An Ode, to an Ode.

Rather than “kissing and telling”, I will instead pass along a love letter stolen from literary antiquity. This “letter” is actually a poem penned from a father to his recently deceased daughter. The poem’s clarity comes both from its simpleness, and from its depths of sadness, at least to me. You may judge for yourself.

As you might have suspected, my Prose.com username derives from Huckleberry Finn. I have loved Tom and Huck’s adventures for as long as I can remember. I read them at first simply for the tales. It was years later that I realized the literary significance of, “Huck’s Adventures”. I was drawn more to Tom Sawyer as a boy, mainly because I did not like the name “Huckleberry”. Shallow, of me, huh? But Huck and Jim, as happens to readers, eventually stole my heart, and now also my name.

I have since read everything “Twain”. I feel I have come to know him through the years, from his lonesome “a-wandering” days to his aged, downright ornery end. I have to admit, when I read his hate spewed, complaint filled autobiography, I was disappointed... “here was my hero?“ He even willed that it not be released for one hundred years post mortum, so that he could freely lambast those who annoyed him. Not nice! This cantankerousness perplexed me for years, but when I found this poem, I felt I had a clue to his angst. The words have helped me to understand, and forgive, not “Mark Twain”, but the Samuel Clemens living the real life beneath the unruly hair, the mustache, and the cheap cigar.

I GOOGLE’d Mark Twain poetry a few years ago. It struck me odd that I had never seen any poems from him while his contemporaries all had published works. Poetry was the preferred writing style of his day. Google did display a handful of poems, this one amongst them. I could not remember having seen any of them before. Neither do I recall this poem from his longer works (I may be wrong). I think I would have remembered it, as I have a love of words that won’t let me forget them:

Warm summer sun,

Shine kindly here,

Warm southern wind,

Blow softly here.

Green sod above,

Lie light, lie light.

Good night, dear heart,

Good night, good night.

This poem, these letters of love, should not be so rare.