Monthly Archives: December 2024

Week 635: From ‘Sur la mort de Marie’, by Pierre Ronsard

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This celebrated sonnet by the French poet Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585; see also week 233) was first published in 1578. Officially it was written at the request of Henry III, who had just lost his mistress Marie de Clèves who died at the age of 21 in 1574, but its real inspiration was Ronsard’s loss of his own beloved Marie, a peasant woman called Marie Dupin who had also died young in 1573.

The poem turns on the one central trope of comparing the life of a beautiful woman to the life of a flower, and I suppose you could call Ronsard a poet of convention, classical in diction and sentiment, rather than a mould-breaker in the manner of, say, Villon. Yet few have ever done the conventional better than Ronsard at his best.

The translation that follows is my own.

From ‘Sur la mort de Marie’

Comme on voit sur la branche au mois de mai la rose
En sa belle jeunesse, en sa première fleur,
Rendre le ciel jaloux de sa vive couleur,
Quand l’Aube de ses pleurs au point du jour l’arrose:

La grâce dans sa feuille, et l’amour se repose,
Embaumant les jardins et les arbres d’odeur:
Mais battue ou de pluye ou d’excessive ardeur,
Languissante elle meurt feuille à feuille déclose.

Ainsi en ta première et jeune nouveauté,
Quand la terre et le ciel honoraient ta beauté,
La Parque t’a tuée, et cendre tu reposes.

Pour obsèques reçois mes larmes et mes pleurs,
Ce vase plein de lait, ce pannier plein de fleurs,
Afin que vif et mort ton corps ne soit que roses.

Pierre Ronsard

As you see upon the branch, in the month of May,
The rose, so young and fair in its first bloom,
That the sky weeps, with envy overcome,
Bedewing its fine tint at break of day:

Such grace and love reposing in that spray,
It scents the gardens round, the woodland glades,
Until rain-beaten or sun-scorched it fades
Petal by petal in a slow decay:

Just so in your first youth and novelty,
As earth and sky were honouring your beauty,
Fate cut you down; as ash you lie today..

Receive then these my tears for threnody,
This vase of milk, these blooms, that of your body
In life and death, may only roses stay.

Week 634: The Innumerable Christ, by Hugh MacDiarmid

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This week, a poem for Christmas, if not exactly a Christmassy poem. It turns on the idea of other worlds throughout space and time needing to be redeemed from sin by the coming of their own Christ figure. I must admit that this is not a part of Christian doctrine I have ever understood: it seems to me that people need to take responsibility for their own sins and I don’t see how someone else suffering a painful death ostensibly on their behalf helps anyone. Be that as it may, I think MacDiarmid makes an eerily effective poem of the idea, conjuring up vast cosmic distances and alien worlds that are nonetheless united by a common experience of suffering and sacrifice.

MacDiarmid has often been criticised for inventing his own version of Scots dialect that no one ever spoke. But of course no one ever spoke like much of Shakespeare either. ‘What did you say, dear?’ ‘I said, the multitudinous seas incarnadine’. ‘Oh, right. Why not take a break, it’s nearly teatime anyway’.

kens – knows
whatna – what kind of
heids – heads
licht – light
’yont – beyond
oor – our
een – eyes
unco – strange, foreign
bairnies – children
lift – sky
doon – dow
cauld – cold
mune – moon
lang syne – long since
maun – must

The Innumerable Christ

Other stars may have their Bethlehem and the Calvary too. (Professor JY Simpson).

‘Wha kens on whatna Bethlehems
Earth twinkles like a star the nicht,
An’ whatna shepherds lift their heids
In its unearthly licht?

‘Yont a’ the stars oor een can see
An’ farther than their lichts can fly,
I’ mony an unco warl’ the nicht
The fatefu’ bairnies cry.

I’ mony an unco warl’ the nicht
The lift gaes black as pitch at noon,
An’ sideways on their chests the heids
O’ endless Christs roll doon.

An’ when the earth’s as cauld’s the mune
An’ a’ its folk are lang syne deid,
On coontless stars the Babe maun cry
An’ the Crucified maun bleed.’

Hugh MacDiarmid

Week 633: Love’s Advocate, by Phoebe Hesketh

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Another poem about grief by the fine and rather overlooked poet Phoebe Hesketh (1909-2005, see also week 60), that captures the way the mind, the ‘love’s advocate’ of the title, tries with small, inconsequential remembered things to fill the great absence in the heart.

Love’s Advocate

I remember sitting together in parks
leaning over bridges
counting trout and swans
holding hands under arches
kissing away suns
and moons into darkness.

I remember platform good-byes
last-minute trains
slamming us apart
and my non-self walking back alone.
I remember smaller things:
a pebble in my shoe
and you throwing a match-box on the Serpentine.

I stood still hearing the years
flow over and over
as over a stone
in a river-bed
polishing, cleaning, wearing away.
But I still remember the last day.

What I cannot remember is how I felt –
mind, love’s advocate,
must remind heart
of the end, the abyss.

The bottom of the world remains;
each day climbs to a new start.

Phoebe Hesketh

Week 632: Elegy for Jane – My student, thrown by a horse, by Theodore Roethke

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Here we see the subject of last week’s elegy writing an elegy of his own for one of his students who died after a fall from a horse, Theodore Roethke having been a notable teacher of the young. It is a poem that walks the edge both of feeling and expression, yet in the end triumphs through an obvious sincerity coupled with a humility, a recognition that the poet’s grief is a marginal one, lacking the entitlement of someone with familial or romantic ties to the young woman. The language sometimes seems on the point of veering off into the merely poetic – ‘And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose’ is a bit too Dylan Thomas for my taste – and yet this slightly over-the-top imagery is sufficiently reined in and redeemed by the touching simplicity of the closing stanzas.

Pickerel: a young pike. It might be thought that being described as having a smile like a pike, even a young one, is not entirely complimentary, especially remembering Ted Hughes’s lines (see week 553): ‘Finally one/With a sag belly and the grin it was born with’. But I suspect that Roethke is thinking here not of the pike’s apparent facial expression but of the shy, elusive nature of the young woman’s smile, like the shadowy flicker of a fish moving underwater.

Elegy for Jane – My student, thrown by a horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow,
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Theodore Roethke