bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with poetry

Sometimes when I am sick I like to read poetry, and sometimes in the winter I like to read Arthuriana. Last week I was both so I decided to read the ancient paperback copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s been sitting on my shelf for I don’t know how long. I can tell the copy is ancient because the price on the front cover is 95 cents. You can’t buy anything for 95 cents anymore.

I’d read J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of this a few years ago, but it was long enough ago that I was ready to give the poem a “reread,” although this translation is by one Brian Stone. Brian Stone may not have written The Lord of the Rings but he does seem to know what he is about as far as medieval poetry goes, as well as the art of translation. I found this version of the poem gripping, surreal, and full of lively, concrete detail. The story itself is fey and freaky, and also seasonal–Gawain’s deadline is the New Year, so most of it takes place during that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s when time comes unmoored and we are all confused and full of cheese.

The storyline is simple enough. One New Year’s, the Green Knight comes to Arthur’s court and demands to play a game–one of Arthur’s knights will cut his head off, and then in a year, the Knight will return the blow. Young Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, takes up the challenge and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and is like “See you in a year! Come find me” and rides out. Gawain procrastinates trying to find the Green Knight again until after Halloween, then goes riding around the countryside looking for the Green Knight’s chapel, to no avail. Around Christmas, he finds himself in a strange castle in an icy wood, and becomes the guest of the jovial castellan and his lady. The castellan tells him that he knows exactly where the Green Knight’s chapel is, and it’s less than two miles away, so Gawan should feel free to just hang out and celebrate Christmas week. This he does. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, the castellan goes out hunting, and Gawain stays in and gets in a set of awkward politeness dances with the castellan’s lady, a sorceress who is trying to seduce him. In an interesting set of scenes, which read as very gender-swapped from a modern perspective, Gawain tries to defend his chastity without doing anything as impolite as overtly refusing the lady, caught between two opposing standards of honorable behavior. Gawain navigates this dilemma mostly cleanly but does find himself succumbing to the temptation of letting the lady give him her girdle as a favor, although this is less because he wants the lady’s favor than because it is a magical green girdle that is enchanted so the wearer of it can never be harmed. Gawain wears this convenient item to his appointment with the Green Knight, whose blow cuts through the skin of his neck but stops at the muscle, leaving Gawain with just a superficial cut, which will scar to remind him forever that he did do a tiny little sin in order to save his own life. Gawain is very penitent about this because a knight should face death fearlessly, but the Giant thinks it’s incredibly funny and that it’s very understandable to value your own life, and forgives him. In fact, the Green Knight, who unsurprisingly is also the castellan, knew all about his enchantress wife’s seduction attempts and thinks that Gawain is a jolly fellow who handled his tests pretty well, and considers them BFFs now. All the rest of Arthur’s knights are also pretty pleased that Gawain’s not dead once he gets back to Camelot.

Thus is the story, in brief, but the point of epic poetry is not to tell it in brief, it is to tell it very dramatically and with lots of scene-setting about the shining and richly embroidered armor and clothes and stuff everyone is wearing, and the food they are eating, and the savage beauty of the northern English or maybe Welsh countryside in the middle of bitter winter. This the poem does beautifully. The introduction tells us that it also describes armor and hunting and other parts of medieval life very accurately, showing that the anonymous author of the poem was well acquainted with courtly life and generally knew what he was about. I don’t know much about hunting so it’s nice to know I am not being led astray.

Really good medieval poetry really is quite like nothing else; the atmospherics are great and the rhythms of alliterative poetry are very unlike that of the rhyming poetry that would come to dominate later eras of English literature. I am always very glad when I revisit one of these types of works when they are translated well.

The first book I finished this year (I started it a few days ago but it counts for 2025!) was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, one of the great works of nineteenth century medievalism, a time period I unabashedly love because it feels like the first real modern invention of fantasy nerds. Except it took itself with typical Victorian dead moral seriousness (the morals were sometimes bad, but they were for sure serious) and is even now taken with dead artistic seriousness.

The copy of the Idylls that I own was acquired for a mere $5 at Brimfield, probably because the spine and slipcover are so faded. Inside, it is a really very lovely edition, with thick linen paper and deeply stamped print, and fanciful full-page line drawings of what appear to be not just the characters but specifically statues of the characters, on pedestals in little alcoves like you’d find in an old cathedral. This is one of the factors that made it a good winter break book, since I didn’t need to take it anywhere and could just go full sitting-by-the-fire cozy and be generally picturesque about it. I feel like the kinds of people who did Victorian medievalism would appreciate that.

Anyway. The Idylls are several narrative poems about different characters in and around King Arthur and his Round Table, some of whom I was already familiar with and some of them, apparently, I was not. Some of the key moments of Arthuriana are in there, such as the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the Fall of Arthur, and the winning of Guenevere. There are also a number of tales of essentially random knights of the Table, which are fun. There are a few tales of basically the tragic glories of heterosexuality, some of which are better than others. The tale of Lancelot and Elaine is effective in presaging the ruin that Lancelot and Guenevere’s adulterous love for each other will wreak on Camelot, although I am probably not the right audience to be fully bought into a story about how noble it is for a teenage girl to die of heartbreak over a guy three times her age. (Snap out of it, Elaine!) The most painful poem was the one between the heathen sorceress Vivien and famous old guy Merlin, in which Vivien tries to seduce Merlin into telling her a charm that will let her essentially bury Merlin alive but magically. Because Merlin is supposed to be wise and old and not a complete fucking idiot man who will do any fool thing the instant a pretty girl asks him to, this poem is really fucking long, as it takes an interminable time for Vivien to wear Merlin down into doing the transparently idiotic thing, so we are treated to pages and pages of painfully gender essentialist pseudo-medieval-but-actually-Victorian moral speechifying. This is the one poem that I will denounce as just straight up bad. In the rest of them, the general Victorian gender nonsense is certainly there, but also they are good poems and good stories, full of evocative imagery and daring deeds and all that good stuff, and it would be silly to expect a Victorian story about early medieval times to be about exploring today’s moral dilemmas, anyway. So all the stuff about Christianity and bloodlines and whatever is just part of the worldbuilding, and I can roll with it, even up to and including basically blaming Guenevere personally for the entire realm falling apart. But the Vivien one is just too much.

