Week 688: The Fall of Rome, by W.H.Auden

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With so much doom and gloom around at the moment I thought I might as well add to it by opening with this one for the New Year: Auden’s take on the way a civilisation decays, couched partly in terms of the fall of Rome, but also cheerfully anachronistic in places. The message seems to be that things end not with a bang but a whimper: his vision is of a society losing cohesion and a sense of purpose, its culture becoming increasingly divorced from reality, its citizens taking refuge in private recreation and the pursuit of personal gain while crime and corruption flourish and such concepts as honour and duty fall by the wayside. The poem concludes on what may or may not be a consoling note with the thought that elsewhere beyond the human sphere nature continues unaffected on its own indifferent way. It should be borne in mind that this was written in 1945, when there was relatively little concern about man’s impact on the environment; I think if he were writing today Auden would be less sanguine about the ability of the natural world to continue inviolate.

The poem is dense with Auden’s idiosyncratic imagery. I love the image of the reindeer in the last stanza, but worry that it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Why are the reindeer in such a hurry? Reindeer eat moss, so confronted with miles and miles of the stuff wouldn’t they instead be moving rather slowly, chomping as they went?

Fisc: the state treasury.
Cato: Cato the Younger (95 BC – 46 BC), a Roman senator notorious for his belief in the old Roman virtues of stoicism and self-sacrifice, making him a scourge of the late Republic; in the end he committed suicide rather than compromise with what he saw as the tyrannical regime of Julius Caesar. Not to be confused with Cato the Elder (234-149 BC), Cato the Younger’s great-grandfather, who was cut from much the same cloth, and is particularly remembered for his tough line on Carthage with speeches in which he repeatedly urged ‘Carthago delenda est’ (Carthage must be destroyed).
Cerebrotonic: having a personality characterized by shyness, introspection, and emotional restraint. Nice example of a mot juste.

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

W.H.Auden

Week 687: Neither Far Out Nor In Deep, by Robert Frost

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As often with Robert Frost, the simplicity of the language in this week’s poem masks a thought of some profundity. ‘They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep’ – really one may think that a big-brained ape species that has only been around on the planet for a blink of geological time has done a pretty good job so far of looking out on the universe and fathoming its workings, but no doubt any scientist would agree firstly that there are still a lot of known unknowns we would like answers to, such as the nature of dark matter, and secondly that these in turn are likely to be swamped by the unknown unknowns, the mysteries that so far have been buried too deep or lain too far off for our perception, let alone our understanding. Still, as the poem suggests, we will keep looking, it is in our nature…

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be –
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost

Week 686: From ‘Requiem’, by Anna Akhmatova

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This week an excerpt from another famous poem by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), for details of whom see week 606. This one, entitled ‘Requiem’, derives from the months she spent in the company of many other women waiting outside Leningrad prison in the hope of seeing their imprisoned loved ones, in Akhmatova’s case her son Lev Gumilev, arrested by the NKVD in 1938.

There are many translations of ‘Requiem’ online, but to me this one stands out for its laconic evocation of anger and pity. I apologise to the translator whose identity I have been unable to discover.

Akhmatova prefixes the poem as a whole with the following prose note:

‘In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison
queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the
queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of
me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and
whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe
this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a
smile crossed what had once been her face.

1 April, 1957, Leningrad

Epilogue

II

Again the hands of the clock are nearing
The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch

All of you: the cripple they had to support
Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;

And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and
Say: ‘I come here as if it were home.’

I should like to call you all by name,
But they have lost the lists….

I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

I remember them always and everywhere,
And if they shut my tormented mouth,

Through which a hundred million of my people cry,
Let them remember me also….

And if in this country they should want
To build me a monument

I consent to that honour,
But only on condition that they

Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,

Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me

Lest in blessed death I should forget
The grinding scream of the Black Marias,

The hideous clanging gate, the old
Woman wailing like a wounded beast.

And may the melting snow drop like tears
From my motionless bronze eyelids,

And the prison pigeons coo above me
And the ships sail slowly down the Neva.

Anna Akhmatova


Week 685: Merrow Down, by Rudyard Kipling

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This is a poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote in memory of his beloved daughter Josephine, who died aged six from pneumonia, and for whom he composed what were later published as the ‘Just So’ stories, in one of which he appears as a caveman Tegumai and she as his daughter Taffy, an idea continued in these accompanying verses.

You may see the poem as a little whimsical, a little fey; you may find it sentimental: that is your right. As for me, I can only say with King Lear, ‘I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward’ and I know what it is to have had a small beloved daughter, though happily not to have lost one. So for my part I must confess to finding the poem intensely affecting: in particular I think the last four lines are perhaps the most moving that Kipling ever wrote.

Merrow Down

                          I

There runs a road by Merrow Down –
A grassy track today it is –
An hour out of Guildford Town
Above the river Wey it is.

