Today’s Poem: Green Groweth the Holly
Poetry and the amateur poet
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There was a time (a long time, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to roughly the middle of the twentieth) in which an educated English speaker was generally expected to be able to compose a rhymed and metered poem. Nothing great was expected of these compositions. It’s just that part of being educated, having a college or even a high-school degree, was the capacity to write some verse whenever a stray morbid or romantic thought demanded the deep feeling of poetry. Or when a comic idea came to mind. Or when a public occasion — a friend’s birthday, a niece’s wedding, a co-worker’s retirement — needed a public comment.
This was something a little different from the poetry produced by poets who were best known for writings other than poetry. John Updike, for example, wrote poems his entire professional life but complained that his verses were never taken as seriously as his novels. Though Thomas Hardy spent much of his time writing poetry, he had difficulty gaining a poetic reputation to match his fame as a novelist. We have a kind of unwillingness to acknowledge poetry by famous prose writers — because, X.J. Kennedy (b. 1929) once suggested, we view them “like some designer of Explorer rockets who hasn’t enough to do, in his spare time touching off displays of Roman candles.”
But true amateur verse comes from people with no pretention to be poets. Jane Austen’s “Oh! Mr. Best, you’re very bad,” for example: a light poem in a possibly unsent letter, admonishing a neighbor to offer a place in his carriage to one of Austen’s friends. Or George Washington’s youthful love poem for Frances Alexander. Or “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” ascribed to Abraham Lincoln. Innumerable newspapermen and schoolmarms and postal clerks would keep drawers of their attempts at verse. There are a few things all of us were expected to do for ourselves, no matter how bad at them we were, G.K. Chesterton once remarked — among them, blowing our nose and writing a love poem.
Reports suggest that haiku still somewhat works this way in Japan: Schoolchildren are taught the form’s meter and traditional themes with the expectation that they will in adulthood be able to produce perhaps not good poems but correctly formed haikus when the moment demands. It’s a skill expected of adults.
Free verse in English was intended to set poetry free, but it contributed to the decline of this sense of every man his own minor poet. I’m thinking here not just of the decline of readership that accompanied free verse and the fading of poetry as a central art of the culture, but also an unexpected difficulty free verse introduced: We now have to create not just the content of the poem but also its form. Easier, in some ways, just to write rhymed couplets.
Today’s Poem is a carol Henry VIII (1491–1547) wrote in his early twenties, composing, it is said, both the words and an accompanying melody. After a certain popularity simply because it was by the king, “Green Groweth the Holly” mostly faded away, a carol in the new Christmas tradition that was entirely a love poem. Although it is still performed occasionally by chorales, its place in the canon was overtaken by the parallel (and actually Christmas-themed) “The Holly and the Ivy.”
What stands out in King Henry’s poem is the general competence. This is not great or inventive verse, but it is what a public man trained as a schoolboy in poetry and music should produce: “As the holly groweth green / And never changeth hue, / So I am, ever hath been, / Unto my lady true.” In quatrains of 3-3-4-3 feet, rhymed abab, the song does exactly what it is expected to do, promising love as enduring as the ever-green holly and ivy. In the event, Henry VIII would prove less true.
Green Groweth the Holly
by Henry VIII
Green groweth the holly, So doth the ivy. Though winter blasts blow never so high, Green groweth the holly. As the holly groweth green And never changeth hue, So I am, ever hath been, Unto my lady true. As the holly groweth green With ivy all alone When flowers cannot be seen And greenwood leaves be gone, Now unto my lady Promise to her I make, From all other only To her I me betake. Adieu, mine own lady, Adieu, my special Who hath my heart truly Be sure, and ever shall.
This is perfect example of knowing too much about the *poet*. It’s sweet verse, but Henry VIII promising fidelity only makes me giggle.