Poem to JRRT
gregoryfeeley sent me copies of work from a poet I'd never heard of (my awareness of modern poetry is embarrassing) knowing I'd like her. He was right. This poet, Ursula Fanthorpe wrote the following:
GENESIS
(for J.R.R. Tolkien)
In the beginning were the words,
Aristocratic, crypic, chromatic.
Vowels as direct as mid-day,
Consonants lanky as long-swords.
Mouths materialized to speak the words:
Leafshaped lips for the high language,
Tranquil tongues for the tree-creatures,
Slits and slobbers for the lower orders.
Deeds came next, words' children.
Legs by walking evolved a landscape.
Continents and chronologies occurred,
Complex and casual as an implication.
Arched over all, alarming nimbus,
Magic's disorderly thunder and lightning.
The sage sat in his suburban fastness,
Garrisoned against progress. He grieved
At what the Duke's men did to our words
(Whose war memorial is every signpost).
The sage sat. And middle-earth
Rose around him like a rumour.
Grave grammarians, Grimm and Werner,
Gave it laws, granted it charters.
The sage sat. But the ghosts walked
Of the Birmingham schoolboy, the Somme soldier,
Whose bones lay under the hobbit burrows,
Who endured darkness, and friends dying.
It gave me a brisk cold-wind sort of pleasure to type that up, though I should be downstairs fixing lunches and unloading/loading the dishwasher before work.
I don't understand the reference to Grimm and Werner (the Grimm brothers' collection? Werner couldn't be Goethe's tragic Marty Sue* of the late 1700s, could it?)--and I apprehend Slits and slobbers for the lower orders as a misfire: the slits and slobbers belong to the evil orders, it seems to me, which of course has its own problems, but we've talked about that before. Even sol, I keep coming back and rereading the poem, turning lines over in my mind, considering what she says about JRRT, about middle-earth, and about the writing process. It's the last stanza that resonates through my bones.
* That reminds me--I need to put up some more of Agnes Porter, including the coach ride with the young man who appreared to me to be acting out Werner for the amazement of the fellow passengers in one of those coach rides. For that happened right about the time romantic teens and early twenties were swooning over poor Werther--young ladies wanting to save him, young men emulating him all except for the romantic suicide. But now I have run out of time.
GENESIS
(for J.R.R. Tolkien)
In the beginning were the words,
Aristocratic, crypic, chromatic.
Vowels as direct as mid-day,
Consonants lanky as long-swords.
Mouths materialized to speak the words:
Leafshaped lips for the high language,
Tranquil tongues for the tree-creatures,
Slits and slobbers for the lower orders.
Deeds came next, words' children.
Legs by walking evolved a landscape.
Continents and chronologies occurred,
Complex and casual as an implication.
Arched over all, alarming nimbus,
Magic's disorderly thunder and lightning.
The sage sat in his suburban fastness,
Garrisoned against progress. He grieved
At what the Duke's men did to our words
(Whose war memorial is every signpost).
The sage sat. And middle-earth
Rose around him like a rumour.
Grave grammarians, Grimm and Werner,
Gave it laws, granted it charters.
The sage sat. But the ghosts walked
Of the Birmingham schoolboy, the Somme soldier,
Whose bones lay under the hobbit burrows,
Who endured darkness, and friends dying.
It gave me a brisk cold-wind sort of pleasure to type that up, though I should be downstairs fixing lunches and unloading/loading the dishwasher before work.
I don't understand the reference to Grimm and Werner (the Grimm brothers' collection? Werner couldn't be Goethe's tragic Marty Sue* of the late 1700s, could it?)--and I apprehend Slits and slobbers for the lower orders as a misfire: the slits and slobbers belong to the evil orders, it seems to me, which of course has its own problems, but we've talked about that before. Even sol, I keep coming back and rereading the poem, turning lines over in my mind, considering what she says about JRRT, about middle-earth, and about the writing process. It's the last stanza that resonates through my bones.
* That reminds me--I need to put up some more of Agnes Porter, including the coach ride with the young man who appreared to me to be acting out Werner for the amazement of the fellow passengers in one of those coach rides. For that happened right about the time romantic teens and early twenties were swooning over poor Werther--young ladies wanting to save him, young men emulating him all except for the romantic suicide. But now I have run out of time.