When you get that mood indigo
Brian Masters
THE FABER BOOK OF BLUE VERSE edited by John Whitworth
Faber, £14.99, pp. 224
It was Walpole who said that he always talked bawdy after dinner, because then everyone could join in. One is bound to wonder what he meant by 'bawdy'. He would probably have included the Earl of Rochester's verses on Charles II's priapic appetite, ever a source of delightful gossip for historians; perhaps even the same poet's rather touching Ancient Person of My Heart. But what passes for bawdy nowadays is such a hotch-potch of the titillating, the gentle, and the downright lewd that there are a number of pieces in this volume of a type which Walpole would have happily recited at tea-time, and others he would have shunned even at midnight.
The most obvious blue verse is that which we learn as sniggering schoolchild- ren, usually only in daring snippets. Eski- mo Nell, Diamond Lil, and Life Presents a Dismal Picture are all here in their entire- ty, as vigorous and joyful as ever. There is also a good helping of Martial, Catullus, Aretino and Verlaine, who were each frequently visited by the lascivious muse and whose output under her influence has sometimes been very difficult to find. Nor could any such collection as this omit Chaucer's uproarious Miller's Tale, and it is an unexpected treat to find T. S. Eliot being positively crude. Probably Burns Is even cruder, but since I can understand scarcely a word, his lubricious intent re- mains hidden from me in all those weird vowels.
It is when one ventures beyond the obvious that definitions collide or collapse. The couplet apparently wrongly attributed by Bevis Hillier to John Betjeman et alii 'I sometimes think that I should like to be the saddle of a bike' — is clever and beguiling and suggestive, but not nearly bold enough to be 'blue'. And there are other inclusions which are simply baffling, as Cavafy's beautiful elegiac poems of tentative love, and Edna St Vincent Mil- lay's haunting sonnet, 'What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten.' This last, a favourite audition piece for young actresses, is not even remotely dirty and must surely have found its way into the wrong book. Never mind; the more people who read it the better. Of quite a different order is a genuinely erotic (and quite unquotable) poem by Marilyn Hacker, which is unabashedly lyrical and intense, wth a soaring feeling of sexual pleasure rarely achieved in poetry since Donne. This is daring, but serious, and sits ill at ease between the same covers as Eskimo Nell. For the essential ingre- dient in 'blue' verse must be that it makes you laugh by its outrageousness and, often, its impossibility. It aims not for tumescence but for the loud guffaw. Hence the most successful pages of this book are the funniest. The Thing That People Do, by John Fuller and James Fenton, is a sup- reme example of the inescapable jokiness of bawdy (`It's deep and wet and danger- ous, with more than a whiff of glue'). Both Lincoln Kirstein and Sylvia Kantaris are represented by very funny verses, vivid and pictorial and ridiculous, and there are a dozen or so inevitable limericks.
Some of these might be familiar. Some should remain secret. One had me fright- ening the cats with the racket I made.
Every time Lady Lowbodice swoons Her bubbies pop out like balloons, But her butler stands by With hauteur in his eye And lifts them back in with warm spoons.
ANON (of course!)
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