"Woodman, Spare that Tree!" and other old-timey verse

The phrase “Woodman, Spare that Tree!” just popped up in my head but I had to look up its significance. It was an 1837 poem and popular song written by a fellow named George Pope Morris who was also a publisher and editor. At one point it seems to have been a Poem Every Child Should Know. I seem to sort of remembering it as a comic go-to to have a child stand up and recite it in class but have no idea where I came across this, starting to think maybe it was a Penrod book, which also reminds me that perhaps I should already use a pre-existing thread of mine but am going to damn the torpedoes and go full steam ahead with this one. The only evidence I can readily find of it in being used in the Twentieth Century is as the title of what seems to be a lost Frank Tashlin cartoon, although it seems that the audio survived, and also as the title of an episode of Dennis the Menace.

Here are some guess papers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lze6uGU9yTM

It was the title of the second film in Frank Tashlin's Fox and Crow series, although he didn't direct it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Crow_(animated_characters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMNTNtKH66g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PDWaiFGRC0

George Pope Morris had some kind of interaction with Edgar Allan Poe. Poe wrote some nice things about Morris's work and Morris was the first to publish "The Raven" under Poe's name. Earlier he had published it under the pseudonym "Quarles."

they often seem to be tree-related viz: "under the spreading chestnut tree the village blacksmith stands"

which is in fact longfellow it turns out

TIL that hiawatha was a historical personage but the events of longfellow's poem are made up

There are plenty of these popular recitation verses. Stuff like 'Casey at the Bat', the 'Wreck of the Hesperus', 'Charge of the Light Brigade', 'O Captain, My Captain!', 'The Highwayman', and so on.

Rote learning was still a big part of elementary education, so memorizing and reciting poems like this fit right in to the curriculum. Back before recorded sound, radio, moving pictures and the like, most entertainment was a do-it-yourself production, but especially in rural places too small to support professional entertainers. Even vaudeville tours to small towns would include some of the more talented reciters. It was very popular stuff.

iirc:

Woodsman, woodsman spare that tree, touch not a single bough!
In youth it has protected me and I'll protect it now.

curious side-issue: why so many of the relevant poets writing this stuff have three names instead of two, viz george pope morris, henry wadsworth longfellow (x 2, he also wrote hesperus), ernest lawrence thayer (casey), and er alfred lord tennyson (light brigade)

the theory collapses w/whitman and alfred noyes (the highwayman is terrible btw, the others are all fine imo)

Having a good time chuckling to myself at imagining the Tashlin superfan who listens to audio only eps because it's better than nothing.

Maybe the video is bad or they don't own it but it still exists somewhere? But yeah, that doesn't detract from thinking that, thought the same thing myself.

Busy, curious, thirsty fly!
Drink with me and drink as I:
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:
Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.

- William Oldys

see also: john greenleaf whittier who wrote 'Barbara Frietchie' and 'The Barefoot Boy' (with cheeks of tan). I should also mention 'Paul Revere's Ride', another number one hit by Longfellow. Patriotic and sentimental themes dominated the charts.

“Barbara Frietchie” was one of the first I thought of whilst creating the thread but figured someone else would eventually post it.

lars porsena of clusium
by the nine gods he swore
that the great house of tarquin
should suffer wrong no more!

by the nine gods he swore it
and named a (?something?) day
and bade his messengers go out
east and west and north and sout(h)
to summon his ?array?

^^all i can manage from memory now sadly, as a kid i loved "by the nine gods" -- which nine gods?

another three-namer = thomas babington macauley

anyway it's much too long (like everything macauley put his hand to tbh) but line by line it's a banger

also i'm gnna pull a harold bloom on the relationship between "oh captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done" (whitman) and "oh tiber! father tiber! to whom the romans pray"

Ah yes. NIce way to say that without resorting to...without recourse to....

Can’t quite remember the term…and it’s making me…kind of anxious.

interesting. it sounds like that term you're reaching for is a real thing that exists in your mind and yet there are times like this when you're not quite aware of it.

I might not even be aware of it whilst under it

I permanently associate "Barbara Frietchie" and "Excelsior!" with the Thurber illustrations.

the word everyone is uneasily reaching for is APOPHRADES btw

Lily Dale is me. Thurber Carnival was Canon for me as a child.

That someone could be so bad at something, and so famous for doing it, warmed my young heart. He is the Sid Vicious of the visual arts.

For me the giants in this category are Kipling, Robert Service, and Ogden Nash.

Kipling: the Parsee came down from his tree and recited the following sloka, which, as you have not heard, I will now proceed to relate.

Them that takes cakes
Which the Parsee-man bakes
Makes dreadful mistakes.

Service: there are strange things done
in the midnight sun
By the men who mail for gold

Nash: a one-L lama, he's a priest
A two-L Llama, he's a beast

When called by a panther...
Don't anther.

