On the evening before his beheading, October 29, 1618, it is said that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote these words in his Bible:
E’en such is time! who takes in trust
Our youth, our joys and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust:
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days!
But from this earth, this grave, this dust
The Lord will raise me up I trust.
I didn’t know that when I first read the verse in a book of poetical quotations where it was listed among other entries under the category “Graves.” It rather takes on a different sort of significance if he really did write it knowing that he was going to have his head cut off the next day!
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
More sonnet pages: Sonnet 1 – From fairest creatures we desire increase … Sonnet 18 - Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day … Sonnet 116 - Let me not to the marriage of true minds …
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.
Earlier in the year, I made mention of Robert Frost’s friend, Edward Thomas. Thomas was originally a journalist At Frost’s encouragement, Thomas began to write poetry. Edward Thomas enlisted in World War I in 1915. Two years later, he was killed in action at Arras on the day after Easter. Thomas was married, and a father of 3 children. He could have avoided serving in the war. Perhaps his poem, This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong, explains it:
This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:–
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches’ cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »
