Freedom in love

I love poetry as I love words. Poetry is language at its purest, the rise and fall of words, of assonance and of dissonance, the simple music that lies at the heart of expression. I can't write poetry, it's a talent beyond me, but I simply can't imagine life without it, I can't imagine not appreciating the beauty of the music of the spheres. To have no understanding or appreciation of poetry is, so far as I am concerned, to have lead in the soul.

I can still recite the poems I learned in early school, still be thrilled by those wonderful verses. There are so many poets I admire, both ancient and modern. There is no point in listing them all but Catullus, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Lovelace, Rochester Dryden, Pope, Keats, Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Yeats, Rilke, Rupert Brooke, T. S Elliot, Stevie Smith and Philip Larkin all come high, though none higher than the sublime John Donne.

But it was Richard Lovelace that I was thinking of recently, the seventeenth century Cavalier poet, specifically of To Althea From Prison, one of the most moving poems ever written, a great tribute to love and to loyalty, the love of a man for a woman, the loyalty of a subject to his king. I find it impossible to say just how much these verses move me, particularly the last. If I have freedom in my love and in my soul am free, angels alone that sore above enjoy such liberty. Is there any finer sentiment than that? God bless your memory, Richard Lovelace, and God bless the memory of King Charles the Martyr.

When love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates;
And my divine ALTHEA brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lye tangled in her haire,
And fetterd to her eye,
The birds, that wanton in the aire,
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying THAMES,
Our carelesse heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty griefe in wine we steepe,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes, that tipple in the deepe,
Know no such libertie.

When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetnes, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King.
When I shall voyce aloud, how good
He is, how great should be,
Inlarged winds, that curle the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls doe not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Mindes innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedome in my love,
And in my soule am free,
Angels alone that sore above
Enjoy such liberty.

Satanic verses

Having reviewed The Libertine I’m in something of a Rochester mood at the moment, rereading a few of my favourite poems. If you don’t know his work I’m guessing that you will be familiar with one brief rhyme notwithstanding;

God bless our good and gracious King,
Whose promise none relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

The good and gracious King is, of course, Charles II, with whom he had a rocky relationship. Rochester is such an intriguing man, the best example of the Restoration rake, very much in the fashion set by the monarch himself, and the most trenchant critic of the debauchery of the age, allowing some to suggest that he might even have been a secret puritan!

He was nothing of the kind: he was an atheist - only giving way to belief when his brief life drew to a close - and a cynic, bitingly critical of any form of hypocrisy; and there was no time in history more clothed in hypocrisy and double-dealing than Restoration England. Rochester’s Satyr against Mankind compares with anything Jonathan Swift ever wrote on the subject.

As for Charles the above verse is mild compared with some of the merciless lampooning to which he was subjected by the poet;

In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best-bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get renown
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.

Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor Prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.
'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

It’s easy to criticise Charles for his sexual excesses but it’s also as well to praise him for his indulgence. For these verses, which would certainly have meant death in the age of Henry VIII, or, indeed, in the France of Louis XIV, the king’s cousin and contemporary, Wilmot was exiled from court for a brief seven week period. A good, gracious and tolerant King!

For me Rochester is the true laureate of the age, far more than John Dryden, providing so much insight to the great highs and the even greater lows. He was never a puritan but he was most certainly a rebel, the kind of person who never rests easily alongside cant and dissimulation.

After singing Psalm the 12th
He laid his book upon the shelf.
And looked much simply like himself;
With eyes turned up, as white as ghost,
He cried, ‘Ah Lard, ah Lard of Hosts!
I am a rascal, that thou know’st.

A modern Faustus

When it comes to genre fiction there is no writer who can match Edgar Allan Poe. It’s he who deserves the credit for creating the detective story and in developing new forms of science fiction; he who gave a new starkness and vitality to the Gothic form, free of the exotic excesses of a previous generation of writers, the kind off thing parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Add to this his poetry, with themes of loss, separation, death and madness then we really do have a unique and disturbing talent.

It was through the poetry that I first came to Poe, verses that unsettled and scared me; poems like The Raven and The Haunted Palace, the last verse of which is firmly settled in my memory;

And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms, that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh- but smile no more.

What a strange, haunted, compelling man Poe was; what a brave and tragic life he lived. His was the best of times…and the worst of times. Born in America not long after the beginning of the nineteenth century he was to do so much to shape the literary imagination of the new nation, to shape the imagination of the world beyond.

