'Like an Occupying Army'

Two unrelated situations bring poems, song lyrics and old television commercial jingles to mind, seemingly out of nowhere: on first waking in the morning and while preparing a meal in the kitchen. None is summoned. They blip to the surface like bubbles in a pond. Last weekend I was greeted to the new day by Tennyson’s warhorse, “Break, Break, Break.” Not the entire poem but the final stanza: 

“Break, break, break

         At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

         Will never come back to me.”

 

Accompanying Tennyson’s lines was a memory of a ferry ride we took around Puget Sound some fifteen years ago. I see no linkage between the two things except water.

 

While cooking dinner a few weeks back, I hosted an earworm from 1966: the frat-house favorite “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” by the Swinging Medallions. Specifically: “She loved me so long and she loved me so hard / I finally passed out in her front yard (whoo).” With it came a memory of passing out on the lawn of my friends Gary and Laura Dumm in the summer of 1975. One thing about preparing a meal – it’s largely mindless. You follow a long-known formula, which leaves plenty of room for whatever’s floating around inside. Clearly, memory is not a reliable critic.

 

While taking a break from writing on Tuesday, I was sitting on the couch by the front window reading and watching nothing, preoccupied with my turkey sandwich. From somewhere came the lyrics to a sixty-year-old commercial for “Mighty Mo,” a toy cannon sold by the Ideal Toy Co.: “Off we go / With Mighty Mo, / Greatest cannon of them all was Mighty Mo . . .” I’m unable to find a video of the jingle but years ago, while reading Dore Ashton’s A Joseph Cornell Album (1974), I found a photo of Cornell seemingly window-shopping in front of a toy store. And there was a box holding the toy I lusted after as a kid.

 

In the Winter 1998 issue of The Threepenny Review, Edith A. Jenkins has a brief “Table Talk” essay about the unbidden arrival of poetry in one’s memory: “It happens that I am blessed or cursed with a memory for lines of poetry, lines that accost me unsolicited and sometimes haunt me like music from an old stuck record.”

 

Some poems I worked at memorizing, especially during my teenage years – Tennyson, Kipling, T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate. That’s the blessed part mentioned by Jenkins. “When I am cursed,” she continues, “a whole dreadful poem can take over like an occupying army.”