[RCL]

You know it's spring when the billy-goats fart!


Cuccu Song

(Middle English)

Svmer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu

Awe bleteþ after lomb
lhouþ after calue cu
Bulluc sterteþ
bucke uerteþ

murie sing cuccu
Cuccu cuccu
Wel singes þu cuccu
ne swik þu nauer nu

Sing cuccu nu • Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu • Sing cuccu nu



Cuckoo Song

(Modern English)

Spring has arrived,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
The seed is growing
And the meadow is blooming,
And the wood is coming into leaf now,
Sing, cuckoo!

The ewe is bleating after her lamb,
The cow is lowing after her calf;
The bullock is prancing,
The billy-goat farting,

Sing merrily, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo,
You sing well, cuckoo,
Never stop now.

Sing, cuckoo, now; sing, cuckoo;
Sing, cuckoo; sing, cuckoo, now!

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

Because this poem is under copyright, I am going to post on the first verse and after it link to a site where it exists together with a different pattern for hendecasyllabics.
The remaining stanzas can be read here.

Very proper of you, I suppose, but Robert Frost is still under copyright as well, yet he gets quoted around here all the time, including in this thread. And Stevie Smith is also under copyright but is quoted in this thread. So is Annie Finch.

Still, I get it, you want to do the right thing. If that's true, you should probably not link to another site that is printing the poem without permission from the copyright owners. In the case of Auden, it appears that permission can only be granted by Random House and/or the Curtis Brown literary agency. So I expect you will shortly be hearing from attorneys at Random House seeking compensation from you for your posting of that link.

[Janice D. Soderling]

The link explicitly stated that the Auden poem was under copyright and by whom, and provided a link page for citation so I assume that the posting site has permission.

Annie Finch is a member here and can easily request we remove her poem, should it not be appropriate. Robert Frost and Stevie Smith have often been quoted here and to the best of my knowledge there have been no complaints.

I certainly wouldn't want to cause any problems for Eratosphere or disrupt a fun thread.

[Janice D. Soderling]

By the way, today is World Poetry Day. http://www.un.org/en/events/poetryday/

That might get me off the hook.

[Julie Steiner]

I can't help picturing "the attorneys of Random House" suing people randomly, for crimes unrelated to copyright.

[Roger Slater]

Actually, Janice, the site you had linked to claimed a copyright for "Long Island University," which I'm pretty sure doesn't own the copyright. I'm still trying to figure that one out. But you didn't have to delete the link based on anything I said. I personally think that it's obviously fair use for you to quote Auden's poem right here, and the odds of anyone objecting are about the same as anyone objecting to the quotes of Frost poems, and the consequence of such an objection would only be to delete the post. (And there's the further non-obvious issue about whether it violates a copyright for you simply to link to a site that is itself possibly violating a copyright).

But you're the one who should be a lawyer, the way you manage to skirt the rules of the Sphere by not addressing me directly but nonetheless broadly letting everyone know that you think I am being "petty, ironic, backbiter, grudgeholder or jolly shit-stirrer." Nice draftsmanship, counselor! You get to insult a particular person but phrase it in a way that you can deny the ad hom violation.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I did feel insulted, really I did, and I got carried away. I apologize and will remove my unkind post. Sorry.

I always bitterly regret it when I don't listen to my inner voice.

[Allen Tice]

Irrelevant!

[Julie Steiner]

Oddly, squabbling does seem appropriate for this thread. Here's why:

J. H. Friswell reissued his collection of essays The Gentle Life in 1869, shortly after having attacked Tennyson in Modern Men of Letters Honestly Criticised. Tennyson employed both Catullus's meter and vitriol to reply:

Gentle Life--what a title! here's a subject
Calls aloud for a gentleman to handle!
Who has handled it? he the would-be poet,
Friswell, Pisswell--a liar and a twaddler--
Pisswell, Friswell--a clown beyond redemption,
Brutal, personal, infinitely blackguard.

Although less confrontational than that, the "Others taunt me" in the Frost ("For Once, Then, Something," 1920) participates in a tradition begun by Catullus and continued by Tennyson (in both "Hendecasyllabics," 1863, and "The Gentle Life," 1870), of using this meter to respond to literary critics.

Frost seems more willing than Tennyson to grant that his critics may have a point. But on closer examination, I wonder if it only seems that way. Frost's poem reminds me strongly of the second stanza of George Herbert's "Teach Me, My God and King":

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.

Although the water in the well is not glass, and Frost's narrator's critics "taunt" him for not looking "beyond the picture, / Through the picture" to deeper truths, he is obviously espying heaven (and earning a poet's Apollonian "wreath") by looking at things just the way he does. So the apparently humble admission of his habitual failure to glimpse vague somethings in the depths is actually not a concession to his critics, but a declaration that his own way is actually better.