But there was something of a devil’s bargain here; his success, always hard won, was accompanied by the sense of loss, the absolute loss that he touches on in The Raven, of death and nevermore. He lost his mother Eliza at an early age to tuberculosis (TB), the great killer of the age; he lost Virginia Clemm, his cousin and child bride, to the same disease. The latter was particularly bad, for Virginia’s death was prolonged: she rallied in false hope at some points, only to sink still further at others, a spiral ever downwards.

I watched – if you’ve not already guessed – Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, a documentary broadcast on BBC4, in which Denise Mina, a writer of crime fiction, had a look at Poe’s life through his relationship with significant female figures.

I have mixed feelings about arguments that try to detect elements of personal biography in an author’s work, but in Poe’s case a psychological explanation seems wholly convincing, particularly with regard the tragic details of the slow decline of Virginia. Her five year struggle impacted directly on Poe, causing his own steady descent into the alcoholism that was to kill him in the end. It also impacted on his work, his poetry, most particularly, and some of his fiction.

Take the disease itself, the nature of the disease, which wastes victims in a kind of hinterland between life and death. Apparently those suffering from TB can sink into a kind of catatonic torpor, characterised by shallow breathing, so shallow, so difficult to detect, that it can be mistaken for death itself. Hence the fear of being buried alive that haunted contemporary imagination, a fear that Poe makes use of in such stories as The Premature Burial, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado and Berenice. It’s really no surprise that this is the beginning of the age of the vampire.

Then there is the fear of death, the fear of ultimate and irredeemable separation, more real in Poe’s age than any other because the old Christian certainties were under question by science, even in the time before Darwin. Hence the desperate and hopeless appeal of the scholar to the Raven, an appeal for reassurance, rejected in one awful word;

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

The narrator in The Raven, incidentally, is clearly looking for consolation for the loss of Lenore in magic, not God, in his books of forgotten lore. Is it consolation, I begin to wonder, or is it something else; a message from beyond, or even resurrection? A messenger comes alright in the form of the black Raven, a devil bird destined to stay with him evermore. As for resurrection, in some kind of vampire or witch form, there is the story of Ligeia, who comes back to life in the body of another, or there is Morella, another voyager in the black arts, in volumes of forgotten and forbidden lore.

I’ve journeyed far from the themes of the BBC documentary, which was really about women as archetypes in the author’s life. Is there anything, anything more dreadful than an archetype? In the end it seems to me that Poe lived a half-life, somewhere between existence and non-existence, brilliant and sad at one and the same time. His own end in Baltimore, while still only forty years old, is as mysterious and macabre as anything in his fiction, a modern Faustus, laughing but smiling no more.

Death, be not proud

I learned tonight of the sudden death of Sean, the nineteen-year-old son of a fellow blogger. I posted the following message on his blog. I want to add it here also in memory of a beautiful Irish boy.

Brendano, dear, dear, Brendano. I’ve not been here for a few days. It was Ike Jakson who told me this terrible news. It frightens me because death does not belong to people like Sean, of my generation, even younger than me: death belongs to those who have lived life; death belongs to the old, not to us: we are immortal. But we are not.

There is nothing I can say that will comfort you, your wife and the rest of your family; indeed, it’s presumptuous of me to say anything at all, a stranger, a mere internet presence. But it’s in moments like this that each and every one of us, across generations, across nations and across all differences, feels solidarity at a simple human level. I can’t begin to understand your pain, I don’t want to understand it, but I feel so sad tonight, so sad for your tragic loss. All I can do is to offer some lines by my favourite poet;

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost over throw
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure - then, from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die.

With much love. Anastasia.

Rest content, Lady Lazarus

I bought the New Statesman on Friday, specifically to read Ted Hughes’ Last Letter, a previously unpublished poem on the suicide in 1963 of Sylvia Plath, his first wife and another poet of genius. It’s the final piece, the coda to Birthday Letters, the wonderful anthology that charts the course of his relationship with Sylvia, which demonstrates, if any demonstration was needed, that the course of true love never did run smooth.

I don’t often buy the New Statesman but when I do there are usually plenty left in the newsagent, even in the middle of the week. On Friday, only the day after publication, my copy was the last on the shelves, a sign, I take it, of the love people have of poetry and the fascination they have for the story of Ted and Sylvia. I score high on both counts. I’m moved by the poetry and touched by the tragedy: that Sylvia, full of talent and promise never to be realised, took her life when she was only thirty years old.

Hughes lived with the tragedy, haunted by it for the remainder of his life. There is no more certain evidence than Birthday Letters, published only a few months before his death. Struggling with his own torments, he had to cope with the dreadful feminist harridans, particularly strong in America, who held him personally responsible for Plath’s suicide, people who went so far as to chip his name off her grave.

