Monthly Archives: November 2024

Week 631: Dream Song 18: A Strut for Roethke, by John Berryman

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It is hard to think of a poet more different from last week’s Richard Wilbur than his contemporary John Berryman (see also weeks 120 and 342): Wilbur formal, fastidious, controlled sometimes to the point of decorousness, Berryman wild, constantly verging on the uncontrolled, a manic driver on the cliff roads of language. Yet apparently they got on well enough together, and I can only say that at their best both of them work for me: taken in isolation Berryman’s fractured syntax, his stylistic affectations can be irritating and yet somehow, against all the odds, the words cohere into an effective whole.

This is another of Berryman’s elegies for poet friends, who seem to have predeceased him in considerable numbers, such that in another poem he wonders why he alone ‘still breasts the wronging tide’. This one is for Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), a fine poet who drew his inspiration mainly, but not exclusively, from the natural world, as reflected in the last two lines.

Dream Song 18: A Strut for Roethke

Westward, hit a low note, for a roarer lost
across the Sound but north from Bremerton,
hit a way down note.
And never cadenza again of flowers, or cost.
Him who could really do that cleared his throat
& staggered on.

The bluebells, pool-shallows, saluted his over-needs,
While the clouds growled, heh-he, & snapped, & crashed.

No stunt he’ll ever unflinch once more will fail
(O lucky fellow, eh Bones?) – drifted off upstairs,
downstairs, somewheres.
No more daily, trying to hit the head on the nail:
thirstless: without a think in his head:
back from wherever, with it said.

Hit a high long note, for a lover found
needing a lower into friendlier ground
to bug among worms no more
around um jungles where ah blurt ‘What for?’
Weeds, too, he favoured as most men     don’t favour men.
The Garden Master’s gone.

John Berryman

Week 630: For the Student Strikers, by Richard Wilbur

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This poem by the American poet Richard Wilbur (see also weeks 29, 144, 264, 355 and 417) was written in 1969, at the height of the protests by American students against the US government’s military involvement in Vietnam. It was composed at the request of a radical student newspaper, who felt that Wilbur was sympathetic to their cause, as indeed he was, but its humane and reasonable tone was not quite what they were expecting, and at first it found its way to their wastepaper-basket. But then, and some credit to them, they had second thoughts and retrieved it.

There may be different causes now, but in an age where there is an increasing tendency to shut down opposing points of view, or simply shut the ears to them, the poem’s message seems as valid as ever, even if the probability of anyone taking notice of it may be even smaller than ever.

For The Student Strikers

Go talk with those who are rumoured to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind towards force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening
Changes of heart.

They are your houses, the people are not unlike you,
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman’s son.

Richard Wilbur

Week 629: Harp Song of the Dane Women, by Rudyard Kipling

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This poem, showing Kipling’s verse at its most skilful and eloquent, was a favourite of the Argentinan writer Jorge Luis Borges. Of course, when you think about it the answer to the question the poem poses is obvious and rather practical. I suspect it would be quite wrong to think of the Vikings as having any mystical or sentimental attachment to the sea, or to picture them as mooning about declaiming some Old Norse equivalent of Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’. They had a proper fear of the sea-goddess Rán and her nets that she used to capture and drown mortals who dared to trespass on her kingdom. There is a poignant elegy, the Sonatorrek, attributed to the great 10th century skald Egill Skallagrimsson, in which he laments the death of his son Böðvar, who drowned at sea during a storm:

Mjök hefr Rán rykst um mik;
emk ofsnauðr at ástvinum.
Sleit marr bönd mínnar áttar,
snaran þátt af sjalfum mér.
 
Mightily Ran has wrought on me
who reft me of friend, of scion.
Bare now is his place at board
Since the sea took my son.                    (my translation)

No, it was simply that the sea offered the speediest route to rich plunder with a bit of rape and monk-bashing on the side, and that the voyaging, though hard and dangerous work, at least offered a break from trying to scratch a living from the Scandinavian soil. Be that as it may, the poem is certainly capable of evoking a shiver. That ‘ten-times-fingering weed’ gets me every time.

Harp Song of the Dane Women

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken–

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Rudyard Kipling

Week 628: No Second Troy, by W.B.Yeats

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This poem, which appeared in the 1910 collection ‘The Green Helmet’, was written in memory of Maud Gonne, for whom Yeats had a lifelong passion, after she had finally rejected the poet’s fourth proposal of marriage in favour of another man, John MacBride. It may be viewed as a companion piece to ‘The Folly Of Being Comforted’ (see week 49). Here, though, there is more of a bitterness, an acknowledgment of the destructive power that beauty can wield, encapsulated in the last line’s allusion to Helen of Troy.

Like many of Yeats’s poems, it seems to me a triumph of style over substance. I think it is possible to look askance at the way Yeats constantly bigs up his friends, and to question his contempt for the ‘little streets’ of democracy, but at the same time fully grant him the power of his supple, incisive language. I think of Auden’s line in his fine elegy for Yeats where he comments how Time: ‘Pardons him for writing well’. Clearly he thought Yeats needed to be pardoned, and you can see what he meant: Yeats adulated the patrician class, romanticised the peasant class, and had little time for the mass of humanity between; also he had a dubious fascination with the occult. Yet it is clear that Time does, and will continue to, pardon Yeats for writing well.

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B.Yeats

Week 627: A Refugee, by E.J.Scovell

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This week another poem by the to my mind much neglected E.J.Scovell (see also weeks 91, 503 and 540). It is easy to understand why Joy’s voice is not more celebrated. Her poems are unfashionably formal. They strike no poses, relying instead on quietly precise observation. Her life she kept private, offering no hook for the journalists of poetry to hang a story on. Well, if her work is only to be kept alive by the love of a few admirers scattered through time, so be it.

Quite a number of her poems reflect her experience on the Home Front during the Second World War. This is one of them, a poem of unostentatious compassion perfectly rounded off by the image of bereft love in the last two lines.

A Refugee

My heart had learnt the habit of earthly life
In an accustomed place.
My voice had learnt the habit of maternal
Sharpness and gentleness.

My thighs had learnt the speech of love. The house
And market tasks that show
So small a flower, rooting in hands and feet
Had matted my flesh through.

My husband died in the mercy of Russian snow.
My child died in the train,
In three days in the weeping cattle truck
From Breslau to Berlin.

I was not taught the song of extremity,
The dancing of duress.
All that I know of infinite is the intensity
Of finite tenderness.

All that I have of goodness is through love –
Their love my only worth.
My rigid arms set in the shape of their love
Have no more use on earth.

E.J.Scovell