Bed-time Story
 

Bed-time Story


The sun has smouldered low. Its flaxen light
drizzles through the birches to the snow
where sheep stand still as haybales, beige on white.
A shepherd with a shoulderful of straw,
brindled by the shadows, softly walks.
The sheep flock round; he swings his load to strew
the strands on pillowed drifts like yellow locks,
then hastens homeward bearing sustenance
against the ghostly dark. He holds small hands
and spins his children tales of happenstance
and golden fleeces in enchanted lands.
Their minds woolgather. Snuggled down in bed,
they drift on snowy pillows; yellow strands
of hair glow like the hay their father spread.




Comments:

Small children are a notoriously difficult subject. It is so hard to avoid ten-little-fingers-and-ten-little-toes. This handles that problem beautifully, but may be too literary for its own good. “Their minds woolgather” is perfect.

Bed-time Story

In “Bed-time Story” imagery and imagination superbly complement one another. I particularly admire its musicality, near perfect enjambment, interesting rhyme scheme and exquisite discourse.

My own poor spirit, constantly trying to put its “chaos into fourteen lines”, found in this sonnet that “brief solace” so eloquently described by Wordsworth. “Bed-time Story” will bathe you in its “flaxen light” from L1 to L14.

This is very attractive, rather like a beautifully illustrated picture book. It is rather rich in modifiers and "poetic" words (such as "brindled", "flaxen," "happenstance,"), which could be a weakness; but this seems deliberate and to contribute to the golden glow of this. "Minds woolgather" is delightful. The very end seems to refer also to spinning straw into gold, yet another tale--perhaps the suggestion is enough. Hmmm. A fairytale within a fairytale.

I like this enormously, recalls to mind The Sheves by EAR.

This is magic.

Cally

This is very lovely. Like a Samuel Palmer painting. A bit too sentimental for my taste but undeniably rich and rewarding. Expertly fashioned.
Janet

I don't know if it is because I am presently so into Chas. Dickens, but this pastoral sonnet opened to a perfect mood of nostalgia as winter slowly releases its grip where I live (not England, though mentally I am transported to that noble small island).

I admire the idea that light drizzles, and the poem slowly drizzles through my mind like a lovely late winter mist sliding down a snowy hill, brief and nearly tangible.

I admire that the author uses "flaxen light" to circumvent "flaxen strands" while cleverly making us aware of the latter term. Possibly there are many city-dwellers who have no idea what flax looks like, but it is very much like blond hair, of a subdued yellow a little less bright than straw. The nuances of color (flaxen, snow, birches, beige on white, straw, yellow locks, brindled by shadows, ghostly dark, golden fleece, snowy pillows, yellow strands, glow, hay) are important here in a small-scale setting appropriate to small children. It makes me want to hold my breath so as not to disturb the shifting nuances of color.

My heart warms at the idea of sheep standing "still as haybales". I have to praise the sounds of "shepherd with a shoulderful of straw", and "then hastens homeward", and "strew/straw. I am admiring of children's minds woolgathering, "tales of happenstance". The snow drifts, the children drift in dreams, their hair drifts on the pillows.

Admittedly this sonnet is hard to title, and I find the title bland and wish the poet had not used a hyphen, but these are worldly things and easily fixed, should the poet care to do so.

Apart from the title, not a single word is awry, or dips into banality, though it easily could in the hands of someone less aware of what they were doing.

All this emanating from the idea of a man tossing out straw onto snow and his children snug on their pillows. Behold! This is how a Poet sees the world.

This sonnet has a wonderful flow and there's no doubt it achieves its author's goals. I find the saccahrine tone alienating and don't believe that childhood or parenthood was ever like this. Nothing but light here while even fairy tales are rife with shadows and darkness. So I weave back to the beginning and say, yes, it is a fine bed-time story, one to calm a child's fears before dropping off.

What everyone said. The dense sounds and the enjambment and alliteration give this a lush Anglo-Saxon feel, though with a warmth and tender emotion not usually associated with Old English. The ultimate impact of the sonnet is perhaps less powerful than the textre and cadence of the words along the way, but not by much. I think less modern picture book than old fashioned etchings or engravings, maybe Durer. Anyway, this may very well have my vote.

