Week 724: Épitaphe écrite pour la mort de Molière, by Jean de la Fontaine

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Last week’s elegy for Shakespeare reminded me of this other rather neat poem playing on the idea of a famous poet in his tomb. Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695), now chiefly known for his Fables, was a great admirer of the French dramatist Molière, and with him was a member of a famous literary coterie, whose other members included the playwright Jean Racine and the poet and critic Boileau. Their two tombs may be found close together in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, though there seems to be much doubt as to whether the tombs actually contain their remains.

Terence and Plautus: Roman playwrights famed, like Molière, for their witty comedies. Jean de la Fontaine’s first serious work was a translation of one of Terence’s plays, ‘Eunuchus’.

The translation that follows is my own.

Épitaphe écrite pour la mort de Molière

Sous ce tombeau gisent Plaute et Térence
Et cependant le seul Molière y git.
Leurs trois talents ne formaient qu’un esprit
Dont le bel art réjouissait la France.
Ils sont partis! et j’ay peu d’espérance
De les revoir. Malgré tous nos efforts,
Pour un long temps, selon toute apparence,
Térence, et Plaute, et Molière sont morts.

Jean de la Fontaine

Here in this tomb is Terence found, and Plautus,
Yet only Molière lies here apart.
For their three talents made one genius
Gladdening all France with their fair art.
Now they are gone! And I see little chance
Of such another coming in their stead.
For a long time now, to all appearance,
Terence, Plautus, Molière are dead.

Week 723: Elegy on Shakespeare, by William Basse

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I suspect that few of my readers will have heard of the poet William Basse (1583-1653?), as indeed I hadn’t until I came across this pleasant if slightly macabre tribute to our national bard, in which he first imagines Shakespeare sharing the tomb with three other worthies before deciding that actually he probably merits a grave all to himself. The choice of the three worthies is interesting: Chaucer (fair enough), Spenser (OK, though probably more honoured than read these days) and Beaumont. This would be Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), best known for his collaborations with John Fletcher, and I suspect that while much esteemed in his own time as both poet and playwright his work is little known now except to specialists in the period.

I have modernized the Elizabethan spelling as being unnecessarily distracting to the modern reader, but have left ‘fift’ for ‘fifth’ for the sake of the rhyme.

Elegy on Shakespeare

Renownèd Spencer lie a thought more nigh
To learnèd Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie
A little nearer Spenser, to make room
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold Tomb.
To lodge all four in one bed make a shift
Until Doomsday, for hardly will a fift
Betwixt this day and that by Fate be slain,
For whom your Curtains may be drawn again.
If your precedency in death doth bar
A fourth place in your sacred sepulchre,
Under this carved marble of thine own,
Sleep, rare Tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone;
Thy unmolested peace,  unsharèd cave,
Possess as Lord, not Tenant, of thy Grave,
That unto us and others it may be
Honour hereafter to be laid by thee.

William Basse

Postscript: I amused myself with the idea of adapting this poem for modern times, imagining an eminent poet recently deceased sharing the grave with two other deserving cases and a third whose star seems more likely to fade. Something on the lines of:

‘Renownèd Larkin lie a thought more nigh
To learnèd Hughes, and let Another lie
A little nearer Larkin, to make room
For Heaney in your threefold, fourfold Tomb.’

I will leave it to readers to contemplate possible candidates for the role of Another…

Week 722: The Sea-widow, by Stevie Smith

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When I first read this poem I was confused by the lack of quotation marks and I needed a second take to realise that this is a dialogue between the ghost of a mariner and his widow in which they speak alternate lines, beginning with the ghost. The idea of a such a dialogue between the dead lover and the suriving partner is not new, of course – compare A.E.Housman’s ‘Is my team ploughing?’ (see week 642) – but Stevie Smith gives it her characteristically unique flavour by lulling the reader with singsong cadences before springing the trap in the last line: no, this is rather more than a slightly eccentric piece of whimsy.

The Sea-widow

How fares it with you, Mrs Cooper my bride?
Long are the years since you lay by my side.
Do you wish I was back? Do you speak of me dearest?
I wish you were back for me to hold nearest.
Who then lies nearer, Mrs Cooper my bride?
A black man comes in with the evening tide.
What is his name? Tell me! How does he dare?
He comes uninvited. His name is Despair.

