Extracts from Poetry
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Poetry’
Lewis Carroll records a suburban photoshoot in the style of Longfellow.
The distinctive rhythm and tricks of speech that Henry Longfellow used in his narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) were just begging to be parodied. Lewis Carroll could not resist the temptation, nor could he resist descending from the lofty tale of a Native American warrior to suburban photography, in which Carroll was an early pioneer.
Henry Longfellow tells us how his tale of a heroic Native American warrior came to him.
In 1855, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published The Song of Hiawatha, a long narrative poem named after the twelfth-century Ojibwe warrior and leader of the Iroquois Confederacy of Native American peoples. The tale he told was wholly fictitious, but in the opening lines he nevertheless told us where he got it from.
In most contests the choices are win, lose or draw, but what happened here remains a mystery.
An Irish tale dating back to 1807 tells of two Cats of Kilkenny, who fought until nothing was left of them but their tails. In ‘The Duel’, a children’s rhyme by American writer Eugene Field, a dog and a cat took things a step further.
Arthur Clough marvels at the vision of a man who could cross the Atlantic without knowing there was a farther shore.
In August 1492, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) of Genoa set out across the Atlantic in ships provided to him by Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II of Spain, reaching the Bahamas the following October. Europeans of his day had only the unproven theory of a round globe to guide them, and nearly four hundred years later Arthur Clough was still in awe of Columbus’s daring.
Hamlet cannot understand what his mother could possibly see in his uncle Claudius.
Hamlet, young Prince of Denmark, has returned home from studying in Wittenberg to find that his father is dead, apparently of a snake-bite, and his mother has married his father’s brother Claudius, who is now styling himself King. Utterly disgusted, and far from convinced by the supposed cause of death, he tells his mother exactly what he thinks of the bargain she has made.
In this ‘Cautionary Tale’, we hear what happened when naughty Jim gave his nurse the slip.
Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children first appeared in 1907, and this story of Jim, his nurse and Ponto the lion was the first in the collection. The moral is that those who are plotting the overthrow of some tyrant, real or imagined, should be careful what they wish for.