TeaWithTater.com

Knew you back when:

We met in San Marcos
We had breakfast
once on the square

You, a full woman who
wrote some fine songs

Me, full of pretendin’
Tryin’ to right myself

From time to time
I’d see you at Gruene Hall
We’d drink a cold beer and
we’d talk and I’d wonder
about what if
But I was too busy
waltzin’ and romancin’,
it turns out, the wrong girl

I knew somethin’
was missin’ in my life
But I did not know what
I tried to write some songs
But while the words would come
the melodies would not
There was something missin’
Something just not quite right

One day, of a sudden,
it all finally changed
I discovered I was
forcin’ my words,
forcin’ myself,
to be something
they could not be,
that I could never be

So I did what
had to be done;
I packed my gear
and my fears and
I walked away
from the wrong girl,
from everything,
and moved out West

Surrounded by
big skies and solitude,
all day long, I read and I wrote
and I wrote and I read
I kept comin’ back to
one thing you used to say;
‘No matter what,
own your own self’

Well, first I had
to know myself
And in time I came to
In the cool, star strewn nights
Then I had to learn to accept
myself and all my faults
And in time I did, here
in the clear mountain air

So, I own my own self,
now after all these many years
and all these many miles
I’m still out West
Where I belong
I miss the high Hill Country rain,
the barbeque, the live music,
and two-steppin’ in Gruene

But I am still dancin’
It’s just that now
I dance with my
words and regrets
I just hope that
remains enough
How else, in the long run,
does a poet’s heart break

© copyright 2013 Cowboy Coleridge mac tag All rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Lluvia de Estrellas” by Terri Hendrix.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

On this day in 1786, Scotland’s beloved poet and bard Robert Burns, perhaps best remembered for romantic classics like “Auld Lang Syne” and “A Red, Red Rose,” stood before his church a third and final time as public penance for “antenuptial fornication” with Jean Armour.

Pregnant with fraternal twins she would name after herself and Robert, Armour had been moved to stay with relatives in another town when her parents learned of her condition.  Her father, hoping there was still time to snag a suitor with better prospects than the penniless Burns, destroyed a document the poet had given Armour promising marriage.  But it was all for naught when the local church caught wind of the scandal.  Armour officially acknowledged her pregnancy and named Burns as the father.

Burns declared all this a “desertion” on her part, and stood before the church the required three times to receive a certificate declaring him a single man.  Burns may have had motives beyond feeling jilted; letters he sent friends that summer suggested he had already found a new paramour and may have impregnated her too.  And, there was at least one other illegitimate child to provide for: “Dear bought Bess,” as Burns called her, a daughter born to a servant girl shortly before he had taken up with Armour.  When the publication of his first book seemed likely, Burns, fearing the Armours would make a claim on his future earnings, turned his estate over to his brother to ensure Bess would be taken care of.

Burns left for Edinburgh and found success – with both poetry and women – in the months that followed the birth of the twins.  He returned to town less than a year from the day he had been declared a single man, and Armour’s parents, impressed by his new wealth, received him with open arms.  So did their daughter Jean, and she became pregnant with a second set of twins.

By and by; despite claims that he would never again extend her the offer, despite calling her “ungrateful” and “foolish,” despite comparing her to a “farthing taper” next to the “meridian sun” of another woman he was busy wooing – Burns married Armour.  She bore his philandering with patience and apparent good cheer, just as she continued to bear him children – the ninth was born on the day of Robert Burns’ funeral in 1796.  “Our Robbie should have had twa [two] wives,” she is said to have exclaimed upon taking in one of his illegitimate daughters to raise.

For all his affairs, Burns was also dealt with rather leniently by the church, which had the custom of making men in his circumstances sit on a “creepie-chair,” or a low stool reserved for public humiliation.  When Burns reported for penance on this day 225 years ago, he was allowed to stand in his usual pew.

The Right Honourable The Lord Tennyson FRS
1869 Carbon print by Julia Margaret Cameron

Today is the birthday of Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (Somersby, Lincolnshire 6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892 Lurgashall, Sussex); Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign and one of the most popular British poets.  Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as “Break, Break, Break”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, “Tears, Idle Tears”, and “Crossing the Bar”.  Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses.  In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and student at Trinity College, Cambridge, after he died of a stroke at the age of 22.  Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, “Ulysses”, and “Tithonus”.  A number of phrases from Tennyson’s work have become common phrases in the English language, including; “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (In Memoriam A.H.H.), “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”, “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”, “My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure”, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, “Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers”, and “The old order changeth, yielding place to new”.

Verse