Jan Montefiore is having trouble posting to the list. I know she
asked John to repost this, not me, but her comments are very
interesting so I thought they should get out to the list as soon as
possible.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Janet Montefiore <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 4:13 AM
Subject: Re: An antidote to poetic inebriation
To: Meredith Dixon <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: JOHN RADCLIFFE <[log in to unmask]>
I don’t know about ‘static’ - Don Marquis very wittily pinpoints the
overblown effects that Kipling’;s early verse can lapse into. And in
fact, he wrote the poem before inventing archy; it was first
published in 1921 under the title ’The Hero Cockroach’, in which it
has conventional typeface and punctuation, and a clear ending. It thus
predates the first appearance of Archy by about 15 years. For
publishing details, see note 4 of my essay in Kipling Journal
no.314, pp. 47-52, where I argued that it’s a send-up of Kipling’s
'Rhyme of the Three Captains.’
Actually, Don Marquis was a brilliant writer of formal light verse
who can stand comparison with the Kipling of Departmental Ditties
(and you can see from the witty lineation of the satire ‘warty
bliggens the toad’ how skilled his vers libre actually is). 'archy’s
life of mehitabel' includes ballades composed by Mehitabel’s
lovers,the ‘elegant gent’ who first coined the phrase ’toujours gai
kid’ with the refrain ‘ours is the zest of the alley cat/ mehitabel
us for the life romantic’, and the disreputable tom Francy she takes
up with in Paris, a 'murderous looking animal’ who is ’nobody else
than francois villon/ and he looks it too’, who recites 2 ballades,
one with the refrain ‘I am a cat of the devil I am’ and the other
‘skeleton rattle your mouldy leg/ all mens lovers come to this’.
Archy himself could do rhyme and metre when he wanted: see ‘archy
at the zoo’ (octosyllabic triplets rhyming aaa) and ’natural history’
(quatrains rhyming abab, disguised as free verse). And don’t forget
Mehitabel’s own lyrical ballad in ‘mehitabel dances with borea’, and
its grim courageous refrain -
whirl mehitabel whirl
leap shadow leap
you gotta dance till the sun comes up
for you got no place to sleep
Ja Montefiore
(Meredith, I’ve copied this to John Radcliffe because I can’t seem to
write on JISCmail myself, only receive it. John, could you very kindly
put it up for me ?)
