I watched that wretched man,
And since, I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
NOTES AND QUESTIONS
Biography. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a Congregational minister. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and was graduated from Harvard College in the famous class of 1829. After studying medicine and anatomy in Paris, he began practicing in Boston. Later he was made professor of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth College, and afterwards at Harvard. In 1850 he wrote the poem “Old Ironsides” as a protest against the dismantling of the historic battleship Constitution which lay in the harbor. It stirred the entire country so that the Secretary of the Navy found it advisable to recall the order he had issued. Like Bryant, Holmes was a poet on occasion, not by profession. For more than forty years after he entered on his duties at Harvard he delivered his four lectures a week eight months of the year, and President Eliot bore witness that he was not less skillful with the scalpel and the microscope than with the pen.
When Lowell was offered the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he made it a condition of his acceptance that Holmes should be a contributor. The result was a series of articles entitled The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Among his poems, the best known are his “Chambered Nautilus,” “The Height of the Ridiculous”, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” (The One Hoss Shay), and short poems in celebration of various occasions. Among these are some forty poems read at anniversaries of his college class, notably the one beginning: “Has any old fellow got mixed with the boys?” In this he refers playfully to the author of “America” as one whom “Fate tried to conceal by naming him Smith.”
He wrote several novels, but it is as the author of the Autocrat series and by his humorous poems that he will be best remembered by his readers. By his personal associates he was most fondly remembered for his sunny, cheerful disposition and his witty conversation.
Discussion. 1. What is it that is described by the poet as being the “height of the ridiculous”? 2. What incidents are related that seem to show him to be right in this estimate? 3. What opinion of the poet does the poem give you? 4. In what state of mind do you think of him as writing it? 5. What is the “trifling jest” referred to in stanza 4? 6. What have the humorists done for the world? 7. Of what use is a poem like this?
Phrases