Peripatetic Poets

...All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings, /All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages .../Would to Heaven some new [Goths] would come and destroy these churches...

...But for the pampered traveler .protected by luxury, tedium is hardly relieved by moving about...

...As pilgrims and missionaries and explorers, in the armed services and as mercenaries, as diplomats and teachers and merchants, as Grand Tourists and package tourists, they have quartered this shining planet...

...Coleridge nastily noted that In Köln, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fanged with murderous stones, And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches...

...The great comic writer Charles Stuart Calverly, a contemporary of Lewis Carroll, reminded readers what it was like not to go first class: "The seats are unutterably dirty," and "the saints deliver us from fleas...

...The verse is arranged according to the locales that evoked it, a satisfying scheme...

...Sir Alfred Lyall, Foreign Secretary to the government of India from 1878 to 1881, realized that his kind were interlopers among an ancient people...

...Auden, Lawrence Durrell, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath, among hundreds of other literary lights who have felt inclined to tour beyond their own shores...

...This being an Oxford book, the British Isles are "home" and everywhere else is "abroad"—even though some of the poets are colonials or Americans...

...I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined and several stinks...

...A number of the peripatetic poets poke fun at the very desire to take a journey...

...O think on Morris in a lonely chamber,/Dabbling in Sapphic," he appealed to a school chum back in England...

...Lawrence wandered from one strange land to another in search of primitive totems to confound decadent civilization: a serpent in Sicily, a mountain lion in Mexico, an earth-mother kangaroo in Australia...

...And he said, as he counted his beads and smiled, 'God smite their souls to the depths of Hell.' Thomas Pringle, who emigrated to Cape Town in 1820, became such a champion of the Hottentots—whom he saluted in his poetry—that he was forcibly shipped home by the government, as racially oppressive then as it is now...

...Doctor John Leyden taught natives of Malaysia to use banana leaves for holly greens at Christmas...

...wrote Coleridge sarcastically, perhaps moved by his intestinal troubles in foreign cities...

...Some of the literary voyagers, though, were true explorers . Thomas Perry sailed with Captain Cook aboard the Resolution on his journey to Antarctica...

...A 17th-century courtier waxed ribald over holy relics in France: And to St...

...Quite a few of their poems bear witness to the White Man's Burden...

...The British," the editor accurately observes, "have long prided themselves on being a nation of enthusiastic and resourceful travelers...

...Dylan Thomas gave a comic picture of his sojourn in Italy, "Where the people talk potato/And the weather drives me pazzo—" Sir Charles Johnston set up "Air Travel in Arabia" with a succinct couplet: "Then Petra flashed by in a wink...

...Your guides will include Milton, Byron, Shelley, George Eliot, Edward Lear, both Brownings, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Kipling, R.L...

...In a series of poetic epistles, "Miss Emily Brittle"— the fictitious mouthpiece of a traveling noble—expatiated on the horrors of sea voyages: cramped cabins, nausea, insolent sailors, boring fellow travelers, and the like...

...D.H...

...Denis first we come To see the sights of Notre Dame, The man that shows them snuffles: Where who is apt for to believe, May see our Lady's right-hand sleeve, And her old pantofles...

...For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome"— little foreseeing the cardinal's hat in his own future...

...His verses carry the charm of Victorian watercolor sketches—slight yet telling...

...Byron and Shelley, banished from England for moral turpitude, roamed the Alps and the Mediterranean in search of a downtrodden people to lead in revolt—but really hoping to find a culture more tolerant of their own forms of personal rebellion...

...Every journey is really a pilgrimage of self-discovery...

...the best travel writing tells us as much about the writer as about the place...

...Sir Owen Seaman poked fun at schoolmasters' tours of Greece, "where the unblushing Sappho wrote/The hymns we hardly like to quote.' Andrew Marvell called Holland "this indigested vomit of the sea...

...England's most popular literary exiles, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, convinced many a young Romantic that truly sensitive souls needed foreign air to spread their wings, and crowds of poet-worshippers flocked to the decayed palazzi where British expatriate writers had genteelly starved...

...Gilbert's witticism, are apt to worship "Every century but this and every country but [their] own...