While the first couple Idylls are fun and even lighthearted (“Gareth and Lynette” is very funny and cute), as the story progresses the sense of melancholy and foreboding grow, and Tennyson’s overall take on the glories of Arthur’s rule seems to be that it was ultimately a failure. This is done very well and further makes the book an excellent choice for gloomy midwinter reading. It’s all very tragic and sad, and Tennyson never once fucks up his scansion or any of that other stuff that’s important to the actual craft of lyrical poetry, which is very impressive. It definitely makes me want to immediately run and read more Arthuriana rather than feeling like I’ve had my fill of it for now.

My yearlong read for 2024 was a very fancy copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which I had never had to read in school, even during the three weeks when were trying to speed-learn Middle English (I think we might have looked real quick at the prologue, but that was it).

The Canterbury Tales is very serious foundational English literature, which is why there are copies of it with leather binding and gold-edged pages and ribbon bookmarks, and all the bells and whistles. But despite what I thought was a decent amount of familiarity with the idea that classics are usually classics because they are good and entertaining and the things that make stories good and entertaining is that they are usually at least a little bit funny and a little bit insane, I was still not quite prepared for how chaotic this work was. The individual tales vary wildly in tone and genre and content and, occasionally form–most of them are told in verse, but an apparently random handful are told in prose. They each have a prologue that connects them back to the frame story, introducing who will tell the next tale and chronicling the general bickering and nonsense between the pilgrims.

A possible alternate title for this work would be “Are The Straights Okay?: The Poem,” and I must say that from my vantage point the straights do not seem to be particularly okay. A bunch of the stories are basically dumb sitcom Boomer humor about how marriage is terrible and the opposite sex is out to get you and women are awful for not endlessly submissive to their shitty husbands, although there are also a number of stories about how the shitty husbands deserve to be humiliated for being shitty. Some of these are very funny, like The Miller’s Tale, in which a young wife and her affair partner (a student who boards with them) play a series of tricks on both the dimwitted husband and a random local who is also in love with the wife, which culminates in tricking the wannabe affair partner into kissing the actual affair partner’s butthole. But there are other times when the various characters on pilgrimage appear to be trying to earnestly dispense worldly wisdom about marriage and men and women and I’m not sure if their ideas about good marriages or bad marriages are more appalling. The prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, which for some reason is like twice as long as the Tale itself, is simultaneously a full biography of the Wife’s marriages and completely incomprehensible. Reading it made me grimace so hard I almost got my face stuck like that.

Possibly one reason the straights are not okay is that they are all, regardless of their personal level of devotion, extremely Catholic. Catholicism permeates every word of this book, and not just the beliefs of Catholicism, but the omnipresence of the Church as the main institution in society. Catholicism is essentially hostile to both straight people and non-straight people, but differently. It also employed a huge number of people around the 1390s or whenever these poems were being written. Because it employed so many people, they could not all actually be pure of heart and godly of soul and ascetic of body and all that stuff good Catholics are supposed to be. This is great for the poem, and some of the funniest bits are about various clerically employed people who are bad at their jobs or who at least all hate each other. My favorite Tales in the book are the Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale, which come one after the other, because the Friar and the Summoner hate each other’s guts. The Friar’s tale is about how summoners are all nosy, greedy douchebags who would frame their own mothers for crimes for a nickel, which has fun ACAB energy. The Summoner’s tale in return is about how friars are hypocritical layabouts and freeloaders whose supposed vows of poverty rake in too much free loot from people with real jobs, and involves a guy tricking a friar into letting him fart into his hand, and then some sort of weird riddle where they have to figure out how to apportion a fart into equal shares and distribute it to all the friars. But my absolute favorite part, and possibly the best single page of poetry in all of English literature, is the prologue to the Summoner’s tale, in which an angel transports a sleeping friar in a dream to Hell, and the friar is like “I don’t see any friars here, is that ‘cause we’re all so good and holy?” and the angel is like “No, they’re around,” and then it turns out that all the dead friars in Hell live inside Satan’s butthole. Hilarious! Very serious classic literature is all about farts and Satan’s butthole, don’t you know.

Another very funny part is The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where a canon shows up like “I heard we’re telling stories” and his yeoman is like “COOL I HAVE A STORY it’s about a canon who is an alchemist and a FRAUD, all the alchemists are FRAUDS, here’s how they trick people into giving them money DON’T GIVE MY BOSS MONEY” and truly people are people at all times in history (this is, in all seriousness, the point of reading classic literature).

Tragically not all of the Tales are this funny. The worst offender unfortunately occurs right at the end, with The Parson’s Tale, which is not a poem nor even a tale, but merely a 50-page sermon on sin (spoiler: Catholics think basically everything is sin). It ends with Chaucer apologizing for everything he’s written and translated in his life that isn’t appropriately religious, including for writing the naughtier of The Canterbury Tales. This is a huge bummer of a note to end on. I am biased because I am an unrepentant Catholic apostate, but I do think that the literary tradition of the West would be significantly impoverished without that section of poetry about dead friars living in Satan’s butthole.

