The Charm of Light Verse

by LOUIS UNTERMEYER

PRACTICALLY every important poet has delighted in the joy of agile rhythms, the ingenuities of rhyme, and, perhaps most of all, in the quick colloquial speech — the common language of the people and the poet when he is at case. It is this sense of affability and lack of self-consciousness, this seemingly nonchalant manner sure of a ready response, that makes light verse so immediate a communication. It is the straightforward tune that rises above the counterpoint of early English poetry: the talk-flavored accents of Chaucer and Skelton and the anonymous balladists. Temporarily muffled by the Classicists and almost drowned out by the Romanticists, it speaks clearly through three great B’s — in the earthy accents of Burns, in the satirical stanzas of Byron, even in the mockpompous voice of Browning.

Browning is, in himself, a proof that light verse is not the opposite of serious poetry but merely another way of expressing a subject , an event, or a preoccupation. The classic “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” is a study in hatred projected by a fanatic dogmatist. But the speaker’s very bitterness is made ridiculous by the way Browning frames it in tripping rhythms and absurdly tinkling rhymes. In the airiest of light verse, he reduces the bombast to burlesque. The very opening of “The Glove” sets the key, the tone being that of flippant conversation: —

Such adroit matching of sounds is a feature of light verse. Browning seems to have set up bristling barricades of syllables for the sheer pleasure of leaping over them; pitting his skill against words that never had been rhymed before and would never be rhymed again, he joined seeming irreconcilables in sudden if not holy harmony. He was fond of such forced marriages as “amazement ” with “blaze meant,”“elsewhere" with “well swear,”"examine it" with “ Lamb in it,” “jasmine" with “alas, mine!" “keepsake” with “leaps, ache,” and a hundred other similarly queer matings.

But trick rhyming is only one of the devices of light verse. What makes us recognize it at once is, as already indicated, its free-and-easy tone. There is, moreover, the matter of touch. In the late nineteenth century when light verse was the vogue, its practitioners made valiant effort to limit it, to keep it for the upper-upper class. Carolyn Wells, one of the arbiters of fashion of the period, suggested that the form should be termed Gentle Verse; such a term would correctly imply that it was written of the gentlefolk, for the gentlefolk, and by the gentlefolk.”

In the early twentieth century, fortunately, it was rescued from false gentility and given a healthy American accent by such journalists as Bert Leston Taylor, Don Marquis, Keith Preston, and Franklin P. Adams, who joyfully threw open their columns to a younger generation knocking on the door with fistfuls of brisk iambs and gusty anapests. Among the newcomers who countered ultra-fastidiousness with caustic forthrightness were Dorothy Parker, past mistress of the verbal double take; Edna St. Vincent Millay, who alternated solemn anachronisms with latter-day Greenwich Village irreverences; Samuel Hoffenstein, whose cynicisms were always on the point of breaking into tears; Newman Levy, who brought the punning, loose-jointed, internally rhyming dexterities of Guy Wetmore Carryl sharply up to date; and Howard Dietz, who was to become one of the nation’s most proficient lyricists. In the last two decades, moreover, writers of light verse have given the form something of its lost importance. Social criticism was restored by the apparently fey but sharply pointed eccentricities of Ogden Nash; irony achieved a new edge in the abrupt disposals of e. e. cummings.

Fresh evidence of contemporary vitality is furnished by four recently published and already popular volumes. The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley (Viking, $3.00), the most roundly praised, is also the most serious. The section entitled “Saints Without Tears” is full of fancy, even facetiousness; but it is impossible to say where, in these pages, light verse ends and poetry begins. Saint Anthony, Saint Martin, Saint Bridget, Philip Neri, Saint Teresa, Saint Catherine, Simeon Stylites, and Thomas More are no less persuasive, no less saintly, for being wryly familiarized rather than heavily apostrophized. In pieces like “The Doll House,” Miss McGinley adroitly mixes modern sensibility and old-fashioned sentimentality; “Portrait of Girl with Comic Book” and “Launcelot with Bicycle” balance themselves on the hazardous line dividing the comedies and tragedies of adolescence; “In Praise of Diversity” is a compact essay — it happened to be a Phi Beta Kappa poem — that says important things in an unimportant tone of voice. A sample sestet: —

Miss McGinley does not disdain a single trick of the trade; parody, puns (“half a love is better than none”), persiflage (“On all the channels,/Nothing but panels!”), and epigrams (“Few friends he kept that pleased his mind./ His marriage failed when it began,/ Who worked unceasing for mankind/But loathed his fellow man.”) She is, however, too good a craftsman to use these devices as examples of craftiness. When she employs “slant” or “suspended” rhymes—“toaster” with “disaster,” “hunger” with “anger,” “chatter” with “butter” — she slants them as purposefully as John Crowe Ransom; when she distorts the word “tickets” into “tiggetts” in order to rhyme with “Liggett’s" she is paying tribute to the pioneering originality of Ogden Nash, who gave modern verse an entirely new direction; when she turns from sportiveness to satire she cuts deep, as in “The Day After Sunday,” with its concluding line: “God knows which God is the God God recognizes.” One can find fault with her only as a parodist. Her take-off on T. S. Eliot (“Mrs. Sweeney Among the Allegories”) is as glib as it is superficial; Miss McGinley seems to have forgotten that no writer of light verse ever accomplished unusual effects more brilliantly than Eliot himself. I am thinking not only of Eliot’s early quatrains but, as a passionate ailurophile, of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and his rollicking ballads about such happily named felines as Tumblebrutus, Griddlebone, Growltiger, Mungojerrie, Old Deuteronomy, Mr. Mistoffelees, and Macavity, the Mystery Cat. Those who, like Miss McGinley, imply that Eliot cannot communicate except through recondite allegories, remote allusions, and ambiguous abstractions should ponder the account of his favorite cat-criminal: —

