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 pretty, witty poet

I read Graham Greene’s Lord Rochester’s Monkey, his biography of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, arguably the greatest poet, satirist and wit of the age of the Restoration, when I was seventeen. From this I moved to the poetry, much of it gloriously obscene and utterly delightful. So, I liked Wilmot before Johnny Depp, taking on the part of the great libertine, announced at the beginning of The Libertine, a 2004 movie based on his life, that I would not like him, meaning I would not like the poet as a man as opposed to not liking the actor as the poet. Phew!

Seventeenth century England, particularly the period following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, is my area of particular expertise. The disadvantage in this is that I tend to find historical dramas set in the time immensely irritating, usually because of the cavalier treatment of basic facts (I know, I know; it’s such a bore!). I absolutely hated To Kill a King, set in the Civil War. I did not, therefore, have high expectations of The Libertine, which I saw recently on DVD for the first time.

Surprise: I liked it: I liked Johnny Depp as Wilmot, a first class performance, one of tremendous depth; I liked the feel of the movie, I liked its depiction of Restoration London and Restoration manners. I liked it so much that I was even able to overlook the howling liberties (a syphilitic Wilmot swaying opinion in the Lords during the Exclusion debate!) The script, adapted by Stephen Jeffreys from his play of the same name, was raw and uncompromising, as was the camera work, showing an unremittingly grimy London, corruption and filth in the streets, corruption and filth in the most elevated social circles.

I had fun looking at the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, most of them carping and negative, most of them mired in incomprehension. Directed by Laurence Dunmore, the film felt like the play from which it emerged, the emphasis being on words and language than action for the sake of action, the first point on which the critics seem to have stumbled. The second was probably their incomprehension over Depp’s performance, not at all what one expects from a Caribbean pirate! But he was so good as Rochester, obnoxious, self-destructive and unremittingly cynical, the perfect mirror of an imperfect age.

He was Rochester as I imagine him, a complex character, loveable and yet not easy to love, angelically satanic, a troubled genius before people knew what a troubled genius was; a Marquis De Sade with intelligence. His life was his art and his art his life. I see him showing signs of existential nausea, a disease of the spirit that really only became fashionable in the last century.

Were I a spirit free, to chose for my own share
What sort of flesh and blood I pleas’d to wear,
I’d be a dog, a monkey or a bear,
Or any thing but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.

Wilmot, if you had seen Depp in your shade you would, I feel sure, have been beguiled and amused. You might even – I hope this is not a step too far – have begun to like yourself.

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.

Eminent Australian

How many of you have a county, I wonder, bearing your family name? Well, I do – Fitzgerald County in the north-west corner of New South Wales. Honestly, it’s true! Actually, the county was specifically named in honour of Robert D. Fitzgerald, one of Australia’s most eminent Victorians, a surveyor by profession who established a dynasty of surveyors, as well as being a poet, a botanist and an ornithologist of some note, one who corresponded with Charles Darwin and published Australian Orchids, a classic in the field.

I mention this because in a recent email I alluded to his grandson, Robert D. Fitzgerald III OBE AM, a distant cousin of mother’s, one who made a significant contribution to the development of Australian poetry. She only ever met him once, when she and my grandparents went out to Australia in the 1960s to attend the wedding of his daughter Phyllida, though his expansive personality made a big impact on her, something she remembered years after. Sadly, I was never able to meet him as he died the year after I was born. Now, I think, is the time for me to say a little more about the Australian Fitzgeralds.

Robert D Fitzgerald, the patriarch, was born in Tralee, County Kerry in Ireland in 1830, emigrating to Australia in the mid-1850s after completing his education in what was later to become University College, Cork. As a surveyor he rose rapidly in the profession, though much of his energy, and a good bit of his free time, was devoted to watching birds and cultivating orchids at his home in Hunters Hill, a suburb of Sydney. His published work on orchids was widely acclaimed in the scientific community.

His son and grandson carried forward his name and his profession, though Robert D Fitzgerald III was to establish a reputation principally as a poet and man of letters. In A History of Australian Literature H. M. Green says of him;

The work of Robert David FitzGerald blows like a fresh wind across today, exhaling a courage and confident aspiration, a sense of wonder and mystery that are strange in a world which is bored and afraid and sorry for itself, and a poetry in which this attitude was intensified under the shadow of the early work of T S Eliot. Fitzgerald represents in fact a life and an interest in life that wars and depression have dammed back after the upwelling of the nineties; that upwelling had found its most characteristic expression in the ballad revival in Britain and the dominions, but FitzGerald's poems have none of the qualities of the ballad, Australian or other, except vigour and an adventurous spirit