I don’t know if it was the rainy weather or what during my trip to Maine but after reading The Silent People I decided I had not had enough depressing reading for that trip, so I started the saddest book I had brought: The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. I remembered one or two of them from high school English and the poetry survey I took in college, especially “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which I’m pretty sure is the most famous.

This collection was very good for rounding out my picture of the man behind the poems; it has a good long introduction and timeline of Owen’s life and an appendix that I think was an introduction to an earlier published collection of his works, which features a lot of excerpts from his letters. This was interesting to me just as additional historical background on World War One, but it also does tie in what was going on when specific poems were being drafted, which is pretty cool. The poems themselves are split up into three segments: the first is war poetry, which is what Owen was most famous for; the second is fragments and unfinished poems; and the third is his juvenilia/pre-war poetry, which is interesting but quite frankly not as good.

The war poems are pretty harrowing. That is, after all, the point, and they are executed brilliantly. There’s not really anything new that my sheltered ass can say about them; they are correctly and widely acknowledged as being some of the best English war poems, in a war that produced a large body of excellent poetry.

Since I am in my epic poetry era and was apparently also doing Medieval January, I decided to follow up Beowulf with a much later medieval epic that I’ve had sitting on my TBR shelves for much longer: the twelfth-century German poem The Song of the Nibelungs, also known sometimes by its actual German name The Nibelungenlied. The copy I have is from the ‘70s and is a verse translation by one Frank G. Ryder.

This saga tells the story of Siegfried of the Netherlands, the most heroic hero to ever hero (as the subjects of all heroic epics are), and his wife Kriemhild of Burgundy, who is of course the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Siegfried does various heroic deeds to win Kriemhild’s hand in marriage, including helping her brother, the Burgundian King Gunther, win another superlatively lovely maiden’s hand, the Icelandic princess Brunhild. Gunther and Brunhild’s marriage, starting off strong with trickery and lies, puts into motion a series of events that culminates in Siegfried’s murder by one Hagen of Trony, a vassal of Gunther’s. Hagen is not punished even though everyone knows he did it—in part because he stole Sigfrid’s sword in the process—because these people have no concept of a trial apparently, and I guess they expect Kriemhild to just get over it eventually.

Kriemhild, however, is not one to get over things, and after several years of staying at the Burgundian court crying, she marries the recently bereaved Attila the Hun. I think it is supposed to be that Attila the Hun even though this one is kind of useless and never picks up a sword the whole poem. Everyone thinks Kriemhild is finally getting over Siegfried but in fact she’s just playing a long (though not real subtle) game where she invites the whole Burgundian court to come visit her and then gets all her Huns to fight them until literally everybody dies. And that’s the story, basically.

More than anything else, this poem is a fascinating look into the chivalric mindset and its frankly bonkers set of ideals. The first noticeable thing is that it has a bad case of the superlatives. Everything mentioned is the most thing to ever thing. Ever knight is the strongest and most valiant knight, every woman is the most beautiful woman, every occasion of gift-giving is the most generous display of largesse in the history of largesse, every outfit is the richest outfit, you get the idea. It’s honestly a little silly. Another noticeable thing is that everything must be done through personal prowess at arms. Kriemhild would rather get tens of thousands of knights killed in a big epic multi-phase fight than learn how to poison Hagen or even slit his throat in his sleep. However, it’s hard not to conclude that this is sort of what everybody deserves, given how much time everyone spends in the final act wibbling about the ethics of killing each other based on stuff like guest-right and kinship networks and oaths of fealty but absolutely nobody but Kriemhild gives a single shit that Hagen murdered Sigfrid.

That said, the poem is still a grand old sword-swingin’ time, and I’m glad I finally read it.

This summer, at a used bookstore in Maine, for the low low price of four dollars I picked up a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf–the one with the Old English text on the verso-side pages and the modern English translation on the recto sides–and for six months or so have been nurturing cozy visions of reading it in January, the traditional time of year when I get obsessed with medieval and ancient world literature of the frigid North, ensconced in blankets while January happens outside. I kind of originally envisioned doing this as soon as the new year kicked off but I got delayed by the enormous tome that was Menewood, but I am pleased to say that I still got this poem in in two sittings in January. I read Heaney’s magnificent introduction and the first few pages of the poem’s text itself in the bath, which was lovely, and then zipped through most of the poem on Sunday, despite several attempts to slow down and puzzle out what was going on on the left-hand pages.

The very basic storyline of Beowulf is, as many have pointed out, mainly a bonkers action movie. Works like Beowulf have a long legacy in popular culture even if it’s mostly students and scholars that read the poem itself anymore. The poem follows a big damn hero with the strength of thirty men, as he single-handedly arm-wrestles the monster Grendel to death, then fights Grendel’s mom in an epic underwater hand-to-hand combat (he uses weapons this time but he has to find an epic sword in Grendel’s mom’s lair because his regular epic sword wasn’t epic enough), and then at the end of his life he heroically battles a dragon, slightly less single-handedly this time because he needs a young sidekick to witness his epic passing and the sidekick has to do something useful in order to be worthy of being Beowulf’s sidekick. The sidekick’s name is Wiglaf, and he is not a comic relief character like “a sidekick named Wiglaf” would be these days.

