Poem of the Day: ‘A Certain Young Lady’

If we don’t think of Washington Irving (1783–1859) as a poet, that’s because poet is one of the few things Irving didn’t try to be. Travel writer, biographer, diplomat, editor, copyright-law pioneer, master of the art of social networking: Irving was all of these. His international array of friends included Charles Dickens, John Jacob Astor, and the young Queen Isabella of Spain. For most people, these roles and relationships would suffice for a career. No doubt you would feel, given such a career, that you had supped richly on variety and interest. You wouldn’t also have to be the first American Man of Letters, an innovator in the art of the short story, or founder of a distinctly American literary tradition, to consider that you had lived. Yet in addition to the rest of the resumé, Irving was all of these.But he wasn’t a poet. That is, he wasn’t a poet in the sense of trying to be a poet. Unlike, say, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, featured here recently, Irving didn’t compile a book of poems or attempt to build a reputation on his verse. On the other hand, he could and did write poems, as every literate person of his era was capable of doing, with greater or lesser displays of virtuosity. Sun readers have witnessed this phenomenon already, in an offering from Jane Austen, for example. Whatever we might say about writers today, however we might explain a certain decline in versecraft, the ability to knock together a lighthearted poem in creditable rhyme and meter used to belong to a writer’s general skill set.Today’s Poem of the Day shows us Irving’s facility with verse. “A Certain Young Lady” is a funny poem in part because it channels the voice of the nineteenth-century gossip column, the sort of voice that begins, “At a certain seat, not so many miles from here,” and peoples that seat with names like “Viscount M—.” Where regular gossip readers would have known who “Viscount M—” was, we are left to guess at the identity of Irvin’s “certain young lady.” Is it Emily Foster, daughter of a family to whom he had become attached in Dresden, over a winter of writer’s block in 1822? We don’t know. And unlike the readers of gossip columns, we ultimately don’t care who the “certain young lady” might be, or whether she existed in reality at all.We don’t care, because the poem is deft and delightful. Despite the refrain, which keeps insisting that we “know very well whom I mean,” the real joke isn’t the riddle of a girl’s identity. Instead, it’s the bounce of the anapestic dimeter and trimeter lines, and the dazzle of the rhymes — “lady / heyday,” “devil take her / heartbreaker” — that keep us reading. Though Irving never tried to be a poet, he had the requisite wit, the requisite ear for language, and the requisite versemaking toolkit to achieve a poem when he wanted to. Read this one, and you’ll know very well what I mean. A Certain Young Ladyby Washington IrvingThere’s a certain young lady,Who’s just in her heyday, And full of all mischief, I ween;So teasing! so pleasing!Capricious! Delicious! And you know very well whom I mean.With an eye dark as night,Yet than noonday more bright, Was ever a black eye so keen?It can thrill with a glance,With a beam can entrance, And you know very well whom I mean.With a stately step — such asYou’d expect in a duchess — And a brow might distinguish a queen,With a mighty proud air,That says “touch me who dare,” And you know very well whom I mean.With a toss of the headThat strikes one quite dead, But a smile to revive one again;That toss so appalling!That smile so enthralling! And you know very well whom I mean.Confound her! devil take her! —A cruel heart-breaker — But hold! see that smile so serene.God love her! God bless her!May nothing distress her! You know very well whom I mean.Heaven help the adorerWho happens to bore her, The lover who wakens her spleen;But too blest for a sinnerIs he who shall win her, And you know very well whom I mean.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘A Certain Young Lady’

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