Drugs = Great Poems! (a review of 'Kubla Khan')

The first poem I plan to review is the poem 'Kubla Khan' by Coleridge - a poem about one of my favourite non-fictional guys ever, and one of the biggest party guys the world has ever known - the one and only Kublai Khan.

Doesn't look much like party animal, does he? Well he was.

It's a poem about Kublai Khan's pleasure palace, which Coleridge describes as being pretty awesome. 'Twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers girdled round' - or, in other words, ten square miles of pleasure palace - is a pretty good idea if you ask me, especially when you consider just how good at partying the Mongols were when they weren't massacring the armies of the Russians and Chinese. I mean, Ogedei Khan (the second ruler of the Mongol empire) had a fountain that literally spewed out various alcoholic beverages instead of water. But bragging about the Mongolian's party skills isn't going to get this poem analyzed, so I better get cracking. Basically, I thought the poem was great, even if Coleridge was tripping out on opium when he wrote it. It has all the weird adjectives that appeal to a Dungeons and Dragons player like myself - Alph is a Sacred River instead of just a body of running water, the trees are Incense-Bearing instead of just being vertical columns of vegetable matter, and the rills in the gardens bright are Sinuous instead of just being... rills. What is a rill, anyway?

So yes, I like the descriptive language all through it, and I feel like I could quote bits of the poem and perfectly set it up as a D&D scenario for my party. Also, lines 14-16 would really help set the tone for a 'haunted garden' type adventure - I'll quote them below.

Due to my strong personal convictions, I would like to stress that these following three lines in no way endorse love affairs with demons. 

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Pretty cool, right? the rhyme scheme may be odd (ABACB in that verse, ABCCB, in the first, and variations all through the poem) but the quality of the work shines through no matter how much he changes his meter, foot, and rhyme scheme.

The other major thing I liked about the poem besides the descriptiveness was the images it invokes in your mind as you read it. You'll need to read the whole poem to really know what I mean, but I'll post some of the best examples right here.

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice! 

Or:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Sunny domes, caves of ice, and the Earth breathing in fast thick pants? (I assume this means short intakes of breath and not fabric leg garments.) All of these lines conjure vivid images when read. They probably aren't the same images Coleridge saw as he wrote the poem, but they are still cinematic and awe-inspiring. It encourages you to read the poem more than once to try to catch Coleridge's meaning - something I did and enjoyed. So let me end this blog with these words: Kubla Khan is an amazing poem, and if they ever made a movie of it, I would sit out all night in front of the theatre to be first in line. Happy poetry reading!

-Paddywagon Man

She should have just gotten a cleric. ('The Lady of Shalott')

Hello again, you few people who actually read my blog. For my first post, as you remember, I reviewed the opium-inspired poem 'Kubla Khan' by Coleridge. Today, in order to get my blog down to a PG rating, I've decided that a poem less rooted in drug use - namely, Tennison's 'The Lady of Shalott'. Great poem if you ask me, as long as you ignore the more practical 'real world' issues that would come up in the poem. To set the tone for my review, I'll start by giving you the first four lines:

        On either side the river lie
        Long fields of barley and of rye,
        That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
        And thro' the field the road runs by
                To many-tower'd Camelot;

Pretty good, don't you think? Every line runs with just about the same rhyme scheme, unlike the wildly shifting Kubla Khan. It ends each stanza with a rhyme of 'Shalott' and is about a beautiful noblewoman forever trapped in a tower by a curse. She can see the world through a mirror in the room of her tower, but she will be cursed if she turns to look at Camelot with her own eyes. Or, to use the better-written words from the poem itself:

        And moving thro' a mirror clear
        That hangs before her all the year,
        Shadows of the world appear.
        There she sees the highway near
                Winding down to Camelot:

Trapped up in her tower, she weaves 'a magic web with colours gay' to pass the time. Or maybe it isn't just to pass the time, maybe it's symbolic or part of the curse.