The basic storyline is only sort of the point. The point is the atmosphere, and the wild world of mead-halls and war, and the heroic warrior code that makes such great songs even though it seems like such a truly awful way to live it’s amazing that so many human societies stuck with it for so long. Genealogies and gold are apparently also the point; there are a lot of both. Heaney’s somber (mostly), stately (again, mostly), Ulster-inflected translation really brings a certain weight and tone, even if I did have to look up some of the more obscure Hiberno-English and other niche English terms he uses (I had a good giggle at “hirpling,” and then looked it up; it’s a Scottish term for limping). Heaney’s introduction, which I probably didn’t give quite the studious attention I should have given that I was reading it bath (mostly for the sake of not bringing a library book into the bath; I still wasn’t done with Menewood), is tailor-made to be Relevant To My Interests, starting off with some praising of Professor Tolkien for his critical treatment of i>Beowulf as a work of art and not just a historic artifact, and working its way through Heaney’s feelings about the cultural politics of the English and Irish languages.

A notable thing about Beowulf is that although it is a Foundational Work of English Literature, and written from a Christian perspective, the story it tells takes place in the pagan long-ago over in Scandinavia. This is because “the English” didn’t really start to begin to exist as a people until about the seventh century or so when the Angles from Scandinavia and the Saxons from also Scandinavia started to blob together into the Anglo-Saxons of Angle-land, so it’s not like they popped out of nowhere. But this lack of an early English mythology, instead making do with bits and pieces of mythology from elsewhere in Europe because the ancient mythology of the British Isles was all Celtic, saddened the deeply English (and Catholic) Professor Tolkien so much that he wrote all the Lord of the Rings books about it, thus changing the face of fantastic writing forever.

Anyway, as much as I want to check out both Tolkien’s older translation and the slangy new Maria Davana Headley one, the Heaney seems to now be the definitive, “classroom standard” translation and it’s likely to stay that way for a while. The “classroom standard” bit is helped along by not only being a very good translation, but also by having little guidepost notes in the margins, and having the two languages side by side so you can pretend to be studious by gawping at them. If you can do a little actual studiousness about Old English pronunciations then this edition also allows you to put on your most stentorian Gandalf impression type of voice and read it out loud, which I certainly have not done and therefore cannot vouch if it’s nearly as fun as it sounds, it’s just an idea.

I was stoked to see that Emily Wilson was following up her translation of Homer’s The Odyssey with a translation of The Iliad, and like a big nerd I bought it the day it was published in September. Then like a big pretentious twerp I waited until December to read it because I figured that while The Odyssey had summer vibes, The Iliad had winter “stay inside and read violent epic poetry” vibes (previously on in this series: the Icelandic family sagas).

I have been more or less familiar with the story of the Trojan War since I was wee and reading Baby’s First Greek Mythology type books like the estimable D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths (which I still have), but I’m much less familiar with the specific story told in The Iliad, which only covers a period of a handful of days about nine years into the war. The abduction of Helen by Paris is old news, and Odysseus’ genius idea for the Trojan Horse has not yet been conceived. This drama revolves mainly around Achilles, the preternaturally strong champion of the Greeks, and Hector, the also-preternaturally-strong-but-not-as-strong-as-Achilles champion of Troy.

The basic plot of this episode within the Trojan War is thus: Agamemnon, the general of the Greek army, imprudently decides to get in a “who can be more full of themselves” contest with Achilles and steals Briseis, a “trophy” whom Achilles had “won” in a previous battle, thus insulting Achilles’ honor in front of the gods and everybody. Achilles is not one to sit down and take being so flexed upon, so he decides to do the manly thing and go sulk in his tent indefinitely, so that Agamemnon will be sorry he pissed him off and realize the Greeks can’t win this war without him. This might sound insanely immature on all sides but, with the intervention of many equally immature and petulant deities, it serves as the basis for many hundreds of pages of intense battle, atrocious violence, and political shenanigans as Hector repeatedly kicks the Greeks’ asses just to the edge of total destruction. There are duels and melees and negotiations and gods spiriting their favorites off the battlefield at politically inopportune times, and Agamemnon eventually repents of pissing off Achilles for no good reason and tries to coax him back into fighting with lavish gifts and the return of Briseis. Achilles, however, is exceeding wroth in a way that only a strong young man who makes his living by violence and domination can afford to be, and even then “can afford” is a bit of a stretch because bad things are about to happen for Achilles.

Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend/closest comrade/work wife, manages to beg leave of Achilles to put on Achilles’ fancy and easily distinguishable armor and go strike some fear into the hearts of the Trojans. This he does, but then he makes the mistake of chasing after Hector to fight him in single combat, even though he isn’t actually Achilles and everybody knows that Achilles is the only player in this game more overpowered than Hector. Hector then slays Patroclus. The Greeks put up a vicious fight to bring Patroclus’ body back to camp so the Trojans can’t desecreate it. Achilles stops being mad at Agamemnon because now he has a new target for his wrath: Hector. Achilles gets some new, even fancier, even more easily distinguishable armor from the forge god Hephaestus, because Hector has stolen his old armor off of Patrocles’ corpse, and returns to the war with a vengeance, specifically vengeance upon Hector, whose ass he is single-mindedly determined to kick. He does this, and then he drags Hector’s corpse back to the Greek camp, ties it to his chariot by the heels, and drives it around Patroclus’ burial mound every day. This is a shocking atrocity to both the Greeks and Trojans, even several millennia before the Geneva Convention, where the difference between war and a war crime was nowhere close to being conceived of. Eventually the gods knock some sense into Achilles to the point where, when Hector’s father comes to Achilles’ tent, alone except for an elderly attendant, bearing lavish gifts and supplicating Achilles most abjectly, Achilles relents and lets him take Hector home to bury, having finally realized that no amount of vengeance is going to bring Patroclus back to life and he’s already done about as much vengeance as it is humanly possible to do, so he might as well take the compensation and move on.

