Tuesday poem: Gabriel Grub’s Song by Charles Dickens
September 16, 2014
Brave lodgings for one, brave lodgings for one,
A few feet of cold earth, when life is done;
A stone at the head, a stone at the feet;
A rich, juicy meal for the worms to eat;
Rank grass overhead, and damp clay around,
Brave lodgings for one, these, in holy ground!
This little song appears in The Pickwick Papers, and was therefore the work of a very young Dickens. It is part of a very long history of funny, morbid gravediggers in literature, and is no doubt intended to trigger memories of Hamlet. The illustration, by Hablot Knight Browne, captures this beautifully. It is well worth looking at his other illustrations on Wikimedia Commons.
Gabriel Grub is like a prototype for Scrooge; the miserable man is reformed by exposure to a goblin, just as Scrooge will later be changed by the ghosts. Even in this early book (1836-37) we see how Dickens loved playing with names; a sexton called Grub singing of worms is just wonderful. Grub, unlike Scrooge, is often very drunk.
Asking if Dickens was a great poet is like judging an elephant on its ability to tap dance. It really is missing the whole point of the creature.
I don’t know if any other poets have posted poems about death, but I shall shortly press this feather, dropped by a hungry crow, and find out:
Tuesday poem: Happy birthday Charles!
February 7, 2012
200 today...
Happy birthday Charles!
Always, somewhere, a Scrooge
is saying something sour,
and a Spirit is coming, to slap
him into rebirth; over chimney tops
or skyscrapers, foul rookeries
or slums, and so he finds himself,
like Marley’s door-face, stirring,
and startling, and breaking
his self-forged solid chains.
***
Charles John Huffam Dickens
February 7th, 1812 – June 9th, 1870
I wonder if there’ll be any further birthday tributes to Dickens apart from my little poem at the Tuesday Poem site today? Click this quill to see!
Little Nell’s death scene from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, ‘improved’ into a happy ending by an alien’s tool.
November 14, 2011
It’s been a good week for my fiction writing, which I generally see as a secondary function to poetry. I sometimes sneak prose poems into story competitions, and hope that the judges will accept the lack of plot and character development! My first small collection of ‘real’ stories, A Quiet Day, was published in 2009 by Ginninderra Press, and was just highly commended in the 2011 Society of Women Writers Awards in Sydney. The judge was Susanne Gervay, who is an established and prolific young adult and children’s fiction writer. (Here’s a link to her blog.) This was very gratifying for me. Susanne told me that there was a poetic element to my stories; I didn’t mention that this element is always threatening to eat the plot!
This week I am going down to Melbourne because my flash fiction ‘A Writing Unexpected’ won the Big West Festival Competition and I’ll be reading it at one of the events. That’s if the airport is open, as a certain President Obama is visiting Canberra this week. The only other problem with the awards being in Melbourne is that I come back to Canberra missing that city too much. I am still having withdrawal symptoms from Sydney last week.
My very silly story ‘Little Nell’s death scene from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, ‘improved’ into a happy ending by an alien’s tool’ was recently highly commended in a humorous story competition. You can read it here if you feel like something quite ridiculous, along with the other prize-winners. There was a special prize for the funniest title, and I thought I would win that!
I am such a pessimist that I focus on one typo I left in the story when I read it. Perhaps you will find it if you go there. There is no prize, dear reader, if you are a pedant too!
Speaking of US Presidents, I just read Stephen King’s new novel about the Kennedy assassination. There’s a real storyteller, like Mr Dickens was before him. I have spent many night with these writers over the years, running through the hours in a readerly marathon, totally absorbed. I just don’t have that narrative urge, but prefer the sound of words. They left plot off my mental Swiss Army knife, and put on extra tools for wordplay.
Which is why I’m mostly a poet, who dabbles, however seriously, in fiction. Here’s the link to my skimpy story again.
must adjust trope...
PS Cottier 