KNOW YOUR POE: The Bells

PREFACE. I'm in yet another Poe phase, and so far it's pretty harrowing. I've chopped my way through two biographies, sending one back to Amazon because it was so godawful. The other one missed the boat on many things, most glaringly not giving ANY interpretation whatsoever on the deep mystery of his death. He just recounted it, without even mentioning the myriad theories about what exactly happened to him. So much of it is dry, detailed, straight reporting based on "what we know" (mainly Poe's letters, which are often 15 pages long and profoundly melodramatic, with every second word underlined). There is no doubt he was a crazy person, maybe the most bipolar historic figure of all time, deeply alcoholic, tortured, and often not very honest or trustworthy. But I also ordered a TOME, a big thick hardcover (made in China) meant to look like an ancient volume: COMPLETE TALES AND POEMS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. I haven't even cracked that one yet, as I am letting the biographical details of his life sink in. At any rate, I ran this series eight or so years ago, and if I don't remember it, neither will my readers! Enjoy.

Hello, and welcome to a new series entitled Know your Poe. (a. k. a. Poe Corner). Though I plan to run through everything Poe ever croaked, yelled or hiccupped, we'll start with an easy one, a poem so shot through with unspeakable horror that it makes The Raven sound like a Beach Boys song. Little Deuce Coupe, perhaps.

Why am I doing this? Because it intrigues me that there are no apparent degrees of separation between Poe and a similar literary legend, Jerry Lee Lewis. Both married their 13-year-old cousins, a move that today might raise a few eyebrows. Wikipedia makes this comment:

Debate has raged regarding how unusual this pairing was based on the couple's age and blood relationship. Noted Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn argues it was not particularly unusual, nor was Poe's nicknaming his wife "Sissy" or "Sis". Another Poe biographer, Kenneth Silverman, contends that though their first-cousin marriage was not unusual, her young age was. It has been suggested that Clemm and Poe had a relationship more like that between brother and sister than between husband and wife.



Yeah, OK, but. How many brothers and sisters are married? There's just no way you can make this turn out right.

From the demented photographic portraits to the gruesome short stories in which people are walled up inside catacombs, to the death at age 40 from God-knows-what-but-probably-alcohol, Poe evolved into legend and now belongs to all of us. He's the patron saint of tortured souls, people left to die in the abyss. Never was abandonment portrayed like this, in a way that fascinates us even as we shrink back and shudder. I felt a visceral stab when reading that he lost both his parents in infancy and was "taken in" by a couple who never formally adopted him, thus leaving him feeling like a permanent charity case. I can just hear them saying to him (and he likely really did hear this, as did many a literary legend): "Edgar, dear chap, do give up this poetry nonsense and make something of yourself."



Poe is part of pop culture as well as literature, and his crossover with Gomez Addams is obvious. If Poe had been happy, he would have been Gomez Addams. He would have had a more normal, wholesome marriage to someone like Morticia. But it was not to be, and at age forty, the poor sod (speaking of ravens) croaked.

Eons ago, I think in my teens, I found The Bells in an anthology somewhere, and a girl friend and I took turns reading it to each other (yes, I was like that, even back then). The locked-in rhyme and rhythm scheme can be headache-inducing and oppressive, but it was the format of the times, before Walt Whitman came along and blew everything apart. In rereading The Raven, a dense, thick, suffocating poem full of rustling purple curtains and velvet divans, I found some lines that were welded into my brain, that in fact were (unconsciously) a part of me:

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'



I didn't catch up with that "balm in Gilead" reference until much later, until I stood up and sang it in church:

"There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul."

Sin-sick? I wonder if marrying your thirteen-year-old cousin counts as "sin". By my standards, it certainly is sick, though Poe biographers hasten to assure us that it was "normal" for the times. But I get the feeling she spent most of her short life chronically ill, gently expiring on his purple velvet divan.



Never mind, we're here to analyze The Bells, which to my mind is even more Hitchcockian than The Raven, and certainly more bizarre. I was going to count how many times "bells" appears in this poem, but gave up after 27 or so. Never have I seen so much repetition in any work of literature, making me wonder if Poe's brain was (as we used to say) like a broken record.

And here's a charming little tidbit, which explains several phrases still in common use:

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people so they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave.
When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside. They realized they had been burying people alive, so they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.

Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered "a dead ringer".



The Bells

HEAR the sledges with the bells,
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars, that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.



Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!



Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!



Hear the loud alarum bells,
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!



How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,—
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells,
Of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!



Hear the tolling of the bells,
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people—ah, the people,
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone—
They are neither man nor woman,
They are neither brute nor human,
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells;



And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells,
And he dances, and he yells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells,
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells:
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

Edgar Allan Poe. 1809–1849

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When you're in the Little Land. . .

 

When you're in the Little Land
You watch the wee folk play,
You see them through a game or two,
You come out old and gray.

When you're in the Little Land
They fill your hands with gold,
You think you stay for just a day,
You come out bent and old.



Dead leaves in your pockets
O my enchanted, have a care
Run, run from the little folk
Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets
And snowflakes in your hair



Lights shine in the Little Land
From diamonds on the wall,
But when you're back on the brown hill side
It's cold pebbles after all.



Music in the little land
Makes the heart rejoice.
It charms your ear so you can not hear
The sound of your true love’s voice

Dead leaves in your pockets
O my enchanted, have a care
Run, run from the little folk
Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets
And snowflakes in your hair



When you’re in the Little Land
You watch the wee folk play,
You see them through a game or two,
You come out old and gray.

Dead leaves in your pockets
O my enchanted, have a care
Run, run from the little folk
Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets
And snowflakes in your hair



Why did this leap into my head today, and where did it come from? Until this morning, damned if I knew. I remember my brother singing it in the '60s when he came home from university. Everyone was singing and playing the guitar and going to hootenannys, whatever they were, and most of us sucked our songs off record albums, often with wrong words and crazy chords.

It took me quite a while to find any semblance of this song, except for a very Irish version of it on YouTube. His didn't much resemble mine. It spoke of leprechauns, which gave me a clue as to what the song was about. But my version was one of those cobbled-together-from-memory things. I was only 9 or 10 years old and impressionable. I had NO IDEA what this song meant or even where it came from: I remember finding it weird and disturbing, which it still is.



So today, thanks to the good graces of YouTube, I more or less hunted it down, but it wasn't easy. This was originally written by Malvina Reynolds, an eccentric folk genius who wrote Little Boxes (on the hillside) and What Have they Done to the Rain? This was one of her more obscure numbers and sounds like it's based on folk poetry. One false lead took me to a poem called The Little Land by Robert Louis Stevenson (ph?), but it was one of those "How Would you Like to Go Up in a Swing" kind-of things, echoes of childhood, etc. Not threatening enough.

Somewhere I found a reference to the Limelighters, a folk group we listened to a lot back then. It featured Glen Yarbrough (borough? Who has time to check?), a tenor with a voice that would cut through barbed wire. I remember quite a few of their songs, but not this one.



So it was still pretty obscure when I finally tracked down the available fragments and pieced them together with my bits of memory: hey, folk singers do that all the time. (I left out one line: someone's version said "Deadly in your pocket," which is completely nonsensical. 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.) But somewhere else, someone made a comment that actually made sense: Reynolds had a sense of social satire which could be quite biting (see Little Boxes). Perhaps the song was about another kind of "enchantment", not by leprechauns, faeries or other "little folk", but by the seductiveness of riches and fame.

It actually works. First you're just looking in from the outside, watching all these charming people at play, and it looks harmless enough, so you stay around for "a game or two". But then, bizarrely, you wake up and realize that decades have passed in a flash. The gold pouring through your hands eventually runs out and disappears. As in those alien encounters where people mysteriously lose time, the lurch ahead into old age is frightening: suddenly you're a has-been who never was.



The dead leaves in your pockets that I took so literally as a child could be the deadened browned scorched currency of false fame, crumbling away into nothing. And I don't need to explain those snowflakes. Bright lights, white hair, cold stones. To enchant, literally, means to gain magical power over someone by chanting, usually in song. Soon the sound of enchantment becomes so strong that we can no longer make out the voice of the one we truly love, the only one whose love is not based on greed.

It's a kind of evil reverse fairy-tale where the victim quickly shrivels under forces he or she can't comprehend. So much for cute little leprechauns, Lucky Charms and Kiss Me, I'm Irish.

