'No Shade, No Shine, No Butterflies, No Bees'

November is the weak sister among the months. October is the true Poetry Month and grabs all the attention thanks largely to Keats. December has Christmas but I have a sentimental attachment to November. The first time I saw my name in print, in 1968, was in my high school literary magazine, Lit Bits (sorry). My contribution to the magazine I edited was a prose-poem titled “November.” The language was lush about a decidedly un-lush month and said absolutely nothing. It was an effusion written under the sway of Thomas Wolfe and his Look Homeward, Angel, an influence my writerly auto-immune system soon threw off, but not before I compared the color of the November sky to “tarnished pewter.”

Unfairly, Thomas Hood (1799-1845) is barely remembered today. The title of one of the English poet’s collections gives you a taste of his approach to verse: Whims and Oddities (1826). He was an eccentric humorist, a friend to Charles Lamb. Let’s avoid that troublesome word “minor.” Stevie Smith admired him extravagantly. In her 1988 biography of Smith, Frances Spalding writes:

“So great was Smith’s admiration for Hood, both his ‘deathly addiction to punning’ as well as his straight, non-punning verse, such as his famous ‘Song of the Shirt’ which she praised for its ‘admirable simplicity’ and ‘careful observation’, that she later [1946] wrote a radio programme on him.”

Consider “No!”, Hood’s poem on the eleventh month:

“No sun—no moon!

        No morn—no noon—

No dawn—

        No sky—no earthly view—

        No distance looking blue—

No road—no street—no ‘t’other side the way’—

        No end to any Row—

        No indications where the Crescents go—

        No top to any steeple—

No recognitions of familiar people—

        No courtesies for showing ’em—

        No knowing ’em!

No traveling at all—no locomotion,

No inkling of the way—no notion—

        ‘No go’—by land or ocean—

        No mail—no post—

        No news from any foreign coast—

No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility—

        No company—no nobility—

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

   No comfortable feel in any member—

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,

        November!”

 

The punchline arrives in the twenty-fourth line. English poetry is rich in good “minor” poets. Personally, I would rather read Hood than, say, most of Coleridge or almost anything by Robert Lowell. In his introduction to Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets (1966), W.H. Auden said Hood was “like nobody but himself and serious in the true sense of the word.”