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’.

Week 714: If Ever You Go To Dublin Town, by Patrick Kavanagh

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Time for another of my favourite Patrick Kavanagh poems, first published in 1953, full of wry humour and tongue-in-cheek self-appraisal. Kavanagh liked to present the persona of an awkward provincial, disliked by Dublin’s males but loved by its women and at home with its children. This seems to have been in reaction to what he felt was the patronising attitude towards him of Dublin’s literary sophisticates: you want rough diamond, I’ll give you rough diamond. Apparently his manner could indeed be a bit offputting, especially in later life. Seamus Heaney, who admired him greatly, recounts how as a budding young poet he met Kavanagh in a Dublin bar in 1967, a few months before Kavanagh’s death. He offered to buy Kavanagh a drink, but the older poet, who at the time did not know who Heaney was, rebuffed him with a curt ‘No’. Heaney’s friend, the poet Richard Murphy, then introduced Seamus. Seamus reports “Kavanagh then said ‘Are you Heaney’, rhyming with Rainey, as people did in the country at home. ‘Well, I’ll have a Scotch’. I took that as a pass”.

The poem’s folklike quality attracted The Dubliners, who set it to music.

Notes:

Kavanagh regularly walked to the Dublin city centre from his apartment in Pembroke Road via Baggot Street, the most direct route.

If ever you go to Dublin town

If ever you go to Dublin town 
In a hundred years or so 
Inquire for me in Baggot Street 
And what I was like to know.
O he was the queer one 
Fol dol the di do,
He was a queer one 
I tell you.

My great-grandmother knew him well,  
He asked her to come and call  
On him in his flat and she giggled at the thought  
Of a young girl’s lovely fall.  
O he was dangerous,  
Fol dol the di do,  
He was dangerous
I tell you.

On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost 
Dishevelled with shoes untied,  
Playing through the railings with little children  
Whose children have long since died. 
O he was a nice man
Fol do the di do,  
He was a nice man  
I tell you.

Go into a pub and listen well  
If my voice still echoes there,  
Ask the men what their grandsires thought  
And tell them to answer fair.
O he was eccentric
Fol do the di do,  
He was eccentric  
I tell you.

He had the knack of making men feel  
As small as they really were  
Which meant as great as God had made them  
But as males they disliked his air.  
O he was a proud one  
Fol do the di do,  
He was a proud one  
I tell you.

If ever you go to Dublin town  
In a hundred years or so  
Sniff for my personality,  
Is it vanity’s vapour now?  
O he was a vain one  
Fol dol the di do,  
He was a vain one
I tell you.

I saw his name with a hundred others  
In a book in the library,  
It said he had never fully achieved  
His potentiality.  
O he was slothful 
Fol do the di do,  
He was slothful  
I tell you.

He knew that posterity has no use  
For anything but the soul,  
The lines that speak the passionate heart,  
The spirit that lives alone.  
O he was a lone one,  
Fol do the di do, 
Yet he lived happily  
I tell you.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 713: T.S.Eliot, by Robert Lowell

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I confess that in general I do not feel comfortable with the poems of the American poet Robert Lowell. To which some may say, since when was it the function of poetry to make us feel comfortable? Fair point, but it surely is, or should be, the function of poetry, in the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘to see life steadily and see it whole’, and I don’t feel that Lowell does this. But I do like this affectionately elegiac portrayal of T.S.Eliot, which shows a generosity of spirit not always accorded by poets to their peers (think Philip Larkin).

Notes:

Harvard: an American Ivy League university.
Memorial Hall: a Harvard building in memory the University’s Civil War dead.
‘warden’s pace’: presumably implying slow and deliberate – Eliot was an air raid warden during the Second World War.
Poe: the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who as well as being famous as a writer of macabre stories worked as a reviewer.
‘The Yard’: the campus at the center of Harvard University.
Pound: the American modernist poet Ezra Pound, who had a great influence on Eliot and others in the early twentieth century but moved to Italy in 1924 and threw in his lot with fascism, making broadcasts during the Second World War in support of eugenics and the Holocaust and urging American G.I.s to throw down their weapons and surrender. Captured by the Italian Resistance, he was handed over to the American authorities but ultimately judged unfit to stand trial and instead was interned for twelve years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane, in Washington, where T.S.Eliot visited him. Released in 1958, he returned to Italy to live in Rapallo, where he died in 1972.

I have a bit of a textual problem with the last line. The version of the poem I found and copied out years ago had ‘humor and honor’, which I have kept, but other versions online have ‘humor and boredom’ which seems to make much less sense – can anyone cast any light on this?

T.S.Eliot

Caught between two streams of traffic, in the gloom
of Memorial Hall and Harvard’s war-dead…. And he:
“Don’t you loathe to be compared with your relatives?
I do. I’ve just found two of mine reviewed by Poe.
He wiped the floor with them…and I was delighted.”
Then on with warden’s pace across the Yard,
talking of Pound, “It’s balls to say he only
pretends to be Ezra….He’s better though. This year
He no longer wants to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem.
Yes, he’s better. ‘You speak,’ he said, when he’d talked two hours.
By then I had absolutely nothing to say.”
Ah Tom, one muse, one music, had one your luck —
lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers,
humor and honor from the everlasting dross!

Robert Lowell

Week 712: Beauty, by Edward Thomas

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I would not claim this as one of Edward Thomas’s best poems: the movement a little stiff, the dissection of his melancholia a little too directly confessional for those who may prefer, say, the rueful obliquity of ‘Aspens’. But for those who love him any poem by Edward Thomas has something to offer, such as in this case that exquisite image of the river at evening, and the closing lines are revelatory of the way in which he could find in the natural world an escape from his own too burdensome selfhood, as if tree and twilight were serving as a kind of external locus for his soul. This of course is reminiscent of Keats’s famous observation in one of his letters: ‘I scarcely remember counting upon happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.’

Beauty

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph –
‘Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one,’ Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

Edward Thomas