Last Letter is a deeply personal statement. I’m really not at all surprised that it remained unpublished during his lifetime. It’s a story of a lost weekend, those crucial hours in which death was invited, banished and returned. In writing this I’m finding it difficult to reach out for the right words, to say just how moved I was. As Hughes took the story to its climax my tears began to blind me to the words;

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there the phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had already started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deeply into my ear: “Your wife is dead.”

It’s unforgettable; I’ll never forget this. Writing in the Observer Robert McCrum rightly said that Hughes has become the once and future king of the English literary imagination, that he is emerging as one of the towering literary figures of the past century, along with Eliot, Yeats, Auden and Larkin. Ann Duffy, the present Poet Laureate, a position once held by Hughes, says that Last Letter is a bit like looking into the sun as it is dying, that it seems to touch a deeper and darker place than any poem he’s ever written. Lady Lazarus can rest content

Forever England

Today is National Poetry Day in the UK. The New Statesman is even publishing a recently discovered poem by Ted Hughes to mark the occasion, a comment on the suicide of Sylvia Plath, his onetime wife. Drat: I'll have to buy the bally thing! Anyway, I suppose I should have held over my post on Philip Larkin until today. No, not really, because the things I have to say about poets and poetry are virtually inexhaustible!

I once had an exchange on Wikipedia in which I shocked a poetical purist by saying that I much preferred the poetry of Rupert Brooke, that golden boy of a golden age, to that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It’s not a technical thing. It’s easy to recognise that Owen and Sassoon are far more original and accomplished than Brooke when it comes to craft of poetry; I just love Brooke, love his words, love his gentle, naïve and simple rhythms; I love his patriotism as much as I am repelled by the pacifist mood ushered in by the work of the war poets.

George Orwell summoned up the period before the outbreak of the Great War thus;

From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breath forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kind of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and crème-de-menthe and soft-centred chocolates-an atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on the green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song.

There is for me one poem that evokes more than any other the taste of those ices and the lilt of that tune – The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, Brooke’s home thoughts from abroad;

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
'Du lieber Gott!'

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten's not verboten.

ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

Cambridge people sometimes smile, Rupert, when they hear these beautiful words and think of you in that corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

Going down the long slide

The Daily Telegraph in England has been serialising the letters of the poet Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, his muse, confidante, sounding-board and occasional lover, often the more deceived! It’s a fascinating insight into the creative process of this quintessentially English poet, the voice of the time, at once pessimistic and perceptive, always with a wonderful undercurrent of delightful irony.

His is the voice of an England in transition, unsure of itself, unsure exactly where it belongs. Yes, there is cynicism, sometimes even the echo of a grumpy old man of letters, but there is also much wry amusement, mischievous observations on the times and the transitions. Take Annus Mirabilis by way of example, a poem that always makes me smile;

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

He manages to be simple, funny and profound all at the same time, rather like John Betjeman, another poet and observer of English life that I hugely admire. Larkin, though, as a discovery was rather late for me (a poet divine in 2009!) It was the 2009 poetry season screened on BBC 2 that really opened me up to the melancholic beauty of his work, to one poem in particular which simply overwhelmed me, something I’ll come on to in a moment. Prior to this I really only knew him from This be the verse, a poem I memorised in my teens to recite to the other girls at school (I was overheard by the games mistress!), more for its shock value than anything else;

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Some do, of that I have not the least doubt; mine didn’t! Yes, there is pessimism here, and he does have a point, but it’s also jolly good fun. There are so many other poems by this most admirable, most English, of post war bards that I love and admire, poems I have read since watching the BBC series. But the one that was introduced to me then for the first time, the one that has remained in my head and my heart is the evocative High Windows. This is my poem, the poem that speaks to me, of present contentment and possible future regrets, of passing time, one that brings an awareness that youth truly is the stuff that will not endure;

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

No sex, please; I’m Milton

There is a lovely little storm in a literary teacup here at the moment, the sort of thing that could only happen in England. It concerns the ‘discovery’ of a poem by John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, in the University of Oxford’s Harding Collection, though how it ranks as a ‘discovery’ when it has already been published on a number of occasions since it first appeared in a miscellany of 1708 is just a little odd. What we have here, I think, is yet another bogus academic scoop!

Anyway, the poem called An Extempore Upon a Faggot (no, it did not mean that then!) proceeds in distinctly un-Miltonesque fashion;

Have you not in a Chimney seen
A Faggot which is moist and green
How coyly it receives the Heat
And at both ends do’s weep and sweat?
So fares it with a tender Maid
When first upon her Back she’s laid
But like dry Wood th’ experienced Dame
Cracks and rejoices in the Flame.

