[Clive Watkins]

BARRY PAIN: THE POETS AT TEA – ANSWERS

This is principally for Janet, Maryann and Andrew, which is why I have detached it from its parent thread and made this new one, re-posting the sequence with the names of Pain’s targets inserted.

I am not sure when Pain wrote this. He was born in 1867 and died in 1928 and, not unnaturally, his spoofs reflect in some measure the popular taste of his age. Nonetheless, of his ten poets only two (or perhaps three) have not survived well, at least among reasonably well-read British readers “of a certain age”. Several, indeed, are “canonical”.

A good parody (like a good translation) is a form of literary criticism. Apart from echoing their characteristic manners and metres, Pain gives each of his ten poets speeches and actions (with regard to the tea) which nicely caricature their supposed temperaments.

The hardest to spot are, I think, the first, the fourth and the eighth. Maryann's suggestion of Kipling for the first was a fine guess, as Kipling owed much to the tradition of heroic ballad to which Macaulay contributed. (As a boy, I was made to learn by heart stretches of “Horatius” from “The Lays of Ancient Rome”.) For the same reason, her suggestion of Keats for the second was shrewd: Tennyson would not have written as he did if Keats had not preceded him. As to the third, Maryann was right: it is Swinburne. Perhaps the crucial clue is the metre, which is that of one of Swinburne’s most noted poems, “Dolores”, though he used it elsewhere, too, as in some sections of “By the North Sea”. The fourth is Cowper. Apart from a few hymns, Cowper’s writing has largely dropped from view, which is a shame: I find some of his long “conversation” poems delightful. The fifth is Browning. Again the metre is a clue, but so are diction, manner (“Tst! Bah! We take as another case”, as if this were an avatar of Bishop Blougram) and syntax. The sixth is clearly Wordsworth, as Maryann saw; the specific target is “We Are Seven” from Lyrical Ballads. The seventh, which Maryann and Janet recognized, is Poe. The eighth is Rossetti, another tricky one. Imagery and metre are again clues. The ninth is, unmistakably, Burns, and the tenth, also unmistakably, is Whitman.


Kind regards

Clive Watkins

…

I. MACAULAY, WHO MADE IT

Pour, varlet, pour the water,
The water steaming hot!
A spoonful for each man of us,”
Another for the pot!
We shall not drink from amber,
No Capuan slave shall mix
For us the snows of Athos
With port at thirty-six;
Whiter than snow the crystals
Grown sweet 'neath tropic fires,
More rich the herb of China's field,
The pasture-lands more fragrance yield;
For ever let Britannia wield
The teapot of her sires!

II. TENNYSON, WHO TOOK IT HOT

I think that I am drawing to an end:
For on a sudden came a gasp for breath,
And stretching of the hands, and blinded eyes,
And a great darkness falling on my soul.
O Hallelujah!....Kindly pass the milk.


III. SWINBURNE, WHO LET IT GET COLD

As the sin that was sweet in the sinning
Is foul in the ending thereof,
As the heat of the summer's beginning
Is past in the winter of love:
O purity, painful and pleading!
O coldness, ineffably grey!
O hear us, our handmaid unheeding,
And take it away!

IV. COWPER, WHO THOROUGHLY ENJOYED IT

The cosy fire is bright and gay,
The merry kettle boils away
And hums a cheerful song.
I sing the saucer and the cup;
Pray, Mary, fill the teapot up,
And do not make it strong.

V. BROWNING, WHO TREATED IT ALLEGORICALLY

Tst! Bah! We take as another case -
Pass the pills on the window-sill; notice the capsule
(A sick man's fancy, no doubt, but I place
Reliance on trade-marks, Sir) – so perhaps you'll
Excuse the digression – this cup which I hold
Light-poised – Bah, its spilt in the bed I – well, let's on go-
Held Bohea and sugar, Sir; if you were told
The sugar was salt, would the Bohea be Congo?

VI. WORDSWORTH, WHO GAVE IT AWAY

“Come, little cottage girl, you seem
To want my cup of tea;
And will you take a little cream?
Now tell the truth to me.”

She had a rustic, woodland grin,
Her cheek was soft as silk,
And she replied, “Sir, please put in
A little drop of milk.”

“Why, what put milk into your head?
'Tis cream my cows supply”;
And five times to the child I said,
“Why, pig-head, tell me, why?”

“You call me pig-head,” she replied;
“My proper name is Ruth.
I call that milk” – she blushed with pride –
“You bade me speak the truth.”

VII. POE, WHO GOT EXCITED OVER IT

Here's a mellow cup of tea – golden tea!
What a world of rapturous thought its fragrance brings to me!
Oh, from out the silver cells
How it wells!
How it smells!
Keeping tune, tune, tune, tune
To the tintinnabulation of the spoon.
And the kettle on the fire
Boils its spout off with desire,
With a desperate desire
And a crystalline endeavour
Now, now to sit, or never,
On the top of the pale-faced moon,
But he always came home to tea, tea, tea, tea, tea,
Tea to the n-th.

VIII. ROSSETTI, WHO TOOK SIX CUPS OF IT

The lilies lie in my lady's bower
(O weary mother, drive the cows to roost),
They faintly droop for a little hour;
My lady's head droops like a flower.

She took the porcelain in her hand
(O weary mother, drive the cows to roost);
She poured; I drank at her command;
Drank deep, and now – you understand!



[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited July 21, 2007).]

[Andrew Frisardi]

Clive,
Thanks for posting these. I finally did give in and Google them, just yesterday, after I had been able to guess only at the most obvious, Whitman, Wordsworth, and Burns. It was interesting trying to figure out the authors, partly because I kept recognizing echoes without being able to place them. The Rossetti, for instance - I just knew that it hit a chord but I couldn't place a name. Clearly the process of guessing and searching the memory says something about how poetry affects us all the time, subliminally, preverbal as well as verbal.
All best,
Andrew

[Janet Kenny]

Clive,
I confess that I Googled them after a period of frustration. I kept mum though. I only truly guessed two of them (Poe and Burns) although I hovered around Wordsworth. It's really a matter of which poems one was exposed to during one's formative years. It was a great exploration. Thanks for setting the trap.
Best,
Janet

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, Clive for the quiz, the answers, and the kind delivery of information about my errors.

Maryann (who doesn't mind having been confused with Catherine and hopes that Catherine feels the same)

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Maryann (Dear Catherine)

I am so sorry about muddling your names! I was attempting two things at once when I compiled this thread, switching back and forth, a foolish thing at the best of times. My wife tells me that only women know how to "multi-task" properly! I have now corrected the thread.

Kind regards

Clive

[Maryann Corbett]

Dear Clive, just keep bringing us these lovely poems. We're all doomed to multi-tasking. It's the poems that make things easier.

Best,
Maryann

[Susan McLean]

I guessed Wordsworth, Poe, Burns, and Whitman, and should have got the Browning, too. It's true that Macauley, Swinburne, Cowper, Burns, and Rossetti were not taught in my British lit survey as an undergrad (and we didn't get much Tennyson, either). I had done some reading of poets of that era on my own, but there are still large numbers that I haven't read, having focused primarily on earlier British literature in grad school.

Susan