In an essay in
The Dyer’s Hand, Auden says that, like Matthew Arnold, he has his Touchstones, “but they are for testing critics, not poets.” He then gives a list of four questions he would ask a critic in order to see whether he can trust his judgement or not.
Quote:
Do you like, and by like I really mean like, not approve of on principle:
1) Long lists of proper names such as the Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad?
2) Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade?
3) Complicated verse-forms of great technical difficulty…even if their content is trivial?
4) Conscious theatrical exaggeration, pieces of Baroque flattery like Dryden’s welcome to the Duchess of Ormond?
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It’s the first of these that I’d like to make the subject of this thread: the lists. I’d be interested to see what examples people can offer of great list-poems.
Of course, the list of names is a standard set-piece in epic poetry – as in the example Auden gives from the
Iliad. There’s the list of the inhabitants of hell in
Paradise Lost, for example, which begins:
First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,
Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud
Thir childrens cries unheard, that past through fire
To his grim Idol. Him the Ammonite
Worshipt in Rabba and her watry Plain,
In Argob and in Basan, to the stream
Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with such
Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart
Of Solomon he led by fraud to build
His Temple right against the Temple of God
On that opprobrious Hill, and made his Grove
The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence
And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell.
Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons,
From Aroar to Nebo, and the wild
Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon
And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond
The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines,
And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool.
However, it’s not only epic poets who get great effects from names. We can leap forward a few centuries and come to our very own John Whitworth, who has a number of poems that consist almost entirely of lists of beautifully selected names:
Landscape with Small Humans, for example, has one recalling medicines from the 1950s. Here are the last seven lines:
Then there’s bags more stuff to
keep you regular.
EX-LAX, ENO’S, ANDREW’S, MILK OF MAGNESIA.
Got the trots? CREAMOLA JUNKET’s what you eat.
ZAM-BUK OINTMENT soothes your Granny’s aching feet.
COD-LIVER OIL sets kiddies up a treat.
There’s a jar, a tube, a bottle or a tin
For a thousand ills. And there’s ASPIRIN.
He has another one in the same volume listing makes of cars (again in the 1950s), all in the yearning tones of one of the few kids whose Dad hasn’t got a car yet. After lines savouring such names as
“Rolls Royce Silver Wraith Grand Touring Limousine, / Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, Bentley Continental” the poem ends with the pleading couplet:
What about a little one to make a start in?
M. G. Midget, Austin Healey, Aston Martin.
And, to leap back in time again, to the heroic style, here’s an Italian example, from Ariosto’s
Orlando furioso:
Duca di Bocchingamia è quel dinante;
Enrigo ha la contea di Sarisberia;
signoreggia Burgenia il vecchio Ermante;
quello Odoardo è conte di Croisberia.
These lines come in the middle of a long list of knights who have come all the way from Scotland and England to join the fight against the paynims. There are three well-known English toponyms in that stanza; perhaps some help might be needed for the last one: Shrewsbury. Elsewhere in the same canto he refers to Varvecia (Warwick), Glocestra, Nortfozia, Pembrozia, Sufolcia, Esenia (Essex), Norbelanda (Northumberland), Dorsezia, Devonia and Sormosedia. It’s wonderful how exotic even Essex can be made to sound.
Anyway, the list-thread is now officially open. Please join in.