Good Bad Poetry
 

In an essay on Rudyard Kipling (still one of the best things ever written on him), George Orwell used the term “good bad poetry”, to describe such works as “Gunga Din” and “Danny Deever”. He said that:

I don’t know how useful a term “good bad poetry” is, but I guess we all know what he means by it. I am wondering what other examples people might like to propose. (I would say that Kipling no longer needs any special pleading.) Or to put it in another way, are there poets (or just individual poems) that people here secretly and perhaps rather shamefacedly enjoy?

I’ll come straight out and say I’ve always enjoyed a number of poems by Sir Henry Newbolt. Take a poem like "He Fell Among Thieves". I can see all the faults in it: the sentimental picture of England, the tendency to fall back on clichéd images – but at the same time I enjoy the narrative vigour of the versification and the colourful use of the exotic setting and place-names. There are other poems of his, like "Vitai Lampada", that are clearly as unpolitically correct as you could get, but which nonetheless have an uncanny quality of memorability; part of it is the way he manages to create a setting and an ethos with a strict economy of details (“A bumping pitch and a blinding light, / An hour to play and the last man in…”). If nothing else, these poems have power as historical documents, giving us an insight into the imperialist mentality (though perhaps that’s a rather cheap line of defence).

Anyway, I’d like to hear other people’s confessions, so if you’ve always got a sneaking enjoyment out of some totally unfashionable names like W.E. Henley or Sabine Baring-Gould or John Greenleaf Whittier, now’s the time to come out and declare it boldly. Here could even be your chance to stand up for Rod McKuen or Pam Ayres.

I'm wondering if by "good bad" we really mean effective poetry that's either hopelessly out of style or that otherwise strikes a false note for us (too corny; too sentimental; archaic language etc.) for whatever reason. I don't mean to suggest that this list of potential reasons is exhaustive or all-inclusive -- maybe there are an infinite number of possible reasons for that false note ...

Well, for my part, I don't care if a poem is considered "good" or "bad" by anyone else...if it affects me positively, I like it...simple as that. I've never really understood the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality of a lot of the literati. Like what you like. There's no shame in it. It's not something that needs to be surreptitious.

I'll stand up for Pam Ayres any time. She is the Beryl Cook of poetry. Poems like 'Heaps of stuff' and 'I wish I'd looked after my teeth' are distinctive and, oh I don't know, but YOU try doing it. Not you, Gregory,since you like Newbolt, so you know what's what. Would Beachcomber count as a poet? I've mentioned him before and his 'The Cabman', or is it 'The Lincolnshire Cabman'? His real name is J.B. Morton and he's googlable. Of course these people are funny, and being funny rather sets you back in the poetry stakes. In Flann O'Brien's masterpiece 'At Swim-two-birds' there is a poem, 'A pint of plain is your onlyman' which I found unforgettable after the first reading. If I can find it I'll post it and you can see.

Wendy, I imagine that Orwell was thinking mainly of "out of style", writing as he was in the wake of Modernism. I suppose when I started the thread I had the idea of soliciting defences of poets whose reputation is generally low today. I partly had in mind a thread from a while back, started (if I remember correctly) by Mark Allinson, in defence of Swinburne. I thought it might be interesting to extend it also to contemporary names who are usually looked down on by intellectual or "highbrow" (there's an old-fashioned word for you) circles (or "literati", to use Shaun's term).

E. Shaun, that's the attitude! I'd like to think that I'm the same, but I have to admit to feeling peer pressure and I'd probably think twice before pulling out a Pam Ayres collection at an academic conference.

Having said which, John, I will admit that undoubtedly from reasons of pure snobbishness I had never actually read anything by Pam Ayres at all. I've googled the two poems you mention and I will say that they're fun; there is a distinctive voice but also it strikes me (unless the versions I found on-line are defective), there's some metrical and syntactical clumsiness; here's a stanza from "I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth":

So I lay in the old dentist's chair,
And I gaze up his nose in despair,
And his drill it do whine,
In these molars of mine,
"Two amalgum," he'll say, "for in there."