I cannot overstate the degree to which this is one of those stories where everyone is an asshole and basically the whole story is about people behaving badly, mostly of the “overweening arrogance” variety. That this does not make the story one iota less gripping is a testament to how well deserved its status as a classic is. Wilson’s translation is readable and rhythmic, and its straightforward language doesn’t paper over the graphic violence and the tantrums and boasting by the dramatis personae. There’s a lot of people getting their brains turned to mush, and their arms and legs cut off, and their nipples stabbed, and all that kind of stuff you can’t show on television (not network television, anyway). Some of the blow-by-blow, anatomically implausible violence and lengthy speeches in the melee scenes kind of remind me of D&D sessions in a way that I find a little silly but also endearing. One of Hector’s horses is named Sparkle, which also sounds like D&D shit in a way that I find endearing.

I came into this book mainly attached to my boy Odysseus, ‘cause I knew in advance that later in the war he’s going to save the day by being clever and then he’s going to have a very bad time getting home again, but as I kept reading I also found myself getting attached to Diomedes, the guy who basically gets stuck taking on the Big Damn Hero role with his spear for the Greeks when Achilles is sulking in his tent, and on at least one occasion ends up fighting the gods, even though this is generally considered a bad idea (in this case it’s OK; he got permission from Athena). Ajax and Ajax are underdeveloped as characters, sorry Homer.

There is really nothing I can say about this poem that hasn’t been said by people much smarter and more erudite than me, and much better versed in the classics. All I can say is that reading the classics always makes me wish I’d been brave enough to follow up on being a little Greek mythology girlie and actually studied the classics at a not-baby level. Also, in the translator’s note, Emily Wilson says that studying the classics has changed the way she thinks about things and now she notices when her feet are not “well-oiled” when she puts on her sandals, and now I want to take Emily Wilson out for a pedicure. (The modern equivalent of “well-oiled” is “moisturized” because we’ve invented/discovered beauty products in addition to olive oil, like soap and shea butter. So now I’m also gonna think about “well-oiled” every time I lotion my feet, probably.)

Overall, great story, great translation. The iambic pentameter really feels like it wants to be read out loud, which I think is one of the most important parts of translating epic poetry but apparently is really hard and a lot of people suck at it. Emily Wilson is not one of those people; she has done a fantastic job with both Homeric poems and I take my hat off to her.

Current Mood: enthralled
Current Music: "And Then There Was Silence," Blind Guardian

Help, how do I review poetry? I’m not nearly enough of a poetry person to do this.

I’m proud of myself that I actually read a poetry despite not even being ill! Usually I only read poetry when I am sick and putting myself in full invalid mode, with tea and moping and everything. But last weekend I had the impulse to move my college copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems from the TBR/incomplete shelf to the top shelf of the read nonfiction bookcase where I squirrel away poetry and mythology and childhood favorites. I’m pretty sure it was just so it would stop sitting on the TBR shelf haunting me, but giving it away felt like losing. I haven’t historically done well with the modernists, and I’ve admitted defeat and given away enough other modernist lit and poetry (Wallace Stevens whumped my ass and there is no use pretending he didn’t), but I vaguely remembered almost sort of liking Eliot enough, and he has enough of a reputation, that I simply wasn’t willing to admit defeat again. It’s such a small book. The poems in it are so important that some of their lines have moved into popular culture. I can handle The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock again, can’t I?

Anyway, one thing I’ve sort of come to terms with is that poetry isn’t necessarily for understanding the same way prose is for understanding; it’s more like music, in that it’s for rolling around in. With that in hand, I think I was able to get more out of it this time around than I did when I was desperately trying to Get It. A lot of the poems included here are bleak and plaintive, which makes sense because some of it is basically World War One poetry, and I do have a soft spot for World War One poetry. The rest of it is just sort of plaintively British, and I enjoy a certain amount of plaintive Britishness.

Also, the line about “I measured out my life in coffee spoons” hits a lot harder now that I’m a weird old adult and own a coffee spoon. Measuring out your life in free French Vanilla-flavored Keurig pods at the office doesn’t have the same ring to it, although someone talented enough probably could write a poem about my 20s with it.

I decided that it would be a nice summer read to finally get around to that Emily Wilson translation of Homer’s The Odyssey that came out a couple of years ago, and borrowed it from my mom. I began reading it on the beach (don’t worry, I was there with an expert in beach) (it was my mom; my mom does have a real job but she is also an expert in beach), which was the correct place to begin reading it. Tragically I read the rest of it, like, at home, because it’s dangerous for me to beach too often.

Anyway, I read the Robert Fagles translation in high school, and also watched the 1997 TV miniseries version and the 1995 episode of Wishbone back in the ‘90s when I was wee, so I was reasonably familiar with the story. Images of key plot points like Odysseus (the human or the dog) shooting his bow through twelve battle-axes are burned deep into my brain.

Wilson’s translation is much less goofy than ‘90s TV, fortunately, but also easier to read than the older translations I’ve peeked at (I remember having not too much trouble with Fagles but it’s definitely a little pompous-sounding). Even with the meandering, flashback-ridden structure of ancient Greek epics, it flows along briskly and strongly. It feels action-packed even though it’s like 50% people crying and 50% people telling stories at dinner and there’s only a 10% left over for real action because there’s a good deal of overlap where people are both crying and telling stories at dinner simultaneously. Morality consists almost entirely of sucking up to the gods with a side of host/guest customs; outside of that, murder, intrigue, lying, and trickery are the order of the day. Dual-classing as a rogue/fighter is overpowered in Pathfinder 2e and also in this poem.

