Close Calls With Nonsense

Still in Onset; just saw Falmouth Center (pretty pretty, pretty pretty) and Woods Hole (even prettier). Not as much ocean science on exhibit at the exhibits there as I had hoped, but we did see the inside of Alvin, along with startling pictures of life around hydrothermal vents. There’s a poem in there somewhere.

Lots of poems, some in translation, in Rachel Hadas, interviewed in the current CPR.

That was the day; for tonight, I’ve been rereading and enjoying Daniel Karlin’s Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (not to be confused with George MacBeth’s book of the same title, which we own). Christina Rossetti had a better ear than just about anyone, and I can’t get enough of her (neither can any anthology, really), though her tonal range was perhaps limited. Also neat to rediscover: Augusta Webster, who would probably be in our book about sonnets if that book had, not 100 sonnets, but 104. (If we can’t secure copyrights to a 20th-century sonnet or two, she might make it in after all: the problem is that “Mother and Daughter” works much better cumulatively, as a sequence, than when you read the sonnets one by one.) And Coventry Patmore’s “The Toys,” almost a stand-in for minor Victorians in general: if you like this poem, you’ll want to spend your free time (as I do) with anthologies of Victorian poetry; if not, then perhaps not. I suspect there’s more good Patmore out there, though his views on politics and culture have made him, let’s say, less than fashionable; I’m pretty sure the secretly-good Patmore does not include sonnets– we checked– though perhaps there’s a fourteen-line experiment anthologists overlooked. Similarly, this fine, wry poem by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt just isn’t a sonnet: it’s a two-stanza poem with 14 lines. Once you start seeking sonnets everywhere, it can get hard to stop.