I think Kate has put her finger on the heart of this one: it is a bedtime story and not a fairytale. The two narrative forms do overlap, and so the poem will attract the attention of those interested in both or either. However, those whose fascination tends more toward fairytale will probably be the poem's most vocal detractors due to the darkness that has been omitted entirely from the picture. For this very reason I think the title is necessary. For someone can very well set out to write a Bedtime Story even though they know quite well how to write a Fairytale, and thus the present title broadcasts this intention quite clearly. The argument could be made that a lullaby must needs be simple. Yet as a poem, this could certainly be made more satisfyingly complex if some hint of that darkness which is being kept at bay were to be implied somewhere in the sonnet (whose turn seems made-to-order for such a shadow), some trace of those childhood fears whose urgency might more fully justify the poem's choice of strategy, it's Field of Light. This suggested, of course, by one with (even as a child) a predilection for the Dark Forest of Fairytale.

All those alliterative s's and h's are quite impressive in context.

Nemo

Yeah, I really like it too. Maybe it's easy to speak against it, & use the head to find things not to like (over-modified, sentimental, too easy, not in touch with "the world," or something), but none of that negates the pleasure that it gives, at least for me. It's sort of like hot chocolate: it warms the soul.

Chris

Lovely -- the sounds, the colors, the texture -- everything works together to carry the reader away. Nits that popped up after further examination were easy for me to overlook since they didn't strike me in the first couple of reads. It seems like such a wispy, airy piece, but the lineation, syntax, and enjambments are staggeringly well-constructed. Beautiful.

David R.

Very well crafted, but the anti-contemporary sense of it - the dated language, the adjectives, the sentimentality, all those points already noted - overcome my admiration for the craft. It's a ship in a bottle - finely wrought, but from another time and place and not pertinent to my taste in poetry, or my own poetry.

I love how the light “drizzles” through those birches. It’s a fine opening to a fine sonnet that I enjoyed reading. As others have said, “woolgather” was a nice touch.

If this sonnet has a weakness, it’s in the middle of the text. I had trouble with another Bake-off sonnet that asked me to accept a simile that came midway and that was key to the ending. I couldn’t buy that simile and consequently the sonnet fell apart. In the present sonnet – Bed-time Story – there is likewise a simile in the middle that’s key to the ending:

he swings his load to strew
the strands [the straw] on pillowed drifts like yellow locks

I think snowdrifts can look like pillows, but the rest of the simile (straw = yellow locks) feels a little shaky to me, even if the word "strands" does its best to make it more credible. The simile feels very contrived, which of course it is – it’s a set-up for the ending of the sonnet. I don’t think this weakness is devastating, though. I can still say I enjoyed the read.

Just so Michael won't be the lone grouch, I'll admit that this one really isn't my cup of tea. The title redeems it somewhat by announcing that the sentimentality is deliberate, and perhaps wistful. But relying on all those modifiers makes it all just feel too easy.

Maz wrote a wonderful poem, "Sky in the Pie," that evoked a kind of wistful nostalgia for the world of children's storybooks. Since it's been published, maybe she won't mind if I post the last few lines:

The clouds melt on your tongue
and sweeten your throat. You can chant
this day across the meadows, & call the lost flocks
home. The sheep & the chestnut cows. The cows
& the wild black horses. The wolves & small quick foxes.
All the lost beasts of your kingdom.
Call them home.

It's a lovely poem, full of sweet-dream images, but it uses language inventively and doesn't suffer from the Hummel-like cuteness of this one.

p.s. "woolgather" is brilliant though!

Well said, Kate and Nemo
 

I too am put off by the saccharine tone and "happily ever after" line of thinking here. From "Snuggled" to "spread" is cliched, even stifling in its sentimentality.

"Enchanted lands" was the coup-de-grace for me, but "sustenance" dealt a heavy blow.

Having said that, the circularity of the poem is masterful in the way it brings images of the day's labor to bear on the bedtime idyll, woolgathering minds and hay-colored hair.

This is an intricate, masterful painting of words ... an ekphrastic without accompanying picture, leaving it to us to draw our own picture. The musicality is wonderful. OK, maybe it's a bedtime story for adults because the children won't get most of its diction, but it has such sensory appeal - tactile, aural - that even the kids will get its essence and enjoy it as well. Well-written!

Cheers,
...Alex

Thanks, all, for the excellent comments.

As Alex indicates, this began as an ekphrastic. It arose from a print our family-room wall, Shortening Winter’s Day by Joseph Farquharson (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displayPicture.asp?id=84&venue=7) . I always liked it because it reminded me strongly of scenes from where I grew up in the north of Scotland. With its golden light and the shepherd looking after his sheep, it brought back childhood feelings of coziness, safety, awareness of the beauty of the natural world, and some of the early comfort of the shepherd/sheep imagery of religion. Around my old home the trees were birches.