"Heaps of Stuff" struck me as much more successful and I can definitely identify with it.

Look forward to the Flann O'Brien poem, which I don't know.

Now anyone going to stand up for Rod McKuen (another poet I confess to not knowing at all, except by misrepute)?

(p.s. to John: excuse my curiosity, do you go to bed very late or get up very early?)

Ok, I admit to being a sucker for this one - I'm not sure if it started out a poem and ended up a song or the other way around - either way, I must confess I've never heard it sung but the words have stuck with me for probably 40 years or so - especially the last verse which still makes me mist up.

http://www.peterpaulandmary.com/music/27-m03.htm

Carl Sandburg. Like Kipling, he's sometimes just plain good, but often good bad. (Through my early teens, Kipling and Sandburg and a book of dirty limericks, published in England - and found hidden under my father's shirts - were the only poetry I read. And I read them joyfully and omniverously. Particularly the limericks.)

Lo, I emailed you this, as well, but I'll post it here. This is a Rhapsody link to the "Mary" solo album where she sings the McKuen song:

Listen to The Solo Recordings [1971-1972] on Rhapsody: http://www.rhapsody.com/goto?rcid=al...lay&lsrc=RN_im

When things go wrong and will not come right
Though you do the best you can.
When life looks black as the hour of night
A pint of plain is your only man.

When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran.
When all you have is a heap of debt
A pint of plain is your only man.

When health is strange and your heart feels strange
And your face is pale and wan.
When doctors say that you need a change
A pint of plain is your only man

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan.
When hunger grows as your meals are rare
A pint of plain is your only man

In times of trouble and lonely strife
You have still got a darling plan.
You can still turn to a brighter life,
A pint of plain is your only man.

Well, I don't know about BAD now I look at it. Flann O'Brien is also Myles na Gopaleen and Brian O'Nolan. I think At Swim-two-birds is the finest Irish novel ever written. Knocks spotsoff Ulysses, being a). shorter and b). funnier. And the columns he wrote for the Irish whateveritwas are works of genius. Try the one about the people who (for a fee) will read your books for you and make then look as if they have been read. A pint of plain is a pint of stout, by the way.

Doesn't seem bad to me.
McKuen -- yeah, that's bad stuff.

I agree with Wendy (and with John, too, it seems), that the O'Brien is Good, and maybe not Good Bad at all.

The McKuen is another matter. Thanks, Lo, for the link. I guess the fact that you've known it for 40 years must come into it; I learned the Newbolt "He Fell Among Thieves" at school and there's probably a certain amount of nostalgia in my enjoyment of it. The Mckuen might work OK as a song, of course, but I can't get the link Roger posted to work. I can imagine the last stanza as being effective, if put to a good tune.

Michael, do you want to be more specific on Sandburg? What are the Good ones? and the Good Bad ones?

Was it Orwell or Elder Olsen in an essay on Kipling who defined "good bad poetry" as "a graceful monument to the obvious"?

When I first read poetry, I was fond of Poe, Kipling, Wilde, Longfellow, Stevenson, and other poets who told a story or did magical things with sound and rhythm. Some of them now seem a bit over the top to me, but I'm still rather fond of them.

Susan

I can't pin the reference down, but I have an impression that somebody once discussed Thomas Hood's social protest poems, like 'The Song of the Shirt' and 'The Bridge of Sighs' in terms of 'good bad poetry' , which may reflect, as I think Gregory indicated, critical unease with a writer who has serious credentials but can reach a mass audience.

Longfellow, yes. He's as out of fashion as a poet can get, but there's some of his stuff I still enjoy enormously, like "Paul Revere's Ride.

I think the only copy of it I had was in a volume of poetry for children, which suggests that adults aren't supposed to take it seriously.