A very old painting of the Lady of Shalott in her tower

Either way, she apparently does it all night and day, which raises some practical questions. If nobody can come into her mysterious tower and she can never stop weaving, how does she eat or drink? And if she can never get up to use the bathroom or even (as a last resort) change into fresh clothes, I imagine that her dress would get pretty nasty after a month or so. But maybe it's time to leave the gaping holes in logic aside and just let all the beautiful things about this poem shine through. 

A more modern, steampunk painting of our dear Miss Shalott

There were two things I truly loved about the poem, logic aside: the story it told and the descriptive language it used. The story is really touching - the Lady of Shalott spends years in her tower weaving endlessly to make her magic colour web while Camelot shimmers beneath her, near but out of her reach. Then Lancelot comes by, leading to four whole stanzas talking about how handsome he is. What is it with this Lancelot guy anyways? Nobody ever wrote four stanzas about me. Anyways, the Lady of Shalott finds his plumes and crests and shining armour unbelievably sexy, and turns from her loom and looks at Camelot. At this, the mirror breaks, she fails her saving throw against curses, and the curse comes upon her -  her eyes darken, her smooth face slowly sharpens, and she sings her deathsong for everybody to hear. Then she dies, and Lancelot remarks that she had a pretty face. It seems like a small reward to die over, but it was the Middle Ages after all. People died like that all the time, and dying of a broken heart was probably slightly preferable to dying in childbirth or of bubonic plague. 

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading my review! See you next time with another one. Feel free to write stanzas about my good looks if you want to. 

-Paddywagon Man

Low-level Rogues tend to die pretty quick ('Pancho and Lefty')

A question that may pop into all your heads as you read the title is this - isn't 'Pancho and Lefty' a song, not a poem? Well, yes it is. But think about it this way - If I were to go up to the late Townes Van Zandt as he was about to play the song, break his guitar, and yell at him to recite the lyrics in a normal talking voice, what would happen? Well, most likely I'd get arrested. But if Townes were to take my advice and just recite the lyrics, it would basically be a poem, and a good one at that. So I hope you accept it as a poem for the purposes of this blog.


'Pancho and Lefty' is a song (poem) about bandits in Mexico. Pancho is apparently already a pretty well-known bandit when the events of the song begin, although his backstory is never really covered. He's used to the bandit's life and is content to live it his whole life. His horse is 'as fast as polished steel' and he wears his guns for everybody to see, but he is apparently not the best of bandits - one of the most famous verses in the song goes,
  "And all the federales say
   They could've had him any day
   But they just let him... slip away
   Out of kindness I suppose."

 

This is the sort of guy I imagine when I picture Pancho. He probably looked a bit less smiley in real life, though.

His partner, Lefty, is a bit different. Lefty is the more central character of the song because the song seems to be directed at him and also (spoilers!) because he actually survives until the end. Lefty was apparently born into a good family but dreamed of being a bandit, similarly to all the little kids who ever watched 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and then wanted to be pirates. This is evidenced in one of the very first verses:
"You weren't your momma's only boy
   but her favourite one it seems.
   She began to cry when you said goodbye
   and sank into your dreams."

Because Lefty is the sidekick, and because he's less of a hardened bandit, I like to picture him as the Frito Bandito.

It sounds like the two could have a great and promising bandito-ing career together, but it wasn't to be. Low-level Rogues like Pancho and Lefty are not at all built to last, and Pancho tragically met his end in the Mexican desert, leaving a sad and broken Lefty behind. The odd thing is that if you read the lines closely, it seems that Lefty might have sold Pancho out for quick money, or even killed him. Read these bits of the song and see what you think:

"The dust that Pancho bit down south
   ended up in Lefty's mouth."

or, right afterwards:

"The day they laid poor Pancho low
   Lefty split for Ohio
   where he got the bread to go
   well there ain't nobody knows."