Stevie Smith

Week 721: Erinnerung an die Marie A., by Bertolt Brecht

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This is a much celebrated poem by the German poet Bertolt Brecht (see also weeks 243 and 650). A good deal of German ink has been expended on establishing who the Marie A. of the poem was, what exactly was Brecht’s relationship to her and how far this can really be called a love poem. The love appears to have been short-lived and subsequently in private correspondence Brecht was quite cruelly dismissive of the poor girl, so I think myself it is one of those cases where biographical knowledge merely serves to detract from the poem, which is best taken more or less at face value as a poignant reflection on the passing of time and on the fallibility and strange capriciousness of human memory.

The translation that follows is my own.

Erinnerung an die Marie A.

An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September
Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum
Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe
In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.
Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel
War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah
Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheuer oben
Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.

Seit jenem Tag sind viele, viele Monde
Geschwommen still hinunter und vorbei.
Die Pflaumenbäume sind wohl abgehauen
Und fragst du mich, was mit der Liebe sei?
So sag ich dir: Ich kann mich nicht erinnern
Und doch, gewiß, ich weiß schon, was du meinst.
Doch ihr Gesicht, das weiß ich wirklich nimmer
Ich weiß nur mehr: Ich küßte es dereinst.

Und auch den Kuß, ich hätt ihn längst vergessen
Wenn nicht die Wolke da gewesen wär
Die weiß ich noch und werd ich immer wissen
Sie war sehr weiß und kam von oben her.
Die Pflaumenbäume blühn vielleicht noch immer
Und jene Frau hat jetzt vielleicht das siebte Kind.
Doch jene Wolke blühte nur Minuten
Und als ich aufsah, schwand sie schon im Wind.

Bertolt Brecht

Remembrance of Marie A

On that day in the blue month of September
Beneath a young plum in a quiet place
I held her there, my silent pale beloved,
In my arms as in some dream of grace.
Above us, in a perfect summer heaven,
There was a cloud, that made me stand and stare,
Very white, and very far above us,
And when I looked, it was no longer there.

Since that day, so many many months
Have come my way and silently are gone.
The plum trees doubtless have been long cut down
And now you ask: and your beloved one?
I say to you that I cannot remember,
Yet to be sure I know well what you mean.
Her face is gone from me beyond recall.
I only know this: that I kissed it then.

Yet the kiss too I would have long forgotten
If not for the cloud that I saw there,
That I still see, that I shall see forever.
It was so white and from the upper air.
Perhaps the plum trees are still blooming; perhaps
The woman has her seventh child to mind,
Yet that cloud blossomed for no more than minutes
And when I looked up, vanished on the wind.

Week 720: Tree At My Window, by Robert Frost/Regards, by Jules Supervielle

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One of the joys of exploring poetry in languages not one’s own is to come across unexpected coincidences of thought and expression, as if underlying all disparity of tongues were some universal language of perception and empathy, a hidden wellspring that poets may sometimes tap into. I think it unlikely that in the case of these two tree poems either poet would have been acquainted with the other’s work, but surely both would have recognised a shared spiritual affinity.

The translation that follows the French is my own.

Tree at my Window

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

Robert Frost

Regards

S’il n’était pas d’arbres à ma fenêtre
Pour venir voir jusqu’au profond de moi,
Depuis longtemps il aurait cessé d’être
Ce coeur offert à ses brûlantes lois.

Dans ce long saule ou ce cyprès profond
Qui me connaît et me plaint d’être au monde,
Mon moi posthume est là qui me regarde
Comprenant mal pourquoi je tarde et tarde.

Jules Supervielle

The Watchers

If it were not for trees outside my window
To come and gaze into the depths of me,
Then given up to its own ardent laws
This heart of mine would long have ceased to be.

In this tall willow, or in this deep cypress
Who grieve for me that still I do not go,
I see my own shade, waiting, looking on,
Not understanding why I tarry so.

Week 719: Acceptance, by David Sutton

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Yesterday my wife and I celebrated our diamond wedding anniversary (sixty years of marriage), so I thought I might mark the occasion with one of my own poems. This was in fact written around twenty years ago, but the sentiment seems if anything more applicable now than ever. Back then, of course, I was just at the age when one first begins to hear time’s wingèd chariot revving up behnd one in the distance; now I get the feeling that the damn thing is about to run me over any day soon. But what can I say: we’re both still hanging in there, for which much thanks.

Acceptance

We stop at the garden centre for tea and cake,
Our time our own now, all the children gone,
And you talk to another couple at the next table
While I half-drowse in late October sun,
Answering your smiles on cue, but thinking
This is not me, not yet, or not today:
I am not ready for the small contentments,
Though what I want instead is hard to say.