One of the best things about this particular edition is that it’s robustly contextualized–the text of the poem itself starts about a hundred pages into the book, preceded by a lengthy and fascinating 80-page introduction, a nerdily delightful ten-page translator’s note, and several maps. The back matter features a pronunciation guide, which was also fun, but the front matter was really key in understanding what to expect and why to expect it, and generally setting me up for success as a reader.

I’m also really pleased to find that Wilson has a translation of The Iliad coming out in September, so if anybody needs me in the last week of that month I will most likely be sitting somewhere atmospheric with my mind in ancient Greece!

So apparently when I am sick that is when I like to read nineteenth-century poetry, and I’m not quite sure what’s up with that, other than that the books are short and have the appropriate Being An Invalid vibes. But anyway, while I was waiting for Network Effect to be delivered I decided to read Essential Blake, a short volume of selections of William Blake’s poetry that I acquired in college.

The most important things to know about Blake are a) he was heavily involved in all sorts of mysticism/occultism/alchemy stuff and b) most of his contemporaries thought he was insane. I’ve had a soft spot for Blake ever since I read In the Forests of the Night as a preteen just beginning her vampire obsession, and I maintain that “The Tyger” is a fantastic poem. I’ve enjoyed the Blake I’ve read in various English classes throughout the years, as well. But there is something about sitting down and reading a whole volume of Blake, short as it is, to really drive home that, stuffy and terrible as most nineteenth-century Englishpersons were, probably the main reason Blake’s contemporaries thought he was insane is because the man appears to have been off his rocker. He also appears to have really, really hated Rubens, and the “miscellany” section at the end of the volume contains no less than three poems about how much Rubens sucks and how dumb everyone is for commissioning him. There’s also a whole section of epigrams titled “Proverbs of Hell” and most of them are just dumb, I’m sorry. So it turns out his most famous poems–mainly the ones in Songs of Innocence and Experience–are his best-known ones for a reason. Sometimes the poems veer into the political, which tends to be of mixed success artistically, and also Blake unfortunately manages to mash up his social conscience about child labor with some really unfortunate attempts at racial solidarity that do not do the thing he seems to have been trying to do, in part due to a chronically English-poet attachment to figurative language around the colors white and black. The results are, as the kids say, cringe! It becomes a relief to get back to something like “The Sick Rose,” which is actually good, and reminds us why we’re still reading this absolute weirdo 200+ years later.

Being ill during spooky season with only my red velvet couch for company, I decided to go the whole hog and, in between catching up on my correspondence and staring in the general direction of the water asking “When will my love be home from the war(hammer tournament)” I read through Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti, which I got in college but had only read bits and pieces from. I am very out of practice reading volumes of poetry from cover to cover; I found myself forgetting to pause between poems and then being confused when they were all running together in my head. I also really don’t know how to review poetry; it’s been decades since I had to try to write anything coherent about poetry of any kind.

Anyway. The most famous poem in this selection is probably The Goblin Market, and it was the line “We must not look at goblin men” getting stuck in my head (who knows why) that prompted me to read this volume. The Goblin Market is an eerie little fairy story that is clearly about any number of things but resists obvious allegory; the imagery in it has become classic for a reason, though. While a lot of the poems are full of the kind of subjects beloved of the pre-Raphaelites–pseudo-Medieval romantic stuff, and natural beauty, and sentiments of love and loss–there’s also quite a lot of range: there’s at least one poem about a story Rossetti read in a newspaper; there’s quite a lot of religious poetry; some tell little stories about people being petty and mean to each other. The funniest poem in the whole lot is probably No, Thank You, John, a mildly brutal rejection of a suitor that contains such gems as “I have no heart?--Perhaps I’ve not/But then you’re mad to take offence/That I don’t give you what I have not got/Use your common sense.” Oh, that Christina Rossetti, what a little shit she can be.

Most of the poems are not funny; most of them are sad and beautiful and generally very good for sitting around in a long robe feeling moody with. Because I never read poetry I also feel like I have gotten additionally Cultured and ought to be rewarded with a copy of the fancypants clothbound edition of The Goblin Market and Other Poems (https://www.abebooks.com/9780241303061/Goblin-Market-Poems-Penguin-Pocket-0241303060/plp).

After having read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Death of Arthur earlier this year I moved onto his The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún, two English-language poems that retell, in the traditional meter and style, two segments of old Norse heroic stories from the Eddas.

The book is probably 30% poem and 70% notes. Ordinarily this would not be a complaint, since old Norse poetry is confusing to me and I definitely need notes! The problem here is that old Norse poetry is so confusing to me that I was still confused after the notes. The style of the poetry is freaking great–stanzas of eight short lines, full of what Professor Tolkien called a “demonic” energy. The poems are constructed to give you just the most-dramatic highlights, barely strung together, so they have the sort of manic pace of the “Previously on…” reel at the beginning of an episode of one of the better sorts of TV shows. The problem here is that those Previously Ons are very helpful to jog your memory if you actually did watch the earlier episodes, but they’re significantly less helpful if you are actually starting a show at Episode 8 or whatever and trying to catch up. Sadly, I am unfamiliar enough with the whole Sigurd myth cycle that I remained gloriously lost the entire time.