POST-MORTEM. I will confess that this is a rerun, originally posted in 2012. Six bloody years is long enough, and hey, if *I* don't remember it, no one else will! I was certain I'd be able to find ample imformation after all that time had passed - it always happens on the internet. What shocked me was that nothing had changed - in fact, it was even harder to find anything at all about this song. There was a weird pdf of Reynolds' song lyrics that looked like it was typewritten on an old Olivetti portable from 1959, but I couldn't do anything with it. All sung versions have disappeared. The Limelighters DID record it, and I was allowed to listen to 30 seconds of it, enough to realize my memory had been close to correct. Malvina included a few lines in the original which specified the "wee folk" were, in fact, leprechauns. Nearly every culture has a myth about tiny people running around in the woods, doing demonic mischief and scaring people half to death. Leprechaun is a horrible word when you look at it. Scares the living shit out of me. No wee folk for me! Go away from my door.

POST-POST DISCOVERY. All right. I have it! I have that lyric sheet from the Olivetti. Here is the relevant lyric:

As you can see, this is pretty close to the version at the beginning of this post, without those few lines about the leprechauns. The possible meaning of the lyric (being bedazzled by wealth and fame, while at the same time seduced and sucked dry) is made more clear by the line, "They'll dazzle you and promise you, and lead you by the hand". It couldn't be more clear, in fact. The Limelighters version leaves that verse out, so it starts in the middle, kind of. But we still get the message. 'Tis luck to catch a leprechaun. Except when it isn't.

POST-IT NOTE: This is a summer repeat, inspired by a comment I just had on the ORIGINAL post (from years ago! I just love it when I get those.) I hadn't thought about it in years!

Here is our conversation:

Anonymous July 29, 2022 at 5:35 PM

There's more now, and based on the information you've given, I've tracked down a Malvina Reynolds recording on YouTube. Also a short version by a Raymond Crooke. Also the Limelighters version, which is least like what I heard in the 60's. Thanks for the leads!

Margaret Gunning July 30, 2022 at 10:51 AM

I had almost forgotten about this! Yes, it amazes me how, if you check back in a few years, suddenly there's all sorts of videos pertaining to the subject at hand. YT grows exponentially by the year. Thank you for your comment!

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💛FLUFFY LITTLE DUMPLINGS! My best duckling video EVER

Haven't seen ANY birds for ever so long. The back yard is deserted! I've complained about this before, so I'll shut up now, but I honestly do not know what is going on, because everywhere we go now is virtually deserted. The neighbors across the back fence folded their tents in the night and disappeared in the weirdest "move" I ever saw. One day they were there, shouting and smoking pot with the dog yapping and strangling, and now the place looks scoured and abandoned. This seems to indicate sketchiness, because moving typically involves lots of hubbub and yells and boxes and vans and general mayhem, and there was NONE of that, not even by professional movers. What breaks my heart is that their two cats are gone, too - daily visitors to our yard, a sweet ginger and a handsome tuxedo. Both gone, along with all the birds. But here I have a record of just a few ducklings, the only ones I saw this year. What is going on?

😳SAY "AHHHHH!" CREEPY 1950s educational film😳

Creepy as fu*k! 

The Troll Doll Channel: GRUMPY CHORUS SINGS!

Lord, can these grumpy trolls SING!

💗The Troll Doll Channel: TROLL VILLAGE!💜

And this isn't all of them. Not by a long shot! These are just the trolls which have invaded my "workspace" (such as it is! Who wants to work anyway?)

🧡SWEET MAMA SQUIRREL (and - drama in the back yard!)

Squirrels are about all we get, these days. It's very depressing, and I don't know why it's happening. Everywhere we go, the bird count is nearly zero, at a time when the waters should be teeming with different species. The Blakeburn Lagoon is practically empty, when we used to see shovellers, ring-necks, wigeons, SWANS. . .and even a sandhill crane and an OTTER, to name only a few (red-tailed hawk?). Why have the birds abandoned so many places? Why is it happening everywhere? Only Burnaby Lake still has birds, but mostly geese, a few mallards, and hungry blackbirds. My darker senses tell me that Something is coming, maybe an earthquake, or something even worse, because birds have been known to have an acute spidey-sense for these things. I want them back! Birds are a huge part of my mental health, and helped me get through the worst of the pandemic - although they were already thinning out two years ago. With all the food I put out, I should be attracting them like a magnet, but all we see these days is fat squirrels and the odd finch at the window feeder. Will they EVER come back? Where are they? Why are they doing this?

BIGFOOT SAMBA!

STOP THE CLOCK! (short fiction)

Stop the clock (short fiction)



“Marcie! Hey it’s good to see you!”