...After the settlers came the expatriates—those idealists who, in W.S...

...Spoofing the penchant of 18th-century squires for sending their sons abroad to acquire polish, William Cowper concluded ironically, "How much a dunce that had been sent to roam / Excels a dunce that has been kept at home...

...Kipling accuses us of not knowing or caring about our own history...

...Osmond Edwards' time in the Orient taught him to understand how boorish and silly Europeans there appeared to their hosts: When 1 first came to live in Japan My duty was simple and plain: To dazzle the nation with civilization Implying more money than brain...

...Louis MacNiece commented that "The hotels are all the same, it might be pawpaw / Instead of grapefruit...

...Wilfred Noyce wrote "Breathless" at Camp VI on Mount Everest, six days before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay reached the summit...

...Americans, we can catch a glimpse of ourselves as exotic foreigners...

...Crossley-Holland chooses the United States as his last port of call, so we American cousins come in for our lumps like everyone else...

...Still, after a few hundred pages I found myself categorizing what 1 was reading not by the scenery described, but by the motives that brought the poet to view it and the sensibility that shaped his impressions...

...As a young Anglican priest, John Henry Newman wrote plaintively from Palermo, "Oh that thy creed were sound...

...The English themselves were not spared by the satirists...

...As must be clear by now, The Oxford Book of Travel Verse concentrates less on scenery than on people, and less on natives than on the travelers themselves...

...The many colonizers included do not qualify as tourists either...

...It looked like Eaton Square—but pink...

...Citizens of English literature, we can share the perspective of the brave explorers and bumptious tourists whose delightful conceits are recorded here...

...Describing a badminton game on a site where a native uprising had been put down, he portrays the British as lightweights, too innocent to realize the fierce resentment their presence causes: Near me a Muselman, civil and mild, Watched as the shuttlecocks rose and fell...

...William Strachey, the first Secretary of the Virginia colony, dreamed of bringing Christian civilization to the Indians: "Wild as they are, accept them, so were we: /To make them civil will our honor be...

...Crossley-Holland begins the voyage by crossing the English Channel...

...Rome disappoints me much," Arthur Hugh Cloughs complained...

...And why not...

...Bon voyage...

...There were also the votaries of paganism, who sought out "the Glory that was Greece, and the Grandeur that was Rome" —often to be let down...

...If you can't wait till your next scheduled time off or can't afford to go away this year, but you long for the romance of unfamiliar sights, I recommend The Oxford Book of Travel Verse (Oxford, 423 pp., $21.95), edited by Kevin CrossleyHolland...

...Thomas Morris, an officer with General Bradshaw during the French and Indian War, wiled away Canadian winters on the shore of Lake Champlain by keeping his classics skills in trim...

...Memories of winter vacations Unger, sweetening the coming summer's promise of adventure...

...Crossley-Holland has organized one of those high-toned English expeditions conducted by notable Oxbridge speakers...

...It will take you around the world, even back in time, at least as far as the 16th century...

...Edward Lear wrote "The Cumberbund" as a parody of those Anglo-Indian poems sprinkled with Hindee words—none of Lear's exotic-sounding terms means anything at all...

...James Fenton, a foreign correspondent in Indochina during the Vietnam War, knew the Cambodian princes well enough to appreciate that the conflict was not one of ideology, but a "Family war" that foreigners blundered into...

...Two hundred years later, Charlotte Mew invoked "Dear Paris of the hot white hands, the scarlet lips, the scented hair," painting her a cruel cocotte who had jilted Christ, "Your Lover, the King with the broken heart...

...Stevenson, Noel Coward, W.H...

...The kindest vision is Thorn Gunn's, from the Barrow Street pier: "Liberty, tiny woman, in the mist—You cannot see the torch—raising her arm/Lorn, bold, as if saluting with her fist...

...The satirists—those trippers who find the whole world absurd—are present too...

...Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it...

...We " breed a kind of men / Who are not dignified," according to J.K...

...The media have at least temporarily stopped reminding us of terrorism, and foreign countries are busy wooing American tourists and their dollars with renewed vigor...

...Stephen...

...In the 18th century...

...But O, what scores are sick of Home, /Agog for Paris or for Rome...