The original handwritten version of this bawdy ditty is signed Milton but, by Lucifer, this is not Milton! It’s not his style, rather a pity in a way, because it would do much to make the tiresome and ponderous old bore sound interesting! Dr Jennifer Batt, who stumbled upon this ‘discovery’, would appear to be just a touch – what’s the word? – oh, yes, batty;

To see the name of John Milton, the great religious and political polemicist, attached to such a bawdy epigram is extremely surprising to say the least. The poem is so out of tune with the rest of his work that if the attribution is correct it would prompt a major revision of our ideas about Milton.

I’m not being completely fair. Batty or not, she also says that it’s possible that it was penned by a jealous rival, anxious to bring scandal on the great seer of Cromwellian England. A possible candidate, she suggests, is Sir John Suckling, a Cavalier poet from the same era who was known to detest Milton for his puritanism and for his politics.

It has also been suggested that it night be the work of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, my favourite Restoration poet. The subject matter is certainly more the sort of thing that appealed to Wilmot, it’s just that this is a very inferior example of the kind of thing he did so much better. Besides, he was not nearly so coy;

Her father gave her dildos six;
Her mother made 'em up a score,
But she loves nought but living pricks
And swears by God she'll frig no more.

Rochester! thou should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee. :-)

Memories of A Huntress

The rippling grass without a flaw,
The rain that tear drops never saw,
Yet who is this that rides beside,
The pack that scurries from her stride.

For those who see the hunt today,
There will be no chorus in the fray,
No dreams are needed when running wild,
The harvest reaper offers no smile.

The sky that blew a welcome breeze,
And sings a lark of subtle praise,
Her shadow tall beneath the trees,
And leaves a mark cross seasons’ page.

The tolling defences of the garden,
With pleasure and sorrow caught between,
Thoughts of youth free of overgrowth hardened,
For age on this brow is by no man seen.

The trumpets sound the sigh of morning,
The hooves are clashing without warning,
The dirt is tumbled with hounds’ bark breaking,
The half filled glass holds claret shaking.

No cadence for a march asunder,
The world is rife with predictable wonder,
But only for the house proud gentleman and lady,
They say they know her, but that’s as maybe.

For who but the Huntress knows her prey,
When others are basking in their lurid attainment,
Theirs the twilight whilst hers is day,
When to vulgar envy they find enslavement.

They see her on six legs a-leaping,
Though they are far away for now,
There is a secret she is keeping,
But where and when they can’t know how.

Hers the catch and they the caught,
Defining themselves by all they’re not,
Lacking the means to hunt the hunter,
As whispers scream a song of blunder.


She cares not for their trifle praise,
Their insincerity shan’t e’er amaze,
They cannot hope to feign her glory,
For they are the bookends of her story.

Her Annette so white—their hearts torched black,
Their cowardice grows as distant slips her back,
Into a wilderness of warmth she cavorts so gently
Her harvest, the liturgy of plenty.

As those in her wake stand only in memory,
Her triumphs linger and augment,
Her fortune the privilege of the free,
No price too high for honour spent.

No hill to climb o’er Elysian bend,
That taunts the lessons long ago learnt,
Love cannot be wasted nor o’er enemies sent,
Crossed bridges are best departed burnt.

They are gone and she’s tall still,
Every hunter’s burden is their own kill,
To keep their fellow riders lost at bay,
In a place where children and fools down lay.

She is the Huntress of gold that’s shown,
When glory is granted all her own,
The pack lie sleeping—all others vanquished,
In the forests where the fox has languished.

They do not dare to run the race,
For they cannot gaze upon such a face,
The Huntress of victory,
That only the killed are blessed to see.

Ana Whose Eyes Are Burning

Thanks to Adam. :-)

Ana’s eyes are burning,
As they shine from beyond the black,
The hearts of men are churning,
As candles burn out all they lack.

They gaze out at the city,
They gaze on all who dare,
They have no place for pity,
And feign not unaware.

There is a bridge that bears much crying,
Like the weeping of a wisp,
A will undiluted and undying,
The burn that’s sharp and crisp.

The hedgerow is now wilting,
The trees will dance and sway,
The parallels are tilting,
And the ships are washed away.

Her melancholy moment’s answer,
Her days are never short,
The twilight angel’s dancer,
The devil’s lust for sport.

