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 Our
subject this week is feet. And shoes. And, come to that, boots.
And since we finished last week with William Blake (1757 – 1827),
it seems only reasonable to start with Jerusalem, which (as
I happen to know) was our Editor-in-Chief’s School Song!
And did those feet
in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
This was actually in
a Preface to Blake’s long poem Milton a Poem which deals
with the conflict between Milton as the hero and Satan; he began
producing this in 1804, and it was completed about 1811. However,
the two pages with the Preface were removed later by Blake, for
reasons that are not known. Seems odd that this is one of the two
Blake poems that are really well-known! Michael Flanders and Donald
Swann, in their album At the Drop of Another Hat (1964) have
a number called A Song of Patriotic Prejudice, and in the
introduction to it Flanders remarks that other nations have patriotic
songs saying how wonderful they are, but “What do the English have?
Jerusalem!”
Matthew Arnold (1822
– 1888):
With aching hands
and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ‘twere done.
The Song of Solomon
7:1:
How beautiful are
thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!
Lewis Carroll (1832
– 1898), from Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 4:
But four young Oysters
hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were cleaned and neat –
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn’t any feet.
 T.S.
Eliot (1888 – 1965), in The Fire Sermon:
O the moon shone bright
on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water.
Edward FitzGerald (1809
– 1883), from The Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyám, Stanza 75:
And when Thyself
with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scattered on the Grass,
And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one – turn down an empty Glass!
Sir Alan Patrick Herbert
(1890 – 1971) has this line in one of the lyrics in Riverside
Nights (1926):
He didn’t ought to
come to bed in boots.
Robert Herrick (1591
– 1674) from Upon Her Feet:
Her pretty feet
Like snails did creep
A little out, and then
As if they started at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in agen.
Compare Sir John Suckling
(1609 – 1642), from A Ballad upon a Wedding, (1646):
Her feet beneath
her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they fear’d the light.
Thomas Hood (1799 –
1845) wrote a number of comic verses, and one of the better known
of these is Faithless Nellie Gray. This poem discusses some
of the problems of a soldier who has lost his feet: here are a few
stanzas:
Ben Battle was a
soldier bold,
And used to war’s alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.
Now as they bore him
off the field,
Said he, ‘Let others shoot,
For here I leave my second leg,
And the Forty-Second Foot!’
………………………………….
‘Why, then,’ she said, ‘you’ve lost the feet
Of legs in war’s alarms,
And now you cannot wear your shoes
Upon your feats of arms!’
‘Oh, false and fickle
Nellie Gray;
I know why you refuse: --
Though I’ve no feet – some other man
Is standing in my shoes!’
 Here
is an unusual little poem by John Keats (1795 – 1821). I don’t know
anything about it: it isn’t in my Poems of John Keats, but
I found it on the web; it was set to music by Benjamin Frankel (1906-1973):
I had a dove and
the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for?
Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving;
Sweet little red feet! why should you die -
Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?
You lived alone in the forest tree,
Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me?
I kissed you oft and gave you white peas:
Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?
Here is John Milton
(1608 – 1674). This is from Comus: A Mask , which was presented
at Ludlow Castle in 1634 before the Earl of Bridgewater (a mask,
or masque, was a dramatic presentation performed at court; usually
a combination of poetry, prose, dance and song, the mask eventually
evolved into opera and ballet). Towards the end of the Mask, Comus
the evil enchanter who has imprisoned a virtuous Lady, escapes from
her brothers, who have rescued her. An Attendant Spirit suggests
calling in a nymph who controls the River Severn. (Historically
this nymph is Sabrina, the daughter of Locrine, a king of the Britons,
by his second wife, Estrildis. His first wife, Guendolen, raised
an army to give battle by the river Sture which ended up with the
death of Locrine; Guendolen then throws Estrildis and Sabrina into
the river, and to leave a monument to her revenge, proclaims that
henceforth the river shall be called after Sabrina, which over time
became Severn.) To help her secure the assistance of the nymph,
the Spirit sings this song:
Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen, and save.
Eventually, Sabrina
rises, attended by water-nymphs, and sings:
By the rushy-fringed bank,
Where grows the willow and the osier dank,
My sliding chariot stays,
Thick set with agate, and the azure sheen
Of turkis blue, and emerald green,
That in the channel strays;
Whilst from the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O’er the cowslip’s velvet head,
That bends not as I tread;
Gentle swain, at thy request
I am here.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792 – 1822) in The Cloud also comments on light feet:
That orbed maiden,
with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer
Algernon Charles Swinburne
(1837 – 1909) wrote a long poem, Atlanta in Calydon (1865).
Here is a stanza:
Come with bows bent
and with emptying of quivers,
Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamour of waters, and with
might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the
feet of the night.
Generally, the word
‘boots’ appears in poems as a negative image, brutal. As George
Orwell (1903 – 1950) said, in 1984, “If you want a picture of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”
One of our Poems this
week has this image in it: it is by W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973). The
title in Auden’s Collected Works is The
Quarry; but another source uses the beginning of the first
line as the title: O what is that sound. However, another
image is that from Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936).
 Kipling
was born on Dec.30, 1865, in Bombay, where his father directed an
art school. He learned Hindi from his nurse, and he also learned
stories of jungle animals. At six, he was sent to school in England,
but until he was 12, poor health kept him from attending. At 17,
Kipling returned to India, and soon became a journalist. He wrote
sketches and verses which at first were used as fillers for unused
editorial space. Many were later published in Departmental Ditties
(1886). In 1900, Kipling went to South Africa to report the Boer
War for an English newspaper. In 1905, Kipling completed Kim,
his first major novel. In it he gives a colorful and dramatic picture
of the complicated life of the Indian People, as seen through the
eyes of the poor orphan boy, Kim. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel
Prize for literature. Before World War I, he became active in politics.
He lectured widely and wrote for the British cause both before and
during the war that ultimately killed his only son. Our first poem
this week is Boots,
which describes the general discomfort experienced by an infantryman
during the Boer War. Our last poem this week is an early poem by
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939), He
wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
I hope you enjoy these.
I have a poem of my own called With You, Buying Shoes. But
I have decided to resist the temptation of imposing that on you
– at least, this time!
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