Poem by R.S. Thomas

Thomas was a great poet of the second half of the 20th Century. I mean one of the great poets. Welsh (thus the Anglo-spellings), an Anglican priest, often he wrote as if to reconcile his despair at the silence of God with his faith. He wrote about, and universalized, marriage, Welsh nationalism and what he referred to as "the machine," by which I think he meant a coldly engineered future that is slowly crowding out the influence of the human soul. Some of his greatest work was done in and about old age. This one, ostensibly about traveling, I came upon while traveling myself.

Somewhere

Something to bring back to show

you have been there: a lock of God's

hair, stolen from him while he was

asleep; a photograph of the garden

of the spirit. As has been said,

the point of travelling is not

to arrive, but to return home

laden with pollen you shall work up

into the honey the mind feeds on.

What are our lives but harbours

we are continually setting out

from, airports at which we touch

down and remain in too briefly

to recognise what it is they remind

us of? And always in one

another we seek the proof

of experiences it would be worthy dying for.

Surely there is a shirt of fire

this one wore, that is hung up now

like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?

Surely these husbands and wives

have dipped their marriages in a fast

spring? Surely there exists somewhere,

as the justification for our looking for it,

the one light that can cast such shadows.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Song at the Year's Turning"

2 Short, Ancient Irish Poems

These two poems from 9th Century Ireland (or around the 9th Century) reflect two sides of the complex Irish soul. And weather. One is from springtime and shows the happy side, the optimistic side, the tone of life I associate with my Grandfather, the side that loves God and nature. The other is the bleaker side and while a little obscure, is clearly full of foreboding. I associate it with me.

My understanding is that the first was found scribbled in the margin of a book an unknown 9th Century monk was transcribing by hand. At some point, he was distracted by the birdsongs and the peacefulness of his situation, wrote about it in verse, and was pretty damn happy with how it came out. On the rare occasions when I think I have written something good, a good phrase or sentence or paragraph, I admit to thinking to myself, "good the stuff I write in my cushy seat."

 

Notes of a Monastic Scribe

A hedge before me, one behind,

a blackbird sings from that,

above my small book many-lined

I apprehend his chat.

Up trees, in costumes buff,

mild accurate cuckoos bleat,

Lord love me, good the stuff

I write in a shady seat.

The other poem, I have run across several versions of it, is about winter and it makes me shiver. "Ice-frost time" and all that. Here are three translations, in order of how I like them. The middle one is the most recent version, and is a translation from the Irish by the great 20th Century Irish writer Flann O'Brien, author of, among many things, the novels At Swim Two Birds and The Pour Mouth; both are very funny. The third version below is probably the most poetically accomplished of these translations, but I like but I like #1 best, probably because it's the first I read.

#1

From the Fenian Cycle

A tale I have for you. Ox murmurs,

Winter roars, summer is gone.

Wind high cold, sun low.

Cry is attacking, sea resounding.

Very red raying has concealed form.

Voice of geese has become usual,

Cold has caught the wings of birds,

Ice-frost time; wretched, very wretched.

                                  A tale I have for you.

#2

Flan O'Brien's Version

Here's a song --

stags give tongue

winter snows

summer goes.

High cold blow

sun is low

brief is day

seas give spray.

Fern clumps redden

shapes are hidden

wild geese raise

wonted cries.

Cold now girds

wings of birds

icy time --

that's my rime.

#3

Winter's Approach

List my lay; oxen roar,

Winter chides, Summer's o'er,

Sinks the sun, cold winds rise

Moans assail, ocean cries.

Ferns flush red, change hides all,

Clanging now, gray geese call,

Wild wings cringe, cold with rime,

Drear, most drear, ice-frost time.

Why I read John Clare, Part 2

I also read John Clare for the empathy and compassion. I love in this poem -- I've seen it titled both "Gipsies" and "The Gypsy Camp" -- the perspective dipping inside and out of minds and bodies, how the boy "thinks upon the fire" and the gypsy "tucks his hands up." How the dog "feels the heat too strong" and how his pathetic condition (and the early image of the forest that "lies alone") adds so much impact to the poem's conclusion about the people it describes. Clare wrote this while a resident of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he died in 1864, in May.

Engraving, Northampton General Lunatic Asylum; thanks, Wik

The Gypsy Camp

The snow falls deep; the forest lies alone;

The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,

Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;

The gypsy knocks his hands and tucks them up.

And seeks his squalid camp, half hidden in snow,

Beneath the oak which breaks away the wind,

And bushes close in snow-like hovel warm;

There tainted mutton wastes upon the coals,

And the half-wasted dog squats close and rubs,

Then feels the heat too strong, and goes aloof;

He watches well, but none a bit can spare,

And vainly waits the morsel thrown away.

Tis thus they live -- a picture to the place,

A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race

Why I Read John Clare, Part 1

I read John Clare because I like the sounds, like those of the closing line of this poem from the early-mid-1800s. I also like "the lodging snows..." Fodder is cattle feed; here, brawl means a loud noise or clamor.

Clare, 1820s, image borrowed from the John Clare Society 

The Foddering Boy 

The foddering boy along the crumping snows

With straw-band-belted legs and folded arm

Hastens and on the blast that keenly blows

Oft turns for breath and beats his fingers warm

And shakes the lodging snows from off his clothes,

Buttoning his doublet closer from the storm

And slouching his brown beaver o'er his nose.

Then faces it again -- and seeks the stack

Within its circling fence -- where hungry lows

Expecting cattle making many a track

About the snows -- impatient for the sound

When in huge fork-fulls trailing at his back

He litters the sweet hay about the ground

And brawls to call the staring cattle back.