Her eyes are truly fire,
That melt a deep dark sea,
The ashes of desire,
Shall tumble far to thee.

Her tongue is but the softest sword,
Too sharp to hear the battle’s run,
When guilty of its own accord,
And thus shall never set this holy sun.

Oh eyes, what eyes that greet the child,
Born in sin and rendered wild,
Casting fragments of a page,
That struts its way cross gilded stage.

Ana’s eyes eternal,
And now they beckon all who seek,
The path from the infernal,
The road too clear for names to speak.

Ana is the fire—Ana is the rain,
Ana is the destiny that carves pleasure from pain.

The rain is washed by morning,
A dawn of deepest blue,
All that’s born of fire—is all in this world that’s true.

Anastasia

This poem was written by my friend Adam Garrie. What can I say other than I'm absolutely delighted. :-)

Anastasia


I heard a voice beside a stream,
An echo from a windswept dream,
Where fire and water filled the cup,
The daughter of Pan would soon drink up.


When mesmerised by memory and the refrain,
One cannot do two things the same,
If not because the weight of gold,
Is but a price yet un-foretold.


Everywhere the hand is lain,
Weaves a spell of love and pain,
Sorrow for fortune, joy for depletion,
Often the ends justify their own reason.

A heroine cross the paths of time,
The hallowed halls of men gone blind,
To the virtue in the fore,
When they've resigned to learn no more.


Oh now child, what means thee,
What price is paid for gallantry,
What noble flame could e'er conspire,
To make her half fulfilment and half desire.


The shepherdess whom outran the flock,
Pandora's treasure can n'er again be locked,
Abandon hope in all illusion,
When on this soil one imparts intrusion.


If the things that fill man's dreams,
Are more real than life, it seems,
The deceiver has become deceived,
And she shan't dare to feign relieved.


Not of this world of minds so empty,
A bridge of sighs o'er trolls aplenty,
The Promethean who cusps the pale of danger,
Great things aren't done from inside a manger.


Sophia runs no normal end,
When rivers of madness twist and bend,
To but be cursed is a kind of blessing.
For in this state the eyes are most confessing.


The noble claw is yet outstretched,
The Restored Stuart out of breath,
The Tory more royal than the King,
Could paint my woe in the hue of spring.


Only from darkness may leap joy,
Only in sorrow might dreams deploy,
Only in anger, lust or company polite,
May one do battle as the knight.


But oh what imps run wild today,
Perpetual children in man's fray,
Not to conquer not to be owned,
As a web of another spell is sown.


Not to battle, just to triumph,
Heaven is the shadow of regretted violence,
Hell is but a favoured hiding place,
And earth is where we show our face.


She is hallowed--she is flesh,
She is mercy too dear to be expressed,
She is the chariot in a garden blue,
Whose flower blossom perpetually lies in bloom.


Said a man: "Oh tell me traveller without name,
Has your destiny in one place remained,
Have you for wisdom, pity exchanged,
And if so, for what reason does one lack shame"?.


The boy-traveller just stood and soft replied,
There's no longer a need to live nor die,
And without knowing just quite why,
He said, "The world is seen in Anastasia's eyes".

Leander and Xerxes

I knew that Lord Byron, the poet, was mad, bad and dangerous to know, but the one thing I did not know was that he was also a champion swimmer! On 3 May 1810 he swam across the Hellespont, the three mile stretch of water that separates Europe from Asia. It was quite an achievement; for although the distance is not great, the currents are strong, with the icy waters of the Black Sea making their way into the Mediterranean.

It was a kind of heroic impulse, undertaken to prove the story of Leander and Hero! According to the Greek myth, Leander swam from Asia to Europe for a nightly liaison with Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite who lived in the tower in the settlement of Sestos. In the dark his way was guided by a lamp lit by his lover. Alas, summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Hero’s lamp was blown out in the storms of winter. Leander lost his way and drowned, while in her grief for the loss of love she threw herself to her death from the tower.

Byron not only emulated the feat of Leander but he also commemorated it in verse;

If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

If, when the wintry tempest roared,
He sped to Hero, nothing loath,
And thus of old thy current poured,
Fair Venus! how I pity both!

For me, degenerate modern wretch,
Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
And think I've done a feat today.

But since he crossed the rapid tide,
According to the doubtful story,
To woo -and -Lord knows what beside,
And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

'Twere hard to say who fared the best:
Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drowned, and I've the ague.

The event was repeated on the two hundredth anniversary by a group of enthusiasts, including Charles Gordon, the son of the present Lord Byron.

