Week 242: From ‘The Prelude’, by William Wordsworth

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Wordsworth was, as far as I recall, the first of my poetic influences: I read ‘The Prelude’ in my early teens and admired it greatly, the more so because it chimed so well with the kind of wandering, reflective, close to nature childhood that it was still just about possible to have back then, and which I had myself enjoyed, though in a rather less rugged environment than Wordsworth’s Lake District. Later I came to be not exactly disenchanted with Wordsworth, but to feel that he was no longer quite what I wanted or needed: what he offered, it seemed to me, was a leisurely ramble in the hills that offered you great views at some points but also involved a lot of slightly tedious plodding in between, and I was beginning to feel that a poem should be more like a fell run, taut and unrelenting all the way to the top. But here, for the sake of that early admiration, is my favourite passage from ‘The Prelude’, that I think shows the poet at his vivid, immediate best, and if I now wish that overall his gait were just a little less leisurely, I remain grateful for those visionary viewpoints that from time to time it takes us to.

From ‘The Prelude’

And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows blazed through twilight gloom,
I heeded not their summons: happy time
It was indeed for all of us – for me
It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six, – I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures, – the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me – even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

William Wordsworth

Week 241: Perfection isn’t like a perfect story, by P.J.Kavanagh

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This is one of several poems that P.J.Kavanagh (1931-2015) wrote in memory of his first wife Sally, who died tragically young two years into their marriage. He commemorates her in his partial autobiography ‘The Perfect Stranger’, a book which like this poem manages to be both grounded and luminous.

Perfection isn’t like a perfect story

I think often of the time I was perfectly happy,
And sat by the harbour reading a borrowed Cavafy.
You were there of course and the night before we
Played bar billiards, green under lights, in the café,
Postponing our first shared bedtime and every ball
That didn’t come back made us look at each other and down.
I collected the key and we crossed the late-night hall
And seeing the room you cried, it was so small.

We were too close. We bore each other down.
I changed the room and we found that you were ill.
Nothing was perfect, or as it should have been.
I lay by your side and watched the green of dawn
Climb over our bodies and bring out of darkness the one
Perfect face that made nothing else matter at all.

P.J.Kavanagh

Week 240: Walking Away, by C. Day-Lewis

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I tend to think of Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) as the archetypal career poet: his work accomplished, urbane, but a little manufactured, a little safe, not often charged with the excitement that real poems bring, that sense that something not entirely under the poet’s control has taken him or her by the scruff of the neck and said ‘Oi! You! Listen up!’. But I do very much like this wise, empathic piece that must surely resonate with anyone who has ever been a parent, and if it should prove in the end that a poet’s fate is to be remembered for just one poem, well, that most of us should be so lucky.

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

C. Day-Lewis

Week 239: On My First Son, by Ben Jonson

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Ben Jonson’s first son died of the plague in 1603, aged seven. This for me is one of the great English poems, an elegy for a lost child that resonates as powerfully now as it must have done four centuries ago. Where does that power come from? One is tempted to say that this is one time, perhaps the only time, when clever Ben Jonson, classically educated Renaissance man, contemporary and not entirely uncritical admirer of Shakespeare, lays down all defences of wit and irony and lets the words come directly from the heart. But this would not be wholly true: there is wit and conceit enough in the poem: in the concept of a child being a debt to fate that must be repaid, in the paradox that really the child’s state is to be envied, in the idea, expressed in the somewhat tortured syntax of the last two lines, of never again risking too great an attachment to an object of love. Yet here, as is not always the case with Jonson and other Elizabethan poets, the wit and conceits seem perfectly harnessed in the service of a heartfelt emotion.

Note: Jonson’s son was also called Benjamin, which in Hebrew means ‘fortunate’ or ‘dexterous’, a meaning echoed in the phrase ‘child of my right hand’.

On My First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, ‘Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

Ben Jonson

Week 238: Festival Enough, by Terence Hards

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I am grateful to the poet Michael Cullup for drawing my attention to this tender love poem by Terence Hards (1922-1991); I vaguely knew the name but had never seen any of his work. He thought I’d like it, and I do, very much: a gift to remember for my 73rd birthday today!

At first I was a bit puzzled by the word ‘desecration’ in the second line and even queried whether it should be ‘decoration’, but no, ‘desecration’ is what the man wrote, and thinking about it harder one sees that the idea here is that the preoccupation with the exchange of material gifts at Christmas desecrates – deconsecrates – the real meaning of the festival, and that goes with the idea of allowing the season’s ‘unaccustomed plenty’ to deflect us from the true ‘expectations of the nativity’.

Terence appears to have published only one book of poetry, ‘As It Was’, in 1964; he spent his last years in the Dorset village of Morcombelake, where his retirement was tragically cut short when he was knocked down by a car as he crossed the street.

