Sunday, January 01, 2006

The Hat

Upon the head our hero sits,
As tall as he is wide;
A dome of felt with brim around,
And satin lined inside.

He's crumpled at his apex;
There is dirt about his brim
A feather in his sash outside,
A half-crown sewn within.

Our hat shall know the streets this night;
A blade is at his hand.
A tattered scarf about the neck,
And malice lately planned.

Then hear the whistles crying out!
Here comes a blue, badged peak;
A bonnet, stained and battered falls,
And flutters 'pon a freak.

Her ribbons streaming in the gloom,
She tumbles through the mist,
And lands in muck at last, beside
The blade the bonnet kissed.

And so a crowd of hats arrive,
To greet the axeman's hood;
Our hat is in some urchin's hand,
A bald head's on the wood.

Many a man has falsely owned
What he only e'er could borrow:
For though the head will roll tonight,
The hat is worn tomorrow.

==

And so, with that, the project is well and truly Begun. Only 364 to go.

This one is strangely macabre for a millinery piece. Let us simply look upon it as a mild riff on Ecclesiastes, perhaps; for indeed, if ever there was a vanity of vanities, it was the hat.

This may be an inauspicious start to an admittedly bold project, but I am, nevertheless, cautiously upbeat. The metrical inconsistencies notwithstanding, what we have here is a playful tribute to the comic verse form. The variety of syllables in each line adds to this style more than it detracts, of course, and framing the relationship of hat and head as though 'twere something akin to that of man to horse (respectively) has a certain irreverent sauciness to it that fits the form well.

More will come tomorrow, of course. And tomorrow, and tomorrow.

¶ 8:39 PM

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This blog was started in an attempt to write a poem once a day, every day, for an entire year, but this expedition has met with failure! I gave up on transcribing the damn things in late January, and gave up writing them entirely around the end of February. It's not easy to do this at all. In fact, it is hard. I still feel as though I've learned something, anyway, so I'll keep what I did manage to do up here for now. I'll probably start posting stuff again irregularly when my workload decreases somewhat, which was really the reason for my problems in the first place. Who would have thought being in the third year of an honours BA would give you a lot of work to do?

Johnson on Poetry

"To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination: he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, and meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety: for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth; and he who knows most will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction."
- Imlac, in Rasselas

"The essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule -- a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it."
- From the biography of John Dryden in Lives of the Poets

Chesterton on Poetry

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
-From Orthodoxy

: Name: Nick Milne; Location: Canada

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