A poem is a lovesome thing, God wot, especially a poem fit for a girl
IDO love a good rummage. I do not love poetry, not much... The bargain corner in the Our Town second-hand shop is a rummager’s delight. Seek and you shall find cigarette lighters that produce a spark with real flint. Cake- stands with wobbly legs. LP’s (remember them?) recorded by Mantovani & His Orchestra. And a choice scattering of books.
‘Persephone, here’s something that may be of interest to you.’ Our daughter turned from her examination of a vintage accordion complete what appeared to be genuine ivory keys. She approached with eyebrows quizzically raised.
‘Persephone, you are a girl, right?’
‘Well, more of a teenager really.’
‘And you are a cultured girl, right?’
‘I have been known to sing ‘Charlie is Me Darling’ for the uncles at family gatherings – does that make me cultured?’
‘It’s a good start but the time has come to step up a rung or two – and I have just the yoke to give you a lift.’ I brandished my latest discovery , a slim paperback entitled ‘One Hundred Poems for Girls’. First published in 1925 by the Oxford University Press, it was compiled and arranged by someone called Herbert Strang.
I try not to burden the children with my personal prejudices. The reality is that I have never graduated beyond ‘ The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ when it comes to poetry. Give me the selected verse of Winnie the Pooh every time and forget your Shakespeare sonnets or your Seamus Heaney. Yet I realise that poetry, proper poetry, must exist for a reason even if philistines like me never quite tune into the serious stuff.
‘Into each life, some rain must fall’. Longfellow.
‘God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.’ Cowper.
‘From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow.’ Aeschylus. Perhaps some of this wisdom poetic may rub off on Persephone if only she reads ‘One Hundred Poems for Girls’ to acquire intellectual firepower and add a lyrical quality to her conversation. The book cost some previous owner the sum of two shillings and three pence but it seemed a snip in modern currency at three euro. Persephone opened it at my urging as we drove home, to be faced with a bewildering range of writers.
Yes, of course William Shakespeare featured, asking ‘Who is Sylvia?’ and displaying his masterly command of rhyme: ‘Hark, hark, the lark.’ Slim Shady or Puff Daddy could not put it better. Mister Strang rounded up other old reliables, such as ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (Thomas Gray), ‘ To a Skylark’ (Percy Blysse Shelley) and William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ to fill out his hundred. Indeed Wordsworth along with his sister Dorothy featured heavily in the compendium and he it was who penned a piece with an eye-catching title, to be approached with scepticism by a 21st century teenaged neo-feminist. What would Persephone make of ‘A Perfect Woman’, written by a man, edited by a man and bought for her by her father?
‘A perfect woman, nobly planned / To warn, to comfort, and command ‘. Persephonefrowned at ‘nobly planned’ and then promised to give commanding her best endeavours. The only poem in the compendium she recognised immediately was ‘ The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ by William Butler Yeats, which she could recite without having to look at the book. The Irish education system has ensured that WB’s ‘ bee loud glade’ has been drummed into the heads of generations upon generations of pupils, for I discovered that I too knew every word.
A poem which weighs in at a dozen lines has a chance of making some impact, even in these hectic modern times. Poor old Tennyson – Alfred Lord Tennyson – may have been a big hit in the Victorian era but he struggles to grip the attention of a fifteen year old in 2017. His ‘Lady Clare’ stretches interminably to 22 verses, a reminder of a pre-TV age when poetry was a drawing room sport to be enjoyed by all the family. Some stern editor really should have had a word with Alfred and handed him a pair of scissors.
By the time we pulled up at the Manor, Persephone was back ShapChatting, careless as to whether Lady Clare lived or died.