461. Dumb: Who Is and Who Isn't

BROWDERBOOKS

The good news:  A good review of New Yorkers by the highly rated Midwest Book Review, which recommends it unreservedly "for community and academic library Contemporary American Biography collections," and the ebook for personal reading.

The bad news:  The only Amazon reader review of the ebook is bad, and Amazon gives this much more attention than the good editorial reviews by professionals.  I don't argue with the reviewer, who has every right to express his views.  But I hate to have this the only review of the ebook.  So HELP!  Puleez give me a review, so this one bad review won't dominate.  Remember:

• Your review doesn't have to be long.
• You don't have to have read the whole book.  Three or four chapters is enough.
• It doesn't have to be a rave (five stars).  Be honest in your statement.

To do a reader review, you have to have bought the book from Amazon.  The cost of the ebook now is $5.99, but if you bought it earlier at $1.99, so much the better; I don't want to strain your budget.  And the first one to do a review may actually get it free, since there's a credit available.  (Don't ask me why.)  If this first bad review is sandwiched in among four or five other less negative reviews, it will be neutralized.  So puleez, go here and scroll down to the customer reviews.

And now, on to Dumb.

             Dumb: Who Is and Who Isn't

Long ago, soon after the end of World War II, while visiting the family of my friend Martin in Speyer, West Germany (as it then was), I met his younger brother Hans.  When I asked Hans what he liked to do, Hans without hesitation gave his answer in a single word: “Diskutieren” (to discuss, debate, argue).  He said this with a look so acute, so charged with meaning, that I have never forgotten it.  Hans, I sensed at once, would be a powerful opponent in a debate: fierce, ruthless, uncompromising. 

I didn’t want to argue with him, least of all politics, but the subject did come up.  Of President Roosevelt’s trusting Stalin, our ally against Germany in World War II, Hans said that an American president should have more brains than a three-year-old child.  “Das war nicht so einfach” (That wasn’t so simple) I managed to say in my faulty German, which was too limited to express my thought fully.  What I wanted to say was this:  Roosevelt trusted Stalin.  Dumm!  Stalin trusted Hitler.  Dumm!  Hitler attacked Russia.  Dumm!  All leaders, even (or maybe especially) the greatest, do dumb things.  Remembering this recently, I started thinking about the dumb things we all do, and one thought led to another, and hence my subject: Dumb.

Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill in Teheran, 1943.
So who was smart, and who was dumb?

Let’s start at he top, the leaders I just mentioned.  Roosevelt was as shrewd and savvy a president as we have ever had, and yes, during the war, he trusted Stalin.  Stalin was our ally against Hitler, and without the Russians we could not have won the war.  Churchill said that, to beat Hitler, he would have allied himself with the Devil, and perhaps he did.  By 1945, the last year of the war, Roosevelt was a sick man, and he died on April 12 of that year.  His leadership during the war had been brilliant, but in trusting Stalin to the extent he did, he may have been a bit, yes, dumb.

Stalin, in trusting Hitler, was dumber still.  He had signed a nonagression pact with Hitler in August 1939, which gave Hitler a free hand to attack France in the spring of 1940.  The resulting French collapse gave Hitler the mastery of continental Europe, minus Russia; Britain stood alone.  So what did Stalin do?  He didn’t just trust Hitler, he helped him in the war.  The Germans wanted to send a warship, a raider, into the Pacific without encountering the British blockade.  So Stalin agreed to help the raider fight its way through the frozen ice off the northern coast of European Russia and Siberia, and thus reach the Bering Sea and the Pacific without encountering any British ships.  And the name of the ice-breaker that created a passageway for the raider?  The Stalin.  

       But what was this, by way of dumb, compared to Stalin’s refusal to believe that Hitler was about to attack the Soviet Union in 1941?  A German deserter crossed the border to warn the Russians, but Stalin didn’t believe his story and may even have had the man executed.  One day later, the Germans attacked, with disastrous results for the Russians.  Yes, in this instance Stalin was dumber, far dumber, than Roosevelt.

