In November the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle shared poems that have to do with hypocrisy.

Abigail enjoyed reading about Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry in his poem “Jubilate Agno.” The narrator praises Jeoffrey for many traits, among them, “For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser./For the former is afraid of detection./For the latter refuses the charge.” Written while Smart was confined for insanity, this poem has made Jeoffry one of the most famous of cats.

Roger read, and was moved by, Archibald MacLeish’s “Hypocrite Auteur” where the poet calls on poets to find a substitute for classical Greek and Christian imagery that can help us understand our era, “Poets, deserted by the world before,/Turn round into the actual air:/Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!” MacLeish himself recognizes the difficulty of doing this, calling the other hypocritical authors who are just like himself, “mon semblable, mon frère” [my likeness, my brother].

Scott remembered reading Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister” in high school and enjoying the humor of a poem beginning and ending with “Grr!”—as one monk badmouths another, “Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!/Water your damned flower-pots, do!/If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,/God’s blood, would not mine kill you!” Scott commented, “I was ultimately disappointed. Perhaps we have become so accustomed to scandal that the idea of a religious figure indulging in sinful thoughts no longer has the power to surprise.”

Gail chose “Honeymoon” by Louis Simpson because she loves “the sly humor of the garbled wedding ceremony and the conventional honeymoon tropes, the drama of romantic disillusionment over fish cakes, the colloquial use of language (‘and then everything was OK’) and the breaking of the fourth wall when the narrator (evoking Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ from ‘Les fleurs du mal,’) challenges the readers’ smug pretensions: ‘And you, hypocrite lecteur,/What makes you so superior?’”

Hazel thought of “To Lucasta” by the English Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace (1618-1658). The narrator explains to his mistress that he is off to a new mistress, war, and concludes, “I could not love thee, deare, so much,/Loved I not honor more.” Hazel commented that she never liked the poem, but “if ever there was hypocrisy, this is it.”

Carol found an hypocrisy quote by Inferno, “Heights of hypocrisy,” that she believes “suits the current times – the difficulty of listening to the other side: “We say, ‘I give a damn to what the world talks about me’/But …/If someone opposes our thoughts we block them!/Someone dares to put forth a thought that defies us, we threaten them/Someone opposes our point of view in our post, we delete their comment.”

Ellen searched through her file of poetry that she admires and selected William Blake’s “The Garden of Love” because “it sure reads to me like an indictment of religion and its hypocrisy”:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

Barbara chose John Betjeman’s WWII poem, “In Westminster Abbey,” about a woman praying. “The hypocrisy lies in her apparent devotion to Christian principles coupled with her overriding self-serving concerns (e.g., spare my house, please, and excuse me while I go to lunch) and her racism.” The poem includes the lines: “Keep our Empire undismembered/Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,/Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,/Honduras and Togoland;/Protect them Lord in all their fights,/And, even more, protect the whites.”

Stan, an Ogden Nash lover, sent the delightful “Tale of Custard the Dragon” in which a cowardly dragon, whose friends bravely chase imaginary dangers, deride him for wanting to stay in a nice safe cage. Then a real menace shows up. Those who were brave when there was no real danger, run for cover while the reluctant dragon saves the day, but nothing changes after the danger is gone: “Belinda is as brave as a barrel full of bears,/And Ink and Blink chase lions down the stairs,/Mustard is as brave as a tiger in a rage,/But Custard keeps crying for a nice safe cage.”

Ken sent us “Hypocrisy,” a simple poem written in 2013 by the Bangladesh poet Sayeed Abubakar. The poem begins, “You say that you love rain./But when it starts raining, you raise/ your umbrella over your head.”

Cate chose Charles Bukowski’s “The Genius of the Crowd” though she’s not usually a Bukowski fan because of his cynicism. “In this poem, I appreciate that he doesn’t stop at indicting average human beings, but moves on to analyzing the source of their hypocrisies. His ‘finest art,’ the death penalty, is an undercurrent of this poem as well as of human history – Socrates to now.” The poem begins, “There is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average/Human being to supply any given army on any given day/And the best at murder are those who preach against it.”

AnnaLee remembered “Hypocrite Women” by Denise Levertov who uses everything in her toolbox, including vulgarity, to illuminate the double standards that women buy into in order to assume subordinate roles in society. This poem from the 1960s still resonates, as again a woman’s freedom over her body is under attack: “Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak/of our own doubts, while dubiously/we mother man in his doubt!”

We look forward to reading the poems you select for Poetry and Mementos. However your poem mentions mementos or reminds you of mementos, email it to one of us by December 14th, with a brief comment on why you chose it. Can’t locate a poem you want to send? Check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.

In the meantime, please blog with us here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Fall 2021 Schedule
December 14: Mementos

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com