The Columbia History of British Poetry (30 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 126
But he'd eaten the balance, you see
("Scale" and "balance" is punning, you see).
Gilbert's troubadours could no more succor a Jew than one of them could bring himself to win freedom for a maid behind bars for stealing a watch, although paradox fights on even terms with prejudice in "The Bishop and the 'Busman," where the lowly driver learns that he could win the bishop's daughter merely by losing his Jewish features. The puns of "The Yarn of the Nancy Bell" depend upon the vernacular: "'I'll be eat if you dines off me,' says Tom." Seeming satirically fierce when they appeared week by week in
Fun
, the Babs have been prized since as the chief source of Gilbert's Savoy operas.
Raising the spirits of a smaller audience than Gilbert's, C. S. Calverley built the firmest bridge between
Gaultier
and Betjeman. Rejecting the siren's call of absurdity, he praised and deplored beer, tobacco, the means and hazards of transportation, nursery tales, and ballads. Even the line "Bowers of flowers encounter showers," in "Lovers, and a Reflection," would be admired by Calverley's fans less for the ingenuity than for the burlesque of Jean Ingelow's Romantic sentiment. His "Ballad," a parody of Ingelow that takes in Gabriel Rossetti as well, italicizes a refrain to point up a lack of sense in the poetry parodied: "The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair / (
Butter and eggs and a Pound of cheese
)."
Early on, Calverley was supreme at knocking the vertebrae out of doggerel while squeezing the air out of puppy love:
At my side she mashed the fragrant
  Strawberry; lashes soft as silk
Drooped o'er saddened eyes, when vagrant
  Gnats sought watery graves in milk:
but early and late his narratives of unrequited lovemore subjective than comicall end, poignantly or not, in anticlimax. The reader anticipates the ending when "The people said that she was blue: / But I was green, and loved her dearly."
Most of Calverley's parodies are light verse that would weigh nothing at all except that the reader recalls the originals. Exceptionally, his parody "The Cock and the Bull" devastated admirers of Browning:
You see this pebble-stone? It's a thing I bought
Of a chit of a boy i' the mid o' the day
I like to dock the smaller parts-o'-speech,
 
Page 127
As we curtail the already cur-tail'd cur
(You catch the paronomasia, play 'po' words?)
Even in travesty of Browning, Calverley maintains his own rhythm; in "The City of Dreadful Night" his contemporary James Thomson ("B. V.") displays ingenuity of structure, stanza, and rhyme, but the occasional fractures in rhythm would disqualify him almost as much as his persistent gloom from competition on Calverley's ground. A translator of Homer, Horace, and Theocritus, Calverley translated into Latin, eccentrically enough, verses of Tennyson, Keble, and Hemans.
Calverley's rival for pure talent in the manipulation of language, J. K. Stephen, produced such telling, durable parodies that they have eclipsed the other light verse in his
Lapsus Calami
(1891). E. C. Bentley gave his middle name, Clerihew, to biographies, designed to trivialize accomplishment, in four lines of unequal length:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said "I'm going to dine with some men,
"If anybody calls
"Say I'm designing St. Paul's."
Anticlimax usually begins in the second line, as here and in "Sir Humphry Davy / Abominated gravy." Bentley's "Ballade of Plain Common Sense" laments the inability of wise versifiers to awaken in a world of political and moral wreckage the "great, long, furry ears" of common sense.
G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and R. A. Knox, as Catholics, revived Dryden's vein of religious satire. Knox (brother of the parodist E. V. Knox) in "Absolute and Abitofhell" characteristically brought to heel the Canon of Hertford, who "Corrected 'I believe', to 'One does feel.'" Chesterton's verses go occasionally to the edge of nonsense, but return in praise of faith and stronger drink than ale. Belloc's
Cautionary Tales
(1907) created political portraits, "Godolphin Horne, Who Was Cursed with the Sin of Pride, and Became a Boot-black"; "Lord Lundy, Who Was Too Freely Moved to Tears, and Thereby Ruined His Political Career." In contrast with satiric aggression against the beliefs of others, May Kendall, in parodies and pellucid lyrics with a burden of thought, analyzed in
Dreams to Sell
(1887) the anxieties induced by discoveries in biology, astronomy, physics, and geology. When a trilobite

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