‘An American Daughter’ Still Not Quite of Age
By ELYSA GARDNER
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Rolfe Humphries’ poem, imagining a lover setting aside his beloved, is ambiguous. Is he taking Lent as an unassailable excuse to end the affair?
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It’s Mardi Gras today, or Shrove Tuesday, or whatever you want to call it: the day before Ash Wednesday, the day before Lent begins its forty days of abstinence. “Till Easter Monday all are chaste,” as Rolfe Humphries (1894–1969) puts it his 1957 poem “A Song for Mardi Gras.”
Humphries was an American translator, poet, and classicist of some renown. His verse translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” for example, was widely praised at the time of its 1951 release, and it remains a solid and readable version. Disliking his former teacher, the Republican president of Columbia University, Humphries was delighted to receive an invitation to submit some verse to Poetry magazine, which he did: a 39-line poem with a hidden acrostic that spelled out “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.”
In “A Song for Mardi Gras,” Humphries plays with a Welsh refrain, “Dy garu di a gerais,” that appears in “Cywydd Merch,” a late-medieval poem by Dafydd ab Edmwnd (c. 1450–97). In four six-line stanzas rhymed abcbdd, each beginning with the borrowed Welsh “I have loved loving you” and ending with the line “Till Easter Monday all are chaste,” Humphries imagines a lover setting aside his beloved.
By ELYSA GARDNER
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By WILL FRIEDWALD
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By A.R. HOFFMAN
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
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By LAWRENCE KUDLOW
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
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By JENNIFER DOHERTY
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By ROSS ANDERSON
|It’s Mardi Gras today, or Shrove Tuesday, or whatever you want to call it: the day before Ash Wednesday, the day before Lent begins its forty days of abstinence. “Till Easter Monday all are chaste,” as Rolfe Humphries (1894–1969) puts it his 1957 poem “A Song for Mardi Gras.”
Humphries was an American translator, poet, and classicist of some renown. His verse translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” for example, was widely praised at the time of its 1951 release, and it remains a solid and readable version. Disliking his former teacher, the Republican president of Columbia University, Humphries was delighted to receive an invitation to submit some verse to Poetry magazine, which he did: a 39-line poem with a hidden acrostic that spelled out “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.”
In “A Song for Mardi Gras,” Humphries plays with a Welsh refrain, “Dy garu di a gerais,” that appears in “Cywydd Merch,” a late-medieval poem by Dafydd ab Edmwnd (c. 1450–97). In four six-line stanzas rhymed abcbdd, each beginning with the borrowed Welsh “I have loved loving you” and ending with the line “Till Easter Monday all are chaste,” Humphries imagines a lover setting aside his beloved.
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