Knowing the answer to the riddle in each of these poems does not diminish my pleasure in them because they are much more than riddles.

I agree that having “On the Cards and Dice” as a title for the first poem is a riddle-spoiler, as Robert suggests, because without that title I would be inclined, at first, to read the poem in religious terms. And I think that is what Raleigh wanted, if one considers the very first line of the poem. But I think I would be frustrated in trying to tease out a religious meaning, since several lines, especially the last two, suggest that Epiphany is a time of doom – just the opposite of what the Church teaches.

But having (I hope) eventually figured out the “joke” that the poem is “really” about card-playing and gambling, I would be all the more inclined to re-read the poem several times to consider Raleigh’s word play. It does more than confuse; it truly does draw some sobering parallels between card-playing/gambling and one’s religious “chances.” For instance, in thinking about the four kings, will I receive a gift of faith from one of the 3 Magi who arrive on Epiphany, or will I receive a death sentence from King Herod? Will the strange herald be merely a crowing rooster or the sound of impending doom? And on a macro level, when Gabriel sounds his “trump,” will I be caught playing cards or praying in church?

The second poem has, for me, elements of a medieval ballad, particularly something like “Edward.” Knowing the answers to the mother’s insistent questions – that Edward has killed his father on the advice of his mother and now deeply regrets his action – does not diminish from a reader’s fascination with the doom to come. Like that of the ballads, Raleigh’s simple, stark language chills the bone. It’s not just that death is inevitable, but that predicting when and how it will come is impossible. Who would have thought that a tree, some hemp and a wag would result in a dead child? Who would think that a jog in the park would result in a deadly robbery?

Thanks, Robert, for introducing me to two fine poems I've never read before (and for giving me a new appreciation of Sir Walter).

Dear MaryAnn:

I like the connection you make between ballads and this (second) riddle of Raleigh's.

I don't think it's an accident that death is at the center of both. Linda Gregerson says that "the answer to the riddle is death." She means, specifically, the answer to the riddle posed by Raleigh's poem. But I wonder if that isn't, at heart, the answer to most of our riddles (in life as in reading) -- where are you taking me? where am I going? As you point out, knowing that death will come doesn't rob it of its fascination. I think there's an echo of that, for us, in our fascination with the working through of the best riddles, even if we already know the answer.

(Linda Gregerson suggests "the manipulated tension between fear-of-knowing and eagerness to know propels a great variety of story-bearing genres.")

The threes in this second riddle also remind me of ballad-patterns, ballad-formulae, and the way that when a specific answer doesn't comfort us, we like to resort to spells, charms, pattern making -- especially things in threes.

For some reason, this second poem made me think of Robert Frost's great story-poem, "Home Burial," which also has at its heart the death of a son.

The poem opens with one kind of riddle, as the husband wonders, as his wife stares out the window from the top of the stairs, "What is it you see / From up there always -- for I want to know." There are different answers to that question: a graveyard, "three stones of slate and one of marble," -- but the husband solves the riddle: "'But I understand: it is not the stones, / But the child's mound---' //"Don't, don't, don't, don't,' she cried."

To say that the husband and wife respond differently to their child's death is a gross understatement. But one of the cruxes of their terribly different responses has to do with words the wife remembers her husband saying after he's come in from digging the child's grave:

'I can repeat the very words you were saying.
"Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build."
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor.
You *couldn't* care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more along.
Friends make pretense of following to the grave,
But before one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand.
But the world's evil. I won't have grief so
If I can change it. Oh, I won't, I won't!'

It seems to me that buried in the heart of her outburst is a riddle -- the same kind of riddle that Raleigh's poem uses:

What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?

We know the answer to this, even if neither husband nor wife can come at it directly. "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build." There's the tree that grows to build the fence, growing like both the Wood and the Weed. And I guess we'd say there's nothing we can build to hold back death, any more than a birch fence can. Time in ballads and riddles grows things *and* cuts them down.

The husband's inclusion of that specific "Three" isn't trivial; it gives him something go hold onto, working his way through his grief. (It makes me think of Rossetti's poem, "The Woodspurge," which ends: "From perfect grief there need not be / Wisdom or even memory: / One thing then learnt remains to me,-- / The woodspurge has a cup of three.")