If Lefty mysteriously found himself with a bunch of money on the same day his crime partner died, it suggests that maybe Pancho's death didn't come as that much of a surprise to him. Maybe he sold Pancho out to the federales, or maybe to a rival gang. Whatever it was, poor Pancho died a lonely death ("Nobody heard his dying words") and then Lefty lived a lonely life in a cheap Cleveland motel. Lefty's life after Pancho's death is covered in some of the songs last few verses:

"The poets (like me) tell how Pancho fell
  Lefty's living in a cheap motel
  the desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold
  and so the story ends we're told"

So it really ends up being questionable which of the two has the sadder story. Sure, Pancho died alone and young - but Lefty had to live all alone with the weight of Pancho's death on his conscience. An unknown, haunted ex-bandit showing up and living in a motel is not likely to find any sort of love or family so late in life, and the poor boy had such a bright future at the beginning of the song. Whichever side of the story you look at, it is a bitterly sad but beautiful peace of art. I hope you all take a listen to the song - you're sure to take away more from a simple listen than you did from all this blogging. Enjoy!

-Paddywagon Man

Sam the Phoenix ("The Cremation of Sam McGee")

mThere are strange things done in the midnight sun

      By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

      That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

      But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

      I cremated Sam McGee.

These are the first line of "The Cremation of Sam McGee", a very clever and funny poem by Robert W. Service. Good few lines, right? Foreshadowing, rhymes, personification, and everything. If you read the poem, you'll find that The Cremation of Sam McGee is very similar to "Pancho and Lefty" in many ways. Sure, it's about miners in the far north instead of bandits in Mexico, but miners and bandits are both bearded and unclean men spending all day trying to pocket some gold, after all. Similarly to "Pancho and Lefty", one of the two protagonists dies while the other survives, but Sam McGee is much more humourous, as you're soon to find out.

The poem itself tracks an unnamed narrator and his whiny, annoying friend Sam McGee. They work all day in the cold, cold, frozen north, mining for gold and mushing around the snow on dogsleds. Sam McGee is from nice, warm Tennessee and can't stand the cold up north. As the narrator said:
"If our eyes we'd close, the lashes froze, till sometimes we couldn't see
   it wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee."

You would think that he would just leave if he hated the cold so much, he would just move back to Tennessee, but apparently the gold mining prospects aren't as good down there, and his greed was enough to keep him from leaving. It didn't stop him from complaining though, or even from dying just to get a friend to warm him up for free. That's right, he died on the road with the narrator, and insisted he be cremated. He didn't die suddenly, either - he had plenty of time to guilt his narrator buddy before kicking the bucket. Not the best friend in the world, is he?

"Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:

"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone."

 Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;

 So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

Now, the narrator could easily just empty Sam's pockets and dump him in an ice floe, but the narrator is apparently a man of honor. Or, as he put it, "a pal's last need is a thing to heed", even if the pal in question is a whiner who brought his death upon himself. So he took Sam's corpse onto his sled and started a-mushing through the snow. Luckily, the frozen north had no patrolling law officers back then, or the corpse would have drawn some attention. I mean, last time I had to go to a secluded place to burn a body, the law was on me in a heartbeat. Anyways, the poor narrator pulled that corpse for days on end, freezing to the bone as the huskies howled and the food ran low. He showed himself to be just about the most dependable person imaginable by just keeping going despite the hunger, cold, and fear. And finally it paid off, when he reached Lake Lebarge (which is actually called Lake Laberge), several kilometers north of Whitehorse. Here's what he saw:

 "Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;

   It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."

   And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;

   Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

By 'derelict', he means an abandoned ship. There's where I would have said, "Nice find! Looting time! Maybe I can pay off this pointless trip!", but the narrator decided instead to burn it up to cremate his dead whiny buddy. So he pulled some planks up from the floor, gathered up some valuable coal that was lying around, and set them afire in the boiler. And once he had it going nice and well, he stuck Sam's body in it to burn. And it's after this that things start to get weird.

Because after standing outside in the cold to let Sam burn for a while, the narrator came back in to make sure the body-burning was complete. And instead of some burnt scraps of cloth and some charred bones (which is what one would expect), he finds something else entirely.