Festival Enough 

We are too penniless this year to buy
A desecration for festivity,
To lay out gifts or banquets and rely
On unaccustomed plenty to withstand
The expectations of nativity.
And so I wake you from your Christmas sleep
To see the vapour of our breath
Hang on the morning, motionless with frost,
And pause in the air above us like a debt.
I bring no presents, love, to scatter at your feet
But come more gently than the growth of moss,
And on my lips the blessing of your name
Is surely festival enough to keep.

Terence Hards

Week 237: Holidays, Explorations, by Molly Holden

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Back from holiday last week. At a certain age it is natural to start to wonder just how many more times you will come over the brow of a hill to see the wide curve of a beach below and a tall sea glittering, or look out of a window at night to see a bright half-moon riding above a dark headland. For Molly Holden, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the curtailment of her adventuring, as she poignantly relates in this poem, came all too early.

Holidays, Explorations

How can I bear it
that journeying’s over
while still the heart’s un-
regenerate rover,

still longs to visit
strange hamlet, strange river,
to feel at view’s width
the authentic shiver?

Now I must practise
good grace at parting,
to wish others joy
though I am not starting

the ride through the sunrise
to valleys of vision.
I fix on my smile now
with summer precision.

Molly Holden

Week 236: Inversnaid, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Another of my favourite Hopkins poems, which considering the date of its composition (1881) seems remarkably prophetic of our current concern for habitat loss and the ever-diminishing role of wild nature in our lives. 

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Week 235: Strange How You Stay, by Dorothy Trogdon

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I have to confess that I had never heard of Dorothy Trogdon till a few days ago, when my attention was drawn to this poem on the Web and I knew from a sudden switching on of alertness that here was a poet I wanted to know better. Haven’t found out much about her so far – she’s American, lives in Orcas Island, been writing for a long while but only recently in her old age started publishing. So, acquaintance is a work in progress; meanwhile I hope you like this quietly assured piece as much as I did.

Strange How You Stay 

Strange how you may stay in one place—
Say a house facing a stand of alders—
and yet are carried forward,

stay in one place but not in that time,
not in the years that meant so much to you,
that were your happiest years,

how you are helplessly carried onward.

It has come hard to me, this knowledge,
I have had to practice to do it—

to swallow silently the losses while I hold close
what the heart has claimed.

Now the trees have entered their winter silence.
In the garden, one foolhardy yellow rose
Is blooming still.

Dorothy Trogdon

Week 234: Evidence At The Witch Trials, by James K. Baxter

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An oddly disturbing piece by the New Zealand poet James Baxter (1926-1972) – witchcraft and devilry may be delusions that we have largely put behind us, but human vulnerability and gullibility are the same as ever, and maybe this account of a young person seduced by a sinister cult leader with promises of reward is not without echo in our own times.

Evidence At The Witch Trials

No woman’s pleasure did I feel
Under the hazel tree
When heavy as a sack of meal
The Black Man mounted me,
But cold as water from a dyke
His seed that quickened me.

What his age I cannot tell;
Foul he was, and fair.
There blew between us both from Hell
A blast of grit and fire,
And like a boulder is the babe
That in my womb I bear.

Though I was youngest in that band
Yet I was quick to learn.
A red dress he promised me
And red the torches burn.
Between the faggot and the flame
I see his face return.

James K. Baxter

Week 233: Quand vous serez bien vieille, by Pierre de Ronsard/The Apparition, by John Donne

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Two for the price of one this week, as I thought they would make an interesting comparison. Both poems deal with what seems to be an occupational hazard of male poets: the fact of women not fancying them as much as they feel entitled to be fancied. But the spirit of the two poems is very different. Ronsard’s poem is grave, beautiful and not without compassion for the woman as he imagines her in her old age; Donne’s poem is more punchy, full of a jagged energy and vengeful to the point of vindictiveness. I value both poems greatly, but do you not get the feeling that that Ronsard’s poem, beautiful though it is, has something of the rhetorical exercise about it, while Donne really does have it in for this poor woman and doesn’t care who knows it?

Note on line 6 of the Donne poem: It was a common belief that candles guttered in the presence of ghosts.

The translation from the French is my own.

Quand vous serez bien vieille

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant:
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,
Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.

Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os:
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos:
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain:
Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.

Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène, 1578

When you are old and sit by candlelight
Spinning your wool at the fireside, then declare,
As you read out my lines for your delight,
‘Ronsard once feted me when I was fair’.

Then not a servant-girl, knowing my fame,
Though she be half-asleep in labour’s daze,
But suddenly will wake, to hear his name
Who blessed your own with such immortal praise.

By then I shall be bodiless, a shade
At rest now in some myrtle-shadowed glade
And you old, at the fireside, stooped and gray,

Regretting my lost love and your proud scorn.
Then trust me, live, and don’t wait till the morn,
Gather the roses of this life today.

The Apparition

When by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tir’d before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie,
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I’had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threat’nings rest still innocent.

John Donne (1573-1631)