My discovery of James Whitcomb Riley

I once paid tuition dollars to learn that 19^th century English poetry was subpar. Not all of it, of course, but one professor, while explaining how “The Wasteland” was revolutionary for its time, constantly referred back to the following schmaltzy line from Shelly: “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed.” That, in his estimation, was the essence of what T.S. Eliot et al were trying to overturn in the early 20th century.

While Eliot was my favorite poet back then, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman (both, of course, iconoclastic in their day) have long overtaken the author of “The Waste Land” in my heart and in the number of minutes I spend reading poetry for pure pleasure. Eliot’s intellectualism seems bare and ascetic compared to Dickinson’s beautiful, pithy, mysterious brilliance or Whitman’s verbose exuberance.

But I've remained wary when it comes to 19^th century poetry collections, so when my library page daughter brought home three century-old books of poetry, I tried to remain unimpressed with the beautiful illustrations, inside and out, and the lovely thick paper that made the books quite heavy for their size. They were all written by someone named James Whitcomb Riley. 

I Googled him. In a nutshell, Riley was a Hoosier who celebrated the Midwest in his poetry. As a born and bred Midwesterner, I dove in and discovered some serious poetry chops in action, clearly displayed in the following lines from a poem titled “The Circus Parade”:

The Circus!—The Circus!—The throb of the drums,

And the blare of the horns, as the Band-wagon comes;

The clash and the clang of the cymbals that beat,

As the glittering pageant winds down the long street.

In the Circus parade there is glory clean down

From the first spangled horse to the mule of the Clown

With the gleam and the glint and the glamour and glare

Of the days of enchantment all glimmering there!

I could almost feel the excitement of a sleepy Midwestern town jolting to life as The Greatest Show on Earth rolled in. I could almost hear it too—Riley had some serious onomatopoeia going on, a few of the lines reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells." 

He could also be funny, as seen in "At Ninety in the Shade":

Hot weather? Yes; but really not,

Compared with weather twice as hot.

Find comfort, then, in arguing thus,

And you’ll pull through victorious!—

For instance, while you gasp and pant

And try to cool yourself—and can’t—

With soda, cream and lemonade,

The heat at ninety in the shade,--

Just calmly sit and ponder o’er

These same degrees, with ninety more

On top of them, and so concede

The weather now is cool indeed!

A painfully accurate description of a Midwestern summer! And while, perhaps, not as sharply humorous as an Ogden Nash poem, the above lines brought the latter immediately to mind (see “Lines to be Scribbled on Somebody Else’s Thirtieth Milestone”).

Thirty today? Cheer up my lad!

The good old thirties aren’t so bad.

Life doesn’t end at twenty nine

So come on in, the water’s fine…

I kept reading and discovered that Riley also did pathos. He did it well. While I knew that Americans of that period absolutely loved to drench themselves in mawkish emotion, I couldn’t find an ounce of it in the following poem entitled “He and I”, describing the quiet love of an elderly couple. It could have easily turned maudlin. It didn’t, and I loved it so much I’ve included the entire poem below:

Just drifting on together—

He and I—

As through the balmy weather

Of July

Drift two thistle-tufts imbedded

Each in each—by zephyrs wedded—

Touring upward, giddy-headed,

For the sky.

And, veering up and onward,

Do we seem

Forever drifting downward

In a dream,

Where we meeting song-birds that know us,

And the winds their kisses blow us,

While the years flow far below us

Like a stream.

And we are happy—very—

He and I—

Aye, even glad and merry

Though on high

The heavens are sometimes shrouded

By the midnight storm, and clouded

Till the pallid moon is crowded

From the sky

My spirit ne’er expresses

Any choice

But to clothe him with caresses

And rejoice;

And as he laughs, it is in

Such a tone that moonbeams glisten

And the stars come out to listen

To his voice.

And so, what’er the weather,

He and I,--

With our lives linked thus together,

Float and fly

As two thistle-tufts imbedded

Each in each—by zephyrs wedded—

Touring upward, giddy-headed,

For the sky.

