Ellisland Farm. Robert Burns,(1759-96) farmed here from 1788 until 1791 where he composed, “Auld Lang Syne.”(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
How is this for a Flashback Friday? Happy 2016, my friends. If you sang this song just after midnight last night, my guess is that you didn’t sing all the original words (though if you did, I want to know–that’s fantastic!), nor did you sing them to the original tune.
I’m not sure about the details of how and when this changed, and I am too busy relaxing today to look it up. If you care to do the research, please give me some sources in the comments. I’d love to read more about it (later).
But this lazy first day of 2016, in which I rest with coffee, leftovers, notebooks, and music, I wanted to share this lovely version, sung by Paolo Nutini. I love the harmony, and the multiple instruments involved. I’m not sure if the video was made to look old or if it was just poor picture quality (something else I am too lazy to look into just now), because Nutini is rather a new-ish voice, since he was born about the time I graduated high school.
It’s been a hard year, and a good one both, each for many a reason. But here’s to making 2016 a year of peace, of joy, and of achieving our dreams. Let’s get to work, shall we?
I don’t know what Robert Frost was thinking when he jotted those words in his notes, “I have envied the four moon planet.” Or maybe he never wrote them at all. Maybe Billy Collins just made the whole thing up. I’ll have to read The Notebooks of Robert Frost to find out for sure. But it’s a lovely poem that Billy created from Frost’s idea.
And since aliens and outer space are sometimes subjects of scary movies and costumes (I’ve dressed as an alien for Halloween, haven’t you?), then maybe it’s not too much of a stretch to make “The Four Moon Planet” by Billy Collins our October 31st Thursday Love Poem. You know, it being Halloween and all, and we bloggers feeling this market-driven need to relate everything to everything else.
Come to think of it, isn’t that what poets do? I recall Billy saying as much in another poem. “The Trouble with Poetry,” I believe it was.
Aside: And while I’m thinking of it, if you managed to miss the former Poet Laureate reading, quipping, and doing poetry tricks with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report Tuesday night, treat yourself by clicking here.
But what’s a Thursday Love Poem, you ask? Well, let me quote myself from last Thursday, when we enjoyed the first ever Thursday Love Poem. Last week we were dumped unceremoniously by Edna St. Vincent Millay via the Thursday Love Poem feature’s flagship poem, appropriately called “Thursday.”
. . . And what should a Thursday Love Poem be here on The Dad Poet? Well, let’s face it, it’s got to be a bit unconventional. No Hallmark cards of course, and none of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Not that your sweetheart doesn’t deserve a nice greeting card, and not they the Bard’s love poems are not a delight (come to think of it a few might actually fit in here) . . . But we have already read Robert Burns’, “my luv is like a red red rose.” Here I want to share something different, off-center, unexpected, something that resonates, but may not be what you expect from a love poem.
. . . I do not wish to act as if true love and romance in a poem is “dishonest,” as some writers claim. But for a poem to be a Thursday Love Poem it will have to look at that tenderness squinting sideways, maybe standing on its head, in order to give us a unique view, one other than what the masses have come to expect of a love poem.
In other words a Thursday Love Poem isn’t your grandmother’s love poem, baby.
And so for this Thursday Love Poem we go galactic, but subtly with the master of wit and winsomeness, Billy Collins. Perhaps I’ll make a brief comment or two below the poem’s text.
The Four-Moon Planet
I have envied the four-moon planet.
-The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Maybe he was thinking of the song
“What a Little Moonlight Can do”
and became curious about
what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.
But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?
and what if you couldn’t tell them apart
and they always rose together
like pale quadruplets entering a living room?
Yes, there would be enough light
to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
and if you drank enough tequila
you might see eight of them roving brightly above.
But think of the two lovers on a beach,
his arm around her bare shoulder,
thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.