That said, what I did experience was still cool enough that it makes me want to get more familiar with this myth cycle so that I can figure out what’s going on and have an experience that was more like my time reading The Death of Arthur. There’s some really bonkers, bloody stuff in here, curses and dragons and poison and cursed gold, and it sounds like Attila the Hun makes an appearance, and clearly this is right up my alley so it’s probably time to read, like, the copy of The Nibelungenlied that I’ve been carting around since I was first introduced to the Baby’s First Germanic Myths version in high school, and maybe track down a copy of either or both of the Eddas.

It just occurred to me that since most of the notes are endnotes to the poems, it might also behoove me to go back and read the poems again now that I’ve read the notes. You can tell how infrequently I read anything remotely difficult that I did not do this as soon as I got to the end of the notes.

::intermission music plays::

OK THIS IS BETTER

I’m definitely spotting some Lord of the Rings-y stuff in the first poem, The Lay of the Völsungs, both in terms of plot elements (a sword shattered and the pieces kept and re-forged later for the chosen one, dragons, dwarves unleashing great evil) and just general vibes. There are also some parallels I can spot between this and other mythology, but I suppose there’s only so many things you can make up before you have to start re-using elements. For example, Sigurd tastes a drop of the blood of the dragon Fafnir, as he is roasting Fafnir’s heart for the dwarf Regin to eat, and starts being able to understand bird talk. This to me seems to parallel the ancient Irish story of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the one drop of hot fat from the Salmon of Knowledge that he accidentally tastes while cooking the Salmon for somebody else.

Everything that happens once Gudrún’s shitty family is introduced makes a lot more sense on the second read, and some long-forgotten memories of the plot of The Nibelungenlied are stirring in my brain. I am more clear on the bit where Brynhild tells a whopper (which I support, even if it does get everybody murdered) but am still a bit lost on why one of Gudrún’s brothers is now a werewolf.

The second poem, the Lay of Gudrún, is a SEQUEL, it picks up just after the funeral pyre of Sigurd and Brynhild, this makes more sense now. These poems are very big on ladies wreaking horrible bloody vengeance (which, as mentioned, I support). Gudrún’s horribly bloody vengeance manages to be even more horrible and bloody than Brynhild’s, which is saying something, and it’s a much more gripping story the second time around now that I’ve figured out who Högni is and just generally what’s going on with Atli and the cursed gold. In fact, reading it a second time, I feel dumb because Gudrún actually recaps everything that happens right at the end before she commits suicide. Whoops.

Anyway, these are some delightfully murdery poems, but apparently the order of operations for uncultured philistines like me is: read poems, read notes, read poems again.

It’s been a big winter for me wanting to read medieval British nonsense, partly due to the cold wet dark New England weather this time of year and partly due to not being allowed to leave the house. Having enjoyed reading some of his Anglo-Saxon poetry translations around Thanksgiving I therefore decided that I would dig into J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur, an original poem done in the style of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry and yet somehow still the least intimidating bit of Arthuriana left on my TBR shelves. (The other two are Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Mort D’Arthur and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which is 800 pages long.)

The poem itself is unfinished and consists of only five cantos, leaving off right as Arthur sets out for his final battle against his treacherous nephew Mordred. Like all good Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is meant to be read aloud, so much so that it’s almost difficult to sit and read it with your mouth shut; the temptation to declaim it or at least to mouth the words along is too strong. The style is purposefully archaic but quite comprehensible, similar to many of Tolkien’s other original works. It is also fairly short–maybe fifty pages of the 230-page book is given to the actual text of the poem. The rest is commentary by Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, walking us both through the evolution of the legend of Arthur and the evolution of this particular poem through its early drafts and bits of scratch paper. Personally, I found the historical tour of the Arthur cycle to be the most engrossing part of the book; Tolkien quotes liberally from a variety of older sources in both their original language and, for the Latin and Old English ones, translated into modern English; for Middle and Early Modern English, however, we get raw, un-spelling-corrected transcriptions with footnotes where necessary (there are a lot of footnotes). I am the sort of dork who thinks lines like “Betwixte me and Launcelote du Lake/Nys man in erthe, for sothe to sayne,/Shall trews sette and pees make/Er outher of vs haue other slayne” are hilarious to read, and I really enjoyed both the prose and poetry versions of Arthur’s last voyage to Avylyon to hele his grete woundes. (It’s possible that an adolescence spent reading Discworld has rotted my brain.)

Anyway, this book took me one evening to read, and I feel very edified, and like I can go back to wasting my time hunting dire chinchillas in The Sims Medieval with a clear conscience.

In the medium-sized pile of books I claimed when Kyle was cleaning out his bookshelf was one little book of J. R. R. Tolkien’s translations of medieval poems. The collection only has three poems so instead of the collection having its own title, the book is just titled Sir Gawain and the Green Knight/Pearl/Sir Orfeo (which are the three poems, if that wasn’t obvious).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is probably the most famous poem here, as the story has been adapted into a variety of easier-to-read (or watch) formats as a common bit of Arthuriana, most recently as a movie starring Dev Patel that I have not watched because I am terrible at watching movies. It takes place around Christmas and New Year’s making it officially Seasonal to read right about now. The very short version is that it involves Sir Gawain getting into some very ridiculous circumstances due to his absolute commitment to doing whatever is knightly and chivalrous, so it also serves as an interesting morality play of what people at the time considered honorable and courtly behavior. This includes exploring some awkward contradictions, like that knights aren’t supposed to refuse requests from high-born ladies but they are also not supposed to commit adultery or cuckold their hosts, leading so a very awkward set of scenes where the lady of the house keeps sneaking in to Gawain’s bedroom and trying to seduce him and he has to keep talking around it in order to refuse without being so offensive as to say no outright. The gender dynamics there are, shall we say, very interesting to watch, and also OH MY GOD LADY BACK OFF. But it all turns out basically for the best because it turns out it was a Test and done with the full knowledge of her husband, who is secretly also the Green Knight that Gawain is involved in his stupid contest with, this doesn’t count as spoilers because the story is 600 years old. Anyway it is a lot of fun if you are a big enough nerd to be able to find reading 100 pages of alliterative verse fun. An especially amusing part is that an alternate version of Gawain’s name is “Wawain” and that gets used any time it would fit the alliteration better.