I'm not sure how Riley was able to capture the quiet beauty long-time love so perfectly since he never married. But it’s crystal clear how he became one of the most popular American poets in his own time, even if he has been forgotten in ours.

Have you heard the one about the rector and the physician who walked into the mausoleum?

One of those deliciously awkward moments that only Barbara Pym can make completely hilarious. From A Few Green Leaves.


Even though the interior of the mausoleum was not to Tom's taste, there was something attractive about the idea of chilly marble on a hot summer day, and he pushed aside the velvet curtain and went in.

'Ah, rector...'

Tom had not expected a greeting and was startled when he saw that Dr. G. was already inside the mausoleum. Tom had sometimes wondered why Dr. G. should, like himself, have a key to the mausoleum. Its inhabitants were surely beyond his help now.

There was something slightly ridiculous about the two men confronting each other in this way and in such a place, and after the doctor's first 'Ah, rector...' and Tom's response of, 'Well, Dr. G...' they stood smiling at each other, Tom's hand resting, almost in blessing, on a cool marble head, and the doctor appearing to be examining the contours of a marble limb as if he were probing for signs of a fracture.

Des Plaines River at Twilight

Published December, 2017, Issue 32 of Peeking Cat Poetry. 

Turning on the Radio to Rachmaninoff’s 18th Variation on a Theme of Pagannini

You can’t expect, always,
to find a ten
or a presidential pardon
in a forgotten pocket.

But you might, on occasion,
turn on the radio
to find Rachmaninoff rising
one moment out of madness
into lucidity
as lovely as a butterfly
lighting on your hand.

Published on December 18, 2017, in Poetry Breakfast. 

Barbara Pym references Jane Austen

Reading Barbara Pym is sometimes akin to prepping for graduate studies in English literature. Here is one literary reference that I caught immediately. The first quote is taken from Pym's A Few Green Leaves.

"'Two eggs?' Emma asked. 'And how do you like them?'

'Oh, just as they come.'

'Boiled eggs don't exactly do that.' On the hard side, then, she thought, five minutes. A too-soft-boiled egg would be awkward to manage, slithering all over the place in the way they did. Not to be coped with by a person in an emotional state, though Mr. Woodhouse in that novel about her namesake had claimed that it was not unwholesome.

'I'll have some toast too,' she said, 'to keep you company.'"

And now the source material:

"'Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than anybody. I would not recommend an egg boiled by anybody else--but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see--one of our small eggs will not hurt you."
--Mr. Woodhouse from Jane Austen's Emma. 

Robert Liddell on reading as a child

"Andrew read books with a concentration and intensity which made him deaf and blind to the outside world. Grown-up people (who tend to think that a child must necessarily be doing mischief to itself or to others, wherever its whole energy is happily occupied and it has forgotten their existence) were always annoyed when they saw Andrew reading. They tried every means of plaguing him; they took his books away, or told him that his eyes were tired, or that he must go out. Sometimes they just sat and talked, and were angry if he did not answer. In spite of their persecution, he generally managed to read four or five books every week. They would never believe that he read them properly, or that he remembered anything about them. They themselves were found of boasting that they never had any time for reading. This never convinced Andrew, who knew that reading was a necessity of life, and that grown-up people wasted hours of valuable time in uninteresting conversation."

Excerpt from Kind Relations by Robert Liddell

Excerpt from Kind Relations by Robert Liddell

"The descent to the drawing-room was therefore not awe-inspiring, as it often is to small children -- like going to church, only worse. Grown-ups have all the fearful attributes of a Calvinistic deity, with the added terror of being visible. It is no use pretending they are not there, because they insist on being talked to and kissed. God, on the other hand, can easily be pretended away. Of course you know He is there all the time; but He does not obtrude Himself, as grown-ups do. It is always possible, if you are terribly bored in church, to press your fingers on your eyelids, and to watch the colours that come and go. Of course you ought to be saying your prayers, but it is far more amusing to play with this natural kaleidoscope. God is not petty enough to mind about a little thing like that. And after all it is no one's business but His."