And Hitler’s attacking Russia was just as dumb.  He had always planned to push to the east to acquire Lebensraum, but never appreciated the vastness of Russia, and the Russian ability to resist.  When winter came and his troops bogged down short of Moscow, they didn’t even have winter uniforms, which were rushed to them belatedly.  Dumber, perhaps, than Stalin.  Once the French surrendered, Hitler admired Napoleon enough to visit his tomb in Paris, but he had never read the grim accounts of Napoleon’s little misadventure in Russia in 1812.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Hitler and Mussolini, 1937.  They both ended badly, both
were often dumb, but both had their brilliant moments, too.

        And history gives us plenty examples of collective dumb.  The Crusades are a good one, but I'll mention instead the medieval English and French attitude toward archery.  In England, every village had archery contests, and all the men took pride in their skill, wanting to be the local Robin Hood.  In France, meanwhile, there was a tax on bowstrings.  So at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, where French knights in heavy armor slogged through thick mud against lightly armed English bowmen, who do you think won?  

        But haven't some world leaders been, not dumb, but brilliant?  Of course.

• Roosevelt, who saved us psychologically from the Depression, and saw us through World War II.  
• Bismarck, who tricked the French into declaring war in 1870, when he was prepared for war, and they were not.  (Smart, the opposite of dumb, needn’t imply ethical.)
• Ben Franklin, a shrewd actor who, as our emissary to the court of Versailles, could also be charming, as witnessed by his friendships (were they only friendships?) with a number of titled ladies. 
• Elizabeth I of England, who teased the princes and monarchs of Europe with the possibility of marrying her, playing one against another, when she had no intention of sacrificing her useful virginity.  

And who do I proclaim the dumbest, the absolutely dumbest,  of world leaders?  I'll mention just two and a half.

Kaiser Wilhelm.  Lots of medals, though he
 himself never saw battle as a soldier.

• Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany tops the list.  A foolish saber-rattler, and so full of himself as to appear (to my American eyes) utterly ridiculous.  
• The Archduke Francis Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 precipitated World War I.  He went with his wife in an open car to Bosnia, a region known to be full of Serb nationalists eager to destroy the Austrian empire and create an all-Slav state.  And he, as heir to the Austrian throne, was their ideal target.  So if taking that little jaunt, its route announced in advance, wasn’t dumb, what is?
• And now the half: the Roman emperor Nero, said to have fiddled while Rome burned.  Or is that just a story?  If he did, maybe a little music wasn’t out of place, if there was nothing he could do to save the city.  It may have calmed his nerves.  So he counts as only a half.

By way of dumb, none of our presidents comes to mind.  “Stupid and inept” characterizes many of them, but that doesn’t make them dumb. 

Enough of this discussion of dumb at the highest levels.  By sticking to the past, I’ve tried to avoid contentious arguments about who, among the world’s leaders today, are dumb.  I’ll leave that to my readers, and have no doubt that they bristle with opinions.  But let’s, for a moment, get personal.  Have we ourselves, good little citizens that we are, and not among the world’s prime movers, ever done anything dumb?

You bet!  In my teen years I did a host of things that were just plain dumb, but I dismiss these adolescent follies, and everyone else’s as well, for they were inevitable, and part of growing up.  Let’s focus on the dumb of maturity, much less excusable.

• Just out of college and hoping to snag a Fulbright scholarship to France, I went home for a year: a disastrous choice, since I had little social life, sank into depression, and flirted with suicide.  Getting the Fulbright saved me.  Yet if I hadn’t had that one year off, I wouldn’t have taken a first-year course in classical Greek, a choice I have never regretted.  As Socrates used to say, γνῶθι σεαυτόν.  (Puzzled?  See  below.)
• When I started writing fiction, I turned out autobiographical novels that were, to put it mildly, awful; the very thought of them makes me blush.  In school from an early age I had loved classes in English and history.  Why did it take me so long to realize that well-researched historical novels were just the thing for me?  Dumb.
• I used to write my mother letters about my doings, and from the time of my Alaskan adventures on (I worked one summer there in a kitchen), she saved them.  After she died, I got hold of them and destroyed them.  Since I had given her only the surface of my life, they contained nothing to embarrass me.  So why did I do it?  Maybe a perverse joy in a kind of self-destruction, or a bitter urge to leave no trace of myself on earth.  Today, as I write a memoir for a gay history archive to be made available to the public only ten years after my death, those letters would be invaluable.  The surfaces alone of my life would tell me a lot that I’ve forgotten.  But I destroyed those letters.  Dumb.  Really dumb.
• Today, with everyone going around masked, I, age 91, have yet to do it.  Dumb?  Maybe.  But I go out rarely, observe social distancing, and wash my hands upon returning from errands.  And I have finally ordered some masks.  Maybe only half dumb, like Nero.  And probably having less musical ability than he had, I can't even fiddle.

dave souza

Enough of my dumb doings.  How about you?  Have you ever done things that were just plain flat out dumb?  And do you have the courage to reveal them?  Let me know.  I’d love to mention them in this blog, but I promise not to do so with your name attached.  So tell me.  How have you been dumb?

