Posted on 12/27/2018 5:36:18 PM PST by mairdie
My personal opinion is that Moore's claim to "Night Before Christmas" would have been questioned years ago if people had read the pompous, moralistic poetry written by this prig. But his poetry is so bad that it's just not accessible, other than on my website. So allow me to offer you a narration of Moore's "apology" for refusing an invitation to a ball. Actually, it's no apology at all. It's a preening bit of virtue signalling at how morally righteous he is to avoid these low occasions of sin. How ANYONE could believe that someone of that mindset could have written the light and lovely "Night Before Christmas" still amazes me. The argument that he wouldn't lie? This moral prig when caught? Of course, he'd lie.
But perhaps more Moore poems would show more of his poetry style and personality.
This name here drawn by Flora’s hand
Portrays, alas! her mind:
The beating surf and yielding sand
Soon leave no trace behind.
But Flora’s name shall still abide
In many a bosom trac’d,
Not e’en by time’s destroying tide
Nor fortune’s storms effac’d.
*************
The beasts who roam o’er Libya’s desert plain
Have gentler hearts than men who dare maintain
That woman, lovely woman, hath no soul.
They too seem drench’d in Circe’s pois’nous bowl
Who grant, the Fair may have a soul to save,
But deem each female born an abject slave.
Give me a maiden of unfetter’d mind,
By thought and knowledge strengthen’d and refin’d!
A gift like this more precious would I hold
Than India’s gems, or Afric’s purest gold.
Ye maids, whose vows to science are address’d,
If thus your minds be fashion’d, thus impress’d,
With joy your course pursue; nor heed, the while,
Envy’s malignant grin, nor Folly’s smile.
Trace Nature’s laws; explore the starry maze;
Learn why the lightnings flash, the meteors blaze.
From earth to heav’n your view, inquiring, dart;
And see how order reigns in every part.
‘Tis sweet, ‘tis wholesome to frequent this school
Where all is beauty and unerring rule.
But strain’d research becomes not well the fair;
Deep thought imparts a melancholy air;
The sparkling eye grows dim, the roses fade,
When long obscur’d beneath a studious shade.
Suffice it for a tender nymph to stray
Where strength and industry have clear’d the way;
To cull the fruits and flowers which bless the toil
Endur’d by Newton, Verulam and Boyle.
Yet all possess not senses to enjoy
These flowers so fair, these fruits which never cloy.
There runs through all things which our powers can note
A golden thread which links the most remote.
There is a kindred feature to be trac’d
In things most opposite, most widely plac’d.
In matter, thus, resemblance may be found
To soaring mind, whose movements own no bound.
For, as a fluid vainly strives to save
A heavier mass from sinking in its wave,
So, in the mind made up of trifles light,
All weighty truths, o’erwhelm’d sink out of sight!
A while, perchance, it may endure to feel
A sober thought’s dread weight, as polish’d steel,
Dropp’d gently on the water’s face, seems loth
To sink; but ‘tis repulsion holds them both.
Fair science, how thy modest cheeks would glow,
If dragg’d to view in fashion’s puppet-show!
Midst fops and feathers, sighs and painted cheeks,
Soft maiden blushes, and strange maiden freaks;
Midst sickening pleasures, wearisome delights,
Days doom’d to listlessness, and sleepless nights.
Ill would’st thou fare amidst this gaudy train,
Where all is treach’rous, transitory, vain!
No, no, the fair who pant for joys like these
Not wisdom’s richest stores of wealth could please.
Let Heaven and Earth, for them, be rul’d by chance;
No laws they heed but those which rule the dance.
Their eyes, fast fix’d on earth, ne’er love to roam
O’er all the splendor of the starry dome,
For them no stars e’er shone, since time began,
With half the glories of a spangled fan.
To you, ye Nymphs, inspirers of my song,
No features here portrayed, I trust, belong.
But should I see a girl at knowledge aim
Because philosophy’s a handsome name;
Or who would learn because the fashion’s so,
And beckon science as she would a beau,
This truth the trifler from my lips should know,
“When Nature shall forget her ‘stablish’d laws,
And chance take place of an omniscient cause;
When every creature some strange powers shall know,
That swims in air, or treads the earth below;
When bees, forgetful of their wonted skill,
Shall idly flaunt, while butterflies distill
The liquid sweets, and build the curious cell,
Then may true wisdom grace a fluttering Belle.”
Someone worked their butt off on their English Lit doctoral thesis!
Thank you for your informative replies; I’m not sure if I can digest all that information, but it’s fascinating that someone has produced it!
I sucked Vassar Professor Don Foster into this quest back in 1999. He spent perhaps 9 months on the research, with me dashing all over the country collecting manuscripts. But he’s occasionally sloppy and literary analysis doesn’t end the arguments.
Some years later, one of the most renowned professors in the field, Mac Jackson, contacted me and said he could prove the issue if I’d help him. My specialty is being anal compulsive and my husband had his first paper out on Algol compilers in 1967, so we were the right resource for Mac. Mac and Paul and I and Lyn spent THREE YEARS of constant analysis pulling every number out of poetry it’s possible to find. The size of my research site for Don and Mac is equivalent in size to my public sites - 10K pages each. We’re all retired, and thus available to volunteer for stuff like this.
Oh I agree that his style changes when he writes what amounts to doggrel. But most poets do have more than one trick up their sleeve.
Just looking a a few single author poetry books one can see the style changes. Frost for example. Big difference between Death of the Hired Man and Acquainted with the Night
An interesting insight, and a curious for so long ago: that cutting-edge scientific study endangers one to godlessness, but synthesized into wisdom excites the soul. I wonder does he believe that something about men’s intellect makes it safer for them to explore such matters, or whether he believes like soldiers, men should be risked but women be protected.