Alright then. You have heard me defend Collins, as if he needs defending, from those who criticize his “simplicity,” using the word “accessible” as if it were a bad thing, as if erecting an electric, barbed-wire fence around an art museum were a good idea. You have heard me say a hundred times that accessibility does not equal simplicity. Neither does complexity, ambiguity, or depth of thought require linguistic word puzzles meant to lose the reader and prove how very clever and intelligent the poet is. Collins is certainly accessible, but he’s anything but simplistic.
And this poem is a prime example. It may also serve as an illustration of why I love poetry so much. Prose might have simply told us, “In matters of love we are so unknowably different from each other that we are doomed to have wildly divergent views of what our relationship actually is.” Or, “We never see each other for who we are, and nobody could ever truly know the other’s thoughts.”
This is probably all true; it might even be a revelation, but how beautifully Collins sets us up, not to tell us this, but to let us discover it ourselves in the final line, “while he gazed at one moon and she another.” He says it without ever saying it. And the result is that tiny gasp, maybe not the freezing, headless sensation Emily Dickinson described, but a tug in the gut that makes me feel something true. And it comes about from a carefully laid trap that I am glad to have fallen into, the way I am glad when Agatha Christie brilliantly shows me why I should have known all along what Miss Marple understood about the murderer. This is why I can’t get enough good poems in my life, getting slapped in the gut, liking it, and asking for more.
This blog seems to get a lot of hits from people googling for “love poems.” Internet searches for love poems in general peak every February because of St. Valentine’s Day, but the Dad Poet gets at least a few searches for them every day.
So I have decided to add a new feature, the Thursday Love Poem. I don’t want you to expect this every Thursday. I mean I’m not committing myself here. This is just for fun, and like Edna St. Vincent Millay I don’t want to be tied down.
To be honest, I hope you don’t take such jokes too seriously. Millay was married to her husband for 26 years, until the day of his death, and she followed just over a year later. Whatever you think of any “arrangements” she and her husband may have had, it appears they loved and were committed to each other.
Millay still gets a lot of flack for some of the poems in A Few Figs From Thistles. I believe she was well aware of the dangers of burning candles at both ends, and building houses in the sand. But in her beautiful, seemingly glib little pieces were gems of truth about how we all really are at the heart. They were telling commentary too about the spirit of the women’s movement at the time. I think the point was that if men can act this way, why not women?
Whether a poet is writing about historical fact or not is never the point. It’s whether the emotions are honest even if the facts are fabricated or exaggerated. But many who wish to make every poem a poet’s confession in morality court will miss the point. I could go on, but I am writing a response to an article by a jealous moralist who doesn’t know what she’s gotten herself into, and I will share that here when I am done.
Meanwhile I’ve promised a Thursday Love Poem, and what should a Thursday Love Poem be here on The Dad Poet? Well, let’s face it, it’s got to be a bit unconventional. No Hallmark cards of course, and none of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Not that your sweetheart doesn’t deserve a nice greeting card, and not they the Bard’s love poems are not a delight (actually one or two could fit in here). It’s not that Blake’s verses didn’t walk “in beauty as the night.” But we have already read Robert Burns’, “my luv is like a red red rose.” Here I want to share something different, off center, unexpected, something that resonates, though it doesn’t fit the traditional love poem mold.
On the other side of love’s penny, I do not wish to act as if true love and romance in a poem is “dishonest,” as some writers claim. But for a poem to be a Thursday Love Poem it will have to look at that tenderness squinting sideways, maybe standing on its head, in order to give us a unique view, one other than what the masses have come to expect of a love poem.
In other words a Thursday Love Poem isn’t your grandmother’s love poem, baby.
As an example I present to you now the flagship poem of this new Thursday feature, the biting little satire on the fickleness of the human heart, by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s entitled appropriately (She wrote this just for the Thursday Love Poem feature and has been waiting a very long time for me to post this) “Thursday.”
THURSDAY
AND if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday–
So much is true.
And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,–yes–but what
Is that to me?