“Hi, Julie.”

Julie looked her up and down. Up and down, then smiled brightly, her eyes glistening like wet caramels. Then came the single syllable.

“Wow.”

It wasn’t a “wow” like “wow, is that your new car?”. It was a “wow” like, “What happened to your new car?” It had a tiny backlilt, an inflection that was just a little bit “off”.

Marcie knew it wasn’t a good “wow”. It was almost a disappointed “wow”, but strained through a sort of Facebook screen so she could never be pinned down or held responsible.



“Wow yourself.”

“Yeah.!” The “yeah” started off as a high squeal, then sailed down to a whisper.

Julie looked away for just a second with a sort of reflexive hair-flip, like something you’d do in junior high. Marcie half-expected her to start chewing on the end of her braid. Then she brighted herself again.

“So what are you, y’knowwww – “

“Oh, same old thing.”

“Did you ever get – “

“No.”

“So are you self-publishing now? Whatever happened to that novel? You know, the one about the cruise ship and the - ”

“That was quite a while ago.”

“I can see that.” (See what? “That”.)

She hair-flipped again. “So what do you do now exactly, you know? I mean.”

“The same thing you do, Julie.”

“Oh, of course!” She kept looking Marcie up and down, her eyes flipping from head to mid-thigh, though pretending she wasn’t doing it.



“You know, it’s been an awfully long time since we’ve seen each other, Julie.”

“Tell me about it!”, with a well-practiced “oh, yeah!” eye-roll.

It was then that she noticed something funny about Julie. Or at least, she thought it was funny. She had a sort of glaze over her, like something you’d pour over cinnamon buns, or maybe a shell of amber. Glossy. Her smile was glossy too.

Had she done something to herself?

Marcie believed that, as you aged, your face decided to go one way or the other. It either went Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy looked almost the same in the ‘60s, well, at least both of them had normal faces, and now Shatner was round as a pumpkin and Nimoy looked like a burnt-out old matchstick.

Skinny faces got fat, fat faces got skinny. Gaunt-looking people rounded out and softened, as if their inner selves were working their way out. The healthy-looking ones housing gaunt souls ultimately lost the battle of looking like someone else.

But there was a third possibility, and that was to stop. Stop time, stop the clock ticking. Marcie always thought there was another word for that: “death”, but apparently not, because everywhere she looked these days, she saw people who had decided to stop the clock

Except that there was a cost.



As Julie pretended not to look at Marcie’s burgeoning weight, the little dewlappy thing that hung below her rounded chin, the lizard skin on her arms, Marcie pretended not to look at Julie’s House of Wax immobility, the shellacked quality which was now considered highly desirable, even as she heard the creepy murmur of Vincent Price in the background.

Some even turned the clock back. Ageing backwards, which was really some trick. If they kept on going, they’d be fetal in a few years, or disappearing altogether, their molecules just coming apart: poof!

“So, I guess you have a pretty big one coming up pretty soon.”

“A pretty big one?” For some insane reason Marcie thought “bowel movement”.

“Birthday!” She almost sang it, lilting high on the first syllable.

“Oh, Julie, how did you ever remember that?”

“I did your horoscope, silly, don’t you remember? Look at that.” She plucked a hair off the shoulder of Marcie’s blouse and looked at it.

“It’s a hair.”

“Yes, I know, but it’s - “

“Didn’t your hair used to be - wait, now what color was it, I mean before?”

“Before what?” Julie was starting to sound defensive. She could dish it out, but she definitely couldn’t take it.

“Before the Jurassic Period,” Marcie wanted to say, but she didn’t. All the nasty things she left unsaid were going to kill her, one of these days, like a great landslide falling down on her.



“You’re still slim,” she said instead. “How do you do it?”

“Oh! I cleanse. Every month. High colonics, they’re awesome! You just purge away all that gunk in your system. All those toxins.”

“I thought you were vegan.”

“Oh, but vegetables have chemicals on them no matter what, because of the water supply.”

“I still eat cows.” She was becoming extremely depressed. How to get rid of her?

“You’re going to kill yourself, Marcie,” Julie murmured, pulling out and using the appropriate facial expression before tucking it away again.

(“Yes, if this conversation goes on any longer.” Another rock in the landslide.)

“My grandmother ate cows.”

“But they were different cows.”

Marcie burst out laughing. She couldn’t keep the laugh to herself.