Jerome, yes, in the essay on Kipling, Orwell gives a list of other examples of "good bad poems", and they include "The Bridge of Sighs", "When All the World is Young, Lad", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", Bret Harte's "Dickens in Camp", "The Burial of Sir John Moore", "Jenny Kissed Me", "Keith of Ravelston", Casabianca". He goes on to say that "one could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting." This is clearly no longer true; I had to Google the last two poems he mentions (the first by Sidney Dobell, the second by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, if you're interested).

Anybody interested in other examples would do well to seek out a great anthology that Kingsley Amis edited in 1978, The Faber Popular Reciter. It doesn't seem to be in print any longer but there are plenty of copies available through Amazon at the modest price of one penny. Amis says in his introduction more or less what Orwell said: "When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War, the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting." The anthology contains most of the names that have been mentioned in this thread so far (all of the names Susan cites), apart from the 20th-century ones; the anthology ends with the First World War. As Amis says, "during the 1930s this entire literary genre quite suddenly disappeared, never to return."

Maryann, ah Longfellow... That would deserve a thread on its own. A couple of years ago, I remember scandalising some by saying that if I were told for a bet that I had to read the complete works of either Longfellow or Whitman, I would definitely go for Longfellow. This was not to say that I consider him a better or more important poet than Whitman; clearly Whitman has had a greater impact on the development of American poetry. However, although the best Whitman is unique and extraordinary, there are pages and pages that are pure windy bombast. Longfellow is sometimes humdrum but is always competent and nearly always fun to read, even if only out of admiration for his technical skills. "Paul Revere's Ride" is a splendid piece of popular poetry but he's a great deal more varied than that (and that's something else he has over Whitman, I would suggest). Hiawatha probably did him a disfavour by becoming so extraordinarily famous - and so easy to parody; I would guess that more people today know Lewis Carroll's version than the original. Longfellow is at his best in medium-length narratives; anybody who doesn't know them would do well to look at his Tales from a Wayside Inn, which is a wonderful collection of tales in varied metres and stanza forms. Here's a link to "The Birds of Killingworth", which is a wonderful ecological fable in ottava rima. I'm also very fond of the dactylic hexameter poems, Evangeline and Miles Standish. But here's one of his shorter poems:

THE AFTERMATH

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
xxxAnd the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
xxxAnd gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
xxxNot the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
xxxIn the silence and the gloom.

(A little off-topic here, perhaps, since that isn't a Good Bad poem, I'd say, but a Good one, full stop.)

Greatr thread. I just recently read Lionel Trilling's essay on Kipling, in which he defends Kipling from the charge (brought by Eliot) that he wrote "verse" instead of poetry. "Verse" was probably Eliot's term for "good bad poetry" as distinct from "immortally bad poetry" such as the output of Julia A. Moore.

I confess to being quite fond of Kipling, especially of "Danny Deever" and "Tomlinson", which reminds us that "The sins we do by two and two/We pay for one by one."

John, I loved At Swim-Two Birds too, although I felt it lost some of its charm after the Pooka took over.

One definition of bad poetry: poems which aspire to move us with their tragedy but make us laugh - Casabianca and The Charge of the Light Brigade for me fall into this category. The best music-hall ballad cleverly has it both ways - The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, somehow being amusing and tragic at the same time.


The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

He was known as "Mad Carew" by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel's daughter smiled on him as well.

He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.

He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.

On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.

He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel's daughter watched beside his bed.

He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying "That's from Mad Carew,"
And she found the little green eye of the god.

She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn't take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he'd chanced his life to get.

When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hurried to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro' the gloom.

His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp'ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
'Twas the "Vengeance of the Little Yellow God."

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

J Milton Hayes

From "The Bridge of Sighs"
 

One of the great stanzas written in English:

Still, for all slips of hers,
   One of Eve's family—
Wipe those poor lips of hers
   Oozing so clammily.

