This Is Us
 

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There's light in the dark,
and dark in the light,
and cloud in the day,
and mirth in the deep,
weep till you laugh
and laugh till you weep.

All I ask of a verse
is don't put me to sleep!

I agree that the term "light verse" cannot encompass everything witty and/or amusing. I don't want to give names bc I don't have their permission to quote them, but one prominent poet told me when I sent him about six or seven samples of what I've written (poems that have gotten laughs at readings), "That's not light verse."

Quincy has also told me, "What you do isn't light verse." I imagine they mean it has a dark or satiric quality. The upshot is I don't know what to call it--if anything.

movement
 

For me, one necessary feature of light verse is that it really move me forward. The meter should carry me along, then bump me up against a witty conclusion. Of course this doesn't infallibly divide poetry into light versus non-light, since plenty of the second variety does this as well. It's a matter of degrees (like the difference between heaven and hell).
Lately I've been revisiting Frost's "Goodbye and Keep Cold," a poem that starts out light and takes a dark turn:

This saying goodbye on the edge of the dark
to an orchard still so young in the bark...

The anapests, the end rhymed couplets, the enjambment, the straightforward diction -- those are signs of light verse. When he ends a poem on a much more somber note, he slips in a concluding iamb

But something has to be left to God

as if the weighty conclusion demands the resounding double thump.

I can agree with Milne that an essential part of 'light verse' is that it treats the craft of poetry as if it were merely an incidental. But I don't think that the craft which is treated in so cavalier a fashion need be 'exact laws of rhythm and metre'. Eliots' Mr. Mistoffelees doesn't quite go as far as modernist mixed metres, but it drifts a long way from what were traditional ideas of strict metre at the time. (In Mr. Mistoffelees Eliot perhaps isn't as modern as Eliot, but he probably is as modern as James Thomson). Ian Hamilton Finlay's Orcadian poems are clearly modernist from a technical point of view, but I think it would be difficult to call them 'serious' poems. (I think from certain points of view they are great poems).

I am flummoxed by Milne's suggestion that taking light verse seriously is a modern thing (nineteenth century or later).

I seem to have started this fracas by comparing a rather fine posting by Holly to Catullus 3. In the Catullus poem the Angel of Death comes for a pet sparrow, and Catullus gives her a good telling off. I don't think it is a serious poem, I also think it is not an unserious poem. I think Catullus wants us not to know whether he has his tongue in his cheek or not.
Catullus 13 is much the same. The first two lines sound as if we will get a poem about the Good Old Days, and about how everybody was happy even though they were poor when we were all True Romans. Then we get some stuff about how expensive courtesans are these days, and what sounds like a ferociously dirty joke about the Goddess of Love turning you into a giant nose.

I think of light verse as verse where we are uncertain whether the poet is being earnest in what he says; and perhaps also uncertain as to whether he knows (or cares). I think it is very, very old - and has had some truly great practitioners.

I think Dante is incapable of being light; I think Chaucer does it easily. I think A Midsummer Nights Dream is a light play - and one of Shakespeare's greatest.

And - since it would be inappropriate to make an entirely serious posting about light verse - I also think that In Memoriam and The Hunting of the Snark essentially treat the same subject matter, and from very similar viewpoints. In Memoriam contemplates the death of a loved one - and the consolations of a general faith in Providence - seriously; The Hunting of the Snark takes the same topics, but deals with them as if death and grief were things which happen to everybody - which makes them a bit of a joke really.

I think the Snark is one of the great English poems about how we face our mortality.

I also think it is light verse.

Jayne, I can't speak for the other guys, but when I crit a supposedly humorous poem as "trivial" or "meaningless", it isn't because it's "light" - it's because it's not very good. There is a difference between somewhat indiscriminately championing anything that passes itself off as "light", and being as demanding when critting light verse as when discussing love sonnets or metaphysical ruminations.

I also have to admit that this entire thing has me a bit snarky. David Anthony is a good guy and a friend - and I apologize to David in advance for using his poem as an example - but he has just posted a "light" poem on Metrical that I assume was prompted by this thread. I would give it about a C+ for humor and originality, if we were passing out grades, but (except for me) the reaction was extraordinarily positive. If you think that was a "brilliant" poem, Jayne, and if that tired, tired "my pocket conceals a big pen" line had you in hysterics, I believe we inhabit different planets. (I also believe that it's permissible to "crit the critter" on a Discussion thread - otherwise we would not have much of a discussion.)