“I should say they were.”

“No, you don’t understand, they weren’t GMO cows.” Marcie thought this was something about General Motors or something. Her lack of interest finally must have registered on Julie.



“Listen, sweetie, I have to go now, but I want to give you something" (rummaging in her voluminous shoulder-bag) “- or actually, a few things, they’re freebies from the gym, you know? And the salon and stuff. Take them.” She thrust a wad of things in Marcie’s hands with a tight smile, turned around abruptly and gave a little Liza Minnelli backwards wave over her shoulder before flouncing away.

Marcie stood in the street shuffling through her treasures. A coupon for Turbo-Charge Fat Blaster Weight Loss Supplement, $2.00 off the first 60 capsules. An ad for a 60-ounce mega-capacity twenty-speed macerating Power-Juicer, 90-day trial free of charge! “Look 20 years younger in 20 minutes with Botuline, available NOW from your dentist!” A little packet of shampoo from a trendy salon, something called Blow your Head Off!, to mask “the grey” (grey sounding as ominous as some creepy space alien, and as undesirable). An ad for dental veneers with a woman smiling like a piano, showing every blinding-white tooth in her head.

God, she must think I’m a disgusting mess.

Just plaster things on the outside, and run-run-run. It’ll catch up with you one day. Sooner or later all your molecules will come apart, never to be replaced. When your molecules do come apart, there will literally be nothing left. Is that why you draw back so hard, by trying to minus-out the years you’ve slogged on this earth? Keep hitting the reset button. But what about your mind? Can you erase that too? I suppose you can. It’s done in a slightly different way.



They were friends then, quite good friends, had many excited conversations about this and that, though they often had a barbed quality to them, a putting-down-with-eyeroll. It was necessarily for them to have a mutual enemy or threat in order to really get along. Julie seemed like a super-coper, always on top of every situation, so Marcie was stunned when she suddenly, floridly fell apart. She had always been a little frantic, but this was something else, as if the tiny dancing ballerina on top of the music box had gradually accelerated until it was spinning a million miles an hour. This wasn’t any penny-ante breakdown, it was wholesale craziness, hallucinations, delusions, the works.

That sounds awful, Marcie thought, just heartless! It was pain and suffering, for sure, but it was funny how everyone around Julie seemed to suffer more than she did. And it was her family who decided she needed “shock”, something her sardonic old great-uncle called “Edison’s medicine”.

The shock re-set her for sure, but things weren’t the same after that. It was as if some mute but powerful presence deep in her psyche said: not this way; THAT way, and gave her a huge shove in the direction of artificiality. This was the way to make it. This was survival, solace, and something she could be really good at. As the years passed, her new strategy dovetailed beautifully with what the culture expected of her: the new Julie was popular at last, and because of that, Marcie just faded into the background. Not that Marcie went backwards: Julie just turned and walked away.



Now, it was: Wow. Look at you. All right. I’ve made decisions, more compromises than I ever thought I would have to. I am no prize. For this reason, I have one less friend in the world, though I suspect I lost her a long time ago. Life is inherently lonely, isn’t it? Aren’t the sweet fleeting times the very worst, because of how they always go away?

And why is it that when things are good, I mean, really good – as sweet as they can possibly be - we are always the last ones to know? Better not to recognize such beauty, even in ourselves, lest we cry out to a heedless universe in last-ditch desperation and despair: "Freeze!"

😱SCREAMING COWBOY!🤠

This just jumped out at me from nowhere! I saw it on someone else's channel, a very small channel which normally garners tens of views, if that - and this one got something like FOUR MILLION. It happens sometimes, and no one can figure it out. The same thing is happening with one of mine, the dumbest thing I ever threw together. This, though - it's excruciatingly good, and I don't know why I didn't know about it before. I stole it, actually, and had to take a copyright claim to do so (and the only reason I did not get a copyright STRIKE is that so many other people had already stolen it). I think it is from a music video by some unknown, surreal cowboy act. Lefty Frizzell on acid or something. 