One last candidate for dumb: my computer, and maybe all computers.  When I mistype a word, mine doesn’t just signal an error, it inserts what it thinks I was trying to say.  So when I look again at the screen, I see words I never dreamed of typing, and sometimes they express the very opposite of what I meant.  If I mistype "please," I get "police."  If I mistype "smart," I get "smattered."  For sheer dumbness, computers beat humans every time.  On this happy note I conclude.

Me and my computer.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The computer, not me.  But maybe both.
Photo credit: S. Berkowitz

Socrates’ advice to us all: γνῶθι σεαυτόν = “know thyself.”  Which is far from dumb.

Coming soon:  Maybe something, maybe nothing.  It's not a good time.

©  2020  Clifford Browder

460. Getting Rid of the Unwanted Dead

BROWDERBOOKS

The first proofs of my website will come to me on Tuesday.  I just sent my design team the three reviews that New Yorkers has received to date, so they can incorporate them into the site.  Meanwhile, New Yorkers is still available from Amazon, both print and e-book, a great read for a world in lockdown.  For my other books, go here.

                    GETTING  RID  OF  
              THE  UNWANTED  DEAD:
                   THE  OFFAL  BOAT, 
            THE  FORBIDDEN  ISLAND

The offal boat

In the old days of horsepower, before the internal combustion engine, the city’s transportation was mostly horse-drawn, which meant that the city’s streets were often encumbered with dead horses, not to mention cows, and the pigs that ran about freely, scavenging the streets and thus saving their owners the cost of feed.  So what happened to all those smelly carcasses, so offensive to eye and nostril?  The answer: the offal boat.

         Departing a dock at 34^th Street in the North (Hudson) River regularly in the 1860s was a small sloop piled high with the carcasses of horses, cows, pigs, dogs, and cats, plus barrels, tubs, tanks, and hogsheads of blood and entrails.  Its destination: a bone-boiling plant up the river that would receive this smelly cargo and use it to produce leather, bone (for buttons, etc.), manure, soap, fat, and other products.  In one week the sloop disposed of 50 horses, 9 cows, 135 small animals, and 3,100 barrels of offal.  The city’s butchers delivered blood and offal from the slaughterhouses; the rest was brought in ten carts by a contractor.  In this way the streets were delivered of an odorous impediment that was actually turned into a variety of useful products.  

         Which prompts me to ask what happens today to all those junked cars and other abandoned contraptions that we would like to make disappear.  Where are they, and what becomes of them?  While hiking on Staten Island I have seen abandoned cars half hidden by creeping vegetation, for Americans treat parklands as dumping grounds.  But what about all the other vehicles?  Will archeologists eons hence discover the remains of vast automobile graveyards and wonder what strange civilization could have produced such a huge array of junk?  Or will all that have crumbled away, leaving only little plastic thingamabobs?  I wonder.

The  Forbidden  Island

And what becomes of humans -- the unclaimed bodies that turn up in every big city?  The answer in New York is that, since 1869, they are taken to Hart Island, a quiet, grassy island only about a mile long and a quarter mile wide in Long Island Sound near City Island in the Bronx.  This now uninhabited island, at various times the site of a lunatic asylum, a sanatorium, a boys' workhouse, and a drug facility, is the city's potter's field, the final resting place of some 800,000 anonymous, indigent, and forgotten persons who are buried in closely packed pine coffins in common graves, three coffins deep for adults, and five for babies.  Some 1500 bodies arrive yearly, about half of them stillbirths and infants who are interred in small pine coffins.  "Baby Morales, age 5 minutes," says the paperwork on one; "Unknown male, white, found floating on the Hudson at 254th Street," says another.  Burials are done quickly and routinely without funeral rites, unless some spontaneous prayer from a gravedigger. 

