POETS Day! Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Happy POETS Day to one and all. This week’s scam to achieve the goal, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, is for the organizers among you. The ones that make sure that there’s a cake in the break room for Sally the accountant’s birthday, that there’s a card in the maternity ward when Bill from receivables and his wife welcome their second bundle of joy into the world and makes sure there’s lasagna for them to eat after two weeks of no sleep and Law & Order (it’s always on and it’s not like you can read while holding a baby and a bottle¹) watching midnight feedings, and flowers to the janitor when his dog finally realizes his dream and catches a car.

Your skills are needed. There’s a softball league to be scheduled.

Not a real one of course. And I should note that it doesn’t have to be a softball league. Basketball, ultimate frisbee, darts, any competition will do. Feel out your boss and find a game that he or she finds boring or frivolous and will never attend. Bonus if your boss has a child heavily involved in a Saturday youth sport that they are into. You can look up the kid’s schedule and set it so whenever your company team has a “game/match” it’s at the same time as the kid’s and halfway across town at that. For the purposes of explanation, I’ll assume softball.

Send a companywide email on Mondays describing various heroics and close calls and how we might need to hire umpires because the self-call rule cost us at least two runs. Make sure you have a losing record. That way you can make all your work pay off by not working the last few hours of an honest Friday.

The aim is not to get yourself out of work early. You are a small part of this.

Friday morning you and your “teammates” need to grouse about the game that inexplicably conflicts with your boss’s child’s baseball or whatever game the next day. The last time you played Joe’s Paper and Printer LLC they cheated. There was no way you should have lost. Keep complaining all day. Get fifteen or so voices whining about a throw out that came up short and then send the current most adored office pet to the boss and tell him that you need to practice. Joe’s employees are telling clients that we can’t cut it on the field and it’s seeping into business. Your reputation as a company is at stake.

Again, a losing record is key. You’ll only be able to pull off an early exit via practice once or twice a season so pepper the Monday emails with a couple of wins, but make it clear that you’re on the cusp. Just a little more practice and you see happy days ahead. If this works, you just sprung a Lou and Bud’s worth of Who, What, I Don’t Know, all the way to Yesterday and Tomorrow.

You might be thinking what a workplace hero you might be for engineering the early release and setting a scenario where fifteen or so of your co-workers get to hunker down at a local bar and kick off the weekend before they normally would. But if you think that, you aren’t seeing the larger picture.

You are organizing a fake league. That means teams. Plural. Enlist friends and families at other businesses. There should be at least eight fake teams in your division. You think you were a hero for springing fifteen people on a Friday afternoon? No. You’re a god for springing one hundred and twenty. You’ll never pay for a fried potato skin again. And they laughed at how anal you were about the filing system.

On the paying note. Given the scale and numbers there is likely to be at least one person on your fictional team who’s a little ticked that there’s no softball to be played. As a group, suck it up and pay her bar tab. The larger the conspiracy the more likely it is that secrets get out. Keep everyone as happy as you can.

Safely sipping a pale ale or nice rose while basking in the adoration of one hundred and nineteen other faux athletes, you might want to take a moment, pull out your phone, and enjoy a bit of poetry. Seems like an odd place to lean back and scan verse, but it’s edifying.

This week’s selection is brought to you by Miss Scarlet, in the dining room, with a bowl of soup.

I watched my son’s high school theater production of Clue Friday and Saturday night. The kids were fantastic. Mine got killed, laid on the floor for ten or so minutes, and then came back at the end as a different character to arrest the baddies. Early on, as the cast sits for dinner, the butler Wadsworth quotes Tennyson. Miss Scarlet quips that she prefers Kipling. I don’t, but it got me thinking about Tennyson.

The narrator of “Ask Me No More” is firm at the beginning. By the end he’s withering and begging.

His love is dying. There is an unresolved issue between them and though we are not told what the issue is, we get the sense from the imagery in the first stanza that it involves change. I’ve read speculation that it was their commitment to burgeoning feminism in the Victorian Era. I don’t see any evidence in the text but there are those with access to his letters and notes. Maybe there’s something there.

The second stanza is a confession of his feelings and denial of what’s happening. He sees the sickness taking her and sees the woman he loves fading away. In the third, he’s broken. All his works did nothing in the face of death. He’s pleading with her to ask no more because he’s got no more to give.

W.H. Auden said that Tennyson had “the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet,” but he also said that Tennyson was the “stupedist” among the same. Per what I’ve read Auden stood on solid ground saying the former and had an argument, though an un-Christian one, for the latter.

Real poetic scholars, as opposed to fan-boys that busy themselves dreaming up conceptual softball leagues, have access to drafts and Tennyson was a sucker for drafts. His early works in the 1830s are considered weak, but by the mid 1840s he was releasing masterpieces. His was not a natural gift so much as a studied skill. He would hold onto poems for over a decade revising and revising until he got them just right, thus the great ear. Patience was his gift.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was also possibly the most popular of the Victorian poets and his Byronesque fame may have gone to his head. He’d go off on current events like a Hollywood actor on the Oscar’s stage with no patient revisions, thus the “stupidest.”

After he passed his work went out of favor. That favor returned, but it took some time. Readers of this weekly may roll their eyes at yet another mention of my favorite poet, Robert Graves, but I see reflections of Alfred, Lord Tennyson in some of Graves more intimate poems. Here Tennyson is quiet, loving, reflective, and tired. Graves struck that tone more than once.

Enjoy.

Ask Me No More
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892)

Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;
The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape,
With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;
But O too fond, when have I answered thee?
Ask me no more.

Ask me no more: what answer should I give?
I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:
Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!
Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;
Ask me no more.

Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are sealed;
I strove against the stream and all in vain;
Let the great river take me to the main.
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;
Ask me no more.

1. I was working in a Birmingham restaurant years ago and S. Epatha Merkelson, Lt. Van Buren from Law & Order, came in to eat. I mentioned that since the show was always on at least one channel any hour of the day, she got me through late night bottle feeding. She smiled and told me that I’m not the first to tell her that.