walks in Beauty and When We Two Parted.

Other new additions this month:

The Eavesdropper by Carman Bliss. Spooky little poem.

T. S. Eliot – The Love Affair of J. Alfred Prufrock. How to categorize Eliot — is he an English poet or an American poet? Ah, well, never one to wrestle on the horns, I just put him in both and on the new life span index, I put him in both countries too.

And, speaking of The Life Span Index, that is a new page that shows almost all the poets on Reely’s Poetry Pages by decade. Eventually hope to have all of them on there, but filling in some gaps first.

Also, on each poem page, where space permitted, there are links to 3 or 4 contemporaries of the poet.

We’ve also got a new page entitled Perseverance Poems, which contains two remarkably similar poems, See It Through by Edgar Guest, and Keep A-Goin’! by Frank Lebby Stanton. I really don’t know which poem was published first, but if I was going to formulate a theory about it (and then try to prove or disprove it later, as we sometimes like to do), I’d guess that Keep A-Goin’! came first, basing that on the fact that Frank Lebby Stanton was roughly 25 years older than Edgar Guest. So I figure Guest likely read Stanton’s works in the Atlanta Constitution and was inspired to write a similar poem for his northern audience.

In any event, it is interesting that both men served as their state’s poet laureate.

Frank L. Stanton also wrote Mighty Lak A Rose also known as “Sweetest Little Feller.” My mother used to sing this song, only when she’d sing to the girls, she’d say “Sweetest little flower.”

Hope you like these new additions and improvements.

Reely

Yes, I know it’s Lord Byron’s birthday and I should talk about him to mitigate the egregious sin of not having any of his poems on the site proper, but I am in the process of rectifying that glaring omission this week.

For the nonce, let us look at poetry on England’s beloved Queen Victoria, who died for real on today’s date in 1901. There were two attempts to send her to an earlier grave by would-be assassins, one of whom, incredibly enough, was a poet! William Topaz McGonagall, a/k/a “The World’s Worst Poet”, immortalized that event in the following offering:

Attempted Assassination of the Queen

God prosper long our noble Queen,
And long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain.

For God He turned the ball aside
Maclean aimed at her head;
And he felt very angry
Because he didn’t shoot her dead.

There’s a divinity that hedges a king,
And so it does seem,
And my opinion is, it has hedged
Our most gracious Queen.

Maclean must be a madman,
Which is obvious to be seen,
Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot
Our most beloved Queen.

Victoria is a good Queen,
Which all her subjects know,
And for that God has protected her
From all her deadly foes.

click here to finish reading the poem and learn the historical background.
Read the rest of this entry »

Couldn’t get to Baltimore on January 19th to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth? Or Philly, to hear the ‘Poe Down” debate, where Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia competed for the right to claim Poe as its own?

Visit www.nevermore.com to learn about all the events the City of Baltimore has planned throughout this year, which will culminate with the anniversary of Poe’s death on October 7th.

And to hold you over in the meantime, here’s a parody of The Raven by Dr. Seuss (Adrian, that is.)

Today is the day that Wyatt Earp died. There is a book out there “Wyatt Earp in Dallas,” that brings Wyatt back to try to save President Kennedy from assassination, but I can’t find any excerpts online.

Then I found this incredible poem on youtube that brings you an incident from the early 70s involving Wyatt Earp, which should resonate with anyone who grew up in the late 50s watching all those westerns and singing those catchy theme songs, like Maverick, Bat Masterson, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide and Wyatt Earp, brave, courageous and bold. (For anyone who doesn’t know these tunes, the links go to www.televisiontunes.com, home of all great TV theme songs, and even some not so great.)

Parental Advisory – this video contains profane language

In this pessimistic little poem, apparently nobody benefits:

Cui Bono by Thomas Carlyle

What is Hope? A smiling rainbow
Children follow through the wet;
’Tis not here, still yonder, yonder:
Never urchin found it yet.

What is Life? A thawing iceboard
On a sea with sunny shore;—
Gay we sail; it melts beneath us;
We are sunk, and seen no more.

What is Man? A foolish baby,
Vainly strives, and fights, and frets;
Demanding all, deserving nothing;—
One small grave is what he gets.

It must have led to some amusing discussions in its time.