          Note:  I have often wondered where the phrase "potter's field" comes from.  It is Biblical, saying what the chief priests did with Judas's thirty pieces of silver when, repenting of his betrayal of Jesus, he flung them down on the floor of the temple and went and hanged himself: "And they took counsel, and bought the potter's field, to bury strangers in" (Matthew 27:7).  A field used for extracting potter’s clay was useless for agriculture and so was available for burials.

          And who are those gravediggers?  Inmates from Riker's Island who arrive by boat handcuffed, but then climb down into the trenches to work unmanacled, most of them glad to be away from prison and out in the open air, working in the flat, calm solitude of the island.  They are paid all of fifty cents an hour, as is typical of our prison/industrial complex.  But they are not insensitive.  "Respect, guys, respect!" they caution one another, as they lower the coffins into the graves and then cover them with dirt.

          Hart Island is not open to the general public, most of whom have probably never even heard of it, and trespassers face a stiff fine.  But family members able to  prove their relatives are buried there can arrange visits.  This is no easy task, since one has to navigate numerous city agencies to obtain the necessary information.  The coffins have no individual markings, but each grave corresponds to an entry in a ledger.  If successful, the family members can then arrange to have the remains disinterred and removed for burial elsewhere.  But most of the remains are unclaimed.

Southern entrance to the Pavilion, once a
women's prison, later a drug rehab facility.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.

         What is it like on the island?  The few who are allowed to visit have different impressions.  One visitor, seeing the crumbling vestiges of earlier installations, called it a dilapidated ghost town; another found it surprisingly peaceful, surrounded on sunny days by an expanse of scintillating water, and serenaded by the distant clanging buoys of Long Island Sound.  One hopes, for this last resting place of the unknown and forgotten, that the latter impression is more accurate.  But those crumbling vestiges have a haunting beauty that photography reveals: the beauty of abandonment and desolation.  I shall never be able to visit this forbidden island, but everything about it breathes mystery.

  

Second floor of the Pavilion.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.

Interior of the asylum's hospital.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.

Unused pine coffins in the hospital.
Photo courtesy of Ian Ference,
The Kingston Lounge.

Source note:  These photos of Hart Island are from Ian Ference’s website, The Kingston Lounge.  I urge viewers to access that website to see haunting photos of other crumbling structures. 

Coming soon:  Dumb.  Who is and who isn't.  FDR, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, and me.  And maybe you, too.

©  2020  Clifford Browder

459. New York Hodgepodge: Alligators, Copperheads, Velocipedes, and the Spite House

BROWDERBOOKS

Waiting for my design team to create my website, I have gone back to my long-neglected project of doing a memoir that will go into the Gay Center's history archive at my death.  I decided to do a new chapter, The Crazy Sixties, about how I and my friends did our respective bouts of craziness in the 1960s.  I chronicle

• how, inspired by Allen Ginsberg's Howl, I threw over the academic atmosphere of Columbia and decamped for North Beach, San Francisco, where the Beatniks hung out;
• how I befriended a homeless Beat and got robbed by him;
• how I got picked up by a guy at the top of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill and was invited for daily lunches followed by a romp;
• how I ushered at a friend's wedding in Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill where the best man was a former trick of his;
• how I ushered at another wedding at Glens Falls, New York, where the groom, the guy who long before had brought me out, married a gifted woman, while I lusted for his best man, and the groom, befuddled, took my wallet by mistake;
• how I wrote wild, crazy poetry like I had never done before;
• how I got high on peyote and saw bearded Hittites, trilobites, Egyptian colossi towering above the Nile, lagoons, mosaics, purple ants, and learned that I could turn clouds green.

It was wild, crazy, foolish, and for the most part, fun.  But I can't publish it now, for I name names and am unsparing.  Meanwhile, here's something that is published and and awaits its readers. 

Paperback and ebook available from Amazon.  And for my other books, click here. 

Now on to alligators and the Spite House.

           NEW  YORK  HODGEPODGE:             ALLIGATORS,  COPPERHEADS,  VELOCIPEDES,  AND  THE  SPITE  HOUSE

       

This is a hodgepodge of New York experiences, real and otherwise.  Don’t look for a unifying theme; there isn’t any, except the wonders and horrors, the quirks and surprises of the city. 

