For the Brightest Inch Your Bookshelf Allows

When the name of Winthrop Mackworth Praed comes up – which admittedly isn’t often – it’s met with a blank look or, at best, a condescending sniff. In his day (he lived from 1802 to 1839), Praed was celebrated as both a parliamentarian and a poet. According to the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his poetry is “now virtually forgotten.” Well, it’s not forgotten by me, nor by others who appreciate a small thing exquisitely done. Praed was, in fact, a master of light verse, a genre that elicits little more than grudging admiration from “serious” readers of poetry. Even worse, he was a poet of froth and glitter plumped down in the midst of the Romantic Age; a damselfly in a gathering of eagles.“Light verse” labors under a twofold burden. First, it must be truly light: seemingly casual, witty, and above all, light-hearted. Second, to succeed in its effect, it must be perfect. Like the best comedy, light verse depends on timing. When the Earl of Rochester – the “Libertine” of the recent film – concludes “The Disabled Debauchee” with the stanzaThus, statesmanlike, I’ll saucily impose, And safe from action, valiantly advise; Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows, And being good for nothing else, be wise,the effect of that final sarcastic “wise” turns on the timing. The misplacement of a single syllable, the fluffing of a crucial rhyme, a hiccup that rumples the cadence, and all is lost. Kingsley Amis put it precisely in his introduction to “The New Oxford Book of Light Verse” (out of print but available atAmazon.com) when he compared “high” verse with “light”: “A concert pianist is allowed a wrong note here and there; a juggler is not allowed to drop a plate.”Praed never dropped a plate in his metrical juggling. George Saintsbury, the great historian of English prosody, may have been a bit daft when he rhapsodized about Praed’s “marvellously transformed anapaestic three-foot with redundance in the odd lines,” but the thrust of his praise was just. Here are two stanzas that suggest Praed’s particular quality:Our love was like most other loves; A little glow, a little shiver, A rose-bud, and a pair of gloves, And ‘Fly not yet’ upon the river; Some jealousy of some one’s heir, Some hopes of dying broken-hearted; A miniature, a lock of hair, The usual vows, and then we parted.We parted – months and years rolled by; We met again four summers after; Our parting was all sob and sigh; Our meeting was all mirth and laughter: For in my heart’s most secret cell There had been many other lodgers; And she was not the Ball-Room’s Belle, But only Mrs. Something Rogers.The wit of this lies in the fact that, though Praed sets us up a bit for the ending, he does so with such deftness that the preceding lines are not canceled out but given a strange retroactive astringency. The rosebud and the lock of hair and the miniature are seen, not as sentimental emblems, but as what they are: the conventional tokens of a transient attachment. Yet Praed’s unsparing tone is never cynical, and so even these discarded keepsakes are accorded an affectionate place in the scheme of things. They’re no longer apposite, but they haven’t become meaningless.Praed alternates in both stanzas between one- and two-syllable rhymes. This imparts momentum to the verses and adds to the dancing cadence. But the alternation is strategic, too. When we come to the rhymeword “lodgers,” we sense a tonal shift. The notion of a heart housing lodgers is droll, but it’s the sound of the word that alerts us. Nothing heartbroken can rhyme with “lodgers.”Praed had many strikes against him as a poet. He preferred frivolities to moodiness; he would rather have danced the quadrille than joined Wordsworth on any ramble along “untrodden ways.” He admired Byron but detested Shelley; he liked the West Wind only when it wafted champagne bubbles and the tinkle of spirited laughter. His poetry is all vers de societe and society, the effervescent world of balls and courts and English country houses, quickened his skillful pen. He disparaged his own verse but took obvious pleasure in its composition. This shows in sly effects, as when he celebrates the joys of fishing: “I’ll cultivate rural enjoyment / And angle immensely for trout.” Here, Praed is angling more for the unexpected adverb than for trout, but his pleasure in his catch delights us, too.Talleyrand, Praed’s older contemporary, claimed that no one born after the French Revolution could appreciate la douceur de la vie, the sweetness of life. The usual rejoinder is “sweet for whom?” And probably nothing Talleyrand said can be accepted at face value (Napoleon called him “s- in a silk stocking”). But the phrase possesses an insidious resonance. We know instinctively what the wily diplomat meant. We hear la douceur de la vie supremely in Mozart but also, in a much smaller way, in such forgotten figures as Praed.His poems aren’t easy to find, and this is a shame. I was lucky enough to come across the 1953 “Selected Poems” edited by Kenneth Allott in the wonderful old “Muses’ Library” series, which does turn up on the Internet. Most anthologies of light verse include several of his best ballads. His poems have charm, a quality scarce in contemporary verse, and his craftsmanship is impressive; in the end, though, this isn’t why I turn to Praed’s verse from time to time. Nothing is harder to write about credibly than happiness, but Praed did this with seeming ease. Of his grim contemporary, George Crabbe, our own Edwin Arlington Robinson once wrote, “Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows.” I’ll filch this for Praed and say, “Give him the brightest inch your shelf allows.”eormsby@nysun.com

For the Brightest Inch Your Bookshelf Allows

For the Brightest Inch Your Bookshelf Allows

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