Book World: ‘Guy Vernon,’ by John Townsend Trowbridge, a witty narrative poem

Now and then, poets are properly valued or their genius recognized only long after their deaths. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson are just the two most famous instances. Alas, their rough contemporary, John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916), isn’t likely to join them in the pantheon of the truly great. As poet and critic William Logan emphasizes, Trowbridge was simply a “literary odd-job man” who turned his hand “to whatever a hand can be turned to,” producing “gouts of poems, a string of plays, and at least forty novels.”

But sometimes, not often, but sometimes, the merely competent writer will inexplicably produce a masterpiece. Daniel Keyes, an otherwise undistinguished science-fiction author, will live forever because of one brilliant, heartbreaking short story: “Flowers for Algernon.” John William Burgon is immortal for a single line from his poem “Petra”: “A rose-red city half as old as time.” And now Trowbridge, the forgotten American hack, will be read again because of this rediscovered “novelette in verse,” one of the wittiest and most winning narrative poems since its great precursors, Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” and Byron’s “Don Juan.” “Guy Vernon” really is what its champion William Logan claims: a forgotten — if minor — masterpiece.

More from Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”

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(University of Minnesota Press) - “Guy Vernon: A Novelette in Verse” by John Townsend Trowbridge; edited by William Logan.

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The action largely takes place in the years just before the Civil War. A wealthy Louisiana plantation owner, on a trip North, woos and wins a beautiful young Brooklyn woman 20 years his junior. However, Guy Vernon and his new wife, Florinda, both carry secrets within their breasts. Guy’s is somehow associated with his foppish “high-yellow” servant Sam, usually called Saturn because of all his rings. Florinda’s secret is less mysterious: Before she married Vernon, she had been in love with a young writer, a journalist and would-be poet named Rob Lorne. Even in his name, as Logan points out, the poor man is “twice lorn.”

Early on in their marriage, the seemingly happy newlyweds visit Cuba:

  . . . that rich land of tropic fruit and tree,

Fair Island of the orange and banana,

   And endless summer in a sapphire sea!

   Land of the cocoa and mahogany,

Voluptuous, balmy nights and wondrous stars,

Of Creole beauties and the best cigars.

Note the lilting, light-verse rhythm and the air of the tongue-in-cheek. “Guy Vernon” is many things — a mystery story, a social satire, the history of a romantic triangle — but it is, above all, an example of sustained wit and wordplay. “The muse should be a trifle too familiar / Than pompous, adipose, and atrabiliar.”

In Cuba, Vernon grows strangely moody, then announces, without explanation, that he must hurry back to his plantation, accompanied only by Saturn. Florinda is immediately booked for a passage to New York, where she is to await his return. By now, she is doubly unhappy, not only because her husband has suddenly abandoned her but also because she has glimpsed the handsome Rob Lorne on the streets of Havana. Still, once alone on the high seas, she is at least safe from temptation. The first night out from port, the young beauty dines at the captain’s table: