"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough"

It was not my intent in the previous entry to be snootily dismissive of Mrs. Eddy as a poet. What was surely most important to her in her metaphysical poems was clearly conveying content, not displaying art. First rate poetry is often obscure and ambiguous, sometimes to the point of opacity. If one desires to be clear and unambiguous, he should write prose, which is, of course, what Mrs. Eddy usually did. Those seven of her poems which have become hymns plus "Christ and Christmas" are more than respectable, and I wouldn't wish to be without them.


I finally read the informative article in the November Journal on Mrs. Eddy's unpublished/unknown poems. It clarified one point on the comment that prompted the previous entry. The first of three quatrains on page 54 (the slightly modified stanza from "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam") originally stood alone. It was later married up, for some unknown reason, with the other two quatrains, which I suspect are hers. The author of the article did not detect her borrowing, though I wouldn't have either since it's not one of the well-known (to me at any rate) verses from the "Rubaiyat".

If you like poetry there are a couple of featured poems in the November issue. "Sing gratitude's refrain" (page 57) is a Shakespearean sonnet with clunky, tin-eared rhymes, possibly in a clumsy attempt to breathe up-to-date life into the old form. Since it was an in-house effort, this lucubration apparently dodged the salubrious ministrations of an editor. Inexcusably, the writer seems ignorant of what the longshoremen, who figure largely in the poem, do. The result is as awkward and square-wheeled as the "misshapen steel" in the poem. I think Christian Scientists deserve better than this sort of stuff for their money, but if you see it differently let me know. The Peter J. Henniker-Heaton poem on page 31, a reprint, is much more satisfying to me, not that it's much of a contest.

I don't know if Journal/Sentinal even accepts unsolicited poems any more. Maybe they never really did, but if they do, here is an Xtreme challenge for those who like poetry and possess a touch of masochism. As you may suspect, my experiences in this bucolic field are like that of a Fuller Brush salesman [Is that far enough back for you?] who can't even get the lady of the house to come to the door. At least with articles, she came to the door and listened to my sales pitch before slamming the door in my face. My rejected poems came back, I'll swear, in the next day's mail. I don't know how they did it. Perhaps something like open the envelope, see that it's a poem, notice the name of that pesky author, add a standard rejection letter, and whoosh it's out the door without offending a single Olympian eye. Try it if they will accept unsolicited poems, and the bonus will be that after you have accumulated 40 or 50 rejections you'll have enough poems to publish your own book of verse for reading underneath the bough. You have nothing to lose but some hours of your time and some stamps--and maybe your poetic equanimity.