It’s been a while since we had a W.H.Auden poem. This one was written in response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia some fifty-four years ago.
August, 1968
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
W.H.Auden
This is part of a longer poem by the Scots poet James Hogg (1770-1835). I give only the beginning plus one quatrain from near the end and omit a lot of allegorical stuff about sinless virgins and radiant beings that to my mind lacks the verve of the evocative opening stanzas. The whole poem is easily accessible online, but I do feel it would have been wiser of Hogg to let the mystery be and leave us to our own imaginings as to where Kilmeny had been: fairylands work better if not made too explicit, a music of horns dimly blowing at the edge of the world. This is something that J.R.R.Tolkien was well aware of when in a letter to a correspondent he expressed his fears, justifiably in my view, that ‘The Silmarillion’ would not have the same appeal as ‘Lord of the Rings’. He says ‘Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist.’
From ‘Kilmeny’
Bonnie Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
But it wasna to meet Duneira’s men,
Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
It was only to hear the yorlin sing,
And pu’ the cress-flower round the spring;
The scarlet hypp and the hindberrye,
And the nut that hung frae the hazel tree;
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
But lang may her minny look o’er the wa’,
But lang may she seek i’ the green-wood shaw;
Lang the laird o’ Duneira blame,
And lang, lang greet or Kilmeny come hame!
When many a day had come and fled,
When grief grew calm, and hope was dead,
When mess for Kilmeny’s soul had been sung,
When the bedesman had pray’d and the dead bell rung,
Late, late in gloamin’ when all was still,
When the fringe was red on the westlin hill,
The wood was sere, the moon i’ the wane,
The reek o’ the cot hung over the plain,
Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane;
When the ingle low’d wi’ an eiry leme,
Late, late in the gloamin’ Kilmeny came hame!
‘Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been?
Lang hae we sought baith holt and den;
By linn, by ford, and green-wood tree,
Yet you are halesome and fair to see.
Where gat you that joup o’ the lily scheen?
That bonnie snood of the birk sae green?
And these roses, the fairest that ever were seen?
Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been?’
Kilmeny look’d up with a lovely grace,
But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny’s face;
As still was her look, and as still was her e’e,
As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea,
Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
For Kilmeny had been, she knew not where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew…..
………
When seven lang years had come and fled,
When grief was calm, and hope was dead;
When scarce was remember’d Kilmeny’s name,
Late, late in a gloamin’ Kilmeny came hame!
James Hogg
yorlin=yellow-hammer
hindberrye=bramble
minny=mother
greet=mourn
mess=Mass
westlin=western
its lane=alone, by itself
low’d=flamed
eiry=eerie
leme=gleam
linn=waterfall
joup=mantle
scheen=sheen, in the obsolete sense of rich or shining attire
emerant=emerald
As is frustratingly so often the case with ballads, it is not possible to know either who wrote this grim but powerful poem nor how old it is. The first mention of it occurs in a letter of 1802 from Charles Kirkpatrick to Sir Walter Scott, who said it had been collected from an old woman at Alva, and it first appeared in print in Walter Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy’ in 1812.
To me it feels much older, perhaps even having roots in mediaeval times, and indeed an English ballad with a very similar theme, ‘The Three Ravens’, is first recorded in 1611. But ‘The Three Ravens’ is much more upbeat, in that the knight’s hawk, hounds and lady stay with the knight to protect his remains rather than deserting him, and the relish with which, by contrast, the knight’s fate is related in this poem hints perhaps at a speaker for the common people, not averse to indulging in a bit of class revenge: I like to think of it being composed by some Ewan MacColl figure with a gift for the trenchant lyric and a big political chip on his shoulder. And yet the last stanza seems to rise above any rancour, recognising that there will be those who will mourn without closure for the knight in his unknown grave, and acknowledging the pathos inherent in all mortality with that haunting image of the wind blowing over bare bones forever.
The Twa Corbies
As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane:
The tane unto the tither did say,
‘Whar sall we gang and dine the day?’
‘—In behint yon auld fail dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.
‘His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en anither mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.
‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue e’en:
Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.
‘Mony a one for him maks mane,
But nane sall ken whar he is gane:
O’er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.’
