The Dusty Bookcase

08 April 2010

Wildly Wayward Walt Whitman

To Toronto this evening for the launch of my friend George Fetherling's third novel, Walt Whitman's Secret, at Ben McNally Books.

So... in anticipation of this joyous event, James McIntyre's verse about the Good Gray Poet:

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

07 April 2010

D'Arcy McGee, All Compliment to Thee

James McIntyre's warm tribute to the great Thomas D'Arcy McGee, assassinated 142 years ago this morning.

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

T.D. MCGEE.

Having been kindly invited as a member of the Mechanics' Institute some 25 years ago by the late Jeremiah O'Neill, Esq., to meet that gentleman in company of a number of our townsmen, when Mr. McGee was rising from the table the chair being new stuck to him and it being near a general election he very wittily remarked that he hoped the people of Montreal would be anxious to retain him in his seat as the people here are. We wrote the following lines at the time, the last verse was added afterwards.

D'Arcy McGee,

All compliment to thee,

The hope of the land

On your lecture so grand.

Though that is your forte,

Oh give us the sport

Of an hour of your chat,

Then we'll laugh and grow fat.

For none but the vile

Could 'ere cease to smile,

When near to thee

So brilliant and free.

Plant of green Erin's isle,

Long in Canadian soil,

May you take deep root

And bear much noble fruit.

Our hopes were in vain,

Alas he is slain,

By a crankish hand

The flower of the land.

Related posts:

'O Martyr'd McGee!'

D'Arcy McGee's Query (with a response)

A St. Patrick's Day Fragment

'IN MEMORIAM! The Hon. T.D. McGee'

A Poet's Angry Word With the Fenian Brotherhood

06 April 2010

Funny He Never Married

Ingersoll's 1897 Fireman and Police Banquet. Hardly a woman in sight.

Today's James McIntyre poem is "Lines Addressed to an Old Bachelor". Here the twice married poet does his best to flog the idea of matrimony to one who does not care for female company.

Why not?

Do I read too much into the use of the word "wingle" – slang for penis?

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

05 April 2010

McIntyre's Mammoth Ode

Let's get this out of the way, shall we. All seven thousand pounds.

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

01 April 2010

National Poetry Month, a time for balloons, ice cream and marching bands. I risk spoiling the party by pointing out, yet again, that William Arthur Deacon's The Four Jameses remains unavailable and, as if to add insult to injury, not one work by the critic's "monarchs of the quill" is in print. No James Gay, no James McIntyre, no James D. Gillis, no James MacRae... and yet brand new copies of Gordon Downie's Coke Machine Glow may be easily obtained through Amazon.ca.

I devoted last National Poetry Month to James MacRae, the son of Glengarry, whom I followed in adopting the little Ontario town of St Marys as my own. This year I'll be reading verse by Ingersoll's James McIntyre. Of the Four Jameses, McIntyre is certainly the best remembered – not one of the others has a contest named in his honour. So much of this limited recognition has to do with his "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese" and, by extension, McIntyre's reputation as "The Cheese Poet". The furniture maker/undertaker played this up to his own detriment; he had a much greater reach.

One hundred and sixteen years ago, in his tribute "To James McIntyre, the Poet", Ezra H. Stafford wrote:

He does not write at stated intervals.
But when some great truth startles and appalls.

McIntyre's voice has been still for over a century – he died 104 years ago yesterday. His work is finite, but we do have the luxury of reading when the spirit moves. No longer must we wait for the Globe, hoping that it might contain a new McIntyre poem.

So, in celebration of this National Poetry Month – and in recognition of the man's industry – I present one James McIntyre or McIntyre-related poem for each workday, beginning with his tribute to fellow Canadian writer Susanna Moodie.

Pay no heed to the misspelling of her name; this is what we refer to as poetic license.

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

MRS. MOODY.

In giving glance at various Canadian authors perhaps it would be well to commence with that early writer Mrs. Moody. She was a sister of the celebrated Agnes Strickland, author of "The Queens of England."

When this country it was woody,
Its great champion Mrs. Moody,
She showed she had both pluck and push
In her work roughing in the bush.

For there all alone she will dwell,
At time McKenzie did rebel,
Outbreak her husband strove to quell,
Her own grand struggles she doth tell.

Round bush life she threw a glory,
Pioneer renowned in story,
But her tale it is more cheering
When she wrote about the clearing.

Her other sister, Mrs. Traill*
Though eighty-six, she doth not fail;
She now is writing of wild flowers
Grown in Canada's woody bowers.

* Mrs. Traill lives near Peterboro. Mrs. Moody died in Toronto. I sent her a copy of my poems in 1885, and she thanked me through a friend as she was in feeble health at the time.