Poem of the Day: ‘A History’

Why the Victorians should do humor so well — and so often — seems a mystery. But perhaps the mystery is lessened if we begin to question the oh-so-superior view of the Edwardians that their Victorian parents were a prissy, dour, and gloomy people, obsessed with going to funerals and outlawing sex. That Edwardian sneer, now over a hundred years old, is so baked-in, so established in social awareness and literary history, that it does, in fact, seem hard to explain how the era gave us Punch magazine. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. Or, to offer one of many minor examples, Tom Hood (1835–1874). He was the son of the poet and author Thomas Hood (whose own word-play in “Faithless Nelly Gray” was featured as Poem of the Day here in the Sun this spring). He was one of those Victorians who did this and that, and that and this, always finding something new to do. After finishing his divinity courses at Oxford (he left without taking holy orders), he worked at the War Office and as an editor — all while pouring out comic verse and novels (of which the 1865 “Captain Masters’s Children” is the best known). Children’s books, too, often with his sister, the children’s writer Frances Freeling Broderip. Oh, and he published French translations and wrote two books on how to compose English poetry, along with hundreds of magazine and journal pieces. Besides which, as good-humored men often do, he had a gift for friendship, reaching from the British W.S. Gilbert to the American Ambrose Bierce. His weekly dinners for friends were famous in the world of workaday British writers.How much of his writing before his early death at 39 is memorable? Not much. But all of it was competent and all of it was fun. Deserving a look, for example, is today’s Poem of the Day, “A History.” In quatrains of common meter, four-foot lines alternating with three-foot, it mocks the breathless tone of memorials and newspaper obituaries.A Historyby Tom HoodThere was a man, so legends say, And he, how strange to tell! Was born upon the very day Whereon his birthday fell! He was a baby first. And then He was his parents’ joy; But was a man soon after, when, He ceased to be a boy. And when he got to middle life, To marry was his whim; The self-same day he took a wife, Some woman married him! None saw him to the other side Of Styx, by Charon ferried; But ’tis conjecture that he died, Because he has been buried. ___________________________________________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 History’

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