Anon
twa=two
corbies=crows (or ravens)
the tane=one of them
tither= other
auld=old
fail dyke=wall of turf
wot=know
kens=knows
hause-bane=neck bone
een=eye
gowden=golden
theek=thatch
Poets and trains go well together – one need only think of Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ or Philp Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. Certainly I have found that in the right circumstances, which do not include sharing the train with several hundred Welsh rugby fans on their way home from a victory in Cardiff, it is a form of transport can induce a kind of dreamy tranquillity, liberating the mind from its usual cares and constraints. I remember well my first journey by train when I was nine and we went away for my childhood’s one and only holiday, my grandmother having conveniently died and left a small legacy. I spent the whole time in a trance of delight as the English countryside unrolled beside me with its fields and woods, its placid rivers, its swooping or soaring skyline, furthering in me an already latent love that was almost painful. In this piece the Australian poet Judith Wright celebrates one such visionary glimpse of her own countryside, different and much harsher than mine, yet equally one of which she could say that it ‘built my heart’: how well I understand that passionate identification with a landscape.
Train Journey
Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the train
I looked and saw under the moon’s cold sheet
your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart;
and the small trees on their uncoloured slope
like poetry moved, articulate and sharp
and purposeful under the great dry flight of air,
under the crosswise currents of wind and star.
Clench down your strength, box-tree and ironbark.
Break with your violent root the virgin rock.
Draw from the flying dark its breath of dew
till the unliving come to life in you.
Be over the blind rock a skin of sense,
under the barren height a slender dance…
I woke and saw the dark small trees that burn
suddenly into flowers more lovely that the white moon.
The ‘Phena’ of this poem’s title refers to a real woman, Hardy’s cousin Tryphena Sparks, with whom he had, in the mid-1860s, a relationship that was at the least flirtatious. ‘Phena’ died on 17 March 1890; Hardy then wrote the poem shortly after ‘news of her death’.
This is not one of my very favourite Hardy poems – I would not rank it with, say, ‘After A Journey’ or ‘At Castle Boterel’ or ‘During Wind And Rain’ – but I find it fascinating for its Shakespearean combination of registers – what other poet but those two could get away with juxtaposing the plain speech of the opening lines with the high-flown ‘aureate nimb’, ‘unsight’, ‘upbrimming’ and ‘disennoble’? It really shouldn’t work, yet there is a stubborn integrity about Hardy that somehow compels assent, even if he does sometimes remind one of an icebreaker crashing through frozen seas of his own creation. And this poem has certainly been ranked high among his canon by Hardy fans. In the preface to his reissued first book of verse, ‘The North Ship’, Philip Larkin recounts how it was instrumental in converting him from an early devotion to Yeats to what was for him the much more suitable mentor Hardy. “In early 1946 I had new digs in which the bedroom faced east, so that the sun woke me inconveniently early. I used to read. One book I had at my bedside was the little blue ‘Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy’. Hardy I knew as a novelist, but as regards his verse I shared Lytton Strachey’s verdict that ‘the gloom is not even relievd by a little elegance of diction’. This opinion did not last long; if I were asked to date its disappearance I should guess it was the morning I first read ‘Thoughts of Phena At News of Her Death’”.
And in Colin Dexter’s ‘Last Bus To Woodstock’ it is revealed that Morse considers the first two lines of this poem the saddest in English poetry. Much as I respect Morse’s judgment – he appears, for example, to be a devotee of A.E.Housman – I wouldn’t go that far, but it is certainly hard to match the poem for its evocation of a youthful love that was never to be, but was also never to be forgotten.
Thoughts of Phena at News of Her Death
Not a line of her writing have I,
Not a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
I may picture her there;
And in vain do I urge my unsight
To conceive my lost prize
At her close, whom I knew when her dreams were upbrimming with light
And with laughter her eyes.
What scenes spread around her last days,
Sad, shining, or dim?
Did her gifts and compassions enray and enarch her sweet ways
With an aureate nimb?
Or did life-light decline from her years,
And mischances control
Her full day-star; unease, or regret, or forebodings, or fears
Disennoble her soul?
Thus I do but the phantom retain
Of the maiden of yore
As my relic; yet haply the best of her—fined in my brain
It may be the more
That no line of her writing have I,
Nor a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
I may picture her there.
Thomas Hardy
‘The Light Of Asia’ is a long narrative poem by Edwin Arnold (1832-1904), which tells the story of the life of Buddha. It has been admired by, among others, T.S.Eliot, which is not of course necessarily a recommendation, though I always find it interesting when poets reveal a perhaps surprising taste for work very different from their own: it offers a new perspective on both admirer and admired. The poem, published in 1890, is very much of its time, with an unfashionably sub-Keatsian opulence of diction, and I believe it has been criticised by Oriental scholars for giving a misleading impression of Buddhist doctrine, but it does have a considerable exotic charm and sometimes rises to real eloquence, as in the extract below.