New York jokes

         These aren’t meant to amuse you; you’ve probably heard them a dozen or a hundred times.  But they say something about the New York mentality.

·      Tourist:  How do I get to Carnegie Hall?

    New Yorker:  Practice, practice, practice.

·      Tourist:  Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?

             (No recorded response.)

·   A young man from the provinces arrives in New York, sets his  suitcase down, and announces, “Look out, New York!  I’m here to conquer you!”  Then he looks down: his suitcase is gone.

A New York myth: alligators in the sewers

         Snowbirds returning north from Florida supposedly bring back cute little baby alligators as pets.  Then, as the pets get bigger and bigger, they panic and flush them down the toilet.  Result: Alligators ranging in the sewers.  (But hard confirmation is lacking.)

Wildlife in the city

         Speaking of alligators, there is plenty of confirmed wildlife in the city.  No, I don’t mean roaches, mice, and rats, our ubiquitous fellow residents, or the wood ticks that show up in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Sanctuary and elsewhere in the spring, or even the magnificent peregrine falcons that nest on tall buildings and make precipitous plunges to seize their mammalian prey.  I mean unexpected and surprising creatures, as for instance:

·      The muskrats I’ve seen in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

·      The little brown bat that zipped past me once in the North End of Central Park.

·      The red fox once reported in Van Cortland Park, though I myself never saw it.

·      The raccoon I saw high in a tree in Central Park.

Has this guy been in your garbage?

    

           In addition to the above, coyotes have been seen in the suburbs north of here and in the city as well, on the streets of Harlem, near Columbia University, and in Central Park, though I have yet to spot one.  I thought coyotes were a Western critter, but it seems that there is an Eastern coyote who is common upstate but has adapted to urban settings, since in them he finds all his favorite foods: rabbits, squirrels, cats, small dogs, and garbage.  People often mistake coyotes for dogs.  Coyotes have long, thick fur, a bushy tail usually pointed down, and erect, pointed ears.

        Of course I've saved the best till last: copperheads inhabit the Jersey Palisades, just across the river from New York.  They and other creatures lurk in the hollows and crevices under the Giant Stairs, a jumble of huge fallen boulders on the Shore Path of the Palisades, a path that I have often walked, scrambling over the boulders, some of which teeter slightly as you scramble.  A rough forty-five-minute trek through a unique landscape that you wouldn’t expect here in the East.  Copperheads are poisonous, but like most snakes they keep away from humans, so in my noisy scrambles over the Giant Stairs I have never seen one.  Also inhabiting the Palisades are raccoons, red foxes, skunks, chipmunks, shrews, moles, and rabbits – all this, just across from the cement and asphalt density, the traffic and the ruckus, of the city.

A copperhead: beautiful, if seen from a distance.  
Look close and you'll see a black snake as well.  
Tad Arensmeier

Street cries of long ago

         Our streets are noisy with traffic sounds and jackhammer screeches, but street cries of vendors are rare, maybe because they wouldn’t be heard over all that racket.  But the early 1800s were different.  Here are some of the street cries from that period, uttered by wandering vendors, some with carts, some without:

Here’s your beauties of oysters, your fine fat briny oysters!

Butter mil-leck!  Butter mil-leck!

Here’s white sand, choice sand, here’s your lily white sand, here’s your Rockaway beach sand!  (Often strewn on floors of taverns.)

Glass put eeen!  Glass put eeen!

Sweep ho!  From the bottom to the top, without a ladder or a rope!  Sweep ho!  Sweep ho! 

Morburre

        Chimney sweeps were common on the streets of nineteenth-century New York, as in Victorian England.  Usually a master and his young apprentice roamed the streets together, the master calling out his cry to alert the householders in need of his services.  The boy would climb up the chimney with a brush to loosen the soot, and then climb down again to bag and remove it.  If he didn't climb properly, he might get stuck in there and not come out alive.  Only much later did machines replace climbing boys. 

The velocipede craze

         In 1869 a new craze from France suddenly swept New York: the velocipede.  This was a crude forerunner of the bicycle, though at the time everyone thought it the very latest in personal transportation and amusement.  Academies and rinks for teaching and riding the velocipede sprang up all  over the city, and hardy young males flocked to them to master this new skill.  The wheels were of iron and the saddle rigid, which discouraged long excursions, so most of the riding was done in indoor rinks.  Accidents were frequent; the victims could display their wounds in much the same way that today's high school football players show their scars and bruises, heroic mementos of a noble sport.