What history the Hellespont has witnessed, the passing of armies and fleets; the passing of emperors and of time. It was here that the army of the Persian Emperor Xerxes crossed in 480BC, on its way to invade Greece. In the account given by Herodotus the emperor is overcome by a sense of the tragic futility of life;

And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships, and all the shores and the plains of Abydus full of men, then Xerxes pronounced himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping. Artabanus his uncle therefore perceiving him [...] having observed that Xerxes wept, asked as follows: "O king, how far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man, thou art now shedding tears."

He said: "Yea, for after I had reckoned up, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a hundred years have gone by."

Leander and Xerxes, myth and man, are as one; time absorbs all.

The Golden Boy

While I can admire the skill, the intelligence and the sheer power of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the poets of the Great War, I have serious reservations when it comes to the influence they exerted.

Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth is perhaps among the greatest of the last century, expressing in simple words the gap between a noble ideal and the ugly reality of war. But it and others contributed to the pacifism of the 1930s, a movement that objectively aided the enemies of England, a movement that left her psychologically and practically unprepared for war, almost to the point of no recovery. For this reason, and for others, the poet of that generation that I admire the most is Rupert Brooke, that golden, beautiful boy, for the simple patriotism of poems like The Soldier, or the lyrical beauty of The Old Vicarage, Granchester, recalling a gentle England of long ago,

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
'Du lieber Gott!'

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten's not verboten.

ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

Remember

Remember is a poem by Christina Rosetti, a poem of consolation for those who have lost someone close to them. I read it at my grandmother’s funeral. I’m posting it here for a friend.

REMEMBER me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Finding the Ancient Mariner

A Shropshire writer has discovered the real Ancient Mariner in what must count as a first class piece of historical detective work! Robert Fowke’s findings are now published in The Real Ancient Mariner. The mariner himself, the man who inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write one of the most memorable poems in the English language, vivid in word and image, was Simon Hatley, born in Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

Coleridge is thought to have come up with the idea for the poem about a sailor who is becalmed at sea after shooting an albatross in 1797 while walking with William Wordsworth in the hills above his home in Nether Stowey, Somerset. Fowke says;

Scholars have always known what gave Coleridge the idea for the poem because Wordsworth said they had talked together about a book by Captain George Shevelocke during their walk, but nobody has ever taken up the story.

It seems such an incredible oversight, that over the years nobody has seen fit to take up this lead. But there it is, in A Voyage round the World by way of the Great South Sea written by Captain George Shevelocke and published in 1726. Sailing in the Speedwell around Cape Horn, Captain Shevelocke logs the following incident:

We observed that we had not had the sight of one fish of any kind since we came into the southward of the streights of le Maire, nor one sea-bird except a disconsolate black Albatross, who accompanied us several days, hovering above us as if he had lost himself, till Hatley, my second Captain, observing in one of his melancholy fits, that the bird which was always hovering near us, imagined, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen…he after some fruitless attempts at length shot the Albatross, not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it…

Fowke, tracing Hatley through some other contemporary sources has pieced together a remarkable picture. At one point he was lost at sea and rescued by a Spanish ship which took him to Lima in what is now Peru. There he was tortured, possibly by the Inquisition, the author surmised, so off he went to Madrid to check the records. He found reference to one Simon Hatley born in ‘Yudstock’ which he took to be Woodstock. Now back in England, he discovered an entry in the register for Simon Hatley born in the parish in 1685.

Interest in Haley goes beyond the albatross incident, for there are other remarkable incidents in his life. Amazingly, as Fowke has discovered, on another voyage he sailed with Alexander Selkirk, whose story inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, and with William Dampier, an adventurer and author whose work inspired Jonathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels. A fascinating life; a fascinating story.

Another Anna

I’m continuing to read Robert Conquest’s engrossing The Great Terror, an exhaustive account of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. It’s full of all sorts of tragic detail, about the death of hope and, in relation to the arts, what he calls the ‘holocaust of the spirit.’ I’ve long admired Anna Akhmatova, arguably the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, and that is really a singular accolade in a nation of great poets. She gave a voice to silence, if I can put it like that, to a time of silence. I can’t explain in words how much Requiem moves me. Just cast your eye over the words.

Requiem

Not under foreign skies protection
Or saving wings of alien birth –
I was then there – with whole my nation –
There, where my nation, alas! was.

1961


INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

In the awful days of the Yezhovschina I passed seventeen months in the outer waiting line of the prison visitors in Leningrad. Once, somebody ‘identified’ me there. Then a woman, standing behind me in the line, which, of course, never heard my name, waked up from the torpor, typical for us all there, and asked me, whispering into my ear (all spoke only in a whisper there):
“And can you describe this?”
And I answered:
“Yes, I can.”
Then the weak similarity of a smile glided over that, what had once been her face.

