Mar
New York Yankees in Lady B’s Ballroom
I know, I know, I’m running late…. I was meant to be in the ballroom before midnight, when Lady B closes the doors to anyone not wearing knee breeches. Or does that only pertain to guys? I mean, gentlemen?
As you can see, I’m a bit muddled right now. I’ve been running hither and yon to celebrate the release of my new book, The Garden Intrigue (and there may also have been a little bit of wedding planning going on in the margins). At any event, I’d told Emma and Augustus, the hero and heroine of Garden Intrigue, that I’d meet them here in the ballroom, for my very first official ball, but I wound up on a very slow train back from the Virginia Book Festival—or ought that to be a very slow post chaise?—so here I am, late and frazzled and rather hoping that my characters haven’t got here before me, because they’re a bit… eccentric.
Oh no. I’m too late. As I approach the entrance, I can see there’s a bit of a fracas going on just inside. There’s a parrot squawking, a bright yellow turban (why does it look so much like a hard hat?) bobbing indignantly, and a high, clear, American voice saying, “You haven’t seen a poet have you?”
Lady B (in tones of outrage): A poet?
Emma: Yes, you know, puffy shirt, flowy sleeves, look of other-worldy absorption, all that sort of thing. He’s not nearly so silly as he seems—but don’t let him recite anything. It can go on for quite some time.
Lady B (forbiddingly): You appear to have the wrong salon, Miss—
Emma: Mrs. Mrs. Delagardie.
Lady B: Hmph. Whoever—and whatever—you may be, you appear to be vastly mistaken as to the nature of the entertainment. This is a ballroom, not a breeding ground for perpetrators of poetical excess. We have no truck with… poets.
Albert (pecking Lady B’s shoulder slyly): Poets! <<squawk>> Poets!
Lady B: Shhh! We don’t talk about that time in my life. Now if you’ll be on your way, Miss—er, Mrs—
Lauren: Lady B! I’m so sorry I’m late. I was on a—well, let’s just call it a mechanized carriage. We got stuck in the southerly former colonies, which was why I was a bit late getting over here. Hi, Emma!
Lady B: You know this person?
Lauren: Know her? I wrote her! Lady B, may I present Emma Morris Delagardie? She originally hails from New York, but she’s spent the last few years in Paris.
Emma: Since I was fifteen, in fact. I came over with my uncle, James Monroe, in ’94, when he was American envoy to France—
Lady B: Enough! I had no idea I was harboring a nest of colonials in my salon.
Lauren: Not just colonials, New Yorkers. There are a whole bunch of us here. (Waves to Sarah MacLean.)
Lady B: Good gad, it’s an invasion!
Albert: The New Yorkers are coming! <<squawk>> The New Yorkers are coming!
Lauren: Consider it more a benign occupation? (Rustling in paper bag.) Bagel? Oh, dear, don’t dunk it in the ratafia. I don’t think they’ll go.
Emma: (brightly) I think I’ll go! Don’t mind me, I’ll just go look for Augustus. He’s probably off reciting somewhere.
Lady B: Reciting? Does she refer to a… poet?
Emma whisks away, leaving me alone with a rather irate Lady B holding a ratafia-sodden bagel. I look around for help, but both Sabrina and Kate appear to be hiding behind potted palms. (Note to self: we really need more foliage in the ballroom. Either that, or some particularly sturdy columns.)
My first ball really isn’t off to an auspicious start.
Lauren (tries distraction): I hear there are a number of people named Minerva in the ballroom this week! And did you hear that there might be a pickpocket on the loose?
For a moment, Lady B looks diverted. Not excessively diverted, but diverted enough. Until someone (and by someone, I mean a man in a puffy shirt with flowy sleeves and long dark locks of the sort that might be called “Byronic” if Byron were around yet) climbs up on a settee and begins to declaim.
Augustus: For, lo! In Cytherea’s perfumed sleep/ Did she dream of the denizens of the dithery deep….