The Spite House

         Years ago passersby were puzzled by a four-story row house at East 82^nd Street and Lexington Avenue that was only five feet wide.  There was of course a story behind it.

         In 1882 a clothier named Hyman Sarner who owned several lots on East 82^nd Street decided to build an apartment house on his property, which extended almost to Lexington Avenue.  Along Lexington Avenue was a narrow strip of land, valueless, he thought, unless joined to the land he already owned, so he set out to acquire it.

         Learning that the land belonged to one Joseph Richardson, he offered the gentleman a thousand dollars for the land.  But Richardson demanded five thousand, which Sarner thought outrageous.  When Sarner refused, Richardson called him a tightwad and showed him to the door.  So Sarner built his four-story apartment house anyway, with side windows looking out on Lexington Avenue.  

         Now came Richardson’s revenge: he would build a narrow four-story building on his strip of land smack against Sarner’s building, thus cutting off the view from Sarner’s windows.  A building only five feet wide?  His wife and daughter thought he was crazy, but Richardson’s spite was not to be denied; he would live there himself – obesity was not his problem – and rent to skinny tenants. 

         Within a year the house was built, cutting off the view and light from Sarner’s windows.  There were two suites to a floor, each with three rooms and a bath, and stairs between floors so narrow that only one person could use them at a time.  To pass each other in the halls, one person had to duck into one of the rooms so as to let the other one pass.  Richardson and his wife moved into a ground-floor suite and, amazingly, found narrow tenants who moved in with narrow furniture.  

Look close: the Spite House is in the
foreground, slightly lower than the
building with awnings next to it.

         The house quickly became a local legend, inspiring articles and jokes.  But when a journalist of pronounced rotundity came to interview Richardson and was told that the owner was up on the roof overseeing workmen doing repairs, he started up the stairs and at once got perilously stuck; alas, the more he wiggled to get free, the more he got wedged in.  A tenant from the ground floor tried to help by pushing from below, and a tenant from above who wanted to reach the street began pushing in the opposite direction.  Mauled simultaneously from above and below, the journalist finally got the two tenants to desist, then took off his outer clothes and wiggled free, and so proceeded up to the roof in his underwear to conduct an airy  interview.  

         Don’t go to Lexington and East 82^nd Street to see this anomaly; it and Sarner’s adjoining building were torn down in 1915 – long after Richardson had died – to make room for a much larger apartment building that could accommodate tenants of whatever proportions.

Coming soon: Getting Rid of the Unwanted Dead. 

©  2020  Clifford Browder

458. Five Worst Poems in the English Language

BROWDERBOOKS

My new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is a good read for a society in lockdown.  And since my mail is being delivered again, and a friend has reported receiving a copy in the mail, it seems likely that anyone wanting a print copy can hope to get it without too much delay.  

A fun book with some grim moments, it's all about New Yorkers and their city.  Chapter 32 on catastrophes seems especially relevant today.  It describes the cholera epidemic of 1832, and the snowstorm of 1888, following which New Yorkers with snowshoes were walking over the tops of trees.  Unless, of course, you'd rather read about booze, weird fun (and I do mean weird), graffiti, the Mystic Rose, and my affair with a Broadway chorus boy.  Paperback and ebook available from Amazon.  For my other books, click here.

                   Five Worst Poems 

              in the English Language

This is a purely personal choice.  I have excluded minor poets, even though one in particular, otherwise obscure, is promoted online as the very worst poet in the language.  No, I am considering only famous poets, names known to anyone seriously interested in English-language literature.  I am also disregarding the online rants of those who in college were force-fed poetry and have yet to get over it; I want to maintain a degree of objectivity.  So here they are: my choice of the five worst poems in the English language.

No. 1.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha.

An 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter based on Native American legends,  It tells the story of the warrior Hiawatha and his love for the maiden Minnehaha.  Though criticized from the start by critics, the poem was — for quite a while —  popular with the public, for in those days educated people actually did read poetry, and long poems at that.  

This 1910 illustration suggests mystery,
adventure, something almost cosmic.
 But then one encounters the poem.

