The Title Provocative

POETS have always had difficulty in getting their poems read. But the poets of the past had the advantage of a device which to-day is seemingly unknown: the Title Provocative.

Take, for instance, Cowper’s celebrated caption: —

To Mrs. Newton, on receiving a barrel of oysters

No one with a spark of curiosity could encounter this title without wishing immediately to read the poem, for, aside from the obvious question of

why Mrs. Newton chose this particular delicacy as a gift to a poet, one feels a not unnatural concern for the condition in which the oysters arrived. It is the same concern that instinctively prompts one to wonder what happened to the fish in Gray’s lesser elegy: —

Ode on the death of a favorite cat, drowned in a tub of goldfishes

BBoth Cowper and Gray, being keen psychologists as well as poets, were fully cognizant of the power of human curiosity, and, we may be sure, left little details of information out of their titles purposely. Another example of Cowper’s art, and one, by the way, also apropos of dumb animals, is this: —

On a mischievous bull, which the owner of him sold at the author’s instance

No unresolved musical cadence ever dangled more tantalizingly in the air than this inescapable question: What mischief did the bull do?

But for the following achievement nothing short of the canniness of a Scotsman would suffice: —

The death and dying words of poor Mailie, the author’s only pet yowe

The reader of Burns unfamiliar with the Scottish dialect is left in delicious and half-scandalized uncertainty as to whether the ‘yowe’ is a dumb animal or something slightly more human — that is, until he satisfies both curiosity and conscience by reading the poem.

Wordsworth had the same knack in a high degree. Note the quiet suppression of information in this title: —

On a celebrated event in ancient history

Almost anybody would nibble at that bait; but even the most obdurate reader could not resist the title next following: —

Upon the same event

This, we make bold to say, is probably the most maddening title in the history of English verse.

Wordsworth is also capable of a thing like this: —

Extempore effusion upon the death of James Hogg

The ordinary man, little acquainted with poetizings and still less so with extemporizings, is completely stumped to know (until he investigates the poem) just what an extempore effusion on such a subject would be like. And he is even more puzzled by the problem set by the chesslike complication of the following: —

Lines composed at Grasmere, during a walk one evening, after a stormy day, the author having just read in a newspaper that the dissolution of Mr. Fox was hourly expected

Very cleverly, you see, Wordsworth piles one detail on another and then — omits the date of the newspaper.

Candor is conspicuous in this confession by another poet: —

On revisiting the seashore, after long absence, under strong medical recommendation not to bathe

Did he or did he not disobey the doctor’s orders? Well, reader, if you are determined to know, you can find the poem in the Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, should you not happen to possess said works, you can find them in any large library or well-stocked bookstore. And if, in addition to this, you are still eager for more medical information, say,

On the benefit received by His Majesty from seabathing in the year 1789,

you are invited to consult the index of the Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper and, having found the above-quoted title, to turn to the likenamed poem. Even then you will probably not rest until you have convinced yourself that Coleridge and His Majesty either were or were not suffering from the same bodily affliction.

Nothing, however, can whet curiosity like a touch of scandal. What could be more intriguing than this little masterpiece of sedate anonymity by Coleridge?

On a connubial rupture in high life, 1796

(Coleridge omitted the month and day so that the title might not be a dead give-away.) Or consider the possible overtones of the same author’s touching address

To an unfortunate woman whom the author had known in the days of her innocence.

Who with any humaneness in his heart could turn from this title without making certain just what misfortune the poor woman was suffering from? For pathos and the power to arouse solicitude it can he matched only by a third expression of Coleridge’s genius:—

Lines on a friend, who died of a frenzy fever, induced by calumnious reports

What, what were the reports?

And now, lest I exalt the poets of the past to too high a pedestal and the reader suppose that they were unfailingly clever and provocative, I add one title that is frankly a failure: —

On the death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s bullfinch. 1788. (It was eaten by a rat)

Probably we shall never know why Cowper added the parenthetical detail. He may have momentarily forgotten himself and thought he was writing the poem and not the title. In any ease, what could be less provocative than to be told in so many words exactly how Mrs. Throckmorton’s bullfinch died? After that who would bother to read the poem?