Yeah, I agree Marcia.
Hood is just plain good.
The "direct", the relatively "simple" -- are these things "bad"?
No one would dare say the same of Blake, for example -- though there's more "hidden" complexity there. But some of his poems are just as "popular" and, after all, were written for children.
But it's an interesting distinction, and I'll have to give it some more thought ...

Thanks, Holly, for the Ballad. It's one of those poems I'd often heard about or of, but had never actually read. Great fun. Definitely fits the category of this thread.

As for Hood, someone said somewhere (I think it was Chesterton), that it was from having written all those wonderful comic poems with their multiple puns ("But a cannon-ball took off his legs, / So he laid down his arms..."), that he acquired the epigrammatic skills for his more serious social poems:

Gregory, thanks for vindicating my erratic memory about Orwell and Hood, though I wouldn't agree with him on 'The Bridge of Sighs' as an example of 'good bad' poetry. I wouldn't put any of Hood's work in this category.

Eliot and Orwell surely can't have been including Kipling poems like 'The Way Through The Woods' or 'Harp Song of the Dane Women'?

I haven't come across the Amis anotholgy, but a similar one from 1967 (Michael Joseph) is Michael R. Turner's 'Parlour Poetry; 101 Improving Gems', which has Casabianca, Vitai Lampada, 'The Lost Chord' and several Longfellows. Hood is represented by 'The Song of the Shirt' and George R. Sims has 'In the Workhouse: Christmas day', among others, which makes an interesting contrast with Hood's earlier drier 'A Pauper's Christmas Carol'.

Sounds as if Longfellow is worth investigating.

I'm sorry, Wendy. My irony was hidden. The poem is terribly pleasurable, especially to read aloud, but awful. (Ditto Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy.")

family
clammily
     !

I sort of want to like some of Hood's others. I was touched by "Silence" at the end of the movie The Piano, but I think the emotion of the movie helped it a lot.

"I Remember, I Remember": In his 20th Century Ox, Larkin has a poem "The Boy Actor," by Noel Coward. It begins

I can remember, I can remember

I think Coward's poem far superior.

Best,
Marcia

Marcia, maybe you don't know Hood's genuinely (not inadvertently) comic poetry, although you've probably heard lines from it, like:

That comes from Faithless Sally Brown, just one of a number of comic ballads; they're all full of puns, some of them excruciating but often quite witty. Here's another poem based entirely on one pun, but very effective:

xxxNo sun--no moon!
xxxNo morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
xxxNo sky--no earthly view--
xxxNo distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
xxxNo end to any Row--
xxxNo indications where the Crescents go--
xxxNo top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
xxxNo courtesies for showing 'em--
xxxNo knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
xxx"No go" by land or ocean--
xxxNo mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
xxxNo company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
xxxNo comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
xxxNo fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
xxxxxxNovember!

I agree that "family / clammily" is pushing it in a poem intended to be taken seriously, and one wonders if the habit of excessive punning might have weakened his sensitivities. But in the same poem a couplet like "Look at her garments / Clinging like cerements" is pretty good, while remaining close to word-play. Taken as a whole I find the poem has an effectively haunting music and if you allow yourself to be swept along with it, even "family / clammily" doesn't sound too absurd. (The Victorians were less worried by feminine rhymes in serious poetry, I think.)

"The Song of the Shirt", however, doesn't require any special pleading. It's one of the great protest poems of all time.

Hmph. I'm still a bit grumpy about the notion that there even is such a thing as "good bad poetry"...there's either poetry you like or poetry you don't. Poetry that moves you or poetry that doesn't. Sure, McKuen does nothing for me...but neither do Nash, Lear, Whitman, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Burns, Cummings and a bunch of other famous poets, old and new. As a whole, I wouldn't call them "bad" but I wouldn't call them "good" either...I would simply call them "well-known." And in all of them, I would say that they have some material that I like...but most of it I do not.

