My copy of Alfred Noyes is a two volume set of collected poems inscribed, delightfully, to “Gladys Faber from her awful Pop. Xmas 1917”. I think I like Gladys’ Pop.
And for this Year of Poetry I decided that two volumes is …a lot of Alfred Noyes, so… I opted to pluck a volume from the collected works, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern. It’s a quasihistorical telling of a real place in Elizabethan London, with poems about litr’y patrons including Shakespeare, Raleigh, and others in the “Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen”.
The collection begins with the poet strolling through (his) present day London marveling at the beauty of the light as “the town / Turned to a golden suburb of the clouds.” It’s at this point that he dreams, as so many poets do, and his imagination is transported across time to an earlier age when he heard the “sound / Of clashing wine-cups: then a deep-voiced song” [that] “Made the old timbers of the Mermaid Inn / Shake as a galleon shakes in a gale of wind / When she rolls glorying through the Ocean-sea.” And our adventure at the Mermaid Tavern is afoot.
That adventure begins with Walter Raleigh, “A figure like foot-feathered Mercury, / Tall, straight and splendid as a sunset-cloud. / Clad in a crimson doublet and trunk-hose, / A rapier at his side” who strides into the Mermaid bringing us along for the ride.
Inside the inn Noyes witnesses carousing and “Scraps of ambrosial talk” from Ben Jonson to Kit Marlowe that veer from poetic to punchy, as when a Jonson, well into his cups, sings:
Will Shakespeare’s out like Robin Hood
With his merry men all in green,
To steal a deer in Charlecote wood
Where never a deer was seen.
Jonson articulates his fictional Shakespeare’s exploits (that is Noyes speaks through a fictional Jonson to celebrate a fictional Shakespeare) equating him to a poacher before telling Marlowe that “Will’s Venus and Adonis, Kit, is rare, / A round, sound, full-blown piece of thorough work.”
…and I paused on that marvelous description: “A round, sound, full-blown piece of thorough work.” Was it Noyes’? (Yes.) Jonson’s? (Mmm?) Whatever the case, Noyes’ Jonson’s evaluation continues, describing another writer’s poetry as “moths of verse that shrivel in every taper.”
But Tales of the Mermaid Tavern is more than literary sniping. Noyes runs these Elizabethan writers through a drawing room comedy of sorts, seeming to revel in the humanizing of these luminaries, often with drink, giving each a personality that rings true (at least to those of us who only know them from print, but can imagine Bacon chiding Shakespeare:
“Thy Summer’s Night—eh, Will? Midsummer’s Night?—
That’s a quaint fancy,” Bacon droned anew,
“But—Athens was an error, Will! Not Athens!
Titania knew not Athens! Those wild elves
Of thy Midsummer’s Dream—eh? Midnight’s Dream?—
Are English all. Thy woods, too, smack of England;
They never grew round Athens. Bottom, too,
He is not Greek!”
Arguments over verisimilitude fade with the introduction of a truly dramatic event: the murder of Marlowe. Noyes treats us to the aftermath as Nash bursts into the Mermaid with blood on his shirt. The tavern is filled with “thrashing out / The tragic truth” as the men of letters confront the death of the playwright before Noyes describes writers doing what writers do and: “Then, all along the Cheape, / The ballad-mongers waved their sheets of rhyme”. What follows are “bawdy tales and scraps of balladry” and never does Noyes seem happier than in describing the chaos that ensues.
But “Tales” (plural) are what the title promises and Noyes delivers on this with stories that extend beyond Marlowe’s bloody murder. There was the day when: “Gods, what a hubbub shook our cobwebs out / The day that Chapman, Marston and our Ben / Waited in Newgate for the hangman’s hands” and another when “on an All Souls’ Eve” when an older Ben Jonson sat “in the old oak-chair, / Over the roaring hearth, puffed at his pipe” and heard the story of “a famous queen” and a ghostly ruby ring (appearing, perhaps, on the hand of a sexton fresh from burying the dead).
In the end it’s Ben Jonson who outlives his peers, described as “Alone in his old nook; perhaps to hear / The voices of the dead,” It’s Raleigh he meets, however, and Noyes’ opportunity to comment on that dashing fellow who began the first poem when he “swaggered down as if he owned a world / Which had forgotten—did I wake or dream?— / Even his gracious ghost!” and led us into the tavern.
Tales of the Mermaid Tavern was a fun collection and as a postscript I’ll add that I found Noyes’ verse full of the quirky one liners like those that I crib for the titles of the poetry posts I’ve been writing (though as you saw, it was Gladys Farber’s Pop who won the day today). I’ll begin to wrap this up with a collection of these titles that might have been (imagine each before “: Alfred Noyes” at the top of this post). They made me smile anyway.
“Wielding his eel-skin bladder”
“Of players, poets, prentices, mad-cap queens”
“Some imagined insult to the Scots”
I’ll give the final words to Noyes, who near the end of the collection seems to speak for all of us who have spent some time in this cozy establishment:
There as I stood
Under the painted sign, I could have vowed
That I, too, heard the voices of the dead,
The voices of his old companions,
Gathering round him in that lonely room,
Till all the timbers of the Mermaid Inn
Trembled above me with their ghostly song
Thanks, Gladys’ Pop.
Continuing this Year of Poetry next week with Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
bjornpaige 