I associated those feelings with story-time for our kids. At the time I was reading nightly to the two youngest. We had lovely evenings and, among other works, got through virtually everything by Roald Dahl and Shel Silverstein, and complete readings of The Old Man And The Sea and Watership Down. These two daughters had idyllic early childhoods on our acreage on Vancouver Island and they lived in a magical world, with no significant fears or worries. On the nights I read to them after coming in from work, I was bathed in their feelings of happiness and security.

The poem emerged from putting these two thoughts together.

The commentaries told me how easy it is to presume that a reader can just step right into your world. You always have to remember that they start out in theirs.

But I don’t think I could gain much ground by attempting to change this.

I couldn’t bring myself to charge it with evil beyond the small hint at “ghostly”.

Janice did a fine job of expressing my defense of the straw/hair metaphor that Petra questioned.

And to those who believe “childhood or parenthood was never like this”, I just have to say “for us it was” and acknowledge that I wasn’t successful in sharing this world with them. I think Michael nails the difficulty when he says, “It's a ship in a bottle - finely wrought, but from another time and place and not pertinent to my taste in poetry, or my own poetry.“

Thanks also to those who did like the poem and who expressed their reactions so warmly.

I was delighted that it ended up on the short list in such excellent company. I learned a lot from the comments, and I enjoyed the competition very much. Thanks again.

John

Why not title (or subtitle) this after the painting, and alert the audience that this is indeed ekphrastic? It think that would add another layer--the idea of imagining into the painting.

John,

I would like to say a couple of things, briefly. I think the reader/viewer of your poem/painting can bring darkness with them to the scene. I want to tell you that two quotations rose in my mind after first reading your poem: first, I thought, "All flesh is grass"; then, I thought, "Golden lads and lasses must / like chimney sweepers come to dust". You have tapped an archetypal vein of prelapsarian awareness, a golden age, that is real and lives even when experience throws its shadow. And the place, Scotland, had the same effect on me, a place of soft, golden, heart-breaking light and beauty and grandeur and mistiness. There is something there, indeed, that Time has forgot.

Finally, I wish I'd had a father like you. And I will cherish this grand little poem of yours.

Cally

John, thanks for posting the link to the painting and giving the background story. It certainly does add another layer to the poem. The rich, detailed description in the first part of the poem perfectly captures the painting, whch then steps out into your home with the ending. Alicia's suggestion of using a subtitle identifying the painting is worth considering.

Best regards.

I felt called somehow to learn more about this artist. A little googling was instructive. And I quote:

"Farquharson exhibited at least one painting of sheep virtually every year at the Royal Academy in London."

Because of his prodigious output of paintings featuring sheep in snow, he "was even nicknamed ‘Frozen Mutton Farquharson’."

A certain little museum in NYC called the Dahesh "was a shrine to what one observer called the . . .the technically ravishing but intellectually vacuous academic paintings that the Impressionists, the Nabis and the Fauves fought hard to consign to the dustbin of history." Farquharson was well represented there.

Which doth raise a question, John: if one is to write an ekphrastic poem, is it not meet to choose one's subject wisely? Vermeer, say, as opposed to Thomas Kinkade?

The sheep painting is pretty. The poem is pretty. And no, I don't mean pretty awful. It's perfect, actually, in its portrayal of a Farquharsonesque world. You report that your children actually lived in that world and were put to bed in an atmosphere of perfect security, where no nightmare could possibly infiltrate. It flabbergasts me. As a child, my lullabies were made up of traffic from the Cross Bronx Expressway, the laugh track of the Gary Moore show, and my parents having another one of their screamfests. Suddenly I wouldn't trade my childhood in for the world!

Uh...I don't recall anyone saying their kids never had nightmares. The world has ample darkness to be sure (including in childhood, as shown in your excellent prize-winner, Kate). Truth be told, no doubt the sheep in the painting had parasites, the shepherd had no dental care and had lost his teeth, and his wife had left him for the butcher. Stuff happens. Too much information for story time, though.

And there are some of those "hot chocolate by the fire" spots of time that grown kids and proud parents remember, even in families more noted for screamfests. The painter may not have much wall space in the Vatican Museum; but he probably fits better in the family room than Laocoon and the serpents would.

Lovely work. If framed in a collection with darker poems before and after, I don't think anyone would comment adversely on the glow.

I thought that John's poem was about a better painting than the one he showed. I hoped for something more like Samuel Palmer.