Here, when they heard the horse-bells ring,
The ancient Britons dressed and rode
To watch the dark Phoenicians bring
Their goods along the Western Road.

Yes, here, or hereabouts, they met
To hold their racial talks and such –
To barter beads for Whitby jet
And tin for gay shell torques and such.

But long and long before that time
(When bison used to roam on it)
Did Taffy and her Daddy climb
That Down, and had their home on it.

Then beavers build in Broadstonebrook
And made a swamp where Bramley stands,
And bears from Shere would come and look
For Taffimai where Shamley stands.

The Wey, that Taffy called Wagai,
Was more than six times bigger then;
And all the tribe of Tegumai
They cut a noble figure then!

                          II

Of all the tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain, –
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry –
The silence and the sun remain.

But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Come Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.

Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.

In mocassins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far – oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!

Rudyard Kipling

Week 684: From The Train, by David Sutton

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We had the first frost of the year the other morning. I love a hard frost, so clean and bright after unmemorable November days of rain and muck. It prompted me to dig out this poem of mine, to which there is a tale. When it first appeared in one of my collections one reviewer was kind enough to single it out for praise as a particularly fine sonnet. Sonnet? I looked at it. I counted the lines. Yep, fourteen. And the rhymes seemed to be in the right place. Well, well, so it was. I was rather impressed with myself. I had as usual just let the poem take the form it seemed to want to take, and had simply not noticed that this particular form had a name. I still can’t decide whether to write a sonnet by accident shows genius or a distressing lack of formal awareness. Naturally I incline to the former view…

Worm-hole: the reference is to the cosmologists’ speculation that there might be passages connecting one universe to another. In this case connecting our universe to a universe of joy and wonder, which is perhaps just our own seen with new eyes.

Fern-seed: as well as being very small, fern-seed (more properly fern spores) was thought in mediaeval times to have magical properties, enabling one to become invisible, see into the future, and stay forever young. Cf. Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’: ‘we have the receipt of fern seed; we walk invisible’.

From The Train

From the train at dawn, on ploughland, frost
Blue-white in the shadow of a wood.
Oh, you again, of all moods soonest lost
And most elusive and least understood.
What should I call you? Vision? Empathy?
Elation’s tunnel? Worm-hole of rejoicing?
Some bliss of childhood, reasonless and free,
The secret microcosms … What a thing
To have no name for, yet to live for, these
Curious contentments under all,
These moments of a planet: weathers, trees –
What dreams, what intimations, fern-seed small,
Are buried in my days, that I must find,
And recognise, and lose, and leave behind?

David Sutton

Week 683: The Icelandic Language, by Bill Holm

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This week’s offering by the American poet Bill Holm (1943-2009), a kind of hymn to the Icelandic tongue, takes a sensuous delight in the sound and feel of language that reminds me somewhat of Seamus Heaney, and I love how it evokes the landscape and culture of that barren, lava-black, troll-haunted land.

The Icelandic language is a fascinating one, deeply conservative to the extent that modern speakers can read without much difficulty texts first written down in the 11th century. This does not work quite the same in the other direction: I can read Old Norse well enough but find modern Icelandic slow going because of the expanded vocabulary. This is despite the fact that much effort has been expended by a body called the ‘language regulator’ in keeping out foreign loanwords and trying to make sure that any new terms necessary are based on older Icelandic words. Which would have gladdened the heart of the English poet William Barnes, who had a passion for an English purified of foreign, post Norman Conquest influences and wanted us to use such terms as ‘welkinfire’ for meteor and ‘wortlore’ for botany.

Bill Holm was himself the grandson of Icelandic immigrants to the US and spent part of every year at his second home in Iceland.

The Icelandic Language

 In this language, no industrial revolution;
 no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
 only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
 The middle class can hardly speak it.

 In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
 through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
 The door groans; the old smell comes
 up from under the earth to meet you.

 But this language believes in ghosts;
 chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
 neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
 at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

 The woman with marble hands whispers
 this language to you in your sleep; faces
 come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
 wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

 In this language, you can’t chit-chat
 holding a highball in your hand, can’t
 even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
 all your grief and failure come clear at last.

 Old inflections move from case to case,
 gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
 vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
 icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

Bill Holm

Week 682: The End of the Weekend, by Anthony Hecht

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This week a rather strange and disturbing poem by the American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004; see also weeks 345 and 464), apparently inspired by an anecdote of Ted Hughes.

I see the poem as being in the ‘Et in Arcadia, ego’ vein, in which the frailty and transience of human life and love are set against the presence of death and the pitiless indifference of the natural world, here casting their shadows over a romantic weekend getaway. I take the symbolic presence in the last stanza to be an owl, and the scratching in the loft evokes memories of Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’, though there is no suggestion here that our human choice can be benign flowers instead of the predatory and destructive birds.

