'Either Very Gravely Gay or Very Gaily Grave'

“Lend me—lend me some disguise; / I will tell prodigious lies; / All who care for what I say / Shall be April Fools to-day!” 

This sounds like our understanding of April Fools’ Day as kids. Low-cost, nothing elaborate, just walk up behind a guy and scream “Your pants are on fire!” and hilarity ensues. April Fools' Day came with a relaxation of conventional manners. You could be a jerk and possibly get away with it. Sixty-five years too late, I pity our poor teachers.

 

The author of the lines at the top is Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39), an English writer of vers de société or what later was called light verse – poems accessible and often amusing. Philip Larkin was an admirer and Yvor Winters suspected Praed (pronounced prayed) had an influence on the young E.A. Robinson. I first heard of Praed from Larkin in his address to the Antiquarian Bookfair in 1972:

 

“Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen. True, I reach to the right more often than to the left, but the twelve are there as exemplars. All in all, therefore, I should miss my books. I like to think I could do without them -- I like to think I could do without anything -- but indubitably I should miss them.”

 

In his poem “April Fools,” Praed assumes foolishness is ubiquitous. We want to be lied to, so long as the lies substantiate our precious illusions. Though he served in Parliament, Praed rarely addressed politics. The seventh stanza nicely captures politics in the twenty-first century:

 

“And to the world I publish gaily,

That all things are improving daily;

That suns grow warmer, streamlets clearer,

And faith more warm, and love sincerer;

That children grow extremely clever,

That sin is seldom known, or never;

That gas, and steam, and education,

Are killing sorrow and starvation!

Pleasant visions!—but alas,

How those pleasant visions pass!

If you care for what I say,

You’re an April Fool to-day!”

 

I won’t proselytize for Praed. By today’s standards his work is old-fashioned – rhyming, metrically strict. But his poems have a charm about them, an obvious willingness to please readers. In an untitled poem Praed composed his apologia:

 

“These gifts shall be unfading signs

That, in his early days,

Some beaming eyes could read his lines,

Some beauteous lips could praise;

Fair Lady, from the cup of bliss

He wants and wishes only this!

 

“For he was born a wayward boy,

To laugh when hopes deceive him,

To grasp at every fleeting joy,

And jest at all that leave him,

To love a quirk, and loathe a quarrel,

And never care a straw for laurel.

 

“And thus, the creature of a day,

And rather fool than knave,

And either very gravely gay

Or very gaily grave,

He cares for nought but wit and wine,

And flatteries,—such as this of thine!”

 

[The Larkin passage can be found in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1983).]