So what’s my gripe?  Everything.

• The length: impossible.  It takes the average reader over two hours to read it, though few would even attempt it today.
• The meter.  Longfellow was innovative in his choice of meters, but this one, trochaic tetrameter, strikes me as obsessively repetitious — la dee da da, la dee da da — and, finally, just plain ludicrous.
• The names: “Hiawatha” is okay, but “Minnehaha” invites ha ha, and as for “Gitche Gumee,” it attains the peak of the ridiculous.

To make my point, I need only cite the opening lines:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water, 

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the Moon, Nokomis. 

Dark behind it rose the forest, rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, 

Rose the firs with cones upon them; bright before it beat the water, 

Beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

Would you really want to spend over two hours with this stuff?  Neither would I.  Case closed.

No. 2.  Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad.”

Nineteenth-century poets embraced the Arthurian legend with enthusiasm, sometimes hugged it to death.  Tennyson, an excellent poet in many ways, in this poem strains our credibility today.  The opening lines:

My good blade carves the casques of men,

   My tough lance thrusteth sure,

My strength is as the strength of ten,

   Because my heart is pure.

Pure?  Hmm.  Not that he’s indifferent to the ladies, far from it.  But:

How sweet are looks that ladies bend

   On whom their favours fall!

For them I battle till the end,

   To save from shame and thrall:

But all my heart is drawn above,

   My knees are bow'd in crypt and shrine:

I never felt the kiss of lov

   Nor maiden's hand in mine.

More bounteous aspects on me beam,

   Me mightier transports move and thrill;

So keep I fair thro' faith and prayer

   A virgin heart in work and will.

A virgin knight?  Okay, but for me that means a bore, a cipher, and a creep.  Granted, the Arthurian legends had to come up with someone other than Lancelot, the greatest of knightly heroes, since the Big L had done naughty things with Arthur’s Guinevere.  But to afflict us with Galahad, the purest biped ever known, and not the least bit conflicted, is going it a bit.  Our post-Freudian mindset just can’t take it.  No wonder my college prof teaching Victorian lit told us he didn’t have the heart — or was it the courage? — to assign the poem to us.  Case closed.

W.E.F. Britten, illustration for Tennyson's poem.

No. 3.  William Wordsworth’s “To the Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturist).”

Never heard of it?  Neither had I, till I found it online.  Of all the Romantics, I rate Wordsworth — the earlier, pre-Laureate Wordsworth — the highest.  But even the best poets have moments of insipid inspiration, as witnessed here.  The poem, Wordsworth adds beneath the title, was “composed while we were labouring together in his pleasure-ground.”  He then begins:

SPADE! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands,

And shaped these pleasant walks by Emont's side,

Thou art a tool of honour in my hands;

I press thee, through the yielding soil, with pride.

He goes on to praise his friend, the spade’s owner, but can’t let go of the spade.

Who shall inherit Thee when death has laid

Low in the darksome cell thine own dear lord?

That man will have a trophy, humble Spade!

A trophy nobler than a conqueror's sword. 

His fetish continues in the last stanza, with mention of the spade’s new owner.

His thrift thy uselessness will never scorn;

An 'heir-loom' in his cottage wilt thou be:-- 

High will he hang thee up, well pleased to adorn

His rustic chimney with the last of Thee! 

I’ve read of heroes’ swords and armor, and poets’ harps and lyres, being hung up in honor, but never a spade.  Wordsworth did often embrace the ordinary and humble, thus avoiding the exoticism of so many nineteenth-century bards, but for me, this is taking it into the realm of the ludicrous.  Frankly, it’s just plain silly.  Case closed. 

No. 4.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chant.”

This poem was first published in 1798.  To render its flavor, here are the opening lines:

At midnight by the stream I roved,

To forget the form I loved.

Image of Lewti! from my mind

Depart; for Lewti is not kind.

The Moon was high, the moonlight gleam 

And the shadow of a star

Heaved upon Tamaha's stream;

But the rock shone brighter far,

The rock half sheltered from my view

By pendent boughs of tressy yew.—      

So shines my Lewti's forehead fair,

Gleaming through her sable hair,

Image of Lewti! from my mind

Depart; for Lewti is not kind.