He began publishing his poetry when he was still at Sydney Grammar school, writing under the nom de plume of Cruma-boo for the Sydnesian, the college magazine. It was the beginning of a lifetime’s dedication. For his poetic achievements he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1951, later becoming a member of the Order of Australia (AM), the most distinguished of a number of other awards and honours. Though by now he was a grand old man of Australian letters he started out as a rebel, whose early associations had all been with the literary avant-garde, his poems published in a literary magazine called Vision. There is a wonderful pen portrait of him from the 1920s;

Impatience is his keynote, an impatience with flesh and bone, boisterously thumping his fist on the marble-topped tables of Mockbells [coffee shop], or the linoleum covering of a bar, while he insisted that Vision found a new school, the pre-Kiplingites, escape from the modern mathematics of verse, from the intellectual cottonwooling of emotion. Huge, lean, gaunt Fitz, with his bright dark eyes and tousled hair, striding down Pitt Street. I can see him now a theodolite tossed carelessly over one shoulder, roaring suddenly at sight of a friend, and swinging around, theodolite and all, so that had he been of ordinary height, he'd have brained at least a dozen passers-by; Fitz bellowing in the Angel or some other pub, or trying to fold his long legs under a restaurant table.

R. D., along with Kenneth Slessor, introduced some important modernist themes into Australian poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, helping to give it a new vibrancy. I particularly like the dualism he perceives in humanity, torn between everyday reality, the mundane facts of existence, and transcendent truths, something he referred to as the Greater Apollo.

His early poetry, including the Greater Apollo series, was published in literary magazines and anthologies, though it wasn’t until the 1950s that it was gathered in a more complete book form, a collection called This Nights Orbit. Amongst other things the latter includes Fifth Day, a partial reflection on the trail of Warren Hastings.

It’s a pleasure to be linked to such a man, however distant the link, such a comfort to know that if my family vanish from the face of the earth we will leave a trace of our name in a county in New South Wales, no better place, I feel sure. :-)

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.

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?

The Revenge for Love

Now here is a scholarly scoop to die for! Daisy Hay, a Cambridge graduate, has discovered a manuscript, part of a memoir by Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelly’s step-sister, while researching for a book on Mary, Percy, her husband, and Lord Byron. In this, Claire, looking back from old age, condemns both Byron and Shelly as “monsters of lying, cruelty and treachery.” She accuses both poets of ruining lives in pursuit of “free love” and “evil passions.”

This document, which Hay found tucked away in the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection, one of the most important Shelly-related archives in the world, is being hailed by historians as a major discovery. The memoir was know to exist but was assumed to have been lost. It’s important because it gives a quite different interpretation of Claire’s attitude towards the poets, a quite different attitude towards Byron in particular.

She had every reason to be bitter. Love may have been ‘free’ for Byron but it carried a price for Claire. It’s true enough that it was she who set out to seduce the famous poet, who became infatuated with her temporarily in 1816. But he soon tired of her, treating her with callous disregard thereafter. They had a child, Allegra. But after the relationship ended Byron even refused to allow Claire access to her daughter, openly questioning if the ‘brat’ was his. Having no regard for Claire he clearly had less regard for the ‘brat’, sending her off to a convent, where she died aged five.

Claire’s anger at the egoism, selfishness and moral baseness surrounding the whole Byron milieu is well captured in her blazing manuscript;

Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England…become monsters. …what evil passion free love assured, what tenderness it dissolves; how it abused affections that should be the solace and balm of life into a destroying scourge…the worshipers of free love not only preyed upon one another but also on themselves turning their existence into a perfect hell.

My, how the sparks just leap off the page! It’s as well to remember, though, not just the past history of Claire and Byron, but that this three-page memoir was written by an old lady in her seventies who had converted to Catholicism. Distance in attitude, distance in morality and distance of judgement have all come to play. Even so, the rawness of her grief, of her anguish, has clearly not been soothed by the balm of time.

The extracts I have read in the Sunday press are at their angriest in the depiction of Byron, whom she describes as “a human tyger [sic] slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women.” Shelly is condemned rather in the abstract, almost if his guilt is one of mere association with the monster. Anyway, the full fragment is set to be published in Young Romantics, Hay’s forthcoming book.

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.

A Thing of Beauty

I long to believe in immortality…If I am destined to be happy with you here-how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality-I wish to live with you forever.
John Keats to Fanny Brawne, July 1820


A thing of beauty is a joy forever. It is indeed, and Jane Campion’s new movie Bright Star, about the tragic and moving love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, is a thing of beauty. I liked The Piano, the film for which Campion is best known, but this is better; this is truly special.

