Wednesday 19 August 2015

By Anon, apparently (this person is prolific!)

The flyleaf of my favourite collection of poetry includes this description:
It is a collection that leads children towards an appreciation of the richness and variety of English poetry. They will find humour of all shades, ballads, poems of mystery, delicate tales of faery, songs of the sea and nature and people, with here and there a jingle or limerick, and always the element of surprise. It is a book that will give many kinds of pleasure to any child and any family.
I received the Oxford Book of Poetry For Children, compiled by Edward Blishen and with illustrations by Brian Wildsmith, as a Christmas present in 1982, when I was eight years old, from an aunt and uncle. By this time my aunt was a published author, whose work continued for many years to be used on the New South Wales HSC English syllabus, and I believe that she wanted me to be sorely infected by the rhyme and rhythm of the poetry collected by Blishen.

I knew many of the poems already, as it turned out. We had for many years been keeps of a bootleg audio cassette of recordings we called "Rhyme And Rhythm", put together (as I had the story later on) by elements within the BBC who felt that poetry was being eroded from the collective consciousness of British children and who called upon actors of the theatre and television establishments to deliver these classic, historic, folksy, and humourous poems in an engaging and memorable way to a new generation of children who parents may have had poetry... shocked out of their heads and their hearts by two world wars and the Great Depression. Whether that's true or not, it seems to me to be a wonderful story and a suitable genesis for the recordings known by the colours of their accompanying books: the Red Book, the Green Book, the Blue Book...

In the following years, while I was in grades three, four, and five, part of our weekly lessons included listening to songs on a tape recorder and later singing along with them. These songs appeared in song books prepared by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for use by schools to promote musicality among students and which, by the by, also fostered in many of us a love for music sorely out of joint with the times we were living in. INXS were singing Listen Like Thieves and Kate Bush was taking us to Wuthering Heights with her ethereal voice but in our grey brick classrooms we were learning to sing along with the Carpenters, the Beatles, and the Seekers, along with Peter Coombes, who seemed to make his musical bones with his contributions to the ABC's Sing! series of songbooks - so much so that he now performs live gigs at pubs and clubs singing songs like Spaghetti Bolognaise and Newspaper Mama that see scores of fortysomethings singing along.

This combination of poetry and music left my creative eyes and ears open to all kinds of things, soaking up examples from the muses like some kind of artistic audience version of the Blob. I listen to all kinds of music (some more than others, of course) and read and listen to a wide variety of poetry too (some, again, more than others). I still write poetry (sometimes) and thoroughly enjoy singing along with the radio, or CDs, or my iPod, or karaoke...

This first post is about perhaps my favourote poem and I can't say that I have much more to say about it than I wrote in a zine about my favourite poems, so I will quote the poem here first and my zine commentary "after-words", haha...
And can the physician make sick men well?
And can the magician a fortune divine?
Without lily, germander, and sops-in-wine,
With sweet-briar
And bonfire
And strawberry wire
And columbine.
Within and without, in and out, round as a ball,
With hither and thither, as straight as a line,
With lily, germander, and sops-in-wine,
With sweet-briar
And bonfire
And strawberry wire
And columbine.
When Saturn did live, there lived no poor,
The king and the beggar with roots did dine,
With lily, germander, and sops-in-wine,
With sweet-briar
And bonfire
And strawberry wire
And columbine.
“This is the last in my top ten. I know of no title and I know of no credited author either. In setting the text into this zine, I googled the first line and came up with this as one of the links given: The LiederNet Archive. Apparently it is from a set of lieder, dating back to the 1600s.

All of this is news to me - it has no history to me, no descendants. It is like Melchizedek, the king-priest in the Bible, of whom it is written, “He is without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life”. To me, the poem simply exists. I think that is its beauty to me. I never puzzled much about it, wondered what it means, who wrote it or why. To speak it aloud feels to me like honey on my lips; it makes me smile.

It’s hard to read at a sedate pace because by halfway through the second stanza I almost feel as if I’m running down a hill and the only option I have left is to stack it now or ride it out - run all the way to the end - and stack it at the bottom. It makes me wonder about the long centuries of British pagan culture that forms such an enormous part of the language and imagery of English.”