To set the scene, the Prince Siddhartha has grown up fiercely protected by his father the King, who has kept him from all knowledge of the suffering and death that lie beyond the palace walls. (Not sure how the King managed this: personally by the time I was five I had already lost two goldfish, a tortoise and a pet rabbit, but there you go). Eventually Siddhartha demands to be allowed out into the city. The King gives orders that all distressing sights are to be hidden away and everyone is to be on their best behaviour, much as now when the Queen visits a place, but as luck would have it one rather decrepit old man hasn’t got the message and staggers out into the road just as Siddhartha is passing. The Prince returns home much burdened with his new knowledge of age and the passing of time, and even his beloved wife Yasodhara and a plate of cakes cannot console him.
I like the ‘Nullius in verba’ aspect of Buddhism. ‘Do not, O Kalamas, be satisfied with hearsay or tradition, with legends or what is written in great scriptures, with conjecture or logic, or with saying, “This comes from a great master or teacher.” But look in yourselves. When you know in yourselves what teachings are unprofitable… you should abandon them… when they lead to virtue, honesty, loving-kindness, clarity, and freedom, then you must follow these’. But I struggle with this non-attachment business, which seems a bit too subtle for me. Love, I say, and pay the price.
Note: Yasodhara is stressed on the second syllable.
From ‘The Light of Asia’
Yasodhara sank to his feet and wept,
Sighing, ‘Hath not my Lord comfort in me?’
‘Ah, Sweet!’ he said, ‘such comfort that my soul
Aches, thinking it must end, for it will end,
And we shall both grow old, Yasodhara!
Loveless, unlovely, weak, and old, and bowed.
Nay, though we locked up love and life with lips
So close that night and day our breaths grew one
Time would thrust in between to filch away
My passion and thy grace, as black Night steals
The rose-gleams from yon peak, which fade to grey
And are not seen to fade. This have I found,
And all my heart is darkened with its dread,
And all my heart is fixed to think how Love
Might save its sweetness from the slayer, Time,
Who makes men old.’
Edwin Arnold
If this poem by the American poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) seems a little naïve, it should be remembered that Lindsay was a performance poet, wandering the country making his living by dramatic recitations, often accompanying himself on the harmonica or other instrument. Never having been part of an oral culture, I must admit that normally I cringe a bit at this sort of thing: for me poetry has always been a matter of mind speaking to mind via the printed page and I feel no great need to have that communication mediated by an actual voice, let alone harmonicas. But I rather like this poem even if I am not hearing it as Lindsay intended, and its message is surely as relevant today as when he wrote it. That ‘flower-fed’, for example, is literally true: there was a time before the settlement of the American West when the great grasslands from April through to September would be ablaze with the likes of prairie rose, Indian Paintbrush, prairie smoke, prairie cinquefoil and goldenrod. So different from today’s nitrate-hungry monocultures. As for the buffalo, more correctly called American bison, it is thought at one time more than fifty million roamed the Great Plains. Now there seem to be three hundred and twenty five wild bison left in North American, though conservation efforts have been increasing the stock.
The Flower-fed Buffaloes
The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
In the days of long ago,
Ranged where the locomotives sing
And the prairie flowers lie low:-
The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass
Is swept away by the wheat,
Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by
In the spring that still is sweet.
But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
Left us, long ago
They gore no more, they bellow no more,
They trundle around the hills no more:-
With the Blackfeet, lying low,
With the Pawnees, lying low,
Lying low.
Vachel Lindsay
This week a poem by the Irish poet and playwright John Millington Synge (1871-1909) about vigilante justice in rural Ireland. I admire it for the way it captures the techniques and spirit of the old ballads, suppressing any authorial comment and leaving the story to speak for itself. And that story is, as so often with the traditional ballad, a grim one. Apparently the poem is based on a real historical incident, the murder of an unpopular rate-collector near the village of Glencastle in County Mayo, and the ‘flat stone’ mentioned in the poem can still be seen today. In the absence of any overt direction from the author, what are we to take as the poem’s message? Well, the eponymous Danny was clearly a social problem that needed addressing, but the trouble is that from a vigilanteism which might be seen as marginally justified it is only a small step to a community ganging up on an old woman suspected of witchcraft and dragging her off to be ducked and drowned in the local pond, as happened near my childhood home as late as 1751 (google Osborn + Tring), or a mob taking it upon themselves to chastise members of a minority group for nothing more than the crime of being different, which of course continues to the present day in many parts of the world.