The problem, when you start attributing value judgments to poets themselves (as opposed to individual poems), is that you invariably turn a blind eye to some of the horrible lines of the "greats". You make concessions for them because they've written so much material that is well-known or widely loved. For instance, take Keats' famous "Ode On A Grecian Urn". We forgive Keats a line such as,

     "More happy love! more happy, happy love!"

simply because he later knocks us out with,

     "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all
          Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

But imagine if one of us were to have a line like the first one in a workshopped poem? We'd be harangued right off the site and ridiculed long after!

Point being: don't judge a poet too harshly for a less-than-stellar body of work. There are indeed many modern poets who have outraged me with their vacuous, meaningless, formless lines passed off as profound poems, but it's a slippery slope to charge the poets themselves as being "good bad" poets...or even "bad bad" poets. Orwell's one of my favorite authors, but I'm not willing to go quite so far as he did in terms of categorization.

I must support Wendy; Hood is just plain good. (Good Lord, in my indignation I have emitted a semi-colon.) Of course, Marcia, you can find the occasional uncooked line or two, as he was a working journalist hard-pressed by deadlines and his verse had to put food on the table. For me, 'The Bridge of Sighs' takes the crude popular street ballad, which was still alive in his day, to the stratosphere, as it were. There are fragments of a longer version he either had no time to complete, or discarded, and he might have removed or revised the lines you object to. However, it seems to me the total effect is tremendous, as well as individual 'simple' but powerful passages like

The bleak wind of March
Made her trembleand shiver;
But not the dark arch
Or the black flowing river;

I think Gregory is spot on with the legacy of his comic punning verse to the protest and other more 'serious' poems, as in the almost Shakespearian brooding swallows that twit the sempstress with the spring and (in the earlier Ode To Melancholy)

Like the sweet blossoms of the May,
Whose fragrance ends in must.

Noel Coward? I hope your lightning-conductor is in good order!

It was Orwell, Jan. Here's a passage from the essay:

My profound thanks for Orwell's essay, Gregory! I feel inspired to respond with:

[Original bad poem moved to the appropriate Drills and Amusements thread, after I realized that this was the Musing on Mastery forum--oops! ]

Sorry, Marcia -- I'll stick with Gregory & Jerome et. al. on Hood: a writer of highly effective, serious social poems. No small thing.

Thanks for the Orwell essay, Jan & Gregory. So ... it seems the "good/bad" poem expresses a so-called "vulgar" thought (i.e., one common to everyone) with too much sentimentality -- but nonetheless does so effectively.

What makes it bad then, exactly, seems to be BOTH:

(1) that the thought/emotion expressed is (allegedly) "vulgar", because universally shared
(that part's a bit hard to swallow); and

(2) that the expression is too sentimental. Well, sure, who wants to be too sentimental -- though the Victorians clearly had a higher threshhold of pain where sentimentality's concerned ...

Reminds me of Oscar Wilde's comment on Dickens -- something like, who could read the death scene of Little Nell without ... laughing his head off! Still, Dickens did fine, right? Not a good/bad writer, would you say? Or, who was the better writer, anyway -- Dickens or Wilde? Can anyone say? Does it even matter?

Seems like this "good/bad" thing is just a hangover from the general artistic reaction against Victorian sentimentality.

Yeah, I can say. Dickens was the better writer. It's not even close, is it?

Yes, I'd have to agree with Roger on that one.

I'm certainly not prepared to go to the barricades over Orwell's phrase. It just struck me as a handy label to use for this thread. Essentially I'm talking about poems that are generally in critical disfavour but which people might like to defend. So, yes, if we're talking about Victorian poetry, the most obvious fault is likely to be sentimentality; as Wendy says, if we can forgive it in Dickens, then maybe we should be able to forgive it in some of these poets as well. But sentimentality isn't the only problem, of course; in some cases critical taste has simply moved against over-emphatic metrical patterns (Swinburne being an obvious example); in others, it may just be the case that we're no longer used to melodramatic narratives in verse form.