April 1, 1957; Leningrad


DEDICATION

The high crags decline before this woe,
The great river does not flow ahead,
But they’re strong – the locks of a jail, stone,
And behind them – the cells, dark and low,
And the deadly pine is spread.
For some one, somewhere, a fresh wind blows,
For some one, somewhere, wakes up a dawn –
We don’t know, we’re the same here always,
We just hear the key’s squalls, morose,
And the sentry’s heavy step alone;
Got up early, as for Mass by Easter,
Walked the empty capital along
To create the half-dead peoples’ throng.
The sun downed, the Neva got mister,
But our hope sang afar its song.
There’s a sentence… In a trice tears flow…
Now separated, cut from us,
As if they’d pulled out her heart and thrown
Or pushed down her on a street stone –
But she goes… Reels… Alone at once.
Where are now friends unwilling those,
Those friends of my two years, brute?
What they see in the Siberian snows,
In a circle of the moon, exposed?
To them I send my farewell salute.


PROLOGUE

In this time, just a dead could half-manage
A weak smile – with the peaceful state glad.
And, like some heavy, needless appendage,
Mid its prisons swung gray Leningrad.
And, when mad from the tortures’ succession,
Marched the army of those, who’d been doomed,
Sang the engines the last separation
With their whistles through smoking gloom,
And the deathly stars hanged our heads over
And our Russia writhed under the boots –
With the blood of the guiltless full-covered –
And the wheels on Black Maries’ black routes.

1

You were taken away at dawn’s mildness.
I convoyed you, as my dead-born child,
Children cried in the room’s half-grey darkness,
And the lamp by the icon lost light.
On your lips dwells the icon kiss’s cold
On your brow – the cold sweet … Don’t forget!
Like a wife of the rebel of old
On the Red Square, I’ll wail without end.

2

The quiet Don bears quiet flood,
The crescent enters in a hut.

He enters with a cap on head,
He sees a woman like a shade.

This woman’s absolutely ill,
This woman’s absolutely single.

Her man is dead, son – in a jail,
Oh, pray for me – a poor female!

3

No, ‘tis not I, ‘tis someone’s in a suffer –
I was ne’er able to endure such pain.
Let all, that was, be with a black cloth muffled,
And let the lanterns be got out ... and reign
just Night.

4

You should have seen, girl with some mocking manner,
Of all your friends the most beloved pet,
The whole Tsar Village’s a sinner, gayest ever –
What should be later to your years sent.
How, with a parcel, by The Crosses, here,
You stand in line with the ‘Three Hundredth’ brand
And, with your hot from bitterness a tear,
Burn through the ice of the New Year, dread.
The prison’s poplar’s bowing with its brow,
No sound’s heard – But how many, there,
The guiltless ones are loosing their lives now…

5

I’ve cried for seventeen long months,
I’ve called you for your home,
I fell at hangmen’ feet – not once,
My womb and hell you’re from.
All has been mixed up for all times,
And now I can’t define
Who is a beast or man, at last,
And when they’ll kill my son.
There’re left just flowers under dust,
The censer’s squall, the traces, cast
Into the empty mar…
And looks strait into my red eyes
And threads with death, that’s coming fast,
The immense blazing star.

6

The light weeks fly faster here,
What has happened I don’t know,
How, into your prison, stone,
Did white nights look, my son, dear?
How do they stare at you, else,
With their hot eye of a falcon,
Speak of the high cross, you hang on,
Of the slow coming death?

7

THE SENTENCE

The word, like a heavy stone,
Fell on my still living breast.
I was ready. I didn’t moan.
I will try to do my best.

I have much to do my own:
To forget this endless pain,
Force this soul to be stone,
Force this flesh to live again.

Just if not … The rustle of summer
Feasts behind my window sell.
Long before I’ve seen in slumber
This clear day and empty cell.

8

TO DEATH

You’ll come in any case – why not right now, therefore?
I wait for you – my strain is highest.
I have doused the light and left opened the door
For you, so simple and so wondrous.
Please, just take any sight, which you prefer to have:
Thrust in – in the gun shells’ disguises,
Or crawl in with a knife, as an experienced knave,
Or poison me with smoking typhus,
Or quote the fairy tale, grown in the mind of yours
And known to each man to sickness,
In which I’d see, at last, the blue of the hats’ tops,
And the house-manager, ‘still fearless’.
It’s all the same to me. The cold Yenisei lies
In the dense mist, the Northern Star – in brightness,
And a blue shine of the beloved eyes
Is covered by the last fear-darkness.