John, I think your associations and your own imagination made something better than the painting which inspired the poem.
Janet

Well this reflects my take on Farquarson: http://www.ramshornstudio.com/joseph_farquharson.htm

He conjures the world I grew up in, and does so in enhanced light. He studied it, loved it, and connected it with poetry. He worked to perfect one theme. So? Yehudi Menuhin practised. For me, he captured light through trees. Vermeer did something similar. But I know more of sheep than baroque beauties. And the Samuel Palmer, perhaps beautiful to some, isn't my world.

Like Rick's Passenger, I'll walk through the first-class compartment of art any day and sit in coach where I'm more comfortable. I won't for one minute regret stopping in the Dahesh gallery whose purpose appears to be to denigrate art appreciated by those with tastes different from one's own.

We moved to Vancouver Island in part to insulate our children from the stress and materialistic values of city life. Kate, give kids traffic noise and screamfests if you must. That's your choice. Not mine.

Bruce and Cally, thanks.

Alicia, I thought of the epigram and stopped short because I changed the trees to birches. Maybe I should rethink. I see that the uncontexted shepherd was offputting to some. Thanks to you too.

John

John, I have seen the beauty of sheep in snow in Central Otago, New Zealand. I don't question the beauty of the real thing.

[quote=John Beaton;103331]
We moved to Vancouver Island in part to insulate our children from the stress and materialistic values of city life. Kate, give kids traffic noise and screamfests if you must. That's your choice. Not mine.

--------

For the record, it was hardly my choice, I was a trapped child, and for years I was ashamed of my background. Now I accept all that and make art of it.

My sister moved to rural Maine in order to do what you did, have a more wholesome family life in a natural setting; alcoholism and poverty took over and she learned that wife abuse can happen anywhere. There is nothing, repeat nothing, intrinsically nobler about country life than city life. But I understand the impulse to escape to a place where there is at least the possibility of calm and quiet.

And I've also been known to like art that the cognoscenti disparages, e.g. Andrew Wyeth's. I think Farquarson's paintings are perfect for Christmas cards; the poetry equivalent would be the Hallmark sentiment. I don't think your poem is that, though. It reads to me as the expression of a deep human wish to return to a womblike bliss. As an ekphrastic, I don't think it engages the painting. The shepherd is extremely small! The eye goes to the sheep in the foreground and then to the burst of sunlight behind the trees. The shepherd's being dwarfed by the nature around him is the one interesting thing about that painting! In your poem, the shepherd is all foreground. No law against it -- you used the painting as a "jumping off spot" for the poem -- but I would think a true ekphrastic poem would be more faithful to the painting itself.

Kate, I become annoyed by the use of the term "ekphrastic" sometimes. If the painting is a jumping off point for something personal that's fine.

I think John has infinitely improved on the painting which is associated for him with deeper personal things. It doesn't have to be a tone poem about the painting does it?

I have often said that Ostrovsky is the only writer who could have dealt with my own extended family.

How can any childhood be "happy"? We are learning so many things and so many of them are painful. No adult can protect us from that.

I sympathise with John's desire to remove his children from some city values. I am appalled at the brand snobbery little children acquire. There must be some sort of balance. A family close to my house has done what John and his wife did and the children are impressive.

I assumed at once that this poem was ekphrastic. I think it's the best kind, where you don't need to refer back to the picture to understand it. The quality or otherwise of the picture seems to me to be irrelevant, and I think John was quite right to let the poem stand on its own merits.
Best regards,
David

Thanks, Janet, Kate, and David.

Janet, thanks for the comments. We're pretty much on the same wavelength, except that I think it's possible for a childhood to be happy.

Kate, thanks for explaining the background to your opinions. I think the poem is more about appreciation of lovely moments than about a wish to climb back into the womb. But, especially since others shared your general reactions, your views are helpful--they highlight factors to consider when choosing a poem to enter in a contest.

David, thanks for your thoughts. You've convinced me not to add a picture subtitle.

Thanks, all, for an interesting discussion and good night. It's my bedtime.

John

Not being much of a formal poet, I couldn't allow myself to vote, but this was my favorite. The topic/theme or whatever here doesn't even interest me much, but the writing is gorgeous -- pulled me in and blew me away.

I also have to say that I paid much more attention to the sonnet bake-off than I ever thought I would -- some amazing, inspiring work on display. Even made me want to write one (yikes!!) myself. Really enjoyed the whole thing. Thanks,

Jim

Hi Jim,

Thank you for your belated comment on Bed-time Story. It was one of my favorites, too. I'm glad you enjoyed the bake-off and perhaps next year you will send in a sonnet!

Also, welcome to the 'Sphere!

:)