>>I wonder does he believe that something about men’s intellect makes it safer for them to explore such matters
Moore is old school. His family was more loyalist and his father lost his church when the Americans had NYC and had it back when the British took it. Moore is down on women’s education and was contented with slavery, since I’ve seen nothing he’s written against it.
Henry, on the other hand, was NY Dutch. This makes all the difference in the world. His family fled from Scotland when his ancestor Rev John Livingston was threatened by the Scottish church. John had been one of the few sent to interview the King who wanted to land in Scotland. When he wouldn’t agree that the anniversary of the landing was a holy day, he had to get out quickly. They went to Amsterdam, which was far more theologically liberal, then his son Robert to America.
Henry is for education of women and, while an early slaveholder - in the Dutch, not NYC, tradition - came out against slavery and his brother Gilbert was one of the early members of the anti-slavery society. Henry joined the Revolutionary Army as a Major in 1775.
Moore’s FATHER is Henry’s contemporary, not Moore.
It’s not just the poetry change, though the main thing to see there is that Moore tries to write perfect classical style. Henry is fast and sloppy. As was the first publication of NBC. Moore would NEVER have tolerated those first mistakes in NBC, and he didn’t when he took the editorial changes en mass.
Moore’s problem was lack of imagination across all of his work. He has one anapest of the Rooster and Pig that is pure nasty. Henry’s Crane and the Fox is pure laughter.
Moore did one light published poem. Old Dobbin. Of a style so copied and imitated by everyone that it had become a joke by the time he published it. He has one pure poem that has not a touch of nastiness to it that exists in the handwritten manuscript book in the Museum of the City of New York. He’s writing there about missing a beloved granddaughter, so he seems to have mellowed with age.
The one thing you can say about Moore is that he loved his family completely. And that’s a great thing to say about anyone.
The bottom line is the phoneme analysis. What was found was what were the favorite sounds that Moore puts into his poetry, what were the favorite sounds Henry did, and what were the favorite sounds of the Night Before Christmas poet.
http://www.henrylivingston.com/data/index.htm
Poet Means of Percentage for Individual Poems
Henry 66.654
Moore 42.912
Visit 64.912
So, for phoneme pairs, a completely unconscious writing characteristic, Mac’s calculations showed that “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” sat firmly in Henry’s camp at 64.912.
This disparity carries over for all the tests run. Night Before Christmas is like NONE of Moore’s poems analytically, as well as psychologically. That’s a one off poem that’s suspiciously like a stolen poem.
Another thing to note. There has NEVER been any Moore story explaining why there is no original written version of the poem with crossouts and such. The Moore family story is that he wrote it down perfectly first time thru, even though they didn’t have such a copy.
The Livingston family contains MULTIPLE people who not only SAW the original, crossed out version, but inherited it from one another.
So you either say that a moralistic prig was a liar, or that a great many ordinary people were liars.
From that poem, it seems he’s making a forceful assertion that women should be educated, merely that they shouldn’t be scientific researchers. Or do you dismiss that as equivalent to him saying, “I’m not racist, but...”?
No. You’re right and I’m wrong. He’s for the correct kind of education for women. It’s just that, stubborn type that I am, I like deciding exactly what education I should have. And I started college as a physics major, so Moore just plain bugs me.
ok.
I initially missed this post; very interesting.
It reminds me of a musical equivalent: a senior project composition by a very intelligent but ostentatious student. I was in the ad hoc choir performing it for his grade, and a very experienced musician and choral conductor I knew attended.
Afterwards, I asked her opinion of the piece. She dismissed it as “a pastiche of pretentious moments.”
The before/after contrast is especially compelling.
I have often devoted myself to creating an ebb and flow within a pure rhyme-and-meter setting. Those few academics who have read my stuff denounced it for that.
It is hard for me to decide if I am just a bad poet, or if they are just too committed to deconstructionist cultural nihilism (or perhaps it is both).
???????
Send some by Freepmail. I’d love to see what your body rhythms produce.
To me, words have definite rhythms. I remember when I first learned to write movie scripts telling my boss that I didn’t know what the next words were, but the rhythm was.....
Much of what I edit my fiction for is rhythm. Poetry, of course, has rhythm. My own poetry doesn’t fit any traditional rhythm and I don’t care. It’s what my body screams out for and I’d rather satisfy myself than someone else.
I love poetry from Matthew Arnold to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But the stuff that gives you cavities while you’re reading.... Some of the fan poetry has that problem and some here. At the same time, I can’t stand obscure for the sake of obscurity. I’m not trying to create puzzles to show someone else how smart I am. I’m trying to understand me and poetry cuts to the essence of a person, in my world view.
When I first built my website, I put a small poem on every page. When I built a website for an artist, I wrote a small poem for every page of her site. Because spare words matched the spare look of her work. That was fun. And for one of my movies on computers helping to teach reading, I got to write a poem and use it as part of the movie teaching. That was fun, too.
I think the disparity in voice (timbre, mood, whatever) of the two pieces is at least as important as a numbers analysis.
NBC is celebratory, the other is not.
AH!
Sorry: I had to wait until I could switch to a more digitally (phalanges, not computer) utile device.
“Just a note: all the similar rhymes that Moore uses to NBC were written AFTER the publication of NBC. All of the similar rhymes that Henry uses (jelly/belly; matter/clatter) were written BEFORE the publication of NBC. I’ve always believed that Moore used these rhymes, so uncommon in his writing, in order to cover his posterior.”
AFTER versus BEFORE.
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