Poem of the Day: ‘No!’
November is the great negative season, erasing streets, people’s faces, newsstands, warmth, and all the fruits of fall.
The comic poet Thomas Hood (1799–1845) wrote some of the most sentimental poems in the extended canon of 19th- and early 20th-century household anthologies and gradeschool textbooks. Think of “I Remember, I Remember, or “The Song of the Shirt,” or “The Bridge of Sighs.” But a comic poet he was, and his comic verse should not be allowed to fade the way his sentimental poetry has disappeared from the prissier anthologies of our own time.
This past spring we offered Hood’s “Faithless Nelly Gray“ as Poem of the Day here in the Sun, and to that, in honor of the arrival of November, we add his light poem “No!” Of all the things for which the late fall says no to us, can we add one more: -vember. “No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,” so why not no-vember?
In a English city locked in by November fog, Hood spends a slew of spondees in two- to five-foot lines to remind us of all that November deprives us. It is the great negative season, erasing streets, people’s faces, newsstands, warmth, and all the fruits of fall. November is the month that says “no.”
No!
by Thomas Hood
No sun — no moon!
No morn — no noon —
No dawn —
No sky — no earthly view —
No distance looking blue —
No road — no street — no “t’other side the way” —
No end to any Row —
No indications where the Crescents go —
No top to any steeple —
No recognitions of familiar people —
No courtesies for showing ’em —
No knowing ’em!
No traveling at all — no locomotion,
No inkling of the way — no notion —
“No go” — by land or ocean —
No mail — no post —
No news from any foreign coast —
No park — no ring — no afternoon gentility —
No company — no nobility —
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member —
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!
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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.