David Stacton Aphorism

American author David Stacton is, was -- he's done writing now -- known for peppering his narratives with aphorisms. Often, they clearly are coming from the narrator, or are clearly in a character's voice. Other times I find it hard to tell and so figure it's just Stacton making a point he wished to make, some piece of wisdom, some certainty he felt he possessed and that he needed to share. I think it probably felt good to write it and eventually see it in print, even if very few people read it, as very few people read Stacton. He wrote challenging literary novels on wildly varying topics, as well as, under the pseudonym Bud Clifton, pulpy novels with great pulp titles like D is for Delinquent and The Murder Specialist, and one with a rather fine homoerotic cover, Muscle Boy, seen below. As for the following lines from a Stacton novel, they don't quite represent a typical Stacton aphorism, but what struck me was how true the thing about what is not audible seemed, and then how differently I felt about the rest of it. What remains audible for me are not the proper things, but things I said that I wish I hadn't, trivial things for sure, but they refuse to leave me be. What remains audible as well is what I wish I'd said, even if I never meant to say it. 

What is audible is what we said before, trivial things, the proper things for people to say while they wait. What is not audible is what we meant to say, and would so much like to say.

                                                                                             -David Stacton

                                                                                              Old Acquaintance

                                                                                              1964

Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins Protesting the Cutting Down of Trees

As with Mew, I share with Hopkins a visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known.

Binsley Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled:

    Of a fresh and following folded rank

                    Not spared, not one

                    That dandled a sandalled

              Shadow that swam or sank

On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do

           When we delve or hew --

Hack and rack the growing green!

            Since country is so tender

To touch, her being so slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

  

                      To mend her we end her,

           When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

    Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

            Strokes of havok unselve

                    The sweet especial scene

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.

Poem by Charlotte Mew Protesting the Cutting Down of Trees

This is from The Rambling Sailor, published the year my mom was born, 1929. Mew had killed herself by drinking Lysol the year before. I share with her her visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known. Although I can't say it makes me suicidal. Other things maybe. (See also Hopkins response to cut-down trees: Binsey Poplars.)

The Trees Are Down 

    -and he cried with a loud voice:

    Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees --

                                                            (Revelation.)

They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.

For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,

The crash of trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,

With the "Whoops" and the "Whoas," the loud common talk, and the loud common laughs 

     of  the men, above it all.

I remember one evening of a long past Spring

Turning in at a gate, getting out of the cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.

I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,

But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

The week's work here is as good as done. There is just one bough

On roped bole, in the fine grey rain,

Green and high

And lonely against the sky.

(Down now!--)

And but for that

If an old dead rat

Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.

It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;

These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem;

When the men with the "Whoops" and the "Whoas" have carted the whole of the whispering 

       loveliness away

Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.

It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;

Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,

In the March wind, the May breeze,

In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.

There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;

They must have heard the sparrows flying,

And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying --

But I, all day, I heard the angels crying

"Hurt not the trees."

Passage from a Chekhov Short Story

Blog formatting won't allow traditional paragraphs, at least not in this case. I like that my grandfather was alive when this story first was published. Melville was still alive. So was Whitman. Crane, as well. Synge. What a world my grandfather was born into... Varvara and Sophia are sisters-in-law. Mashenka is an unlucky woman in a story they've been told by a traveler. Overall, this is a devastating story, but this moment, even though the women are considering killing their father-in-law, Dyudya, and Sophia's husband, Alyoshka, the hunchback, is one of hope, of a dark and bitter hopefulness, as perhaps only Chekhov could find. I find the scene easy to visualize, and that a simple statement like "It's time to sleep" resonates with meanings. I like that Chekhov doesn't describe the sky when Sophia gazes at it "steadily" (in this translation by Robert Payne).

From "The Peasant Women" 

From somewhere behind the church came the mournful song of three voices: two tenors and one bass. And again it was impossible to distinguish the words.

"They're nightbirds all right," Varvara said, laughing.

And she began to whisper about her nightly escapades with the priest's son, and what he said to her, and what his friends were like, and how she carried on with the officials and merchants who came to the house. The mournful songs awoke in Sophia a longing for life and freedom, and she began to laugh. For her, it was all sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and she envied Varvara and was sorry that she too had not been a sinner when she was young and beautiful.

From the church cemetery came the twelve strokes of the watchman's rattle, announcing midnight.

"It's time to sleep," Sophia said, getting up. "Dyudya will catch us if we don't!"

They both went quietly into the courtyard.

"I went away and never heard what happened to Masenka afterwards, " Varvara said, making her bed beneath the window.

"He said she died in prison. She poisoned her husband."

Varvara lay beside Sophia, deep in thought, and then she said softly, "I could kill Alyoshka and never regret it."

"God help you, you are talking nonsense!"

When Sophia was dropping asleep, Varvara pressed close to her and whispered in her ear: "Let's kill Dyudya and Alysoshka!"

Sophia shuddered and said nothing, but her eyes were open wide and for a long time she gazed steadily at the sky.

"People might find out," she murmured.

"No, they would never find out. Dyudya is old, and it's time for him to die, and they say they'd say Alyoshka had croaked from drinking!"

"It's terrible.... God would strike us dead...."

"I don't care."

Neither of them slept; they went on thinking in silence.

"It's cold," Sophia said, and she was beginning to shiver all over. "It will soon be light. Are you sleeping?"

"No...Don't listen to me, my dear," Varvara whispered. "I get so mad with those damned swine, and sometimes I don't know what I am saying. Go to sleep -- the dawn will be coming up soon.... Are you asleep?"

                                                                                    -Anton Chekhov, 1891

Line from James Thomson, aka B.V.

 Our poor vast petty life is one dark maze of dreams

                             -Last line of the poem, "Insomnia," 1882