Anybody want to take up the cause of Robert W. Service?

Anybody want to take up the cause of Robert W. Service?

I will. "The Cremation of Sam McGee" is a great, sly favorite. It seems to be cunningly written as "good bad poetry." Here's a short Service poem I've always treasured:

MY MADONNA

I haled me a woman from the street,
Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model's seat
And painted her sitting there.

I hid all traces of her heart unclean;
I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
If the Worst had been the Best.

She laughed at my picture and went away.
Then came, with a knowing nod,
A connoisseur, and I heard him say;
"'Tis Mary, the Mother of God."

So, I painted a halo round her hair,
And I sold her and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,
Where you and all may see.

Marcia - the Wilde comment on Little Nell's death scene was nastier than that - I believe it was essentially, "One would have to have a heart of stone to read it without laughing."

And after all, Sam, without Sam McGee and Dan McGrew, how could there have been an Eskimo Nell, and where does she fit in here, and does anyone know who wrote her? I never could find out.

That sentence should be taken out and shot. Torture would be too good for it, but might at least make it confess that this farrago of negatives actually says the opposite of what it appears to intend, which I assume to be something like "Only a snob and a liar would say that no one who cares for poetry could get pleasure out of such lines as..." or even "Only a snob and a liar would claim to get no pleasure out of such lines..." Did Orwell — that master of clarity and the direct style —REALLY, seriously write that? If he did, he must have been having a very bad day indeed.

You're right, Henry. Particularly strange since, in his essay "Politics and the English Language", Orwell specifically holds up for scorn the use of multiple negatives, quoting a sentence by Harold Laski:

A bad day probably, as you say.

Thanks, Sam, for the Service poem. It could be a potted version of Barry Unsworth's novel, Stone Virgin. Some years back Tony Harrison did a commentary for a TV documentary on the Yukon in R.W. Service style. It's quite enjoyable; he includes it iin his Collected Film Poetry.

Wouldn't simply removing the 'not' reprieve the sentence Henry wants shot? Perhaps it was the compositor or proof-reader who had a bad day?

Rupert Brooke. Now there's a boyo who's reputation and life's work were blown away by subsequent events. After writing a series of sentimental and patriotic sonnets he died of blood poisoning on a troop ship enroute to Gallipoli. Had he survived that hellhole his Georgian poetics might have undergone the same seachange as Wilfred Owens.
His Heaven is, hands down, the finest piece of light verse ever written.
I wouldn't say his work is good/bad; it's uniformly excellent, sometimes verging on great. But History has disowned him.

I loved Robert W. Service when I was a kid.

And everything by James Whitcomb Riley. 1853–1916. I have a book with his Childhood Poems which I got for Christmas a month after I'd turned four. (According to the inscription. ) I used to know many of them by heart . The Raggedy Man he works for Pa. Little Ophant Annie. (An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you /Ef you don't watch out!).

It doesn't include "When the Frost is on the Punkin", but I knew it by heart too, and I think of it every autumn when the first frost comes.

WHEN the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it's then the time a feller is a-feelin' at his best, 5
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here— 10
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock— 15
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries—kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill; 20
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover overhead!—
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps 25
Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps;
And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage too!...
I don't know how to tell it—but ef such a thing could be
As the angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me— 30
I'd want to 'commodate 'em—all the whole-indurin' flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Not to mention this one. I knew it by heart too.

Casey at the Bat
by Ernest Lawrence Thayer


The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, "If only Casey could but get a whack at that--
We'd put up even money now, with Casey at the bat."

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despisèd, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It pounded on the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile lit Casey's face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt;
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance flashed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped--
"That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one!" the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;
"Kill him! Kill the umpire!" shouted someone on the stand;
And it's likely they'd have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;
But Casey still ignored it and the umpire said, "Strike two!"

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered "Fraud!"
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville--mighty Casey has struck out.