Oh no. Not the Perils of the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes. There are thirty cantos. Or maybe forty. I’ve lost track. Lady B is never ever going to let me back in the ballroom again. Why hadn’t I invited the characters from one of my earlier books? Henrietta—she gets along with everyone. Or maybe Lord Vaughn; his sinister and sardonic manner might have appealed to Lady B. But no, I had to go and invite Augustus and Emma. If there were a desk handy, I’d bang my head against it. As it is, I have to content myself with hiding behind my fan, which, being lacy, doesn’t provide much of a barrier.
Lady B: Who is that?
Lauren: Er… that’s Augustus Whittlebsy. He’s a…
Albert: Poet! <<squawk>> Poet!
Lauren (rather desperately): Spy! He’s a dashing spy! And, hey, at least he’s not a New Yorker. Did I mention that he’s English? And a spy? And dashing?
I’d rather like to dash at this point, but Lady B is standing on the flounce of my gown.
Lady B (examining Augustus through her lorgnette): His verse is vile but his calves are comely. Tell him he may recite for me later—privately.
Lauren: What’s that about your past with poets again?
But Lady B has already walked away. Which is probably a good thing. I’m not sure Lord B would approve. Unless Lord B secretly is a poet? And he did not know it?
Who’s your favorite poet? (Regency or otherwise!)
p.s. I’m having a birthday bash on my website this Wednesday. I can’t give away cupcakes (they’d probably squash in the mail), but I will be giving away books. I’d like to extend an invitation to everyone to stop by and celebrate with me!
Who knows, maybe Lady B will put in an appearance….
Mar 26, 2012
2:00 am
Hi Lauren! And welcome to the Ballroom. A first day is always a little daunting but you’re going to do just fine. I’m sorry I missed you in Charlottesville. I did get to visit with Lady Katharine which was an absolute delight. Perhaps we’ll meet the next time you visit our lovely former colony. *wink*
I have many favorite poets expecially among the Romantics, Keats in particular, but there’s only one poem that makes my heart ‘sigh’ and a tear form at the corner of my eye – ANNABEL LEE by Edgar Allen Poe.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love –
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
[it continues on but gets very sad - sigh]
Mar 26, 2012
9:45 am
Hi, Amy! I’m so sorry I missed you in Charlottesville. I love “Annabel Lee”! I used to sing it when I was little– as weird as that sounds. There was a Joan Baez arrangement of it (I think it was Joan Baez), very slow and simple. I still can’t read the poem without hearing the tune.
Mar 27, 2012
12:31 am
Love this poem so much!
Mar 26, 2012
2:46 am
Good Morning Lauren, welcome to the ballroom.
I’m not a huge fan of poetry, unfortunately when I think of poetry, all that comes to mind is having it drilled into me for hours on end at school.
I do like reading about poets though. Byron and Shelley being particularly fascinating. Those early 19th century poets had very interesting lives, did they not?
Mar 26, 2012
9:47 am
They did! I wonder if they’re where our whole idea of “The Poet” comes from (because, goodness only knows, no one looks at Alexander Pope as a riotous sex symbol!). On the other hand, some of those Renaissance poets of the 16th and 17th centuries cut a wide swathe….
Maybe there’s just something about a man who knows how to put his emotions into words.
Mar 26, 2012
11:02 am
Poor Pope! I once had an argument with a friend about how sad it was that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu rejected him. “Would you have slept with him?” he asked. Er, no.
Mar 26, 2012
11:58 am
I wish there were a “like” button on these posts! I love that story.
Mar 26, 2012
1:53 pm
LOL! Miranda.
I confess that even though I find their life stories fascinating, I’d have given Byron and Shelley a wide berth. I would imagine they were quite intense and uncomfortable to be around.
Mar 26, 2012
7:37 am
Welcome Lauren!
When I first got into poets, I adored Byron. I LOVE the real life story of him and Shelley and Bryon’s life in general. I got a collection of his poems wanting to like them as much as I did him and was disappointed. I only like a couple of the poems. But, he is still mad, bad, dangerous to know and extremely sexy!
If you ask me who are my two favorite poets, I would say Robert Burns and Samuel Coleridge. Their poems speak to me the way I thought Byron’s poems speak to me. Samuel Coleridge, himself, has a very interesting life and gave poems that haunted me even before I really knew who Coleridge really was.
