I've made a blog. I'm also in the mood for self-evident statements. I'm not really sure what to say actually. I'm inclined to believe this is a very unfavourable augury for the future success of this blog. Certainly running out of ideas before the first post is not what I was hoping for. Second or third post maybe.
I've called it, after at least forty seconds of vaguely strenuous book-grabbing, 'Redeemed from Worms'. This is from a magnificent Byron poem (I feel the 'magnificent' may be superfluous in this sentence) called Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull. I think a mere human can only imagine the vastness of a forehead which can comfortably house six verses of poetry. I wasn't going to quote the poem in full, but now I will do precisely that. Call the citation police if you want.
Start not -nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I quaffed like thee;
I died: let earth my bones resign:
Fill up -thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.
Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm's slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet's shape
The drink of gods than reptile's food.
Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others' let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?
Quaff while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth's embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
Why not -since through life's little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.
The story behind this poem is that Byron's gardener had found a skull in Byron's garden, as one does. Goodness knows why, but Byron decided to have this turned into a drinking vessel. He writes, in a letter which I'm certain I've read in full but can only find in part on Wikipedia, 'There had been found by the gardener, in digging, a skull that had probably belonged to some jolly monk or friar of the Abbey, about the time it was demonasteried. Observing it to be of giant size, and in a perfect state of preservation, a strange fancy seized me of having it set and mounted as a drinking cup. I accordingly sent it to town, and it returned with a very high polish and of a mottled colour like tortoiseshell'. So it seems I was right about the 'giant size' of this fortuitously endowed bonce.
I'm rather a big fan of simple rhyme schemes, and this poem profits hugely from such a structure. Byron had a habit of using rhyme schemes that would frankly have driven me insane if I had to write in them, such as Don Juan's complex but not altogether incomprehensible abababcc. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, however, uses a far more convoluted ababbcbcc. I think I would be liable to engage in heated debates with hairdryers if subjected to such a writing pattern. Or indeed any number of household appliances; perhaps a stern disagreement with the toasted sandwich maker; a chagrined altercation with the dumpling steamer. I could go on (but mercifully won't). I can only speculate that the unfortunate lack of dumpling steamers in Byron's era is what led him to making cups out of skulls.
I feel justified in saying that after reading 'Fill up -thou canst not injure me;/The worm hath fouler lips than thine,' I can sympathise with the female hot flush. This is why I love poetry - one can create perfect beauty in a line and then almost disregard it in a pit of nonchalance by moving on to the next verse.
Iambic tetrameter (duh-dun,duh-dun,duh-dun,duh-dun) is an often-overlooked metrical pattern which is very easy to begin with but very difficult to master. It is hugely challenging to compress poetic thoughts into 8- or 9-syllable lines. Pentameter and hexameter are more difficult to begin with but pentameter is used in probably 90% of structured poems, so you have a lot of reference material. The only poet I can think of who used tetrameter a huge amount is Andrew Marvell. Perhaps Jonathan Swift too.
I've rambled quite successfully about that poem but the point about the line redeemed from worms is that it represents the plucking of something from the past and restoring it into worth. Poetry is unbelievably neglected nowadays (unsurprisingly really - there is a veritable dearth of talent). Whenever I think of the state of poetry today, I think of Arthur Miller's phrase 'a paucity of heroes' - it seems perfectly apt. This was not a major phrase of his, but its beauty did linger in my head. Anyway, this blog is in part for the drawing of attention to poetry. There are too many worms and too much wasting clay for poetry to flourish unaided.
This blog is not just for poetry, though. If my almost terminal indolence allows it, I will try to write slightly informal, or at least short, essays on subjects which occur to me. This keeps happening to me and I siphon off one paragraph before being sucked into the black hole of the kitchen, doomed to eat peanut butter on toast for the foreseeable future.
I think I did have a brief outline for this first blog post but I've completely misplaced it. Isn't 'misplace' an odd word? It makes the rather large assumption that each thing has a proper place in the universe, from which it must not stray. If this were the case then I would certainly be in the pub this very second.
This will not be a lifestyle blog. For one thing, the word 'lifestyle' is almost emetic to me. I have no plan when I get up in the morning and this is no source of lamentation on my part (though I'm sure the same cannot be said of my poor, suffering parents). The idea of an artificial construct of a life, some dry husk which one must fill, is in my mind absolute anathema. There are two possible outcomes to such a situation. One, that you meet or exceed your own expectations and experience brief euphoria followed by impossible despair at the ease with which your hopes and aspirations were mown down like reeds. The thought 'Well what now?' is an unbidden inevitability. The other outcome is of course that you fail to meet your expectations and feel even worse. The other reason I will not have a lifestyle blog is that it would certainly bore you into extinction. I will give you a brief taste of such a life, almost as an vaccination against its future relaying. Today I slept at 11am, woke up at 8pm, ate a Snickers bar, and slept from 10pm to 1am. This is the sort of irresistible gossip one might come to expect from my life. So no, I will blog about the interesting things in this world. If anything interesting happens to me, of course I will include it, but that is not the primary purpose of this blog.
I feel I should end here, indeed my laptop is beginning to freeze as if in protest to the idiocy with which I've approached this post. The fantastic thing about making a blog is that if you're terrible at writing anything remotely interesting, and would therefore have some cause to be embarrassed (the ability to be boring is a curse far worse than lycanthropy), then your blog simply will not be read. In other words, success is the only scenario in which your blog will get any attention. So it's a great way of being able to write in a rather equanimous way whilst also having some sense of seriousness.
I will certainly think of something I've forgotten as soon as I publish this, but such is the dynamic lifestyle of pressing plastic keys on a keyboard. Hope I haven't bored you to death. Or even to incapacity.
Andrew Marvell <3 Best Words.
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