The wife's outburst at the end here -- "Oh, I won't, I won't!" -- seems prompted by the same impulse that prompts Raleigh's concluding "God bless the child." Maybe it makes sense to think of Frost in connection with riddle poems because, too, of the relation between riddles and proverbs. Frost dearly loves to play with, to work with, our wish to sum things up in a proverb, as in a punchline.

Why do we resort to riddles, when we know the answer is death? I guess because we know the answer is death.

Thanks, Robert, for posting these great poems.

Yours in the common pursuit,

Jennifer

Thanks for this post, Mary Ann. I agree that the poem is well calculated to frustrate any attempt at "teasing out" a precise, definitive or simple religious meaning: the con-fusion or fusing together of different sorts of connotation and suggestion produces an effective, meaningful cloud of associations, not a signpost or occasion.

What you say (and Jennifer Clarvoe's response to what you say) suggest that a riddle is a bringing-together. (Jennifer suggests, a coming-to-the-end.)

Here's what I mean by that, or an attempt to say what I mean. Association and con-fusion and co-incidence are words-- all meaning some kind of coming together, like the four kings of hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds or the weed the wag and the wood-- that suggest something about the nature of meaning. "This goes with that." A riddle joins two kinds of meaning-- the question form and the answer form, or the surface-part and the underpart.

The ballad-like quality of the poem to his son is partly related in my perception to the idea of a formula. A formula (how many days it takes to rot a fence, or "here come three things that prosper up apace") is in a way the opposite of a riddle: it presents the obvious rather than hiding something. But in another way, like a riddle it gives the assurance that two things or more belong together or can be fit together, co-incided.

(Family duty calls, interrupting this, but I'll post now to make clear I am paying attention!)

Robert

Hi MA. I revisited the links from Daniel and Ezekiel (and the little horn and the valley of the bones are somewhat celebrated stories) and I am flirting with the following two conclusions:

Poem #1 may as well be titled (by a Raleigh detractor, at the time):

On the Cards and Dice and Sedition

Poem #2 may have been written to himself.

(And maybe the first one too)

Yours truly,

HAP (The Shirley McClaine of the Poem Fray)

Thank you, Robert, for posting these fabulous riddles and for posing your own thought-provoking (and perhaps unanswerable) questions about the fundamental qualities of mystery in poetry. As with any fine art (whether riddle or algorithm, German opera or human genome), our knowing the score, in the end, shouldn’t diminish the pleasure of experiencing it again and again (as MaryAnn and Jennifer have noted above).

I feel this question you raise, does knowing what a poem is “about” diminish it somehow, is related to the question of paraphrase. Most of us would say a truly great poem can’t be paraphrased. That’s probably true.

Yet I’m reminded of a time—of many, many times, actually—when you asked of your students’ poems “What is it about?” At the time, I was frustrated by your insistence that a poem be “about” anything in particular. I was young then, oh so young, and had confused mere confusion with the complexities of art. Ten years later, working now as an editor, I find myself demanding that same question of my authors: What is it about? I’ve come to appreciate the importance of reduction, to help introduce essential concepts to others (children as well as adults) and entice potential readers: We all have to start somewhere. What does it taste like? Sweet? Salty? Bitter? These things can be classified, and thankfully, so that they can be more easily shared.

And so a poem or riddle is “about” death or “about” love. It is “sweet” or it is “cautionary.” And hopefully if that’s enough to hook us, we read on.

Then, of course, through the creative acts of a poet’s words, the piece can also transcend what it is “about”: The words selected can “combine, inter-act, so that one influences the other and produces an effect similar in kind to the prismatic formations that occur about us in nature in the case of reflections and refractions” (from Wallace Stevens’ “Effects of Analogy”).

What’s different about a riddle—these riddles, here—is that they taunt us with our instincts to know; and after we know it, or think we do, we find ourselves wanting to cling to the mystery all the more.

Thanks again, Robert. These riddle-poems today are a nice reminder that while not all mysterious poems are riddles, the best usually have us work through confusions, urging us toward some deeper or higher or even more commonplace understanding.

