{"id":503,"date":"2014-10-02T22:54:52","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T02:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/?p=503"},"modified":"2026-03-19T08:14:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T12:14:30","slug":"oktoberfest-poems-billy-mcaw-meets-john-barleycorn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/2014\/10\/02\/oktoberfest-poems-billy-mcaw-meets-john-barleycorn\/","title":{"rendered":"Oktoberfest Poems: Billy M’Caw Meets John Barleycorn"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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Oktoberfest Poems: Billy M’Caw Meets John Barleycorn<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

\"LondonW2Bayswater-Victoria-BarCounter\"<\/a>It’s that time of year again when\u00a0chillier morns\u00a0and earlier sunsets hearken us back to pubs, pints, and poetry. No Oktoberfest Library<\/a> is complete without a requisite pull of modern and contemporary poems from the U.K. Two poets that anchor my modern British poetry courses, American-born T. S. Eliot and current laureate Carol Ann Duffy, offer hearty pours of vernacular verse that pair nicely with Oktoberfest. Read aloud,\u00a0their robustness bursts off the tongue–and the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Eliot’s “Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot” first appeared in The Queen’s Book of The Red Cross<\/em> (1939) before it enlivened the original London production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. <\/em>(You can watch a performance of the song\u00a0here<\/a>.) Eliot sets “Billy M’Caw” in an imagined pub, “the old Bull and the Bush”–a boisterous place on “a Sattuday night”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

(There was two kinds of beer, the thick and the clear)
\nA very nice House it was. Oh dear!
\n<\/span>I’ll never forget it. From basement to garret,
\n<\/span>Ah, a very nice House. But it was the parret–
\n<\/span>The parret, the parret named Billy M’Caw
\n<\/span>That brought all those folk to the bar. (1)<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Summoned by barmaid Lily La Rose, Billy M’Caw played the patrons’ emotions \"TS<\/a> with his range of snappy and sappy tunes. For Eliot, the public house was part of “the whole way of life <\/i>of a people.” Indeed, his famous definition of British culture includes pub games–“the pin table, the dart board”–along with Derby Day, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage, and “the music of Elgar” (2).\u00a0According to Valerie Eliot, her husband based the poem on the resident parrot at\u00a0London’s Charles Lamb<\/a>\u00a0pub,\u00a0which was then the Prince Albert. (3)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"carol-ann-duffy-pic-getty-213907477\"<\/a>In Duffy’s “John Barleycorn,” the pub culture she calls “Britain’s soul” is becoming a vanishing way of life in the twenty-first century. The poem’s legendary namesake dies and regenerates\u00a0through harvest, brewing, drinking, drinking songs, and poems (Robert Burns’s “John Barleycorn: A Ballad”<\/a> being the most famous). Each stanza draws its energy from its litany of pubs, giving pleasure to the tongue as it revives personal reminiscence–and restores cultural memory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

He knew the Ram, the Lamb, the Lion and the Swan,
\nWhite Hart, Blue Boar, Red Dragon, Fox and Hounds.
\nI saw him in the Three Goats’ Heads,
\nthe Black Bull and Dun Cow,
\nShoulder of Mutton, Griffin, Unicorn,
\ngreen man, beer borne, good health, long life, John Barleycorn. (4)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

The poem’s speaker recalls these pubs\u00a0to\u00a0palpable being through the act of naming, like an alehouse Adam. BBC2 produced a striking video<\/a> of Duffy reading the poem for “The Culture Show” in 2009. You can find Duffy’s “John Barleycorn” in her recent volume The Bees<\/a>;\u00a0<\/em>an American version appeared last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Be sure to have a poem with your pint this Oktoberfest. You’ll find that pub poems please the palate of hop and malt lovers alike. \u00a0-MB<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

References:
\n<\/em>Pub photo: the Victoria, London (Bayswater).\u00a0www.heritagepubs.org.uk\/pubs<\/a>
\n(1) The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross<\/em> <\/em>(1939), 53. UF Rare Books Collection<\/a>.
\n<\/em>(2) T. S. Eliot, Notes Toward\u00a0a Definition of Culture<\/em> (1948), 31.
\n(3) The Letters of T. S. Eliot<\/em>, vol. 4 (1928-1929), ed Valerie Eliot.
\n(4) Carol Ann Duffy, The Bees<\/em> (2011), 29-30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\r\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"featured_post":"off","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41,39,40],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-carol-ann-duffy","tag-oktoberfest-poetry","tag-t-s-eliot"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4271,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions\/4271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/mbryant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}