There is a wonderful succinctness to it all, sharp imagery and a delightful economy in words and scenes, beautiful without being overly lavish, highlighting the growing love between Fanny, played by Abbie Cornish, and Keats, played by Ben Whishaw; highlighting, perhaps, the nature of love itself. Both of the leads are super, oh but Wishaw is John Keats, John Keats as I imagine him, pale, thin, intense, fey; hopelessly, hopelessly romantic.

The action begins in 1818 in the village of Hampstead (it was once!), where Fanny and Keats are living next door to each other, and proceeds over the next three years until shortly before the poet’s death from tuberculosis in 1821. To begin with Fanny has little interest in either Keats or poetry, taking pride, rather, in her own skills as a dress-maker and designer, coming across as rather shallow and vacuous. But bit by bit they fall in love, intense, deep…and hopeless.

Campion describes her movie, which draws on Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats, as “a ballad, a sort of story poem.” And that’s really how it proceeds; the story is the poem. There are some passages and lines from Keats poetry, though this is really subsidiary to the interplay between the two characters. Here the exploration of emotions and moods takes first place. Some of the imagery, the cinematography, is just so starkly beautiful that it’s almost impossible for me to put into words. Let me just say that the boundaries between life and art seem to dissolve altogether

Cornish and Whishaw show with skill and conviction how the two characters become entwined in each other. There is passion, yes, but no consummation; in the end there is only consumption, the disease that carried Keats away in Rome. Fanny learns of his death from his friend Charles Brown, played by Paul Schneider, a scene intercut with his coffin being carried in front of the Spanish Steps. Fanny breaks down; I broke down, with lavish waterworks, which continued through to the closing credits, over which Whishaw reads Ode to a Nightingale, and reads it beautifully. This is a movie to savour.

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.

Loving Catullus

I love the poems of Catullus, I love the passion they contain…and the anger. He was a man who knew how to express feelings in verse; oh, how he could express himself. Here are one or two of my favourites, each in a different mood. Please be warned: he does not pull punches!

Let’s Live and Love: to Lesbia

Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love,
and all the words of the old, and so moral,
may they be worth less than nothing to us!
Suns may set, and suns may rise again:
but when our brief light has set,
night is one long everlasting sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred,
and, when we’ve counted up the many thousands,
confuse them so as not to know them all,
so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,
by knowing that there were so many kisses.

Invitation: to Fabullus

You’ll dine well, in a few days, with me,
if the gods are kind to you, my dear Fabullus,
and if you bring lots of good food with you,
and don’t come without a pretty girl
and wine and wit and all your laughter.
I say you’ll dine well, and charmingly,
if you bring all that: since your Catullus’s
purse alas is full of cobwebs.
But accept endearments in return for the wine
or whatever’s sweeter and finer:
since I’ll give you a perfume my girl
was given by the Loves and Cupids,
and when you’ve smelt it, you’ll ask the gods
to make you, Fabullus, all nose.

A Rebuke: to Aurelius and Furius

I’ll fuck you and bugger you,
Aurelius the pathic, and sodomite Furius,
who thought you knew me from my verses,
since they’re erotic, not modest enough.
It suits the poet himself to be dutifully chaste,
his verses not necessarily so at all:
which, in short then, have wit and good taste
even if they’re erotic, not modest enough,
and as for that can incite to lust,
I don’t speak to boys, but to hairy ones
who can’t move their stiff loins.
You, who read all these thousand kisses,
you think I’m less of a man?
I’ll fuck you, and I’ll bugger you.

Bawdy Balladeers!

From his visit to Italy in 1378 Chaucer brought back copies of Boccaccio's two great poems, Filostrato and Tesida, which he subsequently translated and paraphrased. Looking over the whole body of Chaucer's work it is possible to see just how profound Boccaccio's influence was. The themes used in Tesida appear in Anelida and Arcite, the Parlement of Foules, Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale. Filostrato also provides material for Troilus. The structure of the Canterbury Tales itself would seem to indicate that Boccaccio’s own Decameron cycle was also known to Chaucer. And the one is just as bawdy as the other!

The Divine Sappho

Sappho of Lesbos is one of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets and one of the few female artists whose voice has been carried from the ancient world.

I have not had one word from her

Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to me, "This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."
I said, "Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
"all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck
"myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them
"while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song...


Please

Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.
Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech
Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.

Fragment 52

The silver moon is set;
The Pleiades are gone;
Half the long night is spent, and yet
I lie alone.

Fragment 96

She honoured you like a goddess
And delighted in your choral dance.
Now she is pre-eminent among the ladies of Lydia
As the rose-rayed moon after the sinking of the Sun
Surpasses all the stars and spreads it's light upon the sea
And the flowers of the fields
To beautify the spreading dew, freshen roses
Soft chervil and the flowering melilot .....

