Verse or Worse

At a recent Brownies meeting (Brownies are junior Girl Guides) where I’m an apprentice leader, we armed the kids with clip-boards and question sheets so they could charge round asking questions of the grown ups in the room.  We steered clear of imponderables such as “What is the meaning of life?” (Besides, anyone who’s familiar with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows it’s 42) and Hard Sums as this was meant to be for fun.

One of the questions was “Recite a poem”.  I must admit I fell back on Baa Baa Black Sheep but it did make me think about poetry, as such.  Now, in the privacy of my own home, I must admit to a bit of poetry.  When all the kids were reposing themselves and it was time to get up, I would, if the mood struck me, weigh in with a bit of Omar Kyhayyam:

Awake, for morning in the bowl of night,

Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight,

and Lo! (this is poetry. You can use words like Lo!) the hunter of the East has caught,

the Sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

It made me laugh and sometime made the kids laugh too.  It also led to some very odd looks when one of them would ask, in company, “Mum, what’s that poem you sometimes shout in the morning?” private declamation of verse being thought of as strange.

However, most of the time, I tend to talk in prose.  Unlike, I may say the characters in a Golden Age detective story, written in 1939, that I’ve just read.  The author had gone to Oxford and seemed determined to prove it. None of the characters seem to have a thought that someone else – a poet – hasn’t thought first.  Quotations pepper the text like birdseed and, should you miss them in the text, there’s quotations at the head of every chapter, too.  It’s all a bit much.

Did anyone ever really talk like this?  I like Lord Peter Wimsey but he's is far too addicted to poetry.  If I was Charles Parker, his far too patient side-kick, I’d be tempted to put a green baize cover on the man.  Harriet Vane’s no good; she encourages him and, what’s more, breaks into poetry herself.   However, at least Lord Peter gets on with catching villains There’s also  – to come more or less up to date –  a dickens of a lot of poetry in Star Trek, The Next Generation. The trouble is with excessive verse, it that it can’t half sound patronizing.  Either that, or the writer isn’t convinced of the value of their material and wants to beef it up, to fool the reader into thinking that what they’re reading is Literature.

Agatha Christie very, very occasionally used poetry.   Very, very occasionally, but usually if Poirot is quoting something, such a familiar phrase, he mangles it, so instead of feeling “All at sea” he feels “All at the seaside” which is funny and makes us feel all friendly towards him. It wasn’t that she didn’t know any poems or couldn’t afford a dictionary of quotations. it’s just that, like salt in cooking, she knew enough to use it sparingly.

Good old Agatha Christie.