Old Brown Ads (with old brown attitudes)

 

This one simply terrifies me! It sounds like instructions to drown yourself: "To clean the nose: Put two or three drops of Sylpho-Nathal in a glass of warm water.  Pour a little in the palm of your hand and SNUFF IT UP THE NOSE" (emphasis mine). But this madness makes a bit more sense when you read the first paragraph: "Everybody - old and young - should do this. For the mucus membrane of the nose and throat of healthy persons may become contaminated with the infantile paralysis virus. Without falling ill themselves, they may infect others, chiefly children." The infantile paralysis is, of course, polio, and I doubt if snuffing medicated water up your nose would prevent it. But there are eerie echoes here of the weird and desperate things people did to try to cure or prevent COVID. This isn't quite as bad as drinking bleach, but I don't see how it could help, and Sylpho-Nathal is probably made of the same stuff as horse liniment.

"Grippe" is one of those old words, like quinsy or lumbago, that you just don't hear any more. I was going to do a whole post on this, but couldn't find enough words. Heebie-jeebies? (That was, I think, a psychiatric term.) These mysterious tablets are "simply remedies which fight off the poisons in your system, and enable you better to overcome the cold." The implication is that somehow this cold or grippe might morph into influenza, one of the most dreaded diseases of the early 20th century. I doubt if Cold & Grippe Tablets made much difference. And as usual, I wonder: what the hell was IN these things? This was in the days before consumer transparency.

I DO remember pepsin-flavored gum and Life Savers. I don't know if they're made any more, but I hope not, because just the name makes me quail. Pepsin, I later found out, is a digestive enzyme, something probably taken out of a cow's stomach. This stuff has the power to not only get rid of this geezer's tummy-ache, it "purifies breath and whitens teeth" in the bargain! Clean, pure, healthful, and full of sugar and cow bile/vomit.

Though it's a little hard to make out the text of this VERY brown old ad, I think I get the gist of it: FASTABS is a miracle "vegetable substance" that you take before meals, along with a LOT of water. The ingredient is methylcellulose, an indigestible material that soaks up water like a sponge, creating a large squishy mass which supposedly takes up all the room in your tummy so you won't want to eat. Probably you COULDN'T eat with that heaving slime in your gut. 

Oh my goodness - WHAT is "smoker's fag"? I thought a fag WAS a cigarette, at least in olden times in Britain. But you can also be "fagged out", a quaint expression meaning that you're tired. But this is just so bizarre! The ad is for Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, a digestive remedy also used to relieve constipation. This poor old bugger is sitting there with a "fag" dangling out of his mouth, and he'd be green if he weren't so brown. The tobacco has made him so sick he wants to vomit. But ONE SIMPLE THING can "Minimize the After-Effects of Tobacco to a Remarkable Degree"! Nowhere is it stated that you should just stop smoking, idjit, and save your lungs as well as your precious tummy. 

Now we get to the issue of "starved blood" (in later decades known as "tired blood"). Delicate girls and women "need that blood-strength which comes from medicinal nourishment. No drugs can make blood." There is something faintly Dracula-like about all this - "blood-food", are you KIDDING me? But if you are frail, languid, delicate or nervous, then you belong in a vampire movie lying back on a chaise longue waiting for Bela Lugosi to bite your neck.

There is something just so esthetically pleasing about this ad for a punching bag, with its elegant illustration of a man wearing a long, ornate brocade skirt tied with a tasselled sash. No one explains why he's in drag, or why there is a CHILDREN'S SIZE punching bag for a couple dollars less. I have never heard of a child using a punching bag, and it is still more strange to see a man from the early 1900s wearing one of his wife's ballgowns to work out. Or maybe it's the dining room curtains?

Aha! CATARRH! This was one of the obsolete diseases I was trying to remember. Just the name is disgusting and phlegmy. So why has this dire condition fallen out of fashion? Do people not GET catarrh any more, has it just changed into a runny nose which you should shut up about, and why on earth would a runny nose spell such doom for people, particularly in the summer? The guy wearing the graduation cap seems to know all about this, though he would never answer the most fundamental question: what the hell is IN this stuff? 

Again with the stomach remedies! This woman doesn't need Alka-Seltzer, she needs a good night's sleep, and more help with the children on a daily basis. If you have that headachy, tired-all-over feeling, your body is telling you to get the hell to BED and get some rest. But no, it's plop-plop, fizz-fizz, oh what a relief it is. Overwhelmed with the constant stress and isolation of child care? There's a pill for that. 