FS

At the time, I was frustrated by your insistence that a poem be “about” anything in particular. I was young then, oh so young, and had confused mere confusion with the complexities of art. Ten years later, working now as an editor, I find myself demanding that same question of my authors: What is it about?

FS, I love the honesty of your second sentence above and the wisdom of the sentence that follows it.

I don't have anything very interesting to say about the poems, though I like them, but as for riddles, I NEVER guess the right answer. I seem to be constitutionally unable to think of clues to an answer that isn't given in advance. I.e., you tell me what you want to find, and I'll help you find it, but if you just present me with the clues, I'm useless. If it's a mystery movie, I discover the mystery not a second before the author tells me the solution, to which I feel fuddle-headedly resigned.("Well, okay, whatever you say.") I never take the trouble to go back over the evidence. The only point of evidence is to be able to come up with your own answer. Barring that I become uncharacteristically incurious.

Which I guess means that a right answer may not diminish the mystery in the thing, but it diminishes my sense of the mystery in ME and it dampens my desire to play. But maybe I'm just a party-pooper.

I only enjoyed the first poem when I got rid of the title. Then it seemed to me like something out of a Revelations-inspired pageantry, you know some Spenserian [?] anti-Papal tract/poem, with the rooster a horned beast hardened where he should be soft and soft where he should be hard. It reminded me of the way renaissance images of heaven always seem hierarchichal to the point of being administrative, and make we want to run off to Gluck's Elysian fields, where everyone is substanceless, sad and tunefully sweet.

~) Apollinaire

Maybe there's some interest (and some tempering of my demand for subject matter in art, deep in me though that demand certainly is) in the word "about"-- insofar as it connotes circling in the vicinity of something rather than landing kerplunk right on whatever it is.

Fred Speers' "they taunt us with our instincts to know" seems true about the Raleigh riddles, about riddles, and maybe about the whodunnits that Apollinaire refers to: so that the poems tease mystification and rationalization, both?

Here's an argument by authority: many years ago, when I was on a panel of judges that included John Ashbery, we were sifting through manuscripts, many of which seemed somewhat imitative of John's work. He frequently asked, with quite sincere exasperation I believe, "What is this about? I can't tell what this person is talking about!"

The title that gives away the poem on the cards and dice, for me, doesn't make much difference: after we get it, we still want it, if it is any good. As I think both of these poems certainly are.

Wonderful poems, Robert--thanks for posting them. It's been argued that riddles are a kind of ur-genre in poetry, out of which many more supposedly sophisticated forms have sprung. (Andrew Welsh, in his book The Roots of Lyric, posits charms and riddles as the two basic poetic modes.) Couldn't one say that there's an element of riddling in all metaphors? And vice versa, of course.

I'm especially grateful for "On the Cards and Dice"--it's an amazing tour de force that I've somehow never come across before. I appreciated Bottomfish's reading of the poem as a Protestant parody of the Book of Revelations and of apocalyptic rhetoric more generally. Of course it also calls to mind Pope's later transformation of a card game into an epic battle in "The Rape of the Lock." Much as I love that poem, I have to say that Raleigh's version of the conceit is far more elegant and pointed. Set beside Raleigh, the Pope passage feels labored.

I had read "Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son," but only in the "lame" sonnet version; I agree that it's much better without the couplet. (Could that four-word coda be the source of the great Billie Holiday song?) I love poems that enumerate "things" in a riddling way. Two others that could be set beside Raleigh's are this one by Emily Dickinson (one of the great riddlers):

Some things that fly there be --
Birds -- Hours -- the Bumblebee --
Of these no Elegy.

Some things that stay there be --
Grief -- Hills -- Eternity --
Nor this behooveth me.

There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!

--and "Triad" by Adelaide Crapsey:

These be
three silent things:
The falling snow . . . the hour
Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one
Just dead.

Perhaps this is a subgenre of the riddle poem--a cryptic gathering of objects whose affinity is hidden or elusive.