I remember reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I have to admit I had to read it more than once to understand what was actually said, but then I was like, Wow. After learning about Samuel, himself, it seems a bit like he wrote what he felt and isn’t that what you should do?
Mar 26, 2012
9:49 am
Hi, Jamie! You have to wonder if that’s what some of those women were thinking at Byron’s readings back in the day– “his poetry, eh… but he’s so mad, bad and dangerous to know!”
Mar 26, 2012
10:09 am
Hi Lauren!
Congrats on your first official Ballroom Blog post!
I’m so glad you invited Augustus and Emma to the Ballroom-they’re a riot!
Like Beebs, I am not a really big poetry fan, but of all the poetry I studied in high school, A Poison Tree by William Blake is a poem that has stuck with me. Not sure what that says about me though…….
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
I suppose the message of not letting anger revenge and bitterness get the better of you and poison other areas of your life really resonated with me.
And for me, we can hardly talk about poets and poetry without giving a nod to the Bard. 116 is a fav, not only because there is a great scene in Sense and Sensibility when Greg Wise and Kate Winslet talk about this very sonnet.
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
And I also like Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken as a reminder to be brave and bold, and forge my own path and adventures!
Mar 26, 2012
10:46 am
Hi, Lisa! I’m so glad you enjoyed Emma and Augustus’s appearance (even if Lady B didn’t!).
I’m ashamed to admit I’d never read “A Poison Tree”. It’s beautiful– and so meaningful, too.
It reminds me a lot of one of my very favorite poems, Yeats’ “The Two Trees” (I wonder if Yeats was riffing off “A Poison Tree”?):
“Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.”
Mar 26, 2012
11:14 am
That’s a great poem Lauren!The imagrey is lovely. I admit, I’ve never read any Yeats, though I know he’s a favorite among many.
P.S. I forgot to mention how awesome the title of Augustus’s poem is-Perils of the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes had me cracking up. Comedic genius right there, lol.
Mar 26, 2012
10:22 am
Hi, Lauren- I’m not big on poetry either, but welcome to the ballroom! I hope to meet you at RT.
Mar 26, 2012
10:43 am
Thanks, Susan! Looking forward to meeting you at RT…. I can’t believe that that’s only two weeks away already. Where did March go?
Mar 26, 2012
11:00 am
It’s wonderful to have you here, Lauren. I’m so glad to see a poet as a hero. They are more often like Augustus Fawnhope in Heyer’s The Grand Sophie. Did you write all 40 cantos? (Have to admit, much as I loved A.S. Byatt’s Possession, I skipped most of the verse.)
Shakespeare is top of my list, but I think he’s been retired from competition because he’s won too often. So I’ll mention Pope, Gray, Keats, Byron. I’m also fond of the Victorians – Browning, Tennyson, Arnold. This makes me sound a bit of a poetry nerd. I don’t read verse all that often but when I do I enjoy it.
Mar 26, 2012
1:34 pm
I second Miranda’s happiness at having you in the ballroom, Lauren. And I’m always glad to meet poets — so welcome, Augustus! Lady B is far too harsh on his poetry, though she’s on spot about his calves, yum.
I must be pedestrian and claim Shakespeare as my favorite poet. I adore many more — mostly the ancients and medievals, with Virgil and Dante at the fore, and several eastern poets in the Islamic tradition. The beginning of one poem I particularly love, from the pen of an Arab Muslim knight during the period of the crusades:
“I am dazzled by a Frankish woman whose body exudes soft perfume,
A sweet-smelling branch has slipped beneath her dress,
And her cape is made of the silvery moon.
Her eyes are as blue as the glinting steel of a lance.”
- Laqad fatanatni farandjiyya
I’m very fond of the adorably ribald humor of Burns when he speaks of the simpler pleasures in life (*not* politics, though his political poems are fabulous too) and the flowing periods of Byron and his romantic ilk.
p.s. “the denizens of the dithery deep” sound like my sort of denizens.
Mar 26, 2012
1:36 pm
p.p.s. It was so wonderful seeing you this past weekend at the Virginia Festival of the Book. You, Cathy Maxwell, Deanna Raybourn and Joanna Bourne were so fabulous on the panel about writing historical fiction. I wish I could have video taped it and posted it to YouTube so the world could appreciate it!
