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Beginning in 2018 "Ruth's Neighborhood" entries were also posted on Ruth's FACEBOOK page where her entries (usually weekly, on Sunday mornings) lead to lively conversations.

This Page: April - June 2026

CHRISTINA AND DOROTHY

April 12, 2026

         I re-listened recently to the audiobook of THE CUCKOO’S CALLING, the first in the Cormoran Strike series written by J. K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith.
The novel’s epigraph is the poem that inspired the title, “A Dirge” by Christina Georgina Rossetti:

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.

Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples’ dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
And as winds go sighing
For sweet things dying.

        In high school I decided to write my junior-year American Literature term paper about Edna St. Vincent Millay. For my senior-year English Literature term paper I chose Christina Georgina Rossetti. (Both poets’ names are poems!) While researching Christina at the library I also learned about her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose name I knew from reading his “Blessed Damozel” poem in anthologies and also from a poem about him by Dorothy Parker:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Buried all of his libretti;
Thought the matter over—then
Went and dug them up again.

        When I’d read that poem in my parents’ book of Dorothy Parker’s poems I hadn’t understood it. But at the library while reading about the Rossetti family I got it. As usual Dorothy was being flippant. However, here Dorothy was being too much so, about a tragedy: Elizabeth, Dante’s wife, had died from an overdose of laudanum, perhaps intentional, after having a stillborn baby. Grieving, Dante put the manuscripts of his unpublished poems in her coffin with her. Later he did have Elizabeth’s body exhumed to reclaim the poems (the first and only time the poems were “dug up,” not “again”).
        Also, Dorothy was inaccurate about libretti. These were poems, not libretti. As Wikipedia says, “Libretto is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical.”
        The first time I heard the word “libretto” was in high school. Out of the blue the junior-high music teacher came to me with a project, asking me if I would write a play about young Hans Christian Andersen into which she would put songs from the 1952 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN movie starring Danny Kaye. So at the library I did research about Andersen’s youth and then I started writing, fitting into the plot the songs, which included “Wonderful Copenhagen” and “Thumbelina” and “Anywhere I Wander.” When a reporter for the LACONIA EVENING CITIZEN learned that in addition to the students performing in this musical play there had been a student writing the script, he took a picture of me sitting at a school desk and the photo appeared in the newspaper over the word “Librettist.”
        The cheating that Dorothy did for the “Rossetti/libretti” rhyme reminded me of an incident I read about when Googling Alan Jay Lerner for my Facebook piece about his longest song title. Wikipedia had told me:

“In a 1970 interview on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, Alan went into some depth about his lyrics for MY FAIR LADY. Professor Henry Higgins sings, ‘Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters/Condemned by every syllable she utters/By rights she should be taken out and hung/For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.’ Lerner said he knew the lyric used incorrect grammar for the sake of a rhyme. He was later approached about it by another lyricist:
“‘I thought, oh, well, maybe nobody would notice it, but not at all. The night after it [MY FAIR LADY] opened, I ran into Noel Coward in a restaurant and he walked over and said, “Dear boy, it’s HANGED, not HUNG.” I said, “Oh, Noel, I know it, I know it! You know, shut up!”’”

© 2026 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH 2026

April 5, 2026

          National Poetry Month has begun! As I did in April 2019 I’ll start my choices of poems to post this month with some lines from one of Anne Bradstreet’s poems, “The Prologue.” I’ve consulted Wikipedia to refresh my memory about dates, etc.:
Anne Bradstreet was born in England in 1612 and married at age sixteen. In 1630 she and her parents and husband came to America. She had eight children. She died in 1672. Her father and husband helped found Harvard University; in 1997 a gate at Harvard was dedicated to her, “America’s first published poet.”

 . . . I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A Poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong;
For such despite they cast on Female wits,
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance—
They’l say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chanc
          This makes me think of a Dorothy Parker poem, “Fighting Words,” which I’ve also quoted here before:

Say my love is easy had,
     Say I’m bitten raw with pride,
Say I am too often sad—
     Still behold me at your side.

Say I’m neither brave nor young,
     Say I woo and coddle care,
Say the devil touched my tongue—
     Still you have my heart to wear.

But say my verses do not scan,
     And I get me another man!

          Don and I used to recall that in our “courtship” I had quoted this to him. Amused, we had agreed that he would only correct me on technical stuff, such as cars and carpentry.
          Of course in our decades together I actually conferred with him about much more and when he read my manuscripts he mentioned problems he encountered. But of the “do not scan” type of problem in my prose I can only remember in detail the first one. When we were at Keene Teachers’ College, both of us taking the Advanced Writing course, I wrote a short story whose distraught heroine “ran out into the night.” Don gently told me that he hated when people ran out into the night in stories. I immediately rewrote the sentence and I think I can safely say nobody has run out into the night in anything I’ve written since.
          April at last! Here are Robert Frost’s too-true lines I’m always quoting in April to remind myself of the fickle weather, from “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

© 2026 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

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