CUTTING OUT THE POETRY
You know that particular quarter, the monotonous brick streets, the weary suburban highways. Right in the middle of them, a little island of ancient culture and comfort, lies this old home, surrounded by a high sun-baked wall, mottled with lichens and topped with moss, the sort of wall-'
'Cut out the poetry, Watson,' said Holmes, severely. 'I note that it was a high brick wall.'
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| Cut out the poetry, Watson |
In “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” Sherlock Holmes famously tells Watson to cut out the poetry, after Watson waxes a little poetic about a high wall. I’m always disappointed that Watson is cut off at that point as his description of that wall is lovely. Is it poetic? Yes, I think so but then the definition of what is poetry—and especially what is good poetry—is always a definition in flux.
Last week when I posted Late to the Party but I Still Want to Dance about the onset of my Doting on Doyle process, Mark Hanson, my favorite Sherlockian linguistics guru and Canadian Cesspudlian, replied with this:
the text
the author
the context
percolating
timing
#theattentionspanofagnat
The Lost Art of the Deep Dive
“We realized we had more of a miniseries than a movie"
Let the Music Play
keep your feet moving
dance
I read it aloud and admired the poetic sound of it. The thought of a Sherlockian plus poetry reminded me of an interesting statistic I read recently while researching Doyle’s relationship with The Strand Magazine. As noted by the indispensable Arthur Conan Doyle encyclopedia: “Between 1891 and 1930, The Strand Magazine published no less than 121 short stories, 70 articles, nine novels, two interviews and one poem written by Arthur Conan Doyle.”
All those words, and yet, only one poem. One. I had to read that poem.
I knew from reading elsewhere that Doyle had penned several collections of poetry and it seemed odd to me that only one made its way into The Strand. After reading “Bendy’s Sermon,” the situation made more sense to me—this is an action story of sorts: a prize-fighter turned minister straightens out a rowdy crowd. It is not my cup of tea but I can see the charm.
The more I thought about it, I remembered I had read "Bendy's Sermon" before in a scion publication several years ago and then apparently promptly forgot about it.
The ACD encyclopedia pages include 106 poems by Doyle. I had the rather ambitious idea that I would read them all. As it turns out, “Bendy’s Sermon” is not the only one that is not my cup of tea. To be perfectly honest, I did not get very far before interest and energy waned.
Good poetry is excruciatingly difficult to write, and Doyle’s poetry, like much of his work, reflects his specific interests and events around him. It would be unfair of me to judge its worth only by the metric of how much it holds my interest, with my 21st century mindset and attention span.
One of the poems I read did give me
pause:
The Empire
1902
They
said that it had feet of clay,
That its fall was sure and quick.
In the flames of yesterday
All the clay was burned to brick.
When they carved our epitaph
And marked us doomed beyond recall,
"We are," we answered, with a laugh,
"The Empire that declines to fall."
This piece was first published in the collected volume Songs of the Road in March 1911. I could not find any documentation of when he actually wrote it but the 1902 included in the title could only mean one thing to me: The Boer War. On May 31, 1902, the Boer War ended in South Africa after three and a half years of conflict. Doyle’s very public and prolific Boer War crusade (to participate in, to influence policy during, to turn public opinion for, and to defend British atrocities after) is well known.
The defense is hardly surprising as Doyle did, after all, put these words in Sherlock Holmes’s mouth in The Sign of Four: “Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.” I could spend a lifetime attempting to sort out the just proportions of the Boer War and the British Empire.
He was a man who believed in the British Empire. Was he wrong to do so? I think that he was a man firmly rooted in his time and place. A quote on this topic from David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism—How the British Saw Their Empire seems to fit Doyle’s efforts: “They [most Britons] saw what they were conditioned, what they wanted, and what they expected, to see.” Perhaps that is a facet of human nature that never changes.
But I digress. Back to the poetry. The actual construction of Doyle’s poetry is not what I expected to see when I first learned he had written poetry. When I had read none of his work other than the Sherlockian canon, I thought of him as having an ability to write lyric poetry because of my favorite passage from The Hound of the Baskervilles:
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| (Where Watson Walked/photo by Paul Thomas Miller, April 2022) |
The sun was already sinking when I reached the summit of the hill, and the long slopes beneath me were all golden-green on one side and grey shadow on the other. A haze lay low upon the farthest sky-line, out of which jutted the fantastic shapes of Belliver and Vixen Tor. Over the wide expanse there was no sound and no movement. One great grey bird, a gull or curlew, soared aloft in the blue heaven. He and I seemed to be the only living things between the huge arch of the sky and the desert beneath it. The barren scene, the sense of loneliness, and the mystery and urgency of my task all struck a chill into my heart.
Should Watson cut out the poetry? No, not Watson. And, therefore, not Doyle. I will read the rest of it over time. Perhaps over a long time, but still.
