Dog Days
The Dog Days are the last hot days of summer which precede the autumnal mists and mellow fruitfulness.
I’ve been walking the dogs through the damps and the fogs and I love you,
I love you I cry to the sky and the shuttering sun.
I’ve been spending my days counting all of the ways that I love you,
And the sum of the ways that I counted amounted to one.
It’s the way that’s the best and it covers the rest and I love you,
I love you forever since weather began to unwind,
Since the sauropod plod through the memory of God, still I love you
Till the last lazy star fizzles out and the cosmos is blind.
You’re a child of the light, you’re a ghost in the night and I love you,
I love you: I whisper it low to the loitering leaves.
You’re as flash as the flight of a meteorite and I love you.
You’re the cream of the milk, you’re as subtle and silky as Jeeves.
You’re as pale as a bone and as true as alone and I love you,
I love you: I sing to the crystalline ring round the moon.
You’re as black as the tone of the membranophone and I love you.
You’re as luscious as honeydew sucked from a runcible spoon.
You’re as soft as the rose, you’re as solemn as prose and I love you,
I love you: I shout it aloud to the teetering trees.
It’s the way your hair grows, it’s the splay of your toes, yes I love you.
You’re as sweet as the scents of September borne up on the breeze.
As the North loves a magnet or cops love a dragnet, I love you
In the darks of my heart, in the swells of the wandering wave.
As the Lady loves iron or Baptists love Zion, I love you.
You’re as pure as poitin of Knockeen, and as sure as the grave.
You’re so fresh, you’re so funny, so bang on the money, I love you,
As a packet of vinegar crisps loves a lager and lime.
You’re so slick, you’re so smart, so exclusive as art, and I love you,
As an old-fashioned poet loves patterns of metre and rhyme.
As an old fashioned poet I love you, you know it, I love you,
Though I’m crumpled and creased and obese and as ugly as sin,
I’m a popper of pills and I’m late with my bills and I love you
And a world with you in it’s a wonderful world to be in.
Meteorologically speaking this poem is a bit of a latecomer, but good poems are good irrespective of weather or season, so here goes.
One of the main malaises of contemporary verse is its vacuity of music. Even among many of today’s reputable poets, one gets the impression that they must seriously believe that a haphazard scattering of prose somehow constitutes poetry. Coupled with a language that is often anything but playful, intellectually abstruse or just plain incomprehensible, one sometimes even suspects perhaps that they are masking a painful lack of poetic skill.
But writing formal verse in today’s day and age? There one can hardly hide. The formalist, in any art, is far more brazen for he unbares his skill more nakedly to the critical eye. It is easy to spot a bad formalist, even for readers who do not read much poetry, but it is hard, even for the shrewdest critic, to call out and expose a bad writer of free verse.
Bad formal verse is stony thoroughfare,
but I prefer that breed of line and square:
the languid labourer of foot and rhyme
who suffocates his word, but makes it chime
to the
mediocre dribbler
of haphasard line breaks
and
in–
dentations.
By saying this I really don’t want to give the idea that I am an opponent of free verse–it should suffice to read through earlier analyses that I have written to see that that is not the case. What I am contrary to, however, is the idea that verse can ever be “free”–as though anything goes with writing poetry. Unfortunately this seems to be the default position with free verse poets today. A genuine free verse poet–a rare breed indeed!–very often has to labour even harder than a formalist to excavate and sculpt his music from the poetic lode. It’s perhaps as a reactionary that I find it easier to embrace the good formalists of our era. John Whitworth, who passed away just a couple of years ago, was during his poetic career an almost unparalleled master of the technical aspect of verse but nonetheless one who could splice and imbibe it with true feeling. He certainly deserves a greater readership.
Form:
Four stanzas. The meter is predominantly written in anapests. Note the recurring pattern of internal rhymes with end rhymes.
Analysis:
The poem is set during the last, sultry days of summer. That period of blurred lines that dawdles into the autumn. The poet is out walking his dogs, reflecting on the ways that he adores his beloved. In some way there is hardly more to this poem, even if it is of some length. The poem is a failed attempt to describe the nature and scope of his love for this person and the impossibility of doing such a thing is in some ways the theme, hence the constant contradictory and sometimes just plain absurd verses used to explain it, just note some of them:
I’ve been spending my days counting all of the ways that I love you,
And the sum of the ways that I counted amounted to one.
You’re a child of the light, you’re a ghost in the night and I love you,
You’re as black as the tone of the membranophone and I love you.
These images are scarcely relatable but anyway make so much sense in the context–to precisely define the nature of the poet’s love would also be to render it lifeless. All this therefore pardons the very sweet cliché at the end –perhaps the the only clear, unpoetic statement of his love in the poem:
And a world with you in it’s a wonderful world to be in
Enjoy!