Incantations

 Jane Carlyle by Thomas Lawrence

JENNY KISSED ME

Jenny kissed me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in.

Time, you thief! who love to get

Sweets into your list, put that in.

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad;

Say that health and wealth have missed me;

Say I'm growing old, but add-

Jenny kissed me! 

 

Leigh Hunt

 

 

 

 

OVERHEARD ON A SALTMARSH

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.

                        No.

Give them me. Give them me.

                        No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,

Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

They are better than stars or water,

Better than voices of winds that sing,

Better than any man’s fair daughter,

Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

Hush I stole them out of the moon.

Give me your beads, I desire them.

                        No.

I will howl in a deep lagoon

For your green glass beads, I love them so.

Give them me. Give them.

                        No. 

'Strange Meetings' Poems by Harold Monro

These are the first two poems I ever discovered, which means, I found and read them for myself and was each time left breathless and with chills down my neck.  I still expect poetry to do that for me.  Jenny was Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle, the wife of Thomas Carlyle, a tiny woman.  She jumped up out of her chair and kissed Leigh Hunt when he came to tell Carlyle that the publisher had accepted his French Revolution.  

I spent fifty years looking for green glass beads that looked like the beads I saw for the nymph and goblin.  I finally found them, inexpensive soda glass from Africa.