I get the “hot gates”; the fighting in the rain might refer to the Battle of Rain in the Thirty Year’s War. During the Civil War there was a Battle of Saltville, which gets its name from salt marshes in the area. But, yeah, I’m just guessing. I’ve read a number of studies of Eliot’s work, and while I still like the Wasteland, the Hollow Men and Prufrock, a lot of it shows the impenetrable influence of his mentor, Ezra Pound, whose work rivals Finnegans Wake in its obscurity.
Here’s one that I just love; as mentioned above, it’s fantastic for children: Robert Service’s immortal Cremation of Sam McGee —
*There 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 - *
I positively long to moil for gold … not to mention visit the marge of Lake Lebarge.
With a Noo Yawk accent, it does. (Case in point.)
Watch this epic version and then say that. 
That was indeed magnificent! 
But it’s magnificently funny, which I maintain a poem about a tragic catastrophe that killed nearly a hundred people is not supposed to be. You might well love it as a hilarious unintentional self-parody, but that’s not what I was talking about.
Come to think of it, McGonagall must have had some balls to publish something as ludicrously, howlingly clunky as that poem within a few months of the actual tragedy. More than a century later we just see it as funny, but I imagine that at the time many mourners perceived its ridiculous hamhandedness as gratuitously adding insult to injury. Even now in 2013 a lot of us would probably still not enjoy reading such an unintentionally ludicrous poem about 9/11, for example.
You have a point about it being a trivialisation of a tragedy but Billy Connolly’s reading is so heartfelt that he almost gets away with it (the snow helps).
I get the impression that McGonagle had ENORMOUS self-belief. Either that or he had decided to live his whole life as a parody by then.
Oh, man. My mother had me memorize “The Owl Critic” when I was about 8, and have me recite it for ‘lucky’ visitors.
And decades and decades later it still clutters my mind:
“Who stuffed that white owl?” No one spoke in the shop
The barber was busy and he couldn’t stop…
(I’ll spare you the rest.)
Trivia: It’s actually Lake Laberge. Why Service didn’t just say ‘on the verge of Lake Laberge’ is a mystery. As an Alaskan I grew up with Service’s poetry and loved it. We had a collection on our bookshelf for as long as I can remember.
“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.”
It devolves into a gunfight, and:
“Then I ducked my head and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark;
And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou.”
As a middle school teacher, I can keep a class mesmerized with “Little Orphant Annie” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”. As a child, my mother made me memorize “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight” and other long, expressive poems that my kids would be horrified to have to read. There was one about ‘The antiseptic baby and the prophylactic pup’ or some nonsense like that. Shall have to go google that…
Haven’t been to many weddings of not very religious people lately, have you?
Heh. Actually, that Guiterman poem would be quite relevant in today’s antibacterial germophobic culture.
In high school we had to memorize and recite a poem. Being an odd child, I chose The Bench-Legged Fyce, by Eugene Field. A fyce is a small hunting dog, also known as a ‘feist’.
My mother had a 3-book set of his poetry, which I inherited.
“Clementine” also scans to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Therefore, I guess “Psalm of Life” does too.
Everyone I know loves Robert Service. Is his stuff considered “bad poetry”?
Fun fact I recall from library school: Until the late 19th Century, the vast majority of printed matter in the English-speaking world was religious literature. An impression one rarely seems to get from the books from those centuries that people still read, except perhaps for Pilgrim’s Progress, if anyone still reads that.
Well, Eliot’s one of those poets beloved of English profs and lit majors, one of those who is widely known just because he is a poet everybody with any pretense to an education knows they’re supposed to know. I don’t think he ever was a popular poet in the sense that Edward A. Guest and Robert Service were popular poets.
Is it threadshitting to drop a decent poem, just to remind that there still is such a thing, into this bowl of doggerel?
I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned the poems that Lewis Carroll parodied (unless you count Hiawatha), but the Alice books are full of parodies of the (bad, and often didactic) poetry that was popular in the day, such as Robert Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them,” parodied by Carroll as “You Are Old, Father William.”
I’ll do you one better, sung by Bob from Sesame Street.
Big favorite of mine, too, at age 4 or so. It was in a book with this illustration: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vkBLkocveCY/TAbv6aZqIcI/AAAAAAAAAT8/xuTRYBXjgeU/s1600/IMG.jpg
and skeert me ‘bout to pieces, but I loved it jus’ th’ same!