Restless, she remembers gentle Atthis -
Perhaps her subtle judgement is burdened
By your [ fate ] .....

For us, it is not easy to approach
Goddesses in the beauty of their form
But you ....

Of Arses and Red-Hot Irons: the Miller's Tale

I recently touched the wonderfully hedonistic and ribald poetry of the superb John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. But the bawdy tradition in English poetry predates him by many centuries, indeed it does. I’m thinking now of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales, that stupendous compilation that shows so many paths into the Medieval mind. Have you read it? No, well you should; you will almost certainly be surprised by what you find. I first read it in Middle-English, though there are good modern translations.

Let me tell you about the Miller, one of the Pilgrims who accompanies Chaucer’s mixed company to the shrine of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury . To while away the time during the journey from London each is encouraged to tell a tale. The Knight comes first, with a high story of adventure and romance. The Miller immediately takes it upon himself to bring matters down to earth somewhat with the story of a student by the name of Nicholas who persuades Alison, the much younger wife of his elderly carpenter landlord, to go to bed with him. So far, so bad!

But Alison has another admirer, Absolon, the parish clerk. While Nicholas and Alison are in bed together he appears at the darkened window of her house, asking for a kiss. Refusing to go away, Alison finally agrees to his request, though not in the way he imagines, oh no. Remember, it’s dark:

The window she unbarred, and that in haste.

Have done, said she, come on, and do it fast,

Before we're seen by any neighbour's eye.

This Absalom did wipe his mouth all dry;

Dark was the night as pitch, aye dark as coal,

And through the window she put out her hole.

And Absalom no better felt nor worse,

But with his mouth he kissed her naked arse

Right greedily, before he knew of this.

Aback he leapt- it seemed somehow amiss,

For well he knew a woman has no beard;

He'd felt a thing all rough and longish haired,

And said, Oh fie, alas! What did I do?

Teehee! she laughed, and clapped the, window to;

And Absalom went forth a sorry pace.

So, off he goes, poor man, full of fury and hot for revenge. He borrows a red hot iron from the blacksmith, returning to where Alison lives. Once again, he asks for a kiss. This time Nicholas, who has risen for a piss, decides to join in the fun.

This Nicholas had risen for a piss,

And thought that it would carry on the jape

To have his arse kissed by this jack-a-nape.

And so he opened window hastily,

And put his arse out thereat, quietly,

Over the buttocks, showing the whole bum;

And thereto said this clerk, this Absalom,

O speak, sweet bird, I know not where thou art.

This Nicholas just then let fly a fart

As loud as it had been a thunder-clap,

And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap;

But he was ready with his iron hot

And Nicholas right in the arse he got.

Off went the skin a hand's-breadth broad, about,

The coulter burned his bottom so, throughout,

That for the pain he thought that he should die.

And like one mad he started in to cry,

Help! Water! Water! For God's dear heart!

Alison’s husband, who is at home, though unaware what is going on, awakes; the neighbourhood awakes. All have a great laugh at the carpenter’s expense! :-))

Signor Dildo-You Ladies all of Merry England

I'm in a really super mood today, so I feel like upseting all the prigs of the world with a liittle discourse on John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester! He was a poet and a libertine, who lived and worked in my period of my special interest, late Stuart England. His poetry is of a particularly bawdy nature, about as far removed from Puritanism as it is possible to imagine.

More than that, he represents, it might be said, the Restoration's antithesis to the heavy and joyless hand that that had ruled England for over ten years. Wilmot was an atheist and a hedonist-No glory's vain which does from pleasure spring. His poetry is a celebration of pleasure in its many forms, especially sexual pleasure. He did not just practice debauchery, he advocated debauchery!

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.

During the Parliamentary session of 1673 objections were raised to the proposed marriage of James, Duke of York, brother of the King and heir to the throne, to Mary of Modena, an Italian Catholic Princess. An address was presented to King Charles on 3 November, foreseeing the dangerous consequences of marriage to a Catholic, and urging him to put a stop to any planned wedding '...to the unspeakable Joy and Comfort of all Your loyal Subjects." Wilmot's response was Signior Dildo (You ladies all of merry England), a mock address anticipating the 'solid' advantages of a Catholic marriage, namely the wholesale importation of Italian dildos, to the unspeakable joy and comfort of all the ladies of England!

You ladies all of merry England
Who have been to kiss the Duchess's hand,
Pray, did you not lately observe in the show
A noble Italian called Signior Dildo?...
A rabble of pricks who were welcomed before,
Now finding the porter denied them the door,
Maliciously waited his coming below
And inhumanly fell on Signior Dildo...

And so on and so forth! :-))