[Joel Lamore]

Before the holidays and the unfortunate crash of this site, there was a brief discussion on sentimentality in poetry and its risks. The discussion called to mind Coleridge's piece below. I decided to take another close look at it. Wow. Worse than I remember. And yet, is it possible to write about such a subject without the unfortunate results here? What does STC do wrong? What effect does the difference in centuries make? The one clear conclusion I draw is sentiment in rhymed couplets is not a good idea.

To a Young Ass
its mother being tethered near it

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poor little foal of an oppressèd race!
I love the languid patience of thy face:
And oft with gentle hand I give thee bread,
And clap thy ragged coat, and pat thy head.
But what thy dulled spirits hath dismayed,
That never thou dost sport along the glade?
And (most unlike the nature of things young)
That earthward still thy moveless head is hung?
Do thy prophetic fears anticipate,
Meek Child of Misery! thy future fate?
The starving meal, and all the thousand aches
"Which patient Merit of the Unworthy takes"?
Or is thy sad heart thrilled with filial pain
To see thy wretched mother's shortened chain?
And truly, very piteous is her lot --
Chained to a log within a narrow spot,
Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen,
While sweet around her waves the tempting green!

Poor Ass! they master should have learnt to show
Pity -- best taught by fellowship of Woe!
For much I fear me that He lives like thee,
Half famished in a land of Luxury!
How askingly its footsteps hither bend!
It seems to say, "And have I then one friend?"
Innocent foal! thou poor despised forlorn!
I hail thee Brother -- spite of the fool's scorn!
And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell
Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell,
Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride,
And Laughter tickle Plenty's ribless side!
How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play,
And frisk about, as lamb or kitten gay!
Yea! and more musically sweet to me
Thy dissonant harsh bray of joy would be,
Than warbled melodies that soothe to rest
The aching of pale Fashion's vacant breast!

[Michael Juster]

A warning to us all on the long term effects of drug use.

[John Beaton]

What does he do wrong? Well the sense of it sems to go like this:

Little ass I like you.
But why are you so sad?
Are you worried for yourself?
Or for your mother?
Your owner should treat you better.
Wouldn't it be nice for us to go to a paradise together?
In that paradise, your bray would sound pleasant.

I think the story has something to do with it. And the way it's said doesn't help.

What has time got to do with it? Not much. Small asses are still popular.

Porridginal

[Alan Sullivan]

Egad!

Yet this sort of verse has a long pedigree, and there are still practitioners today. The difference between our time and Coleridge's is that no one could retain any literary respectability if such an effusion appeared under his or her name.

The old Auden-Pearson anthology, <u>Poets of the English Language</u>, contains a similar piece by Andrew Marvell (1621-78). It opens with the following lines: "The wanton Troopers riding by / Have shot my Faun and it will dye. / Ungentle men! They cannot thrive / To kill thee. Thou neer didst alive / Them any harm: alas nor cou'd / Thy death yet do them any good."

And so it goes, for a hundred twenty-four lines.

Thank you, Joel, for contributing a how-not-to. We should probably do this more often. But I much prefer posting verses that make me gasp or giggle rather than retch.

Alan Sullivan

[Len Krisak]

Well... I too, stand four-square against the dastardly
and despicable crime of sentimentality in verse (especially
as it pertains to God's noble creatures).

But ... nothing that is weak or bad about this effort of
Coleridge's (or the starting lines from Marvell) derives
from the use of rhymed couplets. To say so comes dangerously close to the notion that certain meters and/or
stanzaic schemes, etc., are mimetic and/or appropriately expressive of, only certain kinds of subject, theme, or feeling--
a doctrine I think false.
Cheers to all

[Alan Sullivan]

Len, I'll go about midway between you and Joel. Nothing intrinsic about rhymed couplets ought to suggest or induce wanton displays of sentiment, but the very fact that the form has been so used, so often, for so long, certainly gives me pause.

Alan Sullivan

[Kate Benedict]

The poem is retchworthy but the responses are LOLville.