Mar 26, 2012
5:37 pm
I’ll join the poetry nerd club with you, Miranda.
Gaelen
Mar 26, 2012
1:49 pm
I have always *tried* to like poetry, but in general poems just go right over my head. I’m a very literal girl, and if they say they are smelling a rose or about to bite into a luscious peach, I believe them! In college, my professor once pulled me aside to say he didn’t get how someone who wrote so well could be so abysmal in the the interpretation of literature!
Still, there is one poem that always gets me a bit misty: Old Ironsides, of all things. Don’t ask…
The new book sounds intriguing!
Mar 26, 2012
5:38 pm
That’s funny, Erin. lol.
Gaelen
Mar 26, 2012
1:52 pm
Welcome, Lauren! What a wonderful topic for your first official post as a Ballroom authoress.
I love poems and poetry. Frost, Yeats, Rumi, Dickinson, Blake – whatever moves me!
And I love this poem ABOUT poetry, by Gerald Locklin. (apologies to Lady B and any others for the few instances of profanity in it)
The Iceberg Theory
all the food critics hate iceberg lettuce.
you’d think romaine was descended from
orpheus’s laurel wreath,
you’d think raw spinach had all the nutritional
benefits attributed to it by popeye,
not to mention aesthetic subtleties worthy of
veriaine and debussy.
they’ll even salivate over chopped red cabbage
just to disparage poor old mr. iceberg lettuce.
I guess the problem is
it’s just too common for them.
It doesn’t matter that it tastes good,
has a satisfying crunchy texture,
holds its freshness
and has crevices for the dressing,
whereas the darker, leafier varieties
are often bitter, gritty, and flat.
It just isn’t different enough and
it’s too goddamn american.
of course a critic has to criticize;
a critic has to have something to say
perhaps that’s why literary critics
purport to find interesting
so much contemporary poetry
that just bores the shit out of me.
at any rate, I really enjoy a salad
with plenty of chunky iceberg lettuce,
the more the merrier,
drenched in an Italian or roquefort dressing.
and the poems I enjoy are those I don’t have
to pretend that I’m enjoying.
Also, note to self:
Try dipping bagel in ratafia.
Mar 26, 2012
5:36 pm
Hi Lauren! It’s so wonderful you’ve joined the Ballroom Blog. Great post!
My favorite poet is Dante Gabriel Rossetti…but Oscar Wilde is a strong second. I’m also a big Wordsworth fan. “Fair seed time had my soul, and I was raised alike by beauty and by fear.” There’s another passage from The Prelude that I love, wish I could remember how it goes. But I’m so exhausted at the moment (finished another ms today – I’m a zombie) that I would butcher if I tried to do it from memory right now.
Tessa, that’s pretty awesome. I love the choices ya’ll have selected!
Gaelen
Mar 26, 2012
5:38 pm
How could I neglect to mention John Donne (preferably read to me by Prince Eric) and Coleridge??
Mar 26, 2012
7:31 pm
welcome to the ballroom & congrats on surviving your first between your h/h & lady b
Mar 26, 2012
8:02 pm
Lauren! I forgot that it was your first day in the Ballroom today! Welcome welcome, friend!
Now that Lady B has been introduced to the bagel (What will be next, the Nathan’s hotdog? The plain slice? The egg cream? Heh. heheh. Lady B & Egg Cream. Fabulous image, that.), I realize how very much the Ballroom was missing without you!
As for poets…well, as you know I have a fondness for Augustus, myself…but my favorite, without question, is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Also a Yankee. A New Yorker, even!
YAY! So good to have you!
Mar 27, 2012
12:40 am
Welcome, Lauren! I think I got a bit lost behind the greenery. I love poetry. Well, some of it.
I used to write quite a bit of poetry but…I decided to take the Cold Comfort Farm approach to that. (And anyone who hasn’t seen that movie should watch it!)
Mar 27, 2012
3:23 am
Or read the book!
A man with a name like Augustus would have to be a poet, really, wouldn’t he.
I rather like Swinburne – not fashionable these days. And his first name was Algernon – I rest my case!