Maurice Bowra, New Bats in Old Belfries

Additions and corrections

Entries deriving from the TLS feature and competition are shown like this
(references to The Waste Land are mostly excluded: see p. 50, note §).
Thanks to Alan Black, Eileen Cottis, Frances Dann, John Fuller, John and Patsy Paine, and Phil Rees.

Two previously censored poems about Patrick Leigh Fermor and a newly discovered poem about Paul Betjeman are available here.

Page Line For Read / add
x 6 [delete footnote cue and footnote, inserting missing title:] The Wounded Gigolo
  8 [insert missing title:] On the Coast of Terra Fermoor
  4 up [insert new line after this one:] The Holy Child            161
  2 up 161 165
  1 up 165 169
xi 5–4 up both Berlin and Sparrow died work was abandoned
xiii 6 the relevant poems have been omitted, or two relevant poems have been omitted, and
  9 change. change. [See now https://bit.ly/2Ef0ekU.]
xix 9 up the 1920s 1920
8 up 1972 1971
xxxi 15 up those poems and stanzas omitted two poems omitted, as is one name,
xxxv 20 up eighteenth century eighteenth-century
21 1 [lower title to standard position]
note §,
7–8		 [save line by taking back ‘interpretation’ and ‘King (1859–85).’]
29 note 2, 2 c.1898 1898
49 4 up [add new note 1 at end of line:] Lord (George) Curzon, believing ‘beano’ to be Italian for ‘festivity’, used to pronounce the word ‘bayáhno’.
50 note 1, 2 1671. 1671; quoted by Eliot in ‘East Coker’.
51 10 [add new note 2a at end of line:] ‘I come from Alabama / With my banjo on my knee.’ ‘Oh, Susanna’ (1848), by Stephen Foster.
13 [add new note 2b at end of line:] ‘ “Oh! is it weed, or fish or floating hair – / A tress of golden hair, / A drownèd maiden’s hair / Above the nets at sea?” ’ Charles Kingsley, ‘The Sands of Dee’ (1848).
53 note 6 [add at end of existing note:] ‘Fed up and far from home’ is a song by John F. Barth published in 1941.
note 7 [replace existing note with the following:] ‘That’s how sailors love’. Song from the 1931 German musical comedy Bomben auf Monte Carlo (lyrics by Robert Gilbert).
54 7 Miles Miles
note 3, 3 225. 225. Miles: ‘soldier’.
note 4 [replace existing note with the following:] This passage echoes ‘I want to go back, I want to go back / I want to go back to the farm [...] with a milk pail on my arm’ (Irving Berlin, ‘I want to go back to Michigan’, 1914), but its sentiments are those of Berlin’s 1918 hit ‘Oh! How I hate to get up in the morning!’
55 13 [add new note 3a at end of line:] ‘At the first turning of the second stair’. ibid.
57 note 4 Ezekiel 37: 3, From the story of the valley of dead bones in Ezekiel 37;
58 note 4 [replace existing note with the following:] It seems likely that Bowra derived the title and subtitle of his satires from these lines, which were no doubt inspired by ‘Birds in the high Hall-garden / When twilight was falling, / Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, / They were crying and calling’ from Tennyson’s ‘Maud: A Monodrama’, in Maud, and Other Poems (1855).
note 5, lines 2–3 Dundee [...] c.1880–1900. From the 1888 song ‘Where did you get that hat?’, published under the name of James Rolmaz in London, but in the USA attributed to Joseph J. Sullivan, whose performances made the song famous.
59 13 [add new note 3a at end of line:] ‘I always hold in having it, if you fancy it, / If you fancy it, that’s understood. [...] Cos a little of what you fancy does you good.’ Music-hall song (1912) by George Arthurs and Fred W. Leigh, made famous by Marie Lloyd’s performance.
5 up [add new note 5a at end of line:] ‘Showing a star in the East’ was a euphemism for showing an unfastened fly-button, to avert which peril signs warning ‘Please adjust your dress before leaving’ used to adorn public conveniences.
note 3 ‘And may ‘Twilight and evening bell, / And after that the dark! /And may
60 note 1 [replace existing note with the following:] ‘I went to a house, / And I asked for a piece of bread; / A lady came out, says, / “The baker is dead.” ’ A verse from one of the many versions of ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’, the original of which was written by Harry McClintock while a hobo in the southern United States in the late 1890s. Based on the Salvation Army song ‘Revive Us Again’, it was adopted as a propaganda weapon by the radical IWW (Industrial Workers of the World – the ‘Wobblies’) and featured in the 1933 Al Jolson film Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.
6 [add new note 2 at end of line:] Perhaps a reference to ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’ Eliot, ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’ (1917).
86 5 [add new note 2 after ‘poetry’:] John Sparrow’s Sense and Poetry: Essays on the Place of Meaning in Contemporary Verse was published in 1934.
90 last [add new note 4 at end of line:] Cf. Murray’s famous line, ‘The Apple-tree, the singing and the gold’, his translation of Euripides, Hippolytus, 722–3.
92 7 up [add new note 4a at end of line:] Cf. ‘Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies / A lass unparalleled.’ Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra V ii.
94 6 up — Ludo
  note 4 [replace existing note with the following:] Ludovic Kennedy (1919–2009), journalist, author and television presenter.
117 note 3, 3 [add at end of note:] Artifex: Sketches and Ideas (1936) was a book of essays by the poet, novelist and biographer Richard Aldington (1892–1962), whose romantic involvements were complex.
152 14 [add new note 1 at end of line:] Maureen Dufferin (1907–98), wife of Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.
note § [substitute:] Information received after publication of the first edition of these verses suggests that this apparently incomplete poem is by (Beryl) Nancy Blakenham (1908–94; she called it ‘Diamond Weekend’), not Bowra, and that the subjects are not, as we suggested, Kenneth and Jane Clark (13/2 and 13/3) but Ann O'Neill, later Fleming (149/1), and her first husband Shane O'Neill, 3rd Baron O'Neill (1907–44). We leave the spurious poem in place for the enjoyment of readers.
154 6 Horizon’s Horizon’s
7 second–rater second-rater
Index [several additions and corrections are required in the index as a result of the amendments listed above: a corrected index will shortly be added to the online addenda]