A Vaguely Menacing Poem About Lions and Great White Hunters?
December 12, 2015 4:42 AM Subscribe
I'm trying to remember a poem I read in my British Authors class, which, I believe, was written in the first person (maybe even epistolary). It was about a White British hunter somewhere in Colonial East Africa (I believe it was in Kenya?), and I think he was hunting lions, but also metaphorically it was about love...
The tone was generally menacing, but subtly so. I believe the hunter in question was a real person, and it was something like Sir Sedgwick or Sir Chauncey or some other excessively British sounding name. Do you know what I'm thinking of?
The tone was generally menacing, but subtly so. I believe the hunter in question was a real person, and it was something like Sir Sedgwick or Sir Chauncey or some other excessively British sounding name. Do you know what I'm thinking of?
Scratch the above, I think you're after The Lion Hunt by Thomas Medwin.
posted by Morfil Ffyrnig at 12:32 PM on December 12, 2015
posted by Morfil Ffyrnig at 12:32 PM on December 12, 2015
Response by poster: Thank you guys for the suggestions! I ended up calling a friend from high school because it was driving me crazy, and working together we figured out that it's actually Frederick Courtney Selous's Letter to his Love, by Matthea Harvey. It begins:
Why do you not ask me about the lions you write of the dying willow
in the garden detailing its species as lustgarten weeping and neglect
to say if you miss me at all though I think perhaps that is what you mean to say
you cannot imagine it here my tent floor is a meadow of animal skins
my own skin silky and papery from wind and sun sometimes I think
the color of my eyes will have to dull to let in all this brightness...
and contains the line I have been tossing around in my head since high school:
"I am sorry but I don't know when I'm coming back because lonely
as I am I wake most mornings thinking I cannot leave this."
posted by ChuraChura at 1:55 PM on December 12, 2015 [7 favorites]
Why do you not ask me about the lions you write of the dying willow
in the garden detailing its species as lustgarten weeping and neglect
to say if you miss me at all though I think perhaps that is what you mean to say
you cannot imagine it here my tent floor is a meadow of animal skins
my own skin silky and papery from wind and sun sometimes I think
the color of my eyes will have to dull to let in all this brightness...
and contains the line I have been tossing around in my head since high school:
"I am sorry but I don't know when I'm coming back because lonely
as I am I wake most mornings thinking I cannot leave this."
posted by ChuraChura at 1:55 PM on December 12, 2015 [7 favorites]
Best answer: Collected in Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (as far as I can infer from this review).
posted by andrewcooke at 2:29 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by andrewcooke at 2:29 PM on December 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
Thanks so much for posting this question, and then following it up with the extract. I hadn't heard of Matthea Harvey, but I'm hugely taken with what you've quoted and with this poem, and have bought that first collection of poems on the strength of it.
posted by MinPin at 12:46 PM on December 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by MinPin at 12:46 PM on December 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
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posted by MonkeyToes at 5:38 AM on December 12, 2015