Our forty years again, of toil and trial?
Indeed, if strength came with them to endure
All that love asks, the given and the taken,
But we have come where only loss is sure,
So I must learn new lines, an awkward actor
Who thought to have no part in age’s play.
Rehearse me, then, in love’s last role, acceptance.
Above all, till the final curtain, stay.

David Sutton

Week 718: Der Garten des Theophrast, by Peter Huchel

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This week a poignant valediction from the fine East German poet Peter Huchel (1903-1981). It is another of those German poems dense with symbolic meaning, and I am by no means confident that I have sussed out all those meanings, but for what it is worth here is my take on it.

Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher, a friend to Plato and Aristotle, renowned for his interest in the natural world and known as the father of botany. Huchel is likening himself to Theophrastus but in his case the garden he has faithfully tended is a literary one, where he and others of his kind have ‘planted conversations like trees’: as well as writing books he edited a prestigious free-thinking poetry magazine, ‘Sinn und Form’ (Sense and Form). After the building of the Berlin Wall he began to experience the unwelcome attentions of the East German authorities, and was forced to give up the editorship of the magazine and live in isolation under Stasi surveillance.

This poem appeared in the magazine’s last issue. It is at once resigned and defiant. So now he is at the end of his stewardship, his breath comes shorter and the garden is dead. But at noon the light of poetry still dances on the urns that commemorate the great writers of the past, and when it does he urges his son to preserve the garden’s memory and the memory of his patient tending. And there is hope: an olive tree (a symbol of peace and endurance) splits the crumbling wall and a voice still speaks from the hot dust. It is tempting to see ‘das mürbe Gemäuer’, the crumbling wall, as a reference to the Berlin Wall, but the timings don’t quite work: the Wall went up in 1961 and the poem appeared in 1962 but would almost certainly have been written well before, as if in anticipation of the coming censorship, and anyway Huchel did not use direct political references, so we can just take the use of this particular image as a happily proleptic coincidence.

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Garten des Theophrast

Meinem Sohn

Wenn mittags das weiße Feuer
Der Verse über den Urnen tanzt,
Gedenke, mein Sohn. Gedenke derer,
Die einst Gespräche wie Bäume gepflanzt.
Tot ist der Garten, mein Atem wird schwerer,
Bewahre die Stunde, hier ging Theophrast,
Mit Eichenlohe zu düngen den Boden,
Die wunde Rinde zu binden mit Bast.
Ein Ölbaum spaltet das mürbe Gemäuer
Und ist noch Stimme im heißen Staub.
Sie gaben Befehl, die Wurzel zu roden.
Es sinkt dein Licht, schutzloses Laub.

Peter Huchel

The Garden of Theophrastus

To my son

When at noon the white fire of poetry
Dances above the urns,
Remember, my son. Remember those
Who planted conversations once like trees.
The garden is dead, my breath comes shorter now,
Preserve the hour, when here went Theophrastus,
To fertilize the soil with oak tan,
To bind the bark of wounded trunks with bast.
An olive tree splits the crumbling walls
And the hot dust has still a voice.
They gave the order: grub the root out. Now
The light fails on your undefended leaves.

Week 717: From ‘Henry IV, part 2’, by William Shakespeare

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This week one of my favourite passages in all Shakespeare: nothing dramatic, no exalted language, just two old men remembering the escapades of their youth, but showing how well, among all the Bard’s other gifts, he could capture the rhythms of common speech and bring out the latent poetry in them. It comes from ‘Henry IV, part 2’; Falstaff has met up with his old acquaintance Shallow, a Justice of the Peace, and they fall to reminiscing about old times. The passage always reminds me of conversations between my mother and my maternal uncle, who was the only one who kept in touch with their Suffolk side of the family. When he had come back from a visit there she would ask him after various relatives of theirs, aunts, uncles, cousins, and he would shake his head and say ‘Old, very old’ or sometimes, in tones of lugubrious relish, ‘Dead, long dead’. And I would think ‘Yes, it still goes on’.

Bona-roba: a showy, attractive, or well-dressed woman, often with connotations of a courtesan or prostitute. From the Italian, meaning ‘good stuff’.

FALSTAFF

Come, I will go drink with you, but I cannot tarry dinner. I am glad to see you, by my troth, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the windmill in Saint George’s field?

FALSTAFF

No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that.

