I was intrigued by the splendid photo (although it is gulls, not swans, that are seen actually in flight…) and wondered if it showed Coole Park*. Checking Coole Park up I discovered that the swans found there are not the usual mute swan found in parks all over Europe, but Bewick’s swans and, more recently, whooper swans - both a rarer sight in Éire, the UK or France. Both are a smaller birds; I wonder if this alters the (my) sense of the poem, which invites the image of grand, stately creatures?
You are eagle-eyed indeed! I chose it, as you imply, because it shows birds on the water and in flight, like in the poem, and was hoping not everyone would notice that they are not actually the same birds. Anyway, I agree it's a good photo. Interesting point about the swans at Coole Park, I didn't know that. Literary swans always make me think of Jonson's not-very-well-known Ode Allegorike: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/ode-allegoric
"Still sky" puts the smooth water into sound, "Mirrors" is a slight ripple on its surface. No, I can't prove it: you can't explain magic, if it's real.
I wonder if we are supposed to pick up on the Irish use of "creature" as an affectionate term. I'm
not very sure of this, but if so, it gives the line quite a different tone.
And does the ending
"Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?"
faintly echo the ending of Keats's Ode to a Nightingale?
" Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"
Again, I can't prove it. But in literature the really interesting things are things you can't prove.
I know Matthew Arnold is widely admired still, but I've never been able to like his verses; he seems to me like a creakier Tennyson. "The Scholar Gypsy" has been inflicted on generations of school children as the sort of thing they are supposed to like; you might call it an "eat your broccoli" poem.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, it is a knock-out of a poem isn't it, really unforgettable. One of those poems that seeps into how you experience things. I like the Keats link. Certainly I think there is something there about inspiration, not knowing when it will disappear. I do very much like a lot of Arnold, but I agree that he is not at all like Tennyson, either in style or spirit. I'm not sure how much he is read any more, beyond specialist Victorian courses (and perhaps also still for his criticism).
That Arnold poem is an interesting one. I think he's figured out that if you're fairly strict about having two non-stresses followed by a stress at the end of every line you can fool around at the beginning.
Such an interesting piece. I love poetry, but have never properly read any of the three you quote. Beautiful. I also admit that I've never been taught scansion (is that even the right word? It just came in my head). When I was a teenager I kept a little orange hardback notebook in which I copied out all my favourites...it's still on my desk today, fifty years later. It may be about to get a couple of new entries. I also was given my love of poetry by both my parents who could recite so much stuff. I hope I've passed it on.
I'm so glad! And no-one really needs to be 'taught' English scansion if they heard lots of poetry as they were growing up, just like you don't need to know any music theory to enjoy singing. My father wasn't a "literary" person at all -- I mean he only really read the financial pages and (oddly) Mills & Boon -- but he could recite lots of poems he'd been taught at school and passed them on to me that way.
Exactly. My Dad's favourite poems were Drake's Drum, which my children can recite to this day (in their thirties) and Vitai Lampada, which I adore and taught myself during lockdown! I think you've inspired a future Substack!
Interesting about Arnold. I learned Dover Beach as a child (which also does not seem to fit any clear pattern) and agree there is something memorable (and memorisable) about how he writes. I knew nothing of scansion then; I just memorised various poems I liked and it was only much later in life that I realised that most of these did have a clear regular stress pattern -- but not that one.
That other thing that struck me reading this was the date (1857). This is the same year that Tom Brown's Schooldays was published, which carries the same broad emotion as the poem, and the last chapter (in which Tom learns of Dr Arnold's death and returns to Rugby to pray in the chapel while a few town boys are outside playing cricket; text at
is uncannily similar in sentiment and detail: surely these were not written entirely independently, the end of that last chapter is almost a prose version of this poem.
Yes 'Dover Beach' is a fantastic example of an absolutely canonical (and, as you say, very memorable) poem which isn't regular either in stress or syllable count. It's actually a lot less regular than 'Rugby Chapel', though it is a bit more iambic. 'The Buried Life' also varies between 3, 4 and 5 stresses per line, as I remember.
In the days before football displaced baseball as the national pastime, most Americans were probably familiar with “Casey at the Bat”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45398/casey-at-the-bat
Since it’s a comic, narrative poem, I suppose the long iambic lines are almost required. I still remember watching a TV cartoon set to this poem.
I like how colloquial it is, mixing in common baseball slang. For example, if an inning ends with runners on base, they’re said to have “died” there.