What gets my goat is not automatically criticizing light verse because it's not ponderous, but what I think is frequently more common on the Sphere - using "it's light verse" as an excuse for bad poetry. There is a great deal of second-rate work posted here and elsewhere (and frequently in Light Quarterly) as "light verse", and a disturbing incllnation on the part of many to applaud it because, after all, it's "light".

It is at least as difficult to write good light verse as it is to write good "serious" verse. If it's mockery you're after it has to be fresh and effective, and apparent-without-being-too-apparent; word play should be unique; imagery vivid; and the overall theme challenging and unusual - not warmed-over sitcom treacle. And politically-oriented or "serious" light verse has to be pointed and hopefully scathing, but avoid preachiness. It's not easy. And

I agree with what Sean said about focusing on good verse and bad verse, and with what Susan said:

In short, I don't think the real problem on the Sphere is that we are denigrating light verse because it is "light" or humorous. I think the major problem is that far too frequently bad poetry is getting a free pass here because once it is regarded as "light", too many crits are undemanding.

I think David's poem is funny, Michael, and can't quite see why you're being so critical.

OK, perhaps 'brilliant' is a bit strong - I use it in a casual sense to describe something I really enjoyed. I've been to brilliant restaurants, seen brilliant films, that kind of thing... it's just a word.

I can't agree with your last sentence, though. Most of the 'bad poetry' I see here isn't the light stuff.

Jayne

One crucial consideration, I think, is that comedy is not the opposite of seriousness. Comedy is a mode of seriousness. For example, in literature and in life, sex and death are two of the things we take most seriously, and also two of the things that are most likely to crack us up. The speaker in "To His Coy Mistress" is dead serious about wanting to get laid, but it's inconceivable that Marvell wasn't smart enough to know what a funny poem he was writing. The Porter scene in Macbeth and the Gravedigger scene in Hamlet are usually referred to as "comic relief." And it's true that they do give the audience (and the actors) a break from high-tragic emoting. But they also serve to highlight the tragedy. A comic scene about mortality in Hamlet, a comic scene about damnation in Macbeth -- there's more than just "relief" happening there. And don't get me started on the Fool in Lear.

Some light verse has exclusively or primarily entertainment value, while some has a more serious intellectual, philosophical, or social commentary agenda. Edward Lear and Ogden Nash vs Lewis Carroll and Dorothy Parker, perhaps? Both kinds are "serious" as well as "light," but the seriousness of the former has to do more with elegant craft than with surreptitiously weighty content.

(Lite verse is a different matter. There's plenty of earnest greeting card doggerel that emphatically is not trying to be funny, and that no intelligent reader can possibly take seriously.)

John,

I was raised on such things, quite literally. My father delighted in quoting them when I was small, and I still know them by heart:

"Little Willie on his bike
Through the village took a hike.
Mrs. Thompson blocked the walk;
She will live, but still can't talk."

That said, it seems as soon as one uses the term the battle is already lost. When people want to demean something, they call it verse. Look how people use the term 'free verse,' as if it denoted a bunch of recently liberated worms, crawling around... ;)

I've also heard people call other poets 'versifiers.' Mostly after a drink or two... ;)

There must be another name. Imagine walking up to Martial and saying "I really liked your Light Verse!" One would be lucky to survive... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

Thanks for speaking truth (as I see it as well), Michael. And Susan and Chris.

It's also true that these days an awful lot of people are seriously in need of comic relief. Some laugh more readily than others, and for a great variety of reasons (no just alcohol!). Humor seems to me to be highly individualistic. Go to a genuinely ironic and subtle film like the beautiful and witty Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and see how different parts of the audience laugh at different lines or faces or gestures. The Kristin Scott-Thomas character is wildly irreverent and hilarious, but I find the Ewan McGregor character's humor more deep and satisfying--yet most the time the rest of the audience doesn't let out so much as a giggle at his ironies. I can't recommend this film enough! And Emily Blunt is the best I've ever seen her, as well. Lasse Hallstrom directed, who did Ciderhouse Rules. And as good as the latter was, it is nothing compared to this latest effort.

It seems to me that light verse is simply verse that uses humor as a tool. That doesn't mean it can't use any number of other tools to produce its effects, or that laughter is the only reaction is strives for. There are, indeed, light verse poems that rely almost exclusively on getting a laugh, and these kinds of poems have their place, and there are poems, like "To His Coy Mistress," that do a good deal more than try to make the reader laugh, and these also have their place. Just like with non-light verse, results will vary, and lots of ephemeral crap will be produced, but I would no more dismiss the enterprise of non-light verse writing for this reason than I would dismiss the enterprise of light verse writing.