  "And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
   And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
   It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm—
   Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

That's right people, Sam sent his most reliable friend through the freezing snows for days on end just to get warmed up from the cold. Nice of him, isn't it? That would be like me pretending to be dying just to get my friends to buy me an ice cream. And now he's risen phoenix-style from the grave to enjoy blissful warmth while his friend is left out in the cold to feel like a chump. I mean, the poem itself ends around there, but if you think it through, the narrator would still have to get all the way BACK. And he said earlier that "the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low".  And on top of everything else, he's now days behind on his gold-mining schedule and has just burned all the valuable wood and coal that he could sell to compensate for the trip. So the poem is supposed to make us feel joyful that Sam has risen as an augmented burning skeleton undead, but I think we should look at the narrator and his suffering instead of looking at all the nice stuff Sam got out the deal. I love the poem but dislike Sam, so to speak. I mean, if Sam were to pull that sort of scam on you, how would you feel?

-Paddywagon Man

Learning to read with nonsensical gibberish ("Jabberwocky")

Looking back at the first four poems I reviewed I noticed a common pattern. Can you guess what it might be? I know that Kubla Khan's pleasure dome seems pretty far removed from the frozen north, and that the refined Lady of Shallot would seem very out of place beside Pancho and Lefty the bandits. But there is one thing that all four poems have in common.

They all make sense.

Now, this sort of imbalance is ridiculous. Four poems that make sense and not a one that doesn't? In fact, I would say that at least 80% of the world doesn't make sense, like politics or movie logic. So to remedy this, I've decided to review "Jabberwocky", by Lewis Caroll, as my fifth poem.

A Jabberwock that apparently never learned to keep your eye on the guy with the vorpal sword.

"Jabberwocky" sets itself apart from the pack by being utter nonsense. Most of the words are made up, like "brillig" and "frumious". And yet, it still manages to tell a story. And now I'm going to tell that story to you.

It's about a "beamish" young lad, who lives in a forest of borogroves (which I assume to be a type of tree) with nothing but his father and some slithy toves for company. His father, worrying about his son and knowing well the indiscretion and general beamishness of the young, gives him a strong warning.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

Now, the Jabberwock sounds pretty scary, but a Jubjub bird doesn't sound so bad to me. It sounds tasty, like jellybeans. The Bandersatch sounds more like one to fear than the Jubjub bird, but he just gets shunned. But frumious Bandersnatches or no frumious Bandersnatches, the boy decides to ignore the warning and go Jabberwock-huntin with his vorpal sword. Now, today we all know what vorpal means - a weapon enchantment priced at the equivalent of six static damage upgrades allowing the removal of a limb on a critical hit if a fortitude saving throw is failed - but vorpal wasn't a word back then. I know, it's hard to imagine that there was a day when people didn't know the intricate details of every obscure D&D magic item, but there was. Weird, huh? In other words, this 'nonsense' poem coined a word that is now used in common speech. Three, actually - it also coined "galumphing" and "chortled" - but those aren't nearly as well-known as vorpal. And so, with his overpowered sword, he went searching for his manxome foe the jabberwock. Unfortunately, he had a lot of forest to cover, and failed his search check completely. After his fruitless search he rested by the Tumtum tree to think his uffish thoughts. Right then, though, the burbling Jabberwock whiffled out of the tulgey woods with its eyes of flame to slay the lad! But with the huge thing's abysmal stealth checks, our hero successfully won initiative and severed its head with a grim snicker-snack. Then he galumphed back to his father with the big ugly head under his arm.

At the return of his triumphant son, the father absolutely chortled with happiness. "Callooh! Callay!" he shouted in celebration. The whole poem is nonsensical, but this line still stands out from the rest with its ridiculousness. I think the dad had probably been drinking something while his son was Jabberwock hunting.

And that's the end of the poem, with everything peaceful again. In fact, the first stanza is repeated again just to stress that things are as before. The Bandersnatch and Jubjub bird are absent from the action and do not make an appearance, and we never learn the nature of the 'slithy toves'. But despite these absences, "Jabberwocky" is regarded as one of the best nonsense poems in the english language. I would recommend reading the full poem to get the full effect, but I still hope you got something out of my review. Anyways, enjoy the nonsense!

-Paddywagon Man