I think it is fairly clear that despite Synge’s careful avoidance of any explicit moral judgment he in fact considers the episode disturbing and shameful. The clues are in the account of the spirited fight that Danny puts up against the overwhelming odds, the savagery of the assault described in the penultimate verse, the detail of the petty theft that accompanies the murder, and the laconic ‘And some washed off his blood’. So I would say that if the poem has a message it is that much as we may become impatient with the processes of official justice and perturbed at the abuses and failures it is susceptible to, it remains better than the anarchic alternative. To quote the eponymous hero of the old Icelandic saga of Burnt Njal, speaking after the period of anarchy and blood-feuds that followed his country’s settlement in the ninth century, ‘með lögum skal land byggja, en með ólögum eyða’ (‘with laws shall our land be built up, but with lawlessness laid waste’).
Danny
One night a score of Erris men,
A score I’m told and nine,
Said, ‘We’ll get shut of Danny’s noise
Of girls and widows dyin’.
‘There’s not his like from Binghamstown
To Boyle and Ballycroy,
At playing hell on decent girls,
At beating man and boy.
He’s left two pairs of female twins
Beyond in Killacreest,
And twice in Crossmolina fair
He’s struck the parish priest.
‘But we’ll come round him in the night
A mile beyond the Mullet;
Ten will quench his bloody eyes,
And ten will choke his gullet.’
It wasn’t long till Danny came,
From Bangor making way,
And he was damning moon and stars
And whistling grand and gay.
Till in a gap of hazel glen –
And not a hare in sight –
Out lepped the nine-and-twenty lads
Along his left and right.
Then Danny smashed the nose on Byrne,
He split the lips on three,
And bit across the right-hand thumb
Of one Red Shawn Magee.
But seven tripped him up behind,
And seven kicked before,
And seven squeezed around his throat
Till Danny kicked no more.
Then some destroyed him with their heels,
Some tramped him in the mud,
Some stole his purse and timber pipe ,
And some washed off his blood.
And when you’re walking out the way
From Banger to Belmullet,
You’ll see a flat cross on a stone
Where men choked Danny’s gullet.
J.M. Synge
This week a slightly belated Christmas poem, another example of the multi-talented Kipling’s gift for small-scale myth-making. The story seems to be entirely of the poet’s own invention, though there was a real Eddi, Eddius Stephanus, a Kentishman who was choirmaster and biographer of Wilfrid, Archbishop of York, and who plays a major part in the story that accompanies this poem in Kipling’s ‘Rewards and Fairies’, ‘The Conversion of St Wilfrid’.
As so often with Kipling’s work, I don’t quite know how to place this poem. I can see that it does not have the wistful resonance of, say, Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ (see week 426), to which I personally feel more attuned, but on the other hand I don’t think it would be fair to dismiss it simply as a piece of sentimental populism. So, I hear you ask, why worry about placing it at all? Why not just enjoy its idiosyncratic charm, without necessarily surrendering to it? Quite right.
Eddi’s Service
(A.D. 687)
Eddi, priest of St. Wilfrid
In his chapel at Manhood End,
Ordered a midnight service
For such as cared to attend.
But the Saxons were keeping Christmas,
And the night was stormy as well.
Nobody came to service,
Though Eddi rang the bell.
“Wicked weather for walking,”
Said Eddi of Manhood End.
“But I must go on with the service
For such as care to attend.”
The altar-lamps were lighted, —
An old marsh-donkey came,
Bold as a guest invited,
And stared at the guttering flame.
The storm beat on at the windows,
The water splashed on the floor,
And a wet, yoke-weary bullock
Pushed in through the open door.
“How do I know what is greatest,
How do I know what is least?
That is My Father’s business,”
Said Eddi, Wilfrid’s priest.
“But — three are gathered together —
Listen to me and attend.
I bring good news, my brethren!”
Said Eddi of Manhood End.
And he told the Ox of a Manger
And a Stall in Bethlehem,
And he spoke to the Ass of a Rider,
That rode to Jerusalem.
They steamed and dripped in the chancel,
They listened and never stirred,
While, just as though they were Bishops,
Eddi preached them The Word,
Till the gale blew off on the marshes
And the windows showed the day,
And the Ox and the Ass together
Wheeled and clattered away.
And when the Saxons mocked him,
Said Eddi of Manhood End,
“I dare not shut His chapel
On such as care to attend.”
Rudyard Kipling
I see that the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella has just died at the age of 93. He did great service to Irish literature with his translations from the early language, and I certainly wish I had had his version of the ‘Táin Bó Cúailnge’ (Cattle-raid of Cooley) to hand when as an undergraduate I was fighting my way with Cuchulain step by step through the original text of that barbarous, magnificent epic. But he should also be remembered as a fine original poet, and here is one of his justly most popular pieces, a reflection on lost youth.
Note: ‘the age of Christ’: according to tradition Jesus was thirty-three years old when he died.
The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed — my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy —
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.
It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.
Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.
Thomas Kinsella
David Sutton 