Saturday, January 14, 2006

A return to the past

To make up for the somewhat haphazard posting in the past few days, here's a simple piece I did sometime last year in response to a derisive fellow's request for "an atheist hymn." The ending, suffice to say, did not satisfy him.

Once I was a Christian,
But the Christians made me cry;
No more do I believe in
That big bully in the sky.

Once I was a Muslim
But the Muslims made me mad;
No more pray I to Mecca,
Nor partake of their Jihad.

Once I was a Hebrew,
But I liked my pork and sin;
I got my foreskin reattached,
And Saturdays sleep in.

Once I was a Buddhist,
But no wan ascetic I;
Meditation's such a drag
For one so young and spry.

Now I am an atheist
And it suits me pretty well;
No rigid laws for me to keep,
No one-way trip to Hell.

No lazy introspection,
Or injustice to condone.
And neither love nor honour:
Just me, myself, alone.

Enraged, the recipient asked me to rework the final stanza, suggesting the following for his own part:

I use my introspection
To examine all men’s claims
Of course I tend to favor
The one’s who use their brains!

Then it will become a perfect atheist anthem!

A skeptic at heart (and a shrewd judge of Poetry, even if I refrain from exercising this judgment upon my own works), I was forced to disagree. Nonetheless, I acceded to his wishes (it was his contest, after all) and made several runs at a new final stanza with his concept in mind.

Attempt #1

No more my mind is shackled!
I've examined all mens' claims,
And uncritically accepted
Only those that suit my aims.

This did not meet with success.

Attempt #2

No more my mind is shackled!
I have heard all arguments.
I've embraced uncommon wisdom
But abandoned common sense.

Similarly unsatisfying, apparently. In the end, I just surrendered and gave the man what he was after, though I was not happy to do so.

Attempt #3

No more my mind is shackled!
I've examined all mens' claims,
And I'm led, at last, to listen
Not to souls or hearts, but brains.

Incredibily, this was not to his liking either. I will not offend your poetic spirit by reprinting the doggerel he eventually settled upon, but we may at least rest assured that he will warrant no biography from Johnson. He's not even unsuccessful enough to merit the treatment Savage got. So much, as they say, for him.

¶ 5:08 PM

Comments:

Good for you, sir.

It's not easy being bald, I imagine. But take heart! If any young punks make fun of you, the Lord will no doubt dispatch she-bears for your defense.

For so it was in ancient times...

# posted by

Nick Milne : 5:46 PM

Don't forget to read my main blog

What is this place?

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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