9

Already madness, with its wing,
Covers a half of my heart, restless,
Gives me the flaming wine to drink
And draws into the vale of blackness.

I understand that just to it
My victory has to be given,
Hearing the ravings of my fit,
Now fitting to the stranger’s living.

And nothing of my own past
It’ll let me take with self from here
(No matter in what pleas I thrust
Or how often they appear):

Not awful eyes of my dear son –
The endless suffering and patience –
Not that black day when thunder gunned,
Not that jail’s hour of visitation,

Not that sweet coolness of his hands,
Not that lime’s shade in agitation,
Not that light sound from distant lands –
Words of the final consolations.

10

CRUCIFIXION
Don’t weep for me, Mother,
seeing me in a grave.

I

The angels’ choir sang fame for the great hour,
And skies were melted in the fire’s rave.
He said to God, “Why did you left me, Father?”
And to his Mother, “Don’t weep o’er my grave…”

II

Magdalena writhed and sobbed in torments,
The best pupil turned into a stone,
But none dared – even for a moment –
To sight Mother, silent and alone.


EPILOGUE

I

I’ve known how, at once, shrink back the faces,
How fear peeps up from under the eyelids,
How suffering creates the scriptural pages
On the pale cheeks its cruel reigning midst,
How the shining raven or fair ringlet
At once is covered by the silver dust,
And a smile slackens on the lips, obedient,
And deathly fear in the dry snicker rustles.
And not just for myself I pray to Lord,
But for them all, who stood in that line, hardest,
In a summer heat and in a winter cold,
Under the wall, so red and so sightless.

II

Again a memorial hour is near,
I can now see you and feel you and hear:

And her, who’d been led to the air in a fit,
And her – who no more touches earth with her feet.

And her – having tossed with her beautiful head –
She says, “I come here as to my homestead.”

I wish all of them with their names to be called;
But how can I do that? I have not the roll.

The wide common cover I’ve wov’n for their lot –
>From many a word, that from them I have caught.

Those words I’ll remember as long as I live,
I’d not forget them in a new awe or grief.

And if will be stopped my long-suffering mouth –
Through which always shout our people’s a mass –

Let them pray for me, like for them I had prayed,
Before my remembrance day, quiet and sad.

And if once, whenever in my native land,
They’d think of the raising up my monument,

I give my permission for such good a feast,
But with one condition – they have to place it

Not near the sea, where I once have been born –
All my warm connections with it had been torn,

Not in the tsar’s garden near that tree-stump, blessed,
Where I am looked for by the doleful shade,

But here, where three hundred long hours I stood for
And where was not opened for me the hard door.

Since e’en in the blessed death, I shouldn’t forget
The deafening roar of Black Maries’ black band,

I shouldn’t forget how flapped that hateful door,
And wailed the old woman, like beast, it before.

And let from the bronze and unmoving eyelids,
Like some melting snow flow down the tears,

And let a jail dove coo in somewhat afar
And let the mute ships sail along the Neva.

On a Darkling Plain

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach is a splendid poem, full of deep, melancholic beauty. For him it was about the loss of faith and the decay of tradition. For me the meaning casts wider: it’s about a world with no point of reference whatsoever. The last verse in particular makes me so sad.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Sailing to Byzantium

I so love this poem, especially the final verse. I can just picture myself as a Lady of Byzantium. :-)



THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

November

NO sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
"No go" by land or ocean--
No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!

Sigh! :-)

Loving Poetry

I was surprised and delighted to discover that T. S Eliot had been voted that nation’s favourite poet in recent a BBC poll: surprised because his poetry can be quite demanding; delighted because he happens to be high on the list of my favourite poets. Indeed, he only just beat John Donne, who is my favourite. The other poets in the top ten included Benjamin Zephaniah, Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, John Betjeman, John Keats and Dylan Thomas. The poll itself comes in the wake of the BBC’s poetry season, of which I watched just about every instilment. It was thanks to this that I began to read and appreciate Larkin properly; thanks to this that I discovered High Windows in all of its simple and magical intensity.

I am, however, under no misaprehension about this kind of thing. Those who took part are most likely a small and very selective group of people, not really representative of the ‘nation’. Indeed, I seem to remember that If was selected not so long ago as the nation’s favourite poem, though Kipling does not even feature in the BBC poll. So, meaningless it may be, but I’m still delighted if more people, no matter how small a sample, appreciate the unsettling beauty of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.