Poetry Night???
Mack and Ruth Kelly write: Poetry Night should continue, lets get away from the "we are old and headed from the grave" and find happy stuff--some funny limericks and amore perhaps.
Clint's undelivered spiel, 10 Sept., 2006:
Like everyone else's, my teachers, junior high in particular, made me memorize poetry, most of which has faded away. But one that still runs through my mind goes,
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
When what to his wondering eyes should appear
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny.....
No, No. Wrong poem. I better start over.
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
I don't need to read it all; I'm sure most of you could recite it. There's the lines
But cheerily still, and said, "I pray thee then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men."
And the punch lines:
And shoed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!
I think my teachers misrepresented the chap's name, Anglicizing it and making it 'Ben Adams.' I think it should really be 'aDHEM' since the 'A' of Arabic names is the article 'the' and as such shouldn't be stressed. And I don't think 'Ben' is Arabic but should be 'bin' meaning 'son of.' But James Leigh Hunt himself probably was thinking 'Ben Adams,' as in the English name. And he may have been poking fun at the whole Arabic schema.
There's a ton of stuff on the internet about this poem. One site has 30 pages of comments people have made about it, most telling how they or their parents were able to recite it thanks to its popularity in schools. Most comments were by Brits but many Americans are included.
And a lot about Leigh Hunt. He was a Brit, might today be termed an 'investigative reporter' and quite a fellow. He and his brother published a couple of journals or newspapers. And he spent two years in prison in the UK, being convicted of some crime growing from his having reported, in print, some misdoing of a member of Parliament. The fact that it was true didn't excuse him.
But I've found nothing that speaks to the question of why Hunt cast his poem in an Arabic setting. Did he think that 'loving his fellow men' was a particularly Islamic trait? A number of on-line writers point out that this is scarcely the image most hold of the Moslems these days.
One other tidbit: The young Issac Asimov once got himself into trouble: When asked why Ben Adhem's name led all the rest, he waved his hand wildly and answered, 'alphabetical order.'