SHALLOW

Ha! ’twas a merry night. And is Jane Nightwork alive?

FALSTAFF

She lives, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

She never could away with me.

FALSTAFF

Never, never; she would always say she could not abide Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

By the mass, I could anger her to the heart. She was then a bona-roba. Doth she hold her own well?

FALSTAFF

Old, old, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she’s old; and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement’s Inn.

SILENCE

That’s fifty-five year ago.

SHALLOW

Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that this knight and I have seen! Ha, Sir John, said I well?

FALSTAFF

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW

That we have, that we have, that we have; in faith, Sir John, we have: our watch-word was ‘Hem boys!’ Come, let’s to dinner; come, let’s to dinner: Jesus, the days that we have seen! Come, come.

Exeunt FALSTAFF and Justices

William Shakespeare

Week 716: Lochan, by Kathleen Jamie

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I think that this beautiful poem by the Scots poet Kathleen Jamie (1962-), so tranquil on the surface, is about the secret places of the heart, about the dream of casting off all duties and expectations, even those of poetry, and returning to that state of pure being in which the poems are actually born. ‘When all this over…’ When all what is over? The demands of the making, I would guess. The German poet Rilke towards the end of his life spoke of no longer being able to delight in new landscapes as he once did because he would immediately feel he had to set about internalizing them for use in his poetry. In our time Seamus Heaney has similarly spoken of sometimes wanting just to let it all go, to forget about poetry and spend his time on some quiet water fishing from a boat.

Why the white boat in the last two lines? I don’t know, and possible this is a reference entirely personal to the poet, but it can be noted that the rowan is a tree of magical protection, and that there may be a mythical resonance here with the boat that awaited Arthur on his journey to Avalon.

Lochan

(For Jean Johnstone)

When all this is over I mean
to travel north, by the high

drove roads and cart tracks
probably in June

with the gentle dog-roses
flourishing beside me. I mean

to find among the thousands
scattered in that land

a certain quiet lochan
where water lilies rise

like small fat moons.
and tied among the reeds,

underneath a rowan,
a white boat waits.

Kathleen Jamie

Week 715: Y Bychan Newydd-eni

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This week a strange yet tender poem by the Welsh poet Bobi Jones (see also week 287), about the way we respond to newborn babies even if they can sometimes arrive a little the worse for wear, and developing in a surprisingly literal sense the idea of ‘worming their way into one’s heart’. In a wider sense it can be seen as being about how our instinct of care and compassion for the vulnerable and helpless can redeem the troubled soul, and as such it reflects Jones’s Christian preoccupations, though of course such an instinct is by no means the prerogative of one religion, or indeed of religion at all.

The translation that follows is my own.

Y Bychan Newydd-eni

‘Mae dy wallt di’n tenau, a’th wyneb
    Yn grych, a’th gorff yn wyw.
Oedd dy swrnai’n faith? Ai blin y daith
Nes dy heneiddio wrth dreiglo
    O ddninas Duw?

‘Ble’ wyt ti’n myned, yr hen ŵr ifanc,
    Yr hen ŵr ifanca’n fyw?’
‘Rwy’n mynd i dwrian fel mwydyn
Mewn tamaid o bridd cochlaid
    A thorri twll bach ynndo i’r byw.’

‘Pa bridd ydyw hwnnw, yr hen ŵr ifanc,
    Yr hen ŵr ifanca’n fyw?’
‘Dy galon di, gyfaill. Dyna un twll
A fynnais, er llawned o falais.
    A’r fan yna caf fyw.’

‘Beth wnei di am y surni, ’r hen ŵr ifanc
    Yr hen ŵr ifanca’n fyw?’
Sylwi dim arno. Taflu blodau drosto
A chyrlio’n smotyn cryno
    Fel eli mewn briw.’

Bobi Jones

The Little Newborn

‘Your hair so fine, your wrinkled face,
   Your body weak and wan.
Was your journey long? Did it weary you
To age you so as you came your way
   From the citadel of God?

’Where are you going, my young old man,
    My youngest old man alive?’
‘I am going to burrow my way within
As a worm that burrows into red soil
   Then tunnel back out into life.’

‘What soil is that, my young old man,
   My youngest old man alive?’
‘Your heart, my friend. To open that,
For all its sorrow, was my desire.
   It is there that I shall live.’

‘But what will you do with the grief you find
    My youngest old man above ground?’
‘Pay it no heed. Strew it with flowers
And curl up tight in my little spot
   Like salve upon a wound’.