Sunday Poetry: With a cat on my shoulder — through the dark trees … down to the lake

GeorgeMorland
George Morland (1763-1804), The Artist’s Cat Drinking

Two for today:

With a cat on my shoulder

Forgive me, Liefje,
this isn’t about you.
It was the feel of your fur
against my neck that brought back
my mother’s words: ‘he loved cats,
my grandfather, always
had a cat on his shoulder’.
And there he was, an old man
I never had seen before,
feeling with pleasure
a cat asleep against his neck

— Jeremy Hooker

The Country Wife

She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.
Following their voices on the breeze,
She makes her way. Through the dark trees
The distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she’s gone.
She make her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.

The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
The night reflected on the lake
But knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water

— Dana Goia

DeathcomesToPemberleyAnnaMaxwellMartin
From Death comes to Pemberley: a typical landscape scene with Anna Maxwell Martin as an older Elizabeth Bennet Darcy

The first has a versification and turns that imitate the movements of the cat on one’s body; in the morning when I wake I often find Clarycat curled up into my neck and shoulder just as Hooker describes his mother’s memories of his grandfather’s cat; the second is beautifully picturesque — and gives some of the feeling of the sublime, and I accompany it with a mini-series whose screenplay I am now studying where I’ve fallen in love with the landscapes and bonded with the central heroine. A new country wife to replace the scurrility of Wycherley’s.

Sylvia

Author: ellenandjim

Ellen Moody holds a Ph.D in British Literature and taught in American senior colleges for more than 40 years. Since 2013 she has been teaching older retired people at two Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, one attached to American University (Washington, DC) and other to George Mason University (in Fairfax, Va). She is also a literary scholar with specialties in 18th century literature, translation, early modern and women's studies, film, nineteenth and 20th century literature and of course Trollope. For Trollope she wrote a book on her experiences of reading Trollope on the Internet with others, some more academic style essays, two on film adaptations, the most recent on Trollope's depiction of settler colonialism: "On Inventing a New Country." Here is her website: http://www.jimandellen.org/ellen/ No part of this blog may be reproduced without express permission from the author/blog owner. Linking, on the other hand, is highly encouraged!

3 thoughts on “Sunday Poetry: With a cat on my shoulder — through the dark trees … down to the lake”

  1. Thank you so much, Ellen, for printing With a cat ….. I loved this little glimpse of how memory works (and how cats work!). I love the way the poet begins by asking forgiveness of the current cat as he muses about past cats on his grandfather’s shoulder. Suddenly an image from the past–perhaps even of a person he never met — comes rushing to him.

    For example, whenever I hear the word “velocipede” (which does not happen often) I have an image of my grandfather in 1890 furiously cycling down Asylum Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut, because he wanted to make it to the end of the road. One of the things that I love about art is its power to connect us to the past.

    “The Country Wife” is also a delightful poem. I’ve long admired Gioia’s good formal work. Poetic forms that have repetition (often they are medieval French forms) can be particularly powerful.

    This poem is a double triolet: a triolet is 8 lines with the 1st, 4th, and 7th lines repeating as well as the second and the final line. Gioia maintains a good iambic tetrameter throughout. Yes, I am crazy about poetic forms that work well. I like the way he ingeniously switches the punctuation around for enhance the potential realm of meanings. And I like the switch in meaning of the verb “reflects”.

    Here’s another contemporary triolet: Wendy Cope is a very amusingly clever British poet: I am cutting and pasting and will try to correct myself if this does not come out legible:

    I used to think all poets were Byronic—

    Mad, bad and dangerous to know.

    And then I met a few. Yes it’s ironic—

    I used to think all poets were Byronic.

    They’re mostly wicked as a ginless tonic

    And wild as pension plans. Not long ago

    I used to think all poets were Byronic—

    Mad, bad and dangerous to know.

    Natalie Tyler

    1. Natalie, thank you very much for the comments on Gioia. Right you are it’s the prosody and form that make the poem. Annie Finch has a good book on women poets who use rhyme, meter, and formal elements — defending them because there is still a prejudice against too much formality. it’s called A Formal Feelling Comes — from Emily Dickinson. . She prints many formal poems of the last 25 year and then talks about them deftly and concisely and wonderfully well.

      for me poetry is ever a personal matter. Personal connections fill much of my reading of imaginative literature.

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