Like many other posts of mine, this one doesn’t make any sense either.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


The lines above constitute the entirety of a poem entitled “The Red Wheelbarrow” by the American poet William Carlos Williams, who died on this date in 1963.

Speaking of poetry, last Friday was the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss) and I missed the celebration completely. You know Dr. Seuss. He wrote Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and Horton Hatches the Egg and Horton Hears a Who! and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street and Yertle the Turtle and If I Ran the Circus and lots of others. What you probably don’t know is how to pronounce his name.

It doesn’t rhyme with Mother Goose.

Wikipedia states that he himself noted that it rhymed with “voice” and a friend of his, Alexander Liang, wrote this:

You’re wrong as the deuce
And you shouldn’t rejoice
If you’re calling him Seuss.
He pronounces it Soice (or Zoice).

And speaking of March 4th, American presidential inaugurations from 1789 through 1933 occurred on March 4th. Since then, thanks to passage of the 20th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the inaugurations have been held on January 20th.

As proof, here is a January 20th scene in Washington, D.C., not too many years ago:

Rather than working yourself into a tizzy over the American political scene in the 21st century, however, just remember:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Dr. Seuss, Elizabeth Taylor, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

What do those three have in common? What links them together? What makes them share space in the title of this post?

The answer to all three questions, friends, is simple:

Me.

The real Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, was born on March 2, 1904 -- belated happy birthday greetings -- and died on September 24, 1991, at the age of 87.

Elizabeth Taylor, who was often called The Most Beautiful Woman In The World, was born on February 27, 1932, and died this week, on March 23, 2011, at the age of 79.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet of the nineteenth century, was not so long-lived. He was born on July 28, 1844, and died on June 8, 1889, at the age of 44.

You may be thinking Sic transit gloria mundi. Then again, you may not.

Here comes the tie-in.

Yesterday, the day of Elizabeth Rosamund Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky’s funeral at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, Mrs. Rhymeswithplague and I saw a live performance of Seussical, the musical, in Kennesaw, Georgia. If you ever have an opportunity to see Seussical, I highly recommend that you do. It is delightful.

The last time Mrs. Rhymeswithplague and I attended the theater was several years ago at Theater on the Square in Marietta, Georgia, where we saw You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. I think I detect some sort of pattern here, but that is irrelevant.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a noted convert to Roman Catholicism. Ms. Taylor, an acknowledged beauty, was a noted convert to Judaism. Yesterday at the funeral of The Most Beautiful Woman In The World her friend, actor Colin Ferrell, read “The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Actually, they are two related poems that are usually read together as one. Here they are:


The Leaden Echo

How to keep — is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.


The Golden Echo

Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace —
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. —
Yonder. — What high as that! We follow, now we follow. — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

(AP Photo)

Now might be a good time to say it: Sic transit gloria mundi.

It might also be a good time to quote Horton the Elephant:

“A persons’s a person, no matter how small.”

To complete today’s daily devotional trifecta, let us read Proverbs 31:30 in the New International Version: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.”

I’m no longer talking about Elizabeth Taylor, friends. I’m talking about Mrs. Rhymeswithplague.

If it’s Tuesday, this must be Byron**

The Destruction of Sennacherib
by George Gordon, Lord Byron

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!


George Gordon, Lord Byron, the author of the poem you have just read, was born on January 22, 1788, and died on April 19, 1824, at 36 years of age. The poem, which he wrote in 1813 using anapestic tetrameter, used to be popular in school recitations. Well, that’s all well and good, you may be saying, but what is Sennacherib? It is not even mentioned in the poem.

Sennacherib is not a what. Sennacherib is a who. Or, rather, Sennacherib was a who a very long time ago. Not the kind that Dr. Seuss wrote about, but a who, nevertheless.

He was the Assyrian mentioned in the first line of Byron's poem.


According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, Sennacherib, the son of Sargon II, succeeded his father on the throne of Assyria and reigned from 704 to 681 BC. The name Sennacherib, or Sin-ahhi-eriba, means “the Moon god Sîn has replaced lost brothers for me.” Depending on your point of view, Sennacherib was either a great warrior or a bit of a stinker. The Wikipedia article includes a section called War with Babylon and a section called War with Judah. Both the Old Testament and Byron’s poem describe Sennacherib’s battle for Jerusalem in 701 BC from the point of view of Hezekiah, king of Judah.

In the Old Testament book of Second Kings, chapters 18 and 19, is a description of the siege of Judah by the armies of Sennacherib, king of Assyria. Chapter 19, verse 35 says, “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”

I must interject here that it is always important to use pronouns correctly. Otherwise, you stumble across such strange statements as “and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses." In the interest of clarity, I must point out that the first “they” refers to Hezekiah’s army and the second “they” refers to Sennacherib’s army. And “dead corpses” is definitely redundant. So much for the English of the King James Version of 1611.

The Wikipedia article on Sennacherib is too long to include here, but it is fascinating because it contains his own account of the battle, the Hebrews’ version of the battle, and an account written around 450 BC by the Greek historian, Herodotus.

A six-sided clay object known as the Taylor Prism is especially fascinating. Found in 1830 in the ruins of Sennacherib’s palace, now in northern Iraq, it contains in the Akkadian language Sennacherib’s version of what happened. Here is an English translation:

“Because Hezekiah, king of Judah, would not submit to my yoke, I came up against him, and by force of arms and by the might of my power I took 46 of his strong fenced cities; and of the smaller towns which were scattered about, I took and plundered a countless number. From these places I took and carried off 200,156 persons, old and young, male and female, together with horses and mules, asses and camels, oxen and sheep, a countless multitude; and Hezekiah himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his capital city, like a bird in a cage, building towers round the city to hem him in, and raising banks of earth against the gates, so as to prevent escape... Then upon Hezekiah there fell the fear of the power of my arms, and he sent out to me the chiefs and the elders of Jerusalem with 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver, and diverse treasures, a rich and immense booty... All these things were brought to me at Nineveh, the seat of my government.”

Nothing at all about 185,000 of his men slaughtered in one night.

The Taylor Prism wasn’t unearthed until six years after Byron died, and it’s a pity. Perhaps he would have written another poem on the subject.

Apparently others thought Sennacherib was a bit of a stinker as well. In 681 BC he was assassinated by two of his own sons.


--------------------------------------

**A long time ago (1969) there was a movie called “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” which has nothing to do with Lord Byron, but I thought it would be fun to twist that movie title into the title of a post about a poem by Lord Byron. The movie was about a busload of American tourists in Europe. Roger Ebert, the movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, said in his review that the American tourist is, in short, a plague. (If you are really hard up for something to read, you can read Ebert’s review of the movie in its entirety here.)


Taking my cue from a phrase on the Taylor Prism, I could just as easily have called this post “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” and included a picture of Maya Angelou.


I would like to announce at this time that I am not a plague, but I rhyme with one.