Elephant Eternity and other poems

Elephant Eternity

Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees
Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees
Elephants elephants walking like time

Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river
Fountaining their children in the mothery river
Elephants elephants bathing like happiness

Strong and gentle elephants
Standing on the earth
Strong and gentle elephants
Like peace

Time is walking under elephant trees
Happiness is bathing in the elephant river
Strong gentle peace is shining
All over the elephant earth

Adrian Mitchell

Ghost Elephants

In the elephant field
tall green ghost elephants
with your cargo of summer leaves

at night I heard you breathing at the window

Don't you ever think I'm not crying
since you're away from me
Don't ever think I went free

At first the goodbye had a lilt to it—
maybe just a couple of months—
but it was a beheading.

Ghost elephant,

reach down,

cross me over

Jean Valentine



The Elephant is slow to mate

The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.

D. H. Lawrence

The Elephant Song

Tong, tong, tong-a-tong, a-tong!
That is thc rhythm of the elephant song,
As the big grey elephants shuffle along.

To the sing, song, singing of the old brass bell,
To the shrill, harsh stridence of the mahoot's yell,
To the shuff-shuff-shuffle of the great round feet,
The elephants are swinging down the village street.

A priest peers out from his while-washed cell,
As he hears the ringing of the elephant bell.
A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse,
A baby peers from the arms of its nurse,

A cobra dances to a charmer's tune,
The incense wavers in the shrine of the moon,
The street dogs scamper, the children scurry,
A woman hum-hums as she fixes curry,

While the bells keep ringing, like a. distant gong,
Tong, tong, tong-a-tong. a-tong,
The swing-along rhythm of the elephant song.

Anonymous

As I Went Out One Morning (after W. H. Auden)

As I went out one morning






As I went out one morning
Walking the primal road
My shoulders were bent over
With an invisible load.

And down by the creek where the salmon
Sing all day in the spring
I heard a man with holes in his clothes
Say, “Love has no ending.”

I wondered at his heresy
He wasn’t supposed to speak
Of things he did not understand
And shouldn’t even seek.



“I love you, Lord, I love you,”
the ragged man proclaimed,
although his face was badly scarred
and his body bent and maimed.

The man was clearly crazy
For as he spoke his rhyme,
The salmon danced in the shallow stream
In fish-determined time.

I didn’t try to love him
But I loved him just the same
For he broke the diver’s quivering bow
And called his God by name.



“Oh tell me, man, oh tell me,”
I cried in my anguished state,
“What is the secret of the world?
Where is the end of hate?”

And all at once his face had changed
To an evil, ugly mask
His body had become the hate
About which I had asked.



“How stamp this mask into the mud,
How keep despair at bay?”
“You can’t,” he told me, grinning,
“But my God can point the way.”

“How dare you speak of God, you wretch,
When God’s abandoned you?
How dare you use the Holy Name?
He doesn’t want you to!





Your life’s just spent surviving
With the sidewalk as your bed
And taking poisons in your veins
And scrambling to be fed.”

The man just stood in leaves and mulch
While the salmon sang and spawned:
“Just see the other side of me
And tell me I am wrong.”

Another face appeared just then
A face all beaming bright
Its eyes were streaming like the sun
With pure mysterious light



“You blinded fool, you stand before
A drop of mist made rain
An eye that Paradise looks through
That holds both joy and pain.”

“I cannot understand you, for
You play such games with me!
How can you masquerade as God
And tell me how to see?”



“No one knows how Life began,
From Nothing came our birth.
A stir of seething molecules
Sparked all the life on earth.”

“Don’t tell me, wretch, you are the one
Who made this world come true!
Imposter, get out of my road,
I cannot look at you.”



“Just so,” the man said, streaming light,
“For no one knows the why.
But you will be forever changed
By looking through my eye.”

Margaret Gunning

My favorite poem

This poem has been my touchstone since I first heard Mr. Griffith read it in Grade 11 English class. I could never share with anyone how much it meant to me. I still find layers of meaning in it, and make new discoveries: the "appalling snow" he writes about, which at first seems nonsensical, casts a "pall" on the landscape, even if it is white rather than black. And so much more! This is a dream poem, the kind of work that can make a poet hang up his pencil because his work is now completed. I was surprised this video got any views at all - I didn't expect any - but since it did fairly well (for a poetry reading), I may do more. I like the format of sitting up in bed, late at night, with a book and a lamp and my cat loafing beside me. I have to keep my voice down, which I believe aids the process. I loathe "actorish" readings of things, as it ruins the atmosphere of most poems, or imposes the reader's ego on it. This poem practically reads itself. "And the deep river ran on."