So what to we learn?  A lover laments his unrequited love and tries to forget that “Lewti is not kind.”  A rather pedestrian way to put it; I would expect fire and rage and tumult, not this low-keyed complaint.  And what’s with “Circassian”?  My online dictionary informs me that the Circassians are mainly a group of Sunni Muslims of the northwestern Caucasus.  But Coleridge did not have access to online dictionaries, and I suspect that he used the word for its exotic effect, its evocation of the mysteriously remote.  Such effects he achieved brilliantly in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the fragment “Kubla Khan,” but alas, not so brilliantly here.  And the name “Lewti,” which he evidently invented, bothers me as well.  Especially in these lines:

And so with many a hope I seek

And with such joy I find my Lewti;

And even so my pale wan cheek

Drinks in as deep a flush of beauty!      

Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind,

If Lewti never will be kind.

Well, he managed to rhyme “beauty” with “Lewti,” and that’s better than “bootie” or “snooty,” but the word itself — “Lewti” — bothers me.  It’s just one more reason why I consider this poem concocted, steeped in an annoying exoticism, not rooted in personal experience.  Which brings me no joy, for Coleridge was capable of so much better.  Case, alas, closed.

No. 5.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Excelsior.”

Yes, for my finale, with regret I must return to our American bard.  Troubled as I am to pick on him so unreservedly, I can’t do otherwise, for this poem compels me to include it.  Here’s the first stanza:

The shades of night were falling fast, 

As through an Alpine village passed 

A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, 

A banner with the strange device, 

      Excelsior! 

So is this young man hawking excelsior, an industrial product made of wood slivers and used in packaging and taxidermy?  And hawking it in, of all places, the Alps?  No, excelsior is surely used here in its Latin sense (yes, it comes from Latin), meaning “higher, always upward.”  In this sense, in fact, it appears on the New York State seal.  So what is this guy up to?  The poem tells us, sort of …

"Try not the Pass!" the old man said; 

"Dark lowers the tempest overhead, 

The roaring torrent is deep and wide!" 

And loud that clarion voice replied, 

      Excelsior! 

"Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest 

Thy weary head upon this breast! " 

A tear stood in his bright blue eye, 

But still he answered, with a sigh, 

      Excelsior! 

By now it should be clear that our hero is no ordinary mountain climber; frankly, he’s a nut.  Which reminds me of some of the daredevil climbers in my previous post, “Mountains: They Entice, Delight, Kill.”  And sure enough, when the monks of St. Bernard send out their hound at daybreak:

A traveller, by the faithful hound, 

Half-buried in the snow was found, 

Still grasping in his hand of ice 

That banner with the strange device, 

      Excelsior! 

There in the twilight cold and gray, 

Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, 

And from the sky, serene and far, 

A voice fell like a falling star, 

      Excelsior! 

So there he is, frozen dead, but sanctified by some celestial voice.  Sorry, it just doesn’t cut.  The damn fool got what he deserved, and maybe what he wanted.  But believe me, the frozen dead aren’t “beautiful,” and they can’t help humanity in any way. 

An 1852 illustration.

Coincidentally, in response to my post on mountains, a friend told me of an acquaintance of his, a poet who was writing a book about volcanoes.  Climbing up a volcano on a remote Japanese island, he wanted to get to the top, but a volunteer at the climbing hut urged him not to, as it was too late in the day.  A risk-taker, he went on anyway, but was never seen again.  He must have fallen into the volcano, but his body was never found.  Even so, was he in some ways a hero?  Hardly.  Everyone in any way involved with him in the U.S. and Japan was thrown into crisis, the island also, and the volunteer in the climbing hut broke down in tears, convinced he should have done more to prevent the accident.  And the climber left behind a wife and child.  So much for “Excelsior!”  Case closed.

                                 *         *         *

So there they are: my five worst poems in the English language.  All from the nineteenth century, as it happens.  Back then exoticism and medievalism raged in literary circles on both sides of the Atlantic, the results being sometimes charming, and sometimes deplorable.  And these five poets — no, only four — could at times be deplorable.  Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson redeem themselves with their other work, but in Longfellow’s case, I’m not so sure.  Today, who reads him?  Poor guy, he’s about as hot as an icicle, as endearing as a dead fish.


Coming soon:  New York Hodgepodge: Alligators, Copperheads, Velocipedes, and the Spite House


©  2020  Clifford Browder