The Maladroit Muse

When I attempted to look up D. B. Wyndham Lewis on the Internet, Google kindly asked me if I didn’t really mean Percy Wyndham Lewis. Emphatically not. The Vorticist painter (whose age, it was suggested, could be estimated by counting the rings on his collar) was not known for his sense of humour. His namesake, on the other hand, was the first ‘Beachcomber’ of the Daily Express, and the collaborator with Ronald Searle on the tales of that least conventional of ladies’ academies, St Trinian’s. But he was overshadowed by his successor, J. B. Morton, and likewise by Searle’s brilliant drawings.

DB, however, doesn’t deserve the oblivion into which time appears to be edging him, if only because he was one of the two begetters of an ‘anthology of bad verse’ which he and Charles Lee – a quiet and unobtrusive writer of Cornish novels – entitled The Stuffed Owl. The title, I’ve always believed, was prompted by the prize for ‘the dullest literary work of the year’ awarded in the 1920s by Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. The trophy was a stuffed owl, and its first recipients were J. C. Squire and Edward Shanks. (When it came to Harold Nicolson, they ran out of owls, and his prize consisted, so Edith Sitwell said, of ‘a curiously mangy cat, playing with some diseased mice and surmounted by a huge dome of glass’.) In his Preface, Lewis suggests that there is Bad Bad Verse and Good Bad Verse: ‘Bad Bad Verse is a strong but inexperienced female child doggedly attacking Debussy’s Fêtes in a remote provincial suburb on a hire-payment pianoforte from the Swiftsure Furnishing Stores. Good Bad Verse is Rummel or Lamond executing Warblings at Eve at Queen’s Hall on a Bechstein concert-grand.’ One doesn’t have to look far to realize that he has got it right, with the anonymous hymn-writers and amateur poets gathered together in category one, and the great names of English poetry treading stately after them. The Bad Bad Poets are perhaps easy game, and one’s reactions to them are almost always, alas, condescending. What can you do except condescend in the face of the pious hymnist eager to show the whole of creation uniting in one gigantic hymn of praise?

Earth from afar has heard Thy fame, And worms have learned to lisp Thy name.

Other worms, however, are made of sterner stuff, or so the Wesleyan hymn book rather ambitiously suggests:

O may Thy powerful word Inspire the feeble worm To rush into Thy Kingdom, Lord, And take it as by storm.

Bad poetry in general seems to focus quite strongly on religious and moral instruction, and the Grim Reaper plays a prominent part. There are quite a lot of dead bodies around, and they are greeted with some excitement: ‘Ah, lovely appearance of Death’, enthuses Charles Wesley,

What sight upon earth is so fair? Not all the gay pageants that breathe Can with a dead body compare.

The God of Bathos works busily among the Bad Bad Poets when they contemplate death. A US Congressman, H. C. Canfield, felt it his duty to provide a commemorative poem on the occasion of the loss of a US submarine, and came up with a quatrain which sticks in the memory with all the tenacity of epoxy resin:

Entrapt inside a submarine, With death approaching on the scene, The crew compose their minds to dice, More for the pleasure than the vice.

A seventeenth-century poet in his ‘Funeral Elegie upon the Death of George Sonds, Esq.’ was none the less sincere, but none the less bathetic:

Reach me a Handcerchiff, Another yet, And yet another, for the last is wett.

The Bad Bad Poets are easy game. The Good Bad Poets, who should know better, are worthier targets. Some of the best of them have a genius for producing just the Wrong Word on the Wrong Subject. What on earth possessed the pious Henry Vaughan not to think twice about the line ‘How brave a prospect is a bright backside’? Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’ was perhaps doomed from its conception (I ask you, a poem about his losing £3,000 in a wood-carving scheme?), but were its subject never so noble, the abrupt appearance of the line ‘He suddenly dropt dead of heart disease’ would surely have put paid to it. The Wrong Image is an equally fatal gift: Meredith produced one which it is difficult to expunge from the memory:

Now Vengeance has a brood of eggs, But Patience must be hen.

Sometimes it’s the ear which fails even the best of poets. Tennyson’s toweringly chauvinistic and snobbish poem ‘To the Lord of Burleigh’ (whose love for a village maid could never be expected to come to the good) finally falls completely to pieces in its last stanza:

‘Bring the dress and put it on her, That she wore when she was wed.’ Then her people, softly treading, Bore to earth her body, drest In the dress that she was wed in, That her spirit might have rest.

Wordsworth struck a similarly deadly blow to English Rhyme in the couplet:

That is a work of waste and ruin; Consider, Charles, what you are doing.

It is all too easy to pick single plums from The Stuffed Owl, but there are lengthier and no less memorably turgid stretches of English poetry. Some of them combine flaccid lines and bathetic fantasy. Isaac Watts was sincere in his celebration of ‘the dear memory of Thomas Gunston, Esq.’, but his lengthy description of an angel showing the deceased round Heaven (‘The buildings struck him with immense surprise’) is not the most solemn of visions. Edward Jerningham was equally sincere in writing a poem (‘Il Latte’ ) in praise of breast-feeding. It is long and impassioned, but his last verse perhaps lets him down:

Unsway’d by Fashion’s dull unseemly jest, Still to the bosom let your infant cling, There banquet oft, an ever-welcome guest, Unblam’d inebriate at that healthy spring.

One T. Baker was so besotted by the coming of the railway that he celebrated it in a poem (‘Great Western Days’) of no less than ten cantos. His experience is not, alas, common to today’s travellers at our main termini:

The ardent tourist who gay scenes admires To join his train with rapt’rous joy aspires.

However, the poet who chalks up the highest score for doing the Muse an injury is Wordsworth (who else? you ask). I suppose my favourite lines must be from ‘Liberty’ – and yes, we’re back to the garden.

The far-fetched worm with pleasure would disown The bed we give him, though of softest down.

Can’t you just see him, his little bald head on the pillow? The Stuffed Owl isn’t a book, of course, to read right through in one sitting. Put it by the bedside – a good exhausting laugh is the best of soporifics. For happy dippers, Mr Lewis provides a convenient index, which in itself is worth careful study, with such entries as ‘Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse’, ‘Heaven, system of book-keeping in’, and ‘Goats, Welsh, their agility envied by botanist’. But I must stop. If you are not convinced that this is a book no one can do without, all I can do is rest my case with the words of Julia Moore:

And now, kind friends, what I have wrote, I hope you will pass o’er, And not criticize as some have done Hitherto herebefore.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © Derek Parker 2006