Of course, it is possible to find unintentionally comic aspects to the poem. Would the narrator really have let himself be distracted by a mere scratching in the roof when he had matters so nearly in hand, so to speak? And then one imagines the perhaps more practically minded woman saying ‘Right, now we’ve established that it’s just an owl that’s caught a mouse, can we get on with it, because I’m standing here freezing’.

But any such irreverent thoughts are overwhelmed by admiration for the sheer skill of the piece: it’s conjuration of shadows, its buildup of erotic tension, and that shaft of moonlight, so stunningly evoked by the unexpected epithet ‘magnesium’.

Quirt: a kind of riding whip.
Lariat: another word for lasso.
Captain Marryat: a Victorian writer of adventure stories.
Dormer: a kind of window positioned directly under a roof, and often found as a way of letting light into attics.

The End of the Weekend

A dying firelight slides along the quirt
Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans
Against my father’s books. The lariat
Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans
Fingers a page of Captain Marryat
Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.
Outside, across the lake, an endless wind
Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails
In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.
She rubs against me and I feel her nails.
Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:
This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,
Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits
The slow unloosening of her underthings
And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates
Against the attic beams. I climb the stairs
Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft
Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path
Among the shattered skeletons of mice.
A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.
Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.
Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.

Anthony Hecht

Week 681: Chard Whitlow, by Henry Reed

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To appreciate this brilliant parody of T.S.Eliot fully requires a degree of familiarity with Eliot’s work, in particular with ‘Four Quartets’, which some may feel is too high a price to pay, but even a superficial acquaintance should be enough to enjoy the adroitness with which Henry Reed echoes and undercuts the great man’s more sententious passages.

To give credit to Eliot, it has to be said that he took the parody very sportingly, commenting ‘Most parodies of one’s own work strike one as very poor. In fact, one is apt to think one could parody oneself much better. (As a matter of fact, some critics have said that I have done so.) But there is one which deserves the success it has had, Henry Reed’s ‘Chard Whitlow’’.

The title of the poem is a made-up name, parodying the English place names used as titles of the sections in ‘Four Quartets’, such as Burnt Norton.

For Henry Reed (1914-1986) see also week 279.

Chard Whitlow
(Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and to-day I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again – if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded tube.

There are certain precautions – though none of them very reliable –
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: ‘It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell.’
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray, not for your sins, but for your souls.

And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.
And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

Henry Reed

Week 680: Requiem: The Soldier, by Humbert Wolfe

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Remembrance Sunday is on us again this weekend, and again a surprisingly large crowd from my village will be gathering round its memorial cross to hear the names of the fallen read out, so many from a place that at that time had scarcely four hundred inhabitants. So on that theme I have chosen as this week’s poem an elegy by the Italian-born British poet Humbert Wolfe (1851-1940). Wolfe had a big reputation between the wars and was even considered for Poet Laureate, but he seems to be little remembered today except for his mordant epigram on the British journalist:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

(As an aside, I was amused to come across an AI interpretation of these lines that took them for a straightforward tribute to the British journalist as being of impeccable integrity and needing no base incentive to strive for excellence. Which shows that AI has some way to go in detecting nuance. Unless, of course, it is developing a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour).

Wolfe, who worked as a civil servant, was a bit too close to the Establishment for my taste – I think myself that it is better for poets to maintain a polite distance from anything that might seek to press them into service. But I find that this poem, though possessing nothing like the power of Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, does have a certain quiet poignancy.

Requiem: The Soldier

Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.

They are speaking together of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin to carry the things they say.
They were young and golden, but they came on pain here,
and their youth is age now, their gold is grey.

Yet their hearts are not changed, and they cry to one another,
‘What have they done with the lives we laid aside?
Are they young with our youth, gold with our gold, my brother?
Do they smile in the face of death, because we died?’

Down some cold field in a world uncharted
the young seek each other with questioning eyes.
They question each other, the young, the golden hearted,
of the world that they were robbed of in their quiet paradise.

Humbert Wolfe

Week 679: Silver, by Walter de la Mare

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This is one of the first poems I ever remember learning, other than nursery rhymes, and I find it still has a certain charm, though it does come with mixed emotions. It was presented to us in an art lesson at primary school, and we were told to create our own painting based on the poem, which indeed cries out for illustration. Sadly, I could only watch as the boy next to me produced a rather fine effort while I suffered the agonies of the totally inartistic, who may have a perfectly clear vision of things in their heads but are quite unable to render this in any drawn or painted form. In retrospect I might perhaps have tried to pass off my smeary mess as being in the modernist vein, but I was innocent of such a possibility back then, so must endure the teacher’s head-shaking disapproval as she, recognising a lost cause when she saw one, passed silently by. But I still like the poem for the way it captures the gleaming utter stillness of the moonlit night.

For a note on Walter de la Mare see week 105.

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
 
Walter de la Mare