Today’s Poem: Lines Suggested by the Fourteenth of February

A Victorian Valentine’s Day Card

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1786 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Lines Suggested by the Fourteenth of February

by Charles Stuart Calverley

Ere the morn the East has crimsoned,
  When the stars are twinkling there,
(As they did in Watts’s Hymns, and
  Made him wonder what they were:)
When the forest-nymphs are beading
  Fern and flower with silvery dew —
My infallible proceeding
  Is to wake, and think of you.

When the hunter’s ringing bugle
  Sounds farewell to field and copse,
And I sit before my frugal
  Meal of gravy-soup and chops:
When (as Gray remarks) “the moping
  Owl doth to the moon complain,”
And the hour suggests eloping —
  Fly my thoughts to you again.

May my dreams be granted never?
  Must I aye endure affliction
Rarely realised, if ever,
  In our wildest works of fiction?
Madly Romeo loved his Juliet;
  Copperfield began to pine
When he hadn’t been to school yet —
  But their loves were cold to mine.

Give me hope, the least, the dimmest,
  Ere I drain the poisoned cup:
Tell me I may tell the chymist                 ◦ chymist = chemist = druggist
  Not to make that arsenic up!
Else, this heart shall soon cease throbbing;
  And when, musing o’er my bones,
Travellers ask, “Who killed Cock Robin?”
They’ll be told, “Miss Sarah J—s.”
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It’s worth the price of admission just for the third line — worth our reading C.S. Calverley’s Valentine’s Day poem just for the ridiculous rhyme of “crimsoned” and “Hymns, and.” (Comic poetry, from Lord Byron to Ogden Nash, loves this kind of feminine rhyme formed from multiple words.)

The nursery rhyme Calverley ascribes to Isaac Watts (1674–1748), “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” — “When the stars are twinkling there, / (As they did in Watts’s Hymns, and / Made him wonder what they were:) — is more probably by Jane Taylor (1783–1824), but there is at least this connection: both authors were parodied by Lewis Carrol (1832–1898). In Chapter Five of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll takes out after Watts’s 1715 “Against Idleness and Mischief” with “You Are Old, Father William.” And in Chapter Seven, he has the Mad Hatter sing, “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! / How I wonder what you’re at!”

This past December, Poems Ancient and Modern offered “Ode to Tobacco” as one of our lighter Wednesday poems, celebrating the author, Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884), his English verse technically clever and filled with jokes. And we bemoaned the disappearance from collective memory of the wry, comic, and wildly learnèd minor Victorian author.

That’s excuse enough to revisit him on Valentine’s Day. In his 1862 collection Verses and Translations, Calverley actually has two poems with the title “Lines Suggested by the Fourteenth of February.” The second is worth a look, with his promise to write a love verse:

Yea! by St. Valentinus,
Emma shall not be minus
What all young ladies, whate’er their grade is,
Expect to-day no doubt

But Today’s Poem, the first of those “Fourteenth of February” poems, is the more striking, with literary claims that reach from Watts to Thomas Gray’s 1751 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (as Calverley chooses the inadvertently comic “the moping owl doth to the moon complain,” of all the lines in Gray). Along the way, we learn that the lover’s love for Miss Sarah Jones, the Valentine’s addressee, is stronger than any love in “our wildest works of fiction”: Romeo’s love for Juliet, for examples, or David Copperfield’s pining “When he hadn’t been to school yet” — “their loves were cold” compared to the narrator’s

(Calverley actually refers to his beloved as “Miss Sarah J—s,” and someday we should explore the strange coy and perhaps legalistic politeness, from the Renaissance through the 18th century, that uses dashes for people’s names, often with enough clues to puzzle it out; regardless, by the late-1800s, it had become a convention of English-language Valentine’s Day cards, with the dashed name, as here, revealed by the implied rhyme: bones / J—s.)

Charles Stuart Calverley (Wikimedia Commons)

In four eight-line stanzas, rhymed abab-cdcd, Calverley dashes through the tropes of Valentinian love — the rising early, the lack of sleep and appetite, the threatened wasting away and even suicide unless the love interest return his love. And, of course, the cause of his death, like Cock Robin’s in the nursery rhyme, will be murder by the deadly Miss Sarah J—s, the cold unrequiter.

A 1911 commercial Valentine card designed by the editor of Household Journal (Univ. of Illinois)

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