By the way, I just happened to hear a musical setting of "Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son" (the sonnet version) by Dmitri Shostakovich, of all people, sung in Russian by a great booming bass. It was spine-tingling--proof that not all poetry is lost in translation, at least not when you have music to compensate.

I'm with you, Robert, in feeling that if an artist can't name a subject (one, one will do!) then there's probably something lost about the endeavor. I think demanding an "about" is a good demand b/c a natural one, not prompted by pedagogy but by the way a person--any of us--approaches something written down. We expect it to communicate. Maybe with music or dance, the answer is too roundabout to count (maybe the equivalent would be, "What does it sound like? How does it move?" only b/c "about" can be a prompt for obsfuscation rather than explication with wordless arts), but "what's it about?" makes sense to me for poetry.

And, okay, I accept that it's okay for the cards and dice poem to have a title; I guess I only pretended to forget the title. The layering is nice: that a gambler waking up at cock's crow to his losses is like a doomsday imagined as a methodical catastrophe--first this, then that, with all the shalls suggesting royal edict, until everything is upturned.

And what's the feeling this poem brings about? Dread? the inevitability of ruin?

~Apollinaire

I think I am drawn to works of art that are distinctly "about" something, and something that cannot be simply named. So in answer to Apollinaire's question I think the cards and dice poem is about the qualities and relationships between mystery and explanation, play and seriousness, diversion and doom. The language-games and image-games are like a ouija board or sacrifice or i ching (like the dice!) an oblique or sidling or bizarrely methodical way toward understanding.

rsg2, I really must get a recording of that Shostakovich setting! And yes, I do think metaphor is a cousin of riddle.

The "Triad" by Adelaide Crapsey evokes Dickinson, who has many poems that illustrate rsg2's point about metaphor/riddle: "It sifts from Leaden Sieves" and in the same poem "It Ruffles Wrists of Posts" --deploying the form of the riddle, or one of its forms (another is the possessive, "I sift from leaden sieves-- who am I?).

The Billie Holiday song occurs to me, too. (The lyric could be a paraphrase of Barnabe Googe's 16th century poem "Of Money!") I'll paste here my attempt to defend the poem to his son, in a thread below, where Helzzapoppin dismisses it as strained, hackneyed, etc:

It has to do with the overtness of the artificiality, a kind of self-mocking tone or rhetoric not so different from Shakespeare's alliteration in Sonnet 71, "No longer mourn for me when I am dead/ Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell/ Give warning to the world that I am fled/ From this vile world . . . " To my ear, the corny or heavy or "hacky artifice" of "surly sullen" helps convey that the self-pity or emotional blackmail is somewhat playful, a deliberately obvious or amusing pose or mood: "Forget me when I'm dead and buried, go have fun." Wallace Stevens is often funny this way, that little poem about the rooster "Chieftain Iffucan in caftan/ Of tan wth henna hackles, halt!" (Or something like that, quoting from memory.)

"Wag" may be less strained than it sounds-- it's what Falstaff repeatedly calls Prince Hal in Henry IV Part One-- he even (odd coincidence?) asks Hal, "I Prythee, sweet wag, shall there be Gallowes standing in England, when thou art king?"

So-- this won't make a convert of you I imagine, but I hope makes you respect what the poem does a little more-- for me it's more a complicated, interesting performance rather than a lesson: a performance of mingled harshness and concern, coldness and dread-- a parental having-it-both-ways by means of playful rhetoric, somewhat the way sonnets have it both ways (sincere lover and flirtatious wit) by means of similar language-pranks.

Robert, the Shostakovich piece is his Opus 62/140, "Six Romances on Verses by Walter Raleigh, Robert Burns, and William Shakespeare"; the Raleigh setting is the first. You can download one version on Itunes; Amazon has three, but I can't tell you which is the best.

Roger

Thanks, got it!

I was struck by that too. When I was a teenager I thought Keats was pretty good, but I basically thought the human race had attained the peak of poetic possibility with John Lennon singing "I am the walrus goo goo g'joob." I didn't really know what it meant or what it was about, but more importantly, my parents didn't know either, and that made it unutterably cool. Somehow that "beyond my bourgeois parents' comprehension" factor doesn't seem so important anymore.

