In the week I first read the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things — the long lost poem of Percy Bysshe Shelley — the tune on loop in my head was that of a less distant protest song, Masters of War. In 1963, unable to bear the escalating loss of American youth in Vietnam, the 22-year-old Bob Dylan sang out against those faceless profiteers of war.
The post The freewheeling Percy Shelley appeared first on OUPblog.
Yesterday's poem was the most famous rondeau of the English language, In Flanders Fields by John McCrae. Today's poem was selected because of its title:
Rondeau
by James Henry Leigh Hunt
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
The official title of the poem is "Rondeau", although it is often called "Jenny Kissed Me" as well. Unlike an actual rondeau, this poem is a single stanza of eight lines, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCD. It is written using trochaic feet (DUMta DUMta DUMta) in a form of hymn meter, with the following syllable counts: 7-8-7-8-7-8-7-4. What it shares with yesterday's rondeau (in addition to calling itself by that form's name) is the use of the first three words (or first four syllables, if you prefer) as its "refrain", with the poem beginning and ending with those same three words.
The poem is semi-autobiographical. Leigh Hunt had been seriously ill with influenza; upon visiting his friends Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle (nicknamed "Jenny"), she jumped up and kissed him. Leigh Hunt wrote the poem as a tribute.
Although I think this poem reads like something from the first half of the 20th century, it was in fact written nearly a century earlier, during early Victorian times. James Henry Leigh Hunt was born in England in 1784, and lived until 1859. He was a good friend of both Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, and introduced Keats to Italian poetry as well as personally introducing Keats to Shelley. Leigh Hunt was also an essayist and newspaper writer. He was also the person on whom Charles Dickens based the character of Skimpole in Bleak House.
