Poems of the Week: Hunting

Our subject for this week is hunting. Nowadays, this is an uncomfortable subject, and particularly, it seems, for today's poets - most of whom remember Oscar Wilde's phrase "The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable." (1893). Nevertheless, until quite recently, hunting (either for food or for sport) was an important part of life, and of culture, in most societies; and it is consequently reflected in the poetry.

Siegried Sassoon (1886 - 1967) was one of the First World War poets, and we have mentioned him before here: he met Wilfred Owen while they were both undergoing treatment during the War. They were both anti-war poets: Sassoon was wounded twice, and received the Military Cross. It was immediately after this, and while he was still in the army, that he publicly affirmed his pacifism: this was attributed to shell shock. After the War, Sassoon wrote a three-volume fictionalized biography through the alter ego of George Sherston. The first volume of this was The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Although Sassoon orphans himself in this account of his childhood, we can still see the love of the English countryside that comes out in Sassoon's early poetry, his pleasure in fox-hunting and playing cricket, and the beginnings of the man who was to become the bravely foolhardy officer - "Mad Jack" - of the First World War.

However, the most significant contributor to this literature in Victorian England was Robert Smith Surtees (1803 - 1864), who wrote very popular novels of English provincial life. His hero in much of his work was Mr. Jorrocks, one of the great comic characters of English literature, a blunt Cockney grocer who is entirely given over to fox hunting. An early collection of his stories, which he published in monthly installments, mostly in the New Sporting Magazine (he was the editor of this until 1836) was Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities (1838). These stories were the prototype for Charles Dickens's (1812 - 1870) Pickwick Papers, which appeared in 1837.

An example of the popular culture aspect of hunting is the favorite English hunting song, dating from 1832, D'ye Ken John Peel. The hero, John Peel, was a Cumberland farmer, who kept a pack of fox hounds. The words of the song are by John Woodcock Graves (1795 - 1886), a fellow Cumbrian, and their origin was told by the author to this effect.

When both men were in the heyday of their manhood they met one night at Graves's house at Caldbeck, to arrange some hunting matter. The grandmother of Graves's children was singing a child to sleep with an old nursery rhyme known as Bonnie Annie, or Whar wad Bonnie Annie lie, and Graves became struck by the idea of writing a song in honour of Peel to the tune the old lady was singing. He completed a version before Peel left the house and jokingly remarked 'By Jove, Peel, you'll be sung when we are both run to earth'. Peel died in 1854, aged seventy-eight, and was buried at Caldbeck. The song is still sung frequently in England - it goes very well with beer!

Here is a little of it - this wording is from the Cumbrian dialect original manuscript, respelt only to make it understandable ('ken' means 'know'):

Did ye ken John Peel with his coat so grey?
Did ye ken John Peel at the break o' day?
Did ye ken John Peel going far, far away -
With his hounds and his horn in the morning?

Chorus:
For the sound of his horn called me from my bed
As the cry of his hounds he often led,
For Peel's 'View Holla!' would waken the dead,
Or a fox from his lair in a morning.

However, Ralph Hodgson (1871 - 1962) has a different view: this is The Bells of Heaven, from his Poems, published in 1917.

'Twood ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers,
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.

And now, as they say, for something completely different. Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson 1832 - 1898) wrote The Hunting of the Snark, (1876) which I have referred to several times before - I think it's the best comic poem I know. In Fit the Third: The Baker's Tale the Baker tells of his uncle, who has explained how the Snark should be hunted:

" 'You may seek it with thimbles - and seek it with care;
     You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
     You may charm it with smiles and soap -' "

("That's exactly the method," the Bellman bold
     In a hasty parenthesis cried,
"That's exactly the way I have always been told
     That the capture of Snarks should be tried!")

My second choice is a poem whose key phrase is extremely well-known, because it was used as a title for an excellent novel by Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The authorship is, to say the least of it, a little odd. William Sharp (1855 - 1905) was born in Paisley, Scotland, on 12th September 1855 and left when aged 12 years. "Celt in heart and spirit" he was a delicate "merry and mischievous" child, also a loner with a strong imagination. He found work with a lawyer, but an attack of typhoid so weakened him that he went to Australia to recuperate. Based on this visit was his first novel Sport of Chance (1888).

Returned from Australia, he worked for a bank in London. In 1884 he had married his cousin Elizabeth A. Sharp, editor of Lyra Celtica.

Following a visit to Rome he produced Sospiri di Roma (1891), poems in irregular meter. When there he became friendly with a lady whose personality symbolised to him the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days. As "Fiona MacLeod" he dedicated Pharais (1894) to her, a story full of "Celtic romance ... and the mysterious". In The Mystic's prayer (s)he asks for help:

In flame of sunrise bathe my mind
Master of the Hidden Fire
That, when I wake, clear eyed may be
My soul's desire

My last selection also needs a little background. It is by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881 - 1975), and is from a book entitled Mr. Mulliner Speaking, which was published in 1929. Mr. Mulliner inhabited the bar-parlour of the (fictitious) British pub, The Angler's Rest, and the books with his name on them consist of a series of anecdotes by him delivered to the other denizens of the bar based on the activities of his relatives. As with essentially all of the Wodehouse books, these are people of the Upper Crust, as they were called in England. The poem I will shortly introduce is from Chapter V, Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court. Mr. Mulliner's story is started by the arrival of a young man in the Angler's Rest: "In one hand he was carrying a double-barrelled gun, and in the other a posy of dead rabbits". This caused a poet who was reading some of his sonnets to the bar patrons to turn green and close his eyes in horror. This reminded Mr. Mulliner of his niece Charlotte, a person also of delicate sensibilities, who wrote Vignettes in Verse for the artistic weeklies. For reasons which the avid readers can check out for themselves, she went for a brief trip to Bludleigh Court, a 'noble old pile of Tudor architecture", inhabited entirely by hunters of the most blood-thirsty sort, having been warned that the place cast an evil spell on visitors. She believed that it would have no effect on her. However, she had a commission to supply the Animal-Lovers Gazette with a poem for its Christmas number, and she wrote a Vignette in Verse entitled Good Gnus there, sending it in to the Gazette. She was astounded when it was rejected outright, with a note from the Editor saying that its tone might offend his readers. (I know all about notes from Editors like that!). This is the third poem of the week, and I am sure you will share Charlotte's surprise, and also perhaps understand the evil influence of Bludleigh Court.

This is a singularly unusual selection of poems, for what I suppose is an unusual topic.

Hope you enjoy them!

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
     And the hunter home from the hill.
                                   Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)  
            

Lord Randall

Good Gnus