Parody, among other things, is more deftly handled by David McCord. His half-concealed emanations of Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot are creative experiments in indirection and double meanings; his “Clutch of Clerihews” are happy reminders of their originator, the English murder-mystery man E. Clerihew Bentley. Mostly, however, McCord delights in the oddities of language. Much of his work consists of a kind of verbal legerdemain, of words that turn into their opposites, single syllables that flower into strange and multiple growths, orthographical mutants, absurdities that make sense — the more so since McCord is generally concerned with realities. This combination gives many of McCord’s pages a quirky and slightly bookish humor; it cannot be denied that they reveal the scholar at work — or at play. “Gloss,” the first oddity in Odds Without Ends (Little, Brown, $3.00), is a professional writer’s joke, a sly presentation of “the lost positive,” a picture that will tickle every part-time lexicographer: —

But McCord is not only preoccupied with the whimsicalities of words; he is also appreciative of the waywardness of thought and the queer shape of things. His animal interests range from jerboas to giraffes, from grubs to guillemots. The resulting summaries are surprising but plausible; their concisions are no less keen for being comical. For example: —

Or, in a slightly more serious mood: —

To those who might charge McCord with too many “odds without ends,” too great a preoccupation with changing vowel sounds, tight techniques (like his “Symmetrics”), and peculiar forms, he has a neat reply. It appears as the unnamed “motto” of his book: —

Something of the schoolman also adheres to (and inspires) Morris Bishop. Yet Bishop frequently takes off on irresponsible flights, breaking the barriers of sound with the lawlessness of surrealism or, as he likes to call it, surhumor. One would not suspect that Bishop is Kappa Alpha Professor of Romance Literature at Cornell University, or that A Bowl of Bishop (Dial, $3.00) is his twelfth volume — the tone is so fresh, the touch so young. The scholar, however, threads his way wistfully through a small essay that serves as introduction and romps giddily through “Museum Thoughts,” which places photographs of some famous and some faded masterpieces at the head of canny, comically reappraising rhymes. In common with McCord, Bishop has a good time with the odd shapes, sounds, and spellings of English words, with the actual inconsistent ones as well as the manufactured modern horrors like “nite,” “ful-vue,” and “moon-glo.” Once he gets under way, Bishop gallops through a wide field, changing pace with the mounting anger of “Sales Talk for Annie,” the grim rejoinder of “Freedom from Speech,”the disillusioned “Who’d Be a Hero (Fictional)?” and the riot of rhyme in “Community Center.” Bishop is at his best when he not only spurs logic but drives it further than it ought to go. “Fragment from ‘The Maladjusted’: A Tragedy” is characteristic: —

Richard Armour approaches the reader with apologetic ambivalence. On the one hand he seems to take his mission seriously; he is derisive about poetry with a Hidden Meaning, defensive about poems with a lack of Significance. “Most of the poems in this book can be readily understood,”he murmurs, “which is why they are not poems at all and why I should apologize for the use of the term.” On the other hand, when he stops theorizing and starts writing, he takes his light verse more lightly than most. Light Armour (McGraw-Hill, $2.75) is Armour’s appropriately punning title for his “Playful Poems on Practically Everything” — recalling (in reverse) Samuel Hoffenstein’s muchquoted “Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.” Armour’s enjoyment of the pun is so genuine that even inveterate pun-haters will tolerate it and exchange a groan for a grin. Some verses about an elderly bride and groom are entitled “To Have and Too Old”; the woman who clips recipes and remedies from old almanacs is a “Yankee Clipper”; a burlesque of “A Shropshire Lad” is called “A Plague on Both Your Housmans.” Even when he is not deliberately punning, Armour twists the meaning of a word with flexibility and dispatch, as when he lets a late riser say: —

Everything stirs him (in spite of his disclaimer) to swift and often to ironic comment. The tense problems of wife and husband, host and guest, dog and master, patient and psychiatrist, and all sorts of daily flotsam and jetsam are resolved in bright if sometimes bizarre cadences. Stray newspaper items pique Armour into a reaction which is not always praise but, in the mildest possible way, protest. For example, when he reads that the best hiding place in event of an atomic explosion is a frozen-food locker where “radiation will not penetrate,” Armour resigns himself to what McCord might call the evitable and writes: —

For the collector of verse in the lighter vein, there are also unexploited riches in the work of some of the most serious poets of our time. E. A. Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy” and “John Gorham,” Robert Frost’s “Departmental” and “A Considerable Speck,” and W. H. Auden’s “Law, say the Gardeners, is the Sun,” as well as many of his curiously acrid songs, point to new extensions in light verse. Robinson distills poignance in an epigram; Frost mixes philosophy and frivolity; Auden, a specialist in the “occasional,” emphasizes the anxieties of the age by putting them into incongruously trivial, music-hall measures. Such poems by such poets should remove misconceptions about light, verse as a kind of bastard poetry and restore it to its place as a legitimate and even noble scion of the art.