[906] To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train

Moving on with the named verse form theme, here's a triolet...

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
     Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
    And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
    Missing so much and so much?

    -- Frances Cornford

triolet: a poem or stanza of eight lines in which the first line is repeated
  at the fourth and seventh and the second line as the eight with a rhyme
  scheme of ABaAabAB.

  The English pronunciation is tr<e>i;olet, though it is tree-o-lay in
  French.

Today's poem is not particularly great, except for one thing - it makes
excellent use of the triolet form. Rather than employ the more modern custom
of attempting to vary the reading of the repeated lines, Cornford structures
the poem so that the repetition reads easily and naturally - it's not
obscured, but it doesn't need to be, since it adds to, rather than
detracts from, the poem.

As for the content of the poem, the "O fat white woman whom nobody loves"
is rather jarring to modern sensibilities; I can't imagine it being
too far otherwise even to her contemporaries. In particular, I find the
'whom nobody loves' a rather odd sort of deduction to make from a train
window, and have to wonder if it was intended as a comment on the narrator
as much as on the woman.

Like 'Trees', like 'The Ballad of the Tempest', today's poem has just that
combination of popular and annoying qualities that make it almost guaranteed
to attract parodies. Chesterton was moved to reply on the woman's behalf:

  Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
  Guessing so much and so much.
  Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
  Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
  And why do you know such a frightful lot
  About people in gloves and such?
    -- Chesterton, 'The Fat White Woman Speaks'
	(c. 1933); an answer to Frances Cornford.

and Housman skewered the poem rather neatly:

  O why do you walk through the fields in boots,
       Missing so much and so much?
  O fat white woman whom nobody shoots,
  Why do you walk through the fields in boots,
  When the grass is soft as the breast of coots
       And shivering-sweet to the touch?

    -- Housman; see http://vp.engl.wvu.edu/Fall98/burnett.htm for the rest
    of the (excellent) piece on Housman's reworking of other poets' poems.

On Triolets:

  Like most of the repeated line verse forms, triolets are influenced rather
  heavily by the constraint. Unlike the villanelle, however, the poem itself
  is short enough that the repetition can be worked with, rather than
  around, a lot more easily (though workarounds are, of course, popular,
  from the shifting of punctuation and parts of speech to the use of
  homophones and homonyms, taking advantage of the fact that the repeated
  lines merely have to *sound* identical).

  Here are some essays on the triolet:

    Going back at least to the thirteenth century, triolets are short,
    usually witty poems, just perfect for tucking into a box of candy or
    some flowers. Its name comes from the repetition of the key line three
    times (French "tri").

      -- http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/triolet.html

    http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/henley01.html is a
    self-referential triolet

    http://pub4.ezboard.com/fthesonnetboardnotsonnets.showMessage?topicID=343.topic
    is another amusingly self-referential piece about the English/French
    pronunciation differences (the triolet is, in general, a fun form to
    play with, and popular among amateur writers of light verse).

    http://pub34.ezboard.com/fla1frm30.showMessage?topicID=2.topic is
    another nice essay

    The earliest English triolets were of a devotional nature composed by
    Patrick Carey, a Benedictine monk, in 1651. It was reintroduced by
    Robert Bridges in 1873.

      -- http://www.themediadrome.com/content/articles/words_articles/right_word4_fixed_forms.htm#triolet

A brief biography of Conford:
  http://www.traditional-poetry.org/cornford.htm

Minstrels Links:
  Poem #84: "From a Railway Carriage", R. L. Stevenson
  Poem #212: "To Alice-Sit-By-The-Hour", Franklin Adams

-martin

From: "peter westcott" <peter@>

Some years ago PUNCH ran a competition on this poem, one of the entries
suggested she was a cricketer - wicket keeper.