[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

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When last we saw the name Coventry Patmore in this space, he was getting inappropriate with a married and unreceptive Alice Meynell. There’s a Walter Stoneman photo of Alice’s mister, Wilfrid Meynell (rhymes with “fennel”), taken circa 1916, putting Wilfrid circa sixty-four years old. He’s a pretty robust looking sixty-four. Contrast that with an 1894 John Singer Sargent portrait of seventy-one year old Coventry Patmore. Old Coventry looks like Mark Twain on the tail end of a GLP-1 bender.

The most in-depth account of how the Meynells’ handled Patmore’s affections, and there’s between the lines stuff suggesting affections verged on obsession, is that Alice “ended their friendship.” For Patmore’s sake, I hope that’s all there was to it. I know the photo and painting capture the men as older, but regress them and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Meynell doesn’t put a pasting on slight Patmore.

In any case, I’m glad to run into Patmore again, this time catching him in a good light. He lent volumes of William Barnes poetry to Gerard Manley Hopkins. There’s no pinning down a single influence or spark that sent Hopkins to write so originally. Admiration for Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry came first. It’s hard not to notice similarities in what Barnes did and what Hopkins would go on to do. I’d throw Barnes’s work in a prominent spot among second tier influences. Everybody likes a redemption story, so remember Patmore as creepy only some of the time and give him credit for fueling Hopkins the rest.