'A later artist, Tintoretto, also did his paintings here...'

Recently Johnson's ballad parody, 'I put my hat upon my head', turned up on this blog, apropos Marianne Moore's tin ear for meter. Browsing last night in a recent charity-shop purchase, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse – edited by Kingsley Amis – I came across it again, sandwiched between two other Johnson parodies. I particularly like the last one...

Epigram

If a man who turnips cries
Cry not when his father dies,
Is it not a proof he'd rather
Have a turnip than his father?

(from Burlesque of Lines by Lope de Vega)

Ballad

I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.

(from Parodies of 'The Hermit of Warkworth')

Idyll

Hermit hoar, in solemn cell,
Wearing out life's evening grey,
Strike thy bosom, Sage, and tell
What is bliss, and which the way.

Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed,
Scarce repressed the starting tear,
When the hoary sage replied,
'Come, my lad, and drink some beer.'

(from Parody of Thomas Warton)
Thomas Warton, who became poet laureate in the year after Johnson's death, was best known for an early work, The Pleasures of Melancholy. 

From the same anthology, I also enjoyed this one, in which John Betjeman applies the plodding Hiawatha meter to La Serenissima...

Longfellow's Visit to Venice
(To be read in a quiet New England accent)

Near the celebrated Lido where the breeze is fresh and free
Stands the ancient port of Venice called the City of the Sea

All its streets are made of water, all its homes are brick and stone
Yet it has a picturesqueness which is justly all its own

Here for centuries have artists come to see the vistas quaint
Here Bellini set his easel, herе he taught his School to paint

Here thе youthful Giorgione gazed upon the domes and towers
And interpreted his era in a way which pleases ours

A later artist, Tintoretto, also did his paintings here
Massive works which generations have continued to revere

Still to-day come modern artists to portray the buildings fair
And their pictures may be purchased on San Marco's famous Square

When the bell notes from the belfries and the campaniles chime
Still to-day we find Venetians elegantly killing time

In their gilded old palazzos, while the music in our ears
Is the distant band at Florians mixed with songs of gondoliers

Thus the New World meets the Old World and the sentiments expressed
Are melodiously mingled in my warm New England breast.

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Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits

At least three literary birthdays today – Max Beerbohm (born 1872, a birthday I've marked more than once on this blog), Jean Rhys (born 1890, on the Caribbean island of Dominica) and Jorge Luis Borges, mentioned here the other day as a literary librarian. His library career took an interesting turn in 1946, when the dictator Perón got him dismissed from his post as a municipal librarian in Buenos Aires and 'reassigned' as an inspector of poultry and rabbits at public markets. This calculated insult was a punishment for his and his family's vocal opposition to Peronism, and Borges did not endure it for long. After Perón was ousted, Borges was appointed director of the National Library, a post he held until he resigned in disgust when Perón returned from exile in 1973.  

Busy

 Busy times, with much family activity, but I did manage to get away for a day's walking in the Cotswolds with my brother and friends, in the course of which I revisited the monument to the Bray children in Great Barrington church  – 'one of the finest in England,' in Mrs Esdaile's estimation (it features in this book, pp175-7). Unfortunately the long, difficult journey back from deepest Gloucestershire left me too exhausted yesterday to post my usual after-walk report. 
  Also contributing to the busyness is a small pile of books on death, ageing and longevity that I'm reading for review. Talking of ageing, here's Kay Ryan – 

As some people age they kinden.
The apertures of their eyes widen.
I do not think they weaken;
I think something weak strengthens
until they are more and more it,
like letting in heaven.
But other people are mussels or clams, frightened.
Steam or knife blades mean open.
They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken. 

Librarians

 As a former librarian, I am always keen to learn of writers, artists and musicians vastly more illustrious than me who also worked as librarians at some point in their lives. So far, my list includes Proust (who took a job as a volunteer librarian, to please his father, but hardly ever turned up for work), Marcel Duchamp (who worked briefly as a librarian, to free his mind for other things), Borges of course (director of the National Library of Argentina for 18 years), Marianne Moore (library assistant at the New York Public Library's Hudson Park branch during the 1920s), Hector Berlioz (librarian at the Paris Conservatoire), Philip Larkin of course (university librarian at Hull), Anne Tyler (assistant librarian at McGill University Law School) and Angus Wilson (British Museum Library, as it then was, before and after the war). Has anybody got any more names to add to the list?
   And then, of course, there is Keith Richards, bibliophile extraordinaire, who spent many happy boyhood hours in Dartford public library, was fascinated by the Dewey decimal system, and might well have been a librarian if his career hadn't taken a somewhat different path. In 1998 he suffered the least rock'n'roll accident that ever befell a rock god, when he fell off his library steps while reaching for a book, breaking three ribs and puncturing a lung. You can read about it here (and follow the link, if you can, to one of the most curious books in my own library).  

'Well, sir...'

 The weather has cooled off at last, and there was even a little rain last night, creating the first puddles I've seen in weeks – a welcome sight. With memories of the July-August heatwaves still fresh, here is an apposite Wodehouse quote that I came across today: 

'Do you know what Jeeves said when I asked him why, during a spell hotter than Bobbie Wickham's hosiery, I had never seen the man sweat? He replied, "Well, sir. From a personal standpoint I've never seen the need for it."'

[Bobbie Wickham is the fun-loving hottie, described by Aunt Dahlia as a 'one-woman beauty chorus', who recurs in various Jeeves and Mulliner stories,]

An Eliot Centenary

 Born 100 years ago today was Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher), the second wife of the poet, and apparently the one who made him happy. The couple lived in Kensington, just around the corner from Ivy Compton-Burnett, and their paths crossed from time to time. On one occasion, the three of them shared a taxi back from a party in Knightsbridge, and in the course of the journey Ivy talked of nothing but the forthcoming Rent Act, cake shops, fishmongers, greengrocers on the Gloucester Road, where to get the best fillet steak, and the iniquity of having to pay her porter five shillings to bring up her coals. Quite the feast of reason and flow of soul...
  Ivy found the phenomenon of 'Mr Eliot's bride' quite fascinating. 'Apparently she's always adored him,' she told Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist), 'although she was his secretary for years. I am sure if I had been his secretary for a fortnight I should have wanted to poison him, not marry him... Yes, I should have run round to the chemist's for three pennyworth of poison after a very short time.'

Tennyson's Painted Tongue

 Last night's Gardeners' World included a report from Farringford, Tennyson's estate on the Isle of Wight, where the garden, which had been entirely lost, has been restored to something very like its original appearance – much like an English cottage garden in style, but quite grand in scale. It looks delightful, and the gardeners responsible have done a great job. From them I learned that Tennyson's favourite flower was no native, but the somewhat exotic Salpiglossis or Painted Tongue (that's one of its many varieties pictured above). Perhaps unsurprisingly, he never celebrated the Salpiglossis in verse, but the little flower poem below can be found on a plaque under Watts's imposing statue of the poet that stands outside Lincoln cathedral. The statue shows him with his dog – a Siberian wolfhound called Karenina – at his side and a flower (presumably from the crannied wall) in his hand. 

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

('Crannies', 'man is' – quite the rhyme.)