Any Prince to Any Princess

(“O Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Let down thine hair!”
— illustration by Walter Crane, 1845-1915,
English artist and book illustrator)

In the early part of the nineteenth century, two German linguists traveled the countryside writing down the folk tales they heard from the people they met.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were not the first to do this. Others had put together collections of folk tales of countries like France and Italy. The brothers, however, were remarkably original in their approach. As the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie explain in their book The Classic Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm were the first to study folk tales for their own sake, the first to record them in the way ordinary people told them without changing or improving them, and the first to appreciate that every detail in the tales was of interest, even the identity of the narrator of the tale.

In 1812, the brothers published over two hundred of the stories in a collection entitled Children’s and Household Tales.

The poem below alludes to several of the better-known Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The narrator is a handsome prince waiting at the base of the tower for the beautiful Rapunzel to let down her golden tresses so that he can climb up to her chamber. In his impatience, he bemoans the sad fact that not everything has turned out happily ever after for some of the characters in the fairy tales. Look closely and you will find the Golden Goose, Rumpelstilskin, the Princess whose sleep was disturbed by a pea, the Frog Prince, the Fairy who granted three wishes, the Elves and the Shoemaker, and Snow White.

ANY PRINCE TO ANY PRINCESS

August is coming
and the goose, I’m afraid,
is getting fat.
There have been
no golden eggs for some months now.
Straw has fallen well below market price
despite my frantic spinning
and the sedge is,
as you rightly point out,
withered.

I can’t imagine how the pea
got under your mattress. I apologize
humbly. The chambermaid has, of course,
been sacked. As has the frog footman.
I understand that, during my recent fact-finding tour of the Golden River,
despite your nightly unavailing efforts,
he remained obstinately
froggish.

I hope that the Three Wishes granted by the General Assembly
will go some way towards redressing
this unfortunate recent sequence of events.
The fall in output from the shoe-factory, for example:
no one could have foreseen the work-to-rule
by the National Union of Elves. Not to mention the fact
that the court has been fast asleep
for the last six and a half years.

The matter of the poisoned apple has been taken up
by the Board of Trade: I think I can assure you
the incident will not be
repeated.

I can quite understand, in the circumstances,
your reluctance to let down
your golden tresses. However
I feel I must point out
that the weather isn’t getting any better
and I already have a nasty chill
from waiting at the base
of the White Tower. You must see
the absurdity of the
situation.
Some of the courtiers are beginning to talk,
not to mention the humble villagers.
It’s been three weeks now, and not even
a word.

Princess,
a cold, black wind
howls through our empty palace.
Dead leaves litter the bedchamber;
the mirror on the wall hasn’t said a thing
since you left. I can only ask,
bearing all this in mind,
that you think again,

let down your hair,

reconsider.

~ Adrian Henri (1932-2000), British poet and painter

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

(Moonlight, watercolor by Winslow Homer, 1836-1910,
American artist)

Memories in the family can be fragile. Explore them carefully, says the poet.

MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

~ Hart Crane (1899-1932), American poet

River Song

(Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old
Theme, 1939 by Joseph Stella, 1877-1946,
Italian-born American Futurist painter)

Over the years, Joseph Stella made quite a few paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was fascinated by the engineering masterpiece of steel-wire suspension spanning the East River. The bridge, he wrote, is “the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America.”

Built between 1869 and 1883, the bridge joined the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Some have likened this man-made icon to the Eiffel Tower. Stella, however, brings out the image of the cathedral, with suggestions of the stained glass windows, arches, and flying buttresses of the Gothic cathedral. In his view, the power of modern industry would replace the influence of the Church.

Inspired by the painting, a contemporary poet has written this poem:

RIVER SONG

Crossing late is best,
The bridge strung
over the water
like a huge harp.
Sun caught
in the black strings
forms one pure note —
trembling,
falling as we rise,
reach out,
strain to hear
the perfect sound
that must be fading
just above our heads.

~ Warren Woessner, born 1944, American poet

Stella was not the only artist to gaze upon the bridge and be reminded of the towering medieval cathedral. The American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) made use of words that echoed the sacred.

from TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry, —

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path — condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.