I still want mystery, though. I like "On the Cards and Dice," but I do think it loses some of its power once the riddle has been reduced to a rooster. It's tempting to interpret the poem as mocking a 17th Century version of "deep-image" poetry, but for me those images ("Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn") are too strong to be mere mockery.

Jennifer Clarvoe, thanks for quoting Linda Gregerson on how "the answer to the riddle is death" and for adding, "But I wonder if that isn't at heart, the answer to most of our riddles (in life as in reading) -- where are you taking me? where am I going"? In other threads, David Thorburn and rsg2 also helpfully pointed up the relation of riddle to metaphor, and Stephen Greenblatt has provided some very useful and provocative facts.

I first heard "Three things there be" read aloud by a brilliant friend in a comic performance -- "the wagg my pritty knave [raised eyebrows] betokeneth THEE!" [eyes popping, finger pointing]. ("Betokeneth" -- obviously, my friend was reading from yet another version.) I've never been able to read this poem since without hearing it in the tone of an exasperated parent lecturing a teenager -- the kind of exaggerated tone Robert describes in another post about one way to read Shakespeare's "No longer mourn for me when I am dead". Thus I've always heard this poem as Robert suggests above that it might be heard, as a mingling of "harshness and concern ... a parental having-it-both-ways by means of playful rhetoric...." It's been illuminating to see how variously the poem can be read. I can't wait to hear what Shostakovich did with it!

As for "On the Cards and Dice," I think if I hadn't known the title I would be able to focus better on the mystery. I agree with Robert that the last line is particularly compelling. Knowing the title, though, as I read the poem the first thing that sprang to mind was "The Rape of the Lock," a connection rsg2 makes in this thread as well. I wouldn't say myself, as rsg2 does, that the Pope passage seems labored compared to the Raleigh poem; with the Pope in mind, the Raleigh seems to me something dashed off by a very witty and sometimes irreverent man. The irreverence I hear in this poem evoked for me the irreverence of Raleigh's "The Lie," a poem that also reminds one of the harshness that Robert identified in "Three things there be". I'll quote some relevant stanzas of "The Lie" below, from the version in the W.H. Auden/Norman Holmes Pearson anthology, _Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets: Marlowe to Marvell_. (Clearly the spelling and punctuation in this version differ in places from modern standards.)

Many thanks again to Robert and all those who posted. I think many of these Fray discussions would be useful not only to readers of poetry but to teachers as well.

from Walter Raleigh's "The Lie"

Goe soule the bodies guest
upon a thankless arrant,
Fear not to touch the best
the truth shall be thy warrant:
Goe since I needs must die,
and give the world the lie.

Say to the Court it glowes,
and shines like rotten wood,
Say to the Church it showes
whats good, and doth no good.
If Church and Court reply,
then give them both the lie.

Tell Potentates they live
acting by others action,
Not loved unlesse they give,
not strong but by affection.
If Potentates reply,
give Potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition,
that mannage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
their practise only hate:
And if they once reply,
then give them all the lie ...

Tell zeale it wants devotion
tell love it is but lust,
Tell time it meets but motion,
tell flesh it is but dust.
And wish them not replie
for thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth,
tell honour how it alters.
Tell beauty how she blasteth
tell favour how it falters
And as they shall reply,
give every one the lie.

Tell wit how much it wrangles
in tickle points of nycenesse,
Tell wisedome she entangles
her selfe in over wisenesse.
And when they doe reply
straight give them both the lie.

Tell Phisicke of her boldnes,
tell skill it is prevention:
Tell charity of coldnes,
tell law it is contention,
And as they doe reply
so give them still the lie.

Tell fortune of her blindnesse,
tell nature of decay,
Tell friendship of unkindnesse,
tell justice of delay.
And if they will reply,
then give them all the lie.

Tell Arts they have no soundnesse,
but vary by esteeming,
Tell schooles they want profoundnes
and stand so much on seeming.
If Arts and schooles reply,
give arts and schooles the lie.

Tell faith it fled the Citie,
tell how the country erreth,
Tell manhood shakes off pittie,
tell vertue least preferred.
And if they doe reply,
spare not to give the lie....