Pearl is a vision poem from the point of view of a mourning poet who has a dream about a young girl who has died, who is presumably his daughter. It is a very religious poem about grieving and the afterlife and what a great place the dead girl is in now, which is important because otherwise it would probably just be a maudlin ghost story about how much white one ghost can wear. Unsurprisingly, pearls figure very heavily in the poem, both metaphorically and in what people are wearing.

Sir Orfeo is a Britain-based retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, here significantly changed to better match the kind of themes that medieval British poetry likes, like tests of loyalty to one’s king and elaborate descriptions of fancy castles. When King Orfeo’s wife Lady Heurodis is kidnapped by fairies, the King leaves his throne in the hands of his steward, grabs his harp, and runs off into the woods to live as a beggar. From there he makes his way into the fairy kingdom and bargains to get his wife back. There is no test about not looking backwards; Orfeo instead stashes his wife somewhere in the city and goes back to his throne room to pull an Odysseus-esque test of loyalty on his steward, by reporting that he had picked up the harp of a corpse in the woods. The steward is appropriately upset at this news that King Orfeo had died and therefore is allowed to live and is named Orfeo’s heir for whenever he dies for real. Orfeo, Heurodis, the steward, and everybody else then have a big feast, because big feasts are the staple happy ending of medieval British poetry.

In short, they are all good wintery poems, it’s nice to read some real literature once in a while, and translating out of Middle English is a lot harder and more interesting than you might think it’d be.

At this year’s Readercon, the Memorial Guest of Honor is the amazing Mary Shelley—author of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, daughter of noted freethinker William Godwin and the awesome early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of famed Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and apparently half-auntie to at least one illegitimate child of Lord Byron, although probably so was everyone.

I’ve already read Frankenstein on multiple occasions (and written a number of papers on GOD VICTOR YOU’RE SUCH AN IDIOT), read Daisy Hay’s biography of her and her whole clique, Young Romantics, and read this Kate Beaton comic:

So it was a bit of a challenge to seek out NEW things to read about Mary Shelley in order to prepare for the convention.

Enter stage right, The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece by Roseanne Montillo, shelved unassumingly on the bargain nonfiction table at Brookline Booksmith, waiting for a morbid nerd such as myself to stumble upon it so it could tempt us out of our book-buying hiatus. (I bought three other nonfiction books about dead people that day, too. Le sigh.) I started reading the book in the middle of a thunderstorm because that is clearly the only way to do the thing properly.

The book itself is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of research, being about numerous distinctly different things, although they all do relate back to Frankenstein sooner or later. All the things are pretty interesting, though. A big chunk of it is biography of Mary Shelley and her whole nutty Romantic set, including her half-sister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, some English dude who was really into boats, and some other friend that Percy Shelley was trying to get Mary to sleep with so he could feel less bad about the fact that he was banging Claire Clairmont. Guys, these people might have been literary geniuses but they were so fucked up.

Other sections of the book, which I was less familiar with going into, include: the history and habitat of the actual Frankenstein family in Germany. I HAD NO IDEA THERE WAS AN ACTUAL FRANKENSTEIN FAMILY. I wonder if they still exist or if they’ve changed their name (or are all like “FRANKEN-SHTEEN!” about it). There is a bunch of stuff about body-snatching and resurrection men, the murder aspects of which I was fairly familiar with (although I did learn a new nursery rhyme about Burke and Hare!). There is also a hell of a lot more stuff than I’d ever heard before about the actual SCIENCE that all this grave-robbing, body-snatching, and prostitute-murdering was in service of, although if you want some quick funny treatments of the subjects I recommend the Sawbones podcast episodes on “Reanimation” and “Corpse Theft and the Resurrection Men.” We meet such infamous Italians as Luigi Galvani, from whom we get the word “galvanism” (which used to refer specifically to the science of using electricity to make dead things twitch, which was SUPER FUNNY the one or two times the book also used it in its modern sense of “motivated”); his nephew Giovanni Aldini, who did further experiments in galvanism in England, Alessandro Volta, who invented the voltaic battery and did some impressive debunking of galvanist theory; and Humphry Davy, who was high on nitrous oxide. We also travel back in time a bit and meet several interesting alchemists, who are what we had before they got their process down enough to be scientists.

My biggest gripe with this book is that it’s rather poorly edited. The subjects jump around a lot, which would be OK on its own, probably. But there are weird issues with the line editing and confusing word choices, and there are some small bits (a paragraph here, a tangent there) that could really have been scrapped or severely condensed (we don’t need a two-page recap of the plot of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; might as well just go reread the poem). Whoever wrote the captions to the (totally awesome) images appeared to have just dashed them out without proofreading them or deciding if they needed to be in sentence form or not. This bums me out, because the book is well-researched and about awesome things and essentially well-written.