Today’s Poem: By What Mistake Were Pigeons

A lost Victorian

John James Audubon’s plate of band-tailed pigeons, 1838 (National Audubon Society)

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By What Mistake Were Pigeons

by James Henry

By what mistake were pigeons made so happy,
So plump and fat and sleek and well content,
So little with the affairs of others meddling,
So little meddled with? say, a collared dog,
And hard worked ox, and horse still harder worked,
And caged canary, why, uncribbed, unmaimed,
Unworked and of its will lord absolute,
The pigeon sole has free board and free quarters,
Till at its throat the knife, and pigeon pie
Must smoke ere noon upon the parson’s table;
Say, if ye can; I cannot, for the life o’ me;
But, whersoe’er I go, I find it so;
The pigeon of all things that walk or fly
Or swim or creep, the best cared-for and happiest;
Ornament ever fresh and ever fair
Of castle and of cottage, palace roof
And village street, alike, and stubble field,
And every eye and volute of the minster;
Philosopher’s and poet’s and my own
Envy and admiration, theme and riddle;
Emblem and hieroglyphic of the third
Integral unit of the Trinity;
Not even by pagan set to heavier task
Than draw the cart of Venus; since the deluge
Never once asked to carry in the bill,
And by the telegraph and penny-post
Released for ever from all charge of letters.

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The self-published poetry of the Irish physician James Henry (1798–1876) made not the slightest impact on the reading public of his time — pebbles dropped into a well that produced not the slightest echo. But, wonderful Victorian eccentric that Henry was, that seemed not much to matter, and he never ceased to pour out his poetry, pamphlets, and scholarship on Virgil’s Latin.

The lack of notice is a shame. Any sane person would want to pause a moment over something like his 1854 prose “Dialogue Between a Stethoscopist and an Unborn Child,” just for the title, and his studies of Virgil are, by all accounts, eccentrically suggestive. (Henry’s last words were, it is claimed, “Dido was never married to Sichaeus.”) But it’s his poetry that has broken to the surface over the past thirty years — all thanks to the critic Christopher Ricks (b. 1933).

In the 1980s, Ricks stumbled upon some of Henry’s books in the Cambridge University library — books so definitively unread that he had to use a paper knife to cut the pages. Perhaps by whim, perhaps in boast at his discovery, or perhaps even in genuine admiration at the better poems, Ricks included eight of Henry’s poems in his 1987 New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

Henry could be funny, although he had that sense of humor which is satisfied at having made the joke, even if no one listens. “All the whole world loves twaddle — ‘How do you know?’ / All the whole world reads Harriet Beecher Stowe,” he scoffed. “Blessed be the man who first invented chairs! / And doubly blessed, the man who beds invented!” he added in an ironic paean to Italian beds.

In 2002, Christopher Ricks returned to the poet, editing Selected Poems of James Henry. The poetry sometimes reaches to something Browningesque — in both the good and bad senses. More often Henry’s humor has the elaborateness of those bachelor comic poets of Victorian England, Latin-trained as schoolboys. And so with Today’s Poem, “By What Mistake Were Pigeons,” in Henry’s 1866 collection Menippea. In competent blank verse, 27 lines of unrhymed pentameter, Henry ponders the curious existence of pigeons: “The pigeon of all things that walk or fly / Or swim or creep, the best cared-for and happiest.”

James Henry, from the frontispiece of his 1866 Poematia (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s fine light stuff — appropriately for one of our lighter Wednesday poems here at Poems Ancient and Modern, since pigeons are “Not even by pagan set to heavier task / Than draw the cart of Venus; since the deluge / Never once asked to carry in the bill.”

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