When I created this thread was thinking Thurber but couldn’t remember which poems and hadn’t found my Carnival yet.

To describe him as a bad cartoonist is the equivalent of saying “Dylan is a bad singer.” Well maybe to some but I mean, c’mon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgW6s8FPm_w

For the three-namer files, Felicia Dorothea Hemans with Casabianca ('The boy stood on the burning deck…')

She seems Felicia Hemans in more recent mentions but actual books give her the dorothea (when she's not just Mrs Hemans)

I probably still have large portions of the Courtship of Miles Standish filed back in the mustiest cabinets in my head. Plus Hiawatha, Whitman, a fair amount of Emily Dickinson as well.

Because I could not stop for death / he kindly stopped for me (sung to the tune of either "Yellow Rose of Texas" or the "Gilligan's Island" theme.)

I am an aging a ball of neuroses, but I think at one time I must have been at least a little bit educated

self xp
oh ok her poem 'the homes of england' was another one of these and gives us 'stately home' as a common phrase.

JR+tB: I didn't say Thurber was a bad cartoonist. He was a great cartoonist.

But it's fair to say that he was not skilled at drawing, and didn't want to be. The amateurish quality of his drawings is part of the charm - and was understood to be so at the time. It was part of the joke. If he could sketch like Ingres, he wouldn't have been Thurber.

Incidentally he lived (briefly) in my home town, and there's a street named after him, but nothing else remains.

Every once in a while I get out "The Pet Department" and it always cheers me up.

I am an aging a ball of neuroses, but I think at one time I must have been at least a little bit educated
New borad description!

the boy stood on the burning deck
picking his nose like mad
he rolled them into little balls
and flicked them at his dad

^^^this is poetry,, to me

Lol

Uh, more Emerson: Here once the embattled farmers stood

Thinking about something like “Abou Ben Adhem,” by Leigh Hunt, but feel like that has somehow remained in the curriculum and so does not belong on this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrdKe5sDVI4
For instance, there’s this^

I don't think I ever memorized any of Abou Ben Adhem.

I could still mos def reel off a bunch of Gunga Din and Fuzzy Wuzzy if needed.

One could even mash them up because the meter is the same.

Down in India's sunny clime
Where I used to spend my time
In the service of her majesty the queen

Here's to you Fuzzy Wuzzy
In your 'ome in the Sudan
You're a poor benighted heathen
but a first-class fightin' man

Not too far off from the cadence of Service:

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up
In the Malamute Saloon

Or

Since I left Plumtree down in Tennessee
It's the first time I've been warm

There's all this racist / orientalist imperialism that is somehow infused with a dawning consciousness of, like, a protean glimpse of humanity, and it's all encoded in the metric tromp and these rigid martial lines.

My fascination with this stuff is not a matter of moral approval or disapproval, it's just... a thing that happened.

And Wolfe’s ‘Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, of course - ‘Notadrumwasheardnotafuneralnote shut up peason larffing as his corse as his corse what is a corse sir? gosh is it to the rampart we carried’

My uncle once took on the project of recording some Robert Service poems for a friend, then forgot about it for a decade or so. He finally sent the recording along with a poem of explanation and apology in the style of Robert Service. I only know the last two lines: "You think you know, but you're a little nervous/ The Collected Works of Robert Service."

Lol

Also, have been scratching my head for most of this thread’s life until I just now confirmed the existence of TWO Robert Services. RONG DUDE!

Yes, that's thrown me a few times.

There's all this racist / orientalist imperialism that is somehow infused with a dawning consciousness of, like, a protean glimpse of humanity, and it's all encoded in the metric tromp and these rigid martial lines.

Kipling is doing this on purpose, though, right? The voice of the uneducated soldier who is, in his way, more broad-minded than the average stay-at-home Englishman just because he's been exposed to more cultures, but whose perceptions are all filtered through his limited language and the expectations of a racist, imperialist military environment. (Like you, I'm not saying this with approval or disapproval, it's just a thing.)

I love how the Clash plays with this style in "The Card Cheat":

From the Hundred Years' War to the Crimea
With a lance and a musket and a Roman spear
To all of the men who have stood with no fear
In the service of the King

Four lines of perfect martial-pomp pastiche and then a swerve away from it, abandoning meter, rhyme, and sentence structure: "Before you meet your fate, be sure you do not forsake/your lover/may not be around anymore."

Yes, Lily Dale. See also "The Junk and the Dhow."

xp ok but now i want to read lenin: a biography as delivered in the style of "the bard of the yukon"

Per Wikipedia there are at least three

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Service

Call me Rollo, I mean Holly Martins, I was never aware of this third Robert Service, but I do like his pen names and his hometown.