I was intrigued by the splendid photo (although it is gulls, not swans, that are seen actually in flight…) and wondered if it showed Coole Park*. Checking Coole Park up I discovered that the swans found there are not the usual mute swan found in parks all over Europe, but Bewick’s swans and, more recently, whooper swans - both a rarer sight in Éire, the UK or France. Both are a smaller birds; I wonder if this alters the (my) sense of the poem, which invites the image of grand, stately creatures?
* it doesn’t.
You are eagle-eyed indeed! I chose it, as you imply, because it shows birds on the water and in flight, like in the poem, and was hoping not everyone would notice that they are not actually the same birds. Anyway, I agree it's a good photo. Interesting point about the swans at Coole Park, I didn't know that. Literary swans always make me think of Jonson's not-very-well-known Ode Allegorike: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/ode-allegoric
That is a splendid thing. I like the slow build-up to the full list of rivers at the end. Not Johnson’s only swan-song, either:
Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver,
Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!
(Allen Ginsberg got himself into a fearful pother in a seminar, trying to define ‘hard’ without looking it up…)
The Yeats poem is justly famous.
"Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky ..."
"Still sky" puts the smooth water into sound, "Mirrors" is a slight ripple on its surface. No, I can't prove it: you can't explain magic, if it's real.
I wonder if we are supposed to pick up on the Irish use of "creature" as an affectionate term. I'm
not very sure of this, but if so, it gives the line quite a different tone.
And does the ending
"Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?"
faintly echo the ending of Keats's Ode to a Nightingale?
" Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"
Again, I can't prove it. But in literature the really interesting things are things you can't prove.
I know Matthew Arnold is widely admired still, but I've never been able to like his verses; he seems to me like a creakier Tennyson. "The Scholar Gypsy" has been inflicted on generations of school children as the sort of thing they are supposed to like; you might call it an "eat your broccoli" poem.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, it is a knock-out of a poem isn't it, really unforgettable. One of those poems that seeps into how you experience things. I like the Keats link. Certainly I think there is something there about inspiration, not knowing when it will disappear. I do very much like a lot of Arnold, but I agree that he is not at all like Tennyson, either in style or spirit. I'm not sure how much he is read any more, beyond specialist Victorian courses (and perhaps also still for his criticism).
That Arnold poem is an interesting one. I think he's figured out that if you're fairly strict about having two non-stresses followed by a stress at the end of every line you can fool around at the beginning.
Such an interesting piece. I love poetry, but have never properly read any of the three you quote. Beautiful. I also admit that I've never been taught scansion (is that even the right word? It just came in my head). When I was a teenager I kept a little orange hardback notebook in which I copied out all my favourites...it's still on my desk today, fifty years later. It may be about to get a couple of new entries. I also was given my love of poetry by both my parents who could recite so much stuff. I hope I've passed it on.
I'm so glad! And no-one really needs to be 'taught' English scansion if they heard lots of poetry as they were growing up, just like you don't need to know any music theory to enjoy singing. My father wasn't a "literary" person at all -- I mean he only really read the financial pages and (oddly) Mills & Boon -- but he could recite lots of poems he'd been taught at school and passed them on to me that way.
Exactly. My Dad's favourite poems were Drake's Drum, which my children can recite to this day (in their thirties) and Vitai Lampada, which I adore and taught myself during lockdown! I think you've inspired a future Substack!
Interesting about Arnold. I learned Dover Beach as a child (which also does not seem to fit any clear pattern) and agree there is something memorable (and memorisable) about how he writes. I knew nothing of scansion then; I just memorised various poems I liked and it was only much later in life that I realised that most of these did have a clear regular stress pattern -- but not that one.
That other thing that struck me reading this was the date (1857). This is the same year that Tom Brown's Schooldays was published, which carries the same broad emotion as the poem, and the last chapter (in which Tom learns of Dr Arnold's death and returns to Rugby to pray in the chapel while a few town boys are outside playing cricket; text at
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1480/1480-h/1480-h.htm#link2HCH0018 )
is uncannily similar in sentiment and detail: surely these were not written entirely independently, the end of that last chapter is almost a prose version of this poem.
Yes 'Dover Beach' is a fantastic example of an absolutely canonical (and, as you say, very memorable) poem which isn't regular either in stress or syllable count. It's actually a lot less regular than 'Rugby Chapel', though it is a bit more iambic. 'The Buried Life' also varies between 3, 4 and 5 stresses per line, as I remember.
I used to teach A level English and read this with great affection and pleasure. Lovely to discover your posts through @sarahharkness.
What a purely enjoyable read!