In Pegasus Descending (anthology of bad poetry), there is a poem that starts thusly:

Another sin I had forgot:
that hog I killed in my back lot.

Somehow, somewhere, right now, there must be a poet with PETA credentials penning something in the same vein as the ass poem. Perhaps it will be less in the sentimental vein and more in the rabid anger category -- but it won't be a very good poem.

We humans are subject to what I call "false" emotions. Sentimentality is one -- crying into your beer, or idealizing concepts such as "childhood" or "America," or personifying the blessedly unhuman beasts. And so is rabid anger of the knee-jerk anti-this, anti-that type.
Poets have to dig past the false, into the true.

[A. E. Stallings]

Actually, maybe I'm in an odd mood (maybe it is too much Retsina), but I find this much less offensive than the rest of you. The first section actually has for me a certain charm to it. The whole thing seems to partake of some classical tropes. By modern sensibilities, Catullus' lament for Lesbia's sparrow might be deemed "sentimental," but by classical standards it is very sophisticated and polished. One of the most famous sections of Lucretius describes in detail a cow mourning, in very human terms, her calf which has been taken for sacrifice. It is a beautiful passage, but one which, again, by modern standards, might be stamped sentimental, even laughable. We groan now, for instance, to see elegies for pets (Wendy Cope's hilarious dead cat poem tweaks its nose at them), but in fact that is an ancient and esteemed genre--the Greek anthology, Catullus, Martial, Thomas Gray, and others. And it seems to me that Coleridge is aware of the poetic "inappropriateness" of his subject--that there is some playfulness in the mock-epic tone of the apostrophes, which we are meant to smile, not grimace, at.

Not to say that there are not some other, more serious things going on here. In Coleridge's time, ideas about slavery, about Republicanism, about oppression, etc., were very hot topics. In likening the ass's colt to his master, it seems to be touching on these. But yes, the second stanza contains some infelicities and lacks the charm of the first, which really could stand alone. Anyway, no doubt I come across as a bit of a nut defending this piece. Obviously, it isn't a great poem--but it just doesn't strike me as quite as dreadful as you all are making out.

While everyone is still groaning at me, and throwing rotten vegetables, I thought I'd share this. Coleridge himself has some hilarious parodies on bad sonnets of the time. Here is one (the italics are beyond me, I'm afraid):

To Simplicity

O! I do love thee, meek SIMPLICITY!
For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart and soothes each small distress,
Distress though small, yet haply great to me!
'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I amble on; yet, though I know not why,
So sad I am--but should a friend and I
Grow cool and MIFF. O! I am VERY sad!
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall;
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But, whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity!

Now THAT's a clunker...



[This message has been edited by A. E. Stallings (edited January 20, 2001).]

[Richard Wakefield]

There's a certain mood -- real but infrequent for me -- in which this is not awful. It seems to me that old Sam must have recognized the grating disjunction of form and content here, must have known he was loading the poor beast with language it couldn't bear, and so in more charitable moments I look for what might lie outside the poem that inspired such excess. Most of the time, though, I'm inclined to turn away in embarrassment, as I do from so much of Romanticism, even the sainted Keats.
Richard Wakefield

[Alan Sullivan]

Kate, could you clarify "LOLville?" I agree with your point about excessive and one-sided emotions, but I regard them all as variants of sentimentality.

Alicia, it's good to see you paying another visit to the Eratosphere. For those who haven't seen the Cope poem, it is titled "An Unusual Cat-Poem," and the text goes: "My cat is dead / but I have decided not to make a big / tragedy out of it."

Not only does Cope sneer at the tradition of animal epitaphs, but she also parodies the flatness of much contemporary free verse. Regarding parody and the Coleridge sonnet: it is often difficult to discern, from a distance, the boundary of parody. Some of those classical pieces you cite might have had an element of parody. Given our fragmentary knowledge of context, can we be really know? With Coleridge, of course, the task is easier.

Thank you all for your contributions to the discussion.

Alan Sullivan