Tag Archives: poetry

Week 317: The Bustle in a House, by Emily Dickinson

Posted on by
Reply

The mystery of Emily Dickinson is how a poet seemingly so innocent of life could nonetheless go so often and so unerringly to the heart of the human experience – in the words of Ted Hughes, who could be so generous and perceptive about other poets, how she ‘grasped the centre and circumference of things as surely as the human imagination ever has’. It’s an odd flower, poetic genius, that may wither in a hothouse yet flourish neglected in the barest of soils.

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth –

The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity –

Emily Dickinson

Week 316: Sommernacht, by Gottfried Keller

Posted on by
Reply

The Swiss writer Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) was, like our own Thomas Hardy, novelist and short story writer as well as poet, author of the semi-autobiographical novel ‘Der grüne Heinrich’ and such fine stories as ‘Die drei gerechten Kammacher’ and ‘Romeo und Julie auf dem Dorfe’. Though Keller is accounted a realist, this poem does draw rather heavily on the stock vocabulary of German romanticism; still, I love the way it evokes a lost camaraderie of rural labour, that my generation just caught the tail-end of: I have happy memories as a teenager of haymaking and potato-picking before workers more or less disappeared from the land.

The translation that follows is my own.

Sommernacht

Es wallt das Korn weit in die Runde,
Und wie ein Meer dehnt es sich aus;
Doch liegt auf seinem stillen Grunde
Nicht Seegewürm noch andrer Graus:
Da träumen Blumen nur von Kränzen
Und trinken der Gestirne Schein.
O goldnes Meer, dein friedlich Glänzen
Saugt meine Seele gierig ein!

In meiner Heimat grünen Talen,
Da herrscht ein alter schöner Brauch;
Wann hell die Sommersterne strahlen,
Der Glühwurm schimmert durch den Strauch:
Dann geht ein Flüstern und ein Winken,
Das sich dem Ährenfelde naht,
Da geht ein nächtlich Silberblinken
Von Sicheln durch die goldne Saat.

Das sind die Bursche, jung und wacker,
Die sammeln sich im Feld zuhauf
Und suchen den gereiften Acker
Der Witwe oder Waise auf,
Die keines Vaters, keiner Brüder
Und keines Knechtes Hilfe weiß –
Ihr schneiden sie den Segen nieder,
Die reinste Lust ziert ihren Fleiß.

Schon sind die Garben fest gebunden
Und schön in einen Kranz gebracht;
Wie lieblich flohn die stillen Stunden,
Es war ein Spiel in kühler Nacht!
Nun wird geschwärmt und hell gesungen
Im Garbenkreis, bis Morgenduft
Die nimmermüden, braunen Jungen
Zur eignen schweren Arbeit ruft.

Gottfried Keller

Summer Night

The fields of corn roll all around,
A sea that stretches far and near,
But breaks upon that quiet ground
No monster grim, no grisly fear.
There only flowers of garlands dream
And drink the starlight silently
As now my soul drinks in the gleam
Of that pacific golden sea.

In the green valleys hereabout
There is a custom, old and fine,
That when the summer stars are out
And glow-worms glimmer, comes a sign.
There’s movement in the fields, a hint,
A whisper on the night-wind borne,
A signalling, a silver glint
Of sickles in the golden corn.

Lads of the village, young and strong –
Together they seek out a field
Whose still unreaped ripe ears belong
To widow or to orphaned child,
That have no father, brother, kin,
No man whose labour they can ask –
For them the corn is gathered in.
The purest joy attends that task.

How soon with sheaves bound fast they’ve made
A harvest ring, so fair a sight,
How pleasant was the game they played
Through the cool silent hours of night.
Now all the sheaves stand round, and then
Come song and revel, till with day
The never-weary, brown young men
To their own labours must away.

Week 315: MCMXIV, by Philip Larkin

Posted on by
Reply

And to continue last week’s Remembrance theme, here is what I consider to be one of Philip Larkin’s best poems, and one that reminds us, if reminder is needed, that alongside the cantankerously solipsistic persona that he liked to affect, and that was sometimes allowed to make its way into his work, there existed a compassionate, evocative poet of immense skill.

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin

Week 314: The Wind on the Downs, by Marian Allan

Posted on by
2

Last weekend, with a centenary Remembrance Sunday coming up, I went to an exhibition of World War I memorabilia in a local village. It is interesting to me how it is this war more than World War II that still haunts my generation, just as it haunted my parents’ generation, yet it is easy to see why, reading those stoically cheerful yet yearning letters, preserved by careful hands for a century now, and seeing the photographs of all the keen-eyed young men, smart in their uniforms, who wrote them and never came back to their upland villages among the trees. I am indebted to the poet Sean Haldane for drawing my attention to this piece by Eleanor Marian Dundas Allen (1892-1953), written in 1917, a few days after hearing that her fiancé, Arthur Tylston Greg, had been killed in an air battle over France. He was 22 years old.

The Wind on the Downs

I like to think of you as brown and tall,
As strong and living as you used to be,
In khaki tunic, Sam Brown belt and all,
And standing there and laughing down at me.
Because they tell me, dear, that you are dead,
Because I can no longer see your face,
You have not died, it is not true, instead
You seek adventure in some other place.
That you are round about me, I believe;
I hear you laughing as you used to do,
Yet loving all the things I think of you;
And knowing you are happy, should I grieve?
You follow and are watchful where I go;
How should you leave me, having loved me so?

We walked along the tow-path, you and I,
Beside the sluggish-moving, still canal;
It seemed impossible that you should die;
I think of you the same and always shall.
We thought of many things and spoke of few,
And life lay all uncertainly before,
And now I walk alone and think of you,
And wonder what new kingdoms you explore.
Over the railway line, across the grass,
While up above the golden wings are spread,
Flying, ever flying overhead,
Here still I see your khaki figure pass,
And when I leave the meadow, almost wait
That you should open first the wooden gate.

Marian Allen

Week 313: Night Wind, by Boris Pasternak

Posted on by
Reply

If this poem by the Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) is, as I assume, a veiled reference to his problems with the Soviet authorities, then the veil seems quite thin and one is surprised that it sufficed to throw them off the scent, but Pasternak seems to have been more successful than some in treading the difficult line with the censors, and even managed a rather fraught personal relationship with Stalin himself, who apparently decided that he should be treated as some kind of holy fool and left alone, or at least, spared execution.

Night Wind

The village blacks out. The young
Go home from going gay.
The songs and the drunks are silent.
Tomorrow’s an early day.

Only the night wind fumbles
A path bewildered among
The weeds, that brought it home
With the party-going young.

It hangs its head at the door,
No stomach for a fight,
Wondering how to settle
Its argument with night.

Between the garden fences
And trees that crowd the track
Night picks another quarrel
And wind must answer back.

Boris Pasternak (translated by M. Harari)

Week 312: Which Of Us Two, by Peter Viereck

Posted on by
2

When I came across this poem by the American poet Peter Viereck (1918-2006) it struck me as such a powerful, intimate statement of grief that I immediately went looking for more by the same poet, but, as sometimes happens, could find plenty of verbal pyrotechnics but nothing that seemed to match this one for feeling. Still, as I’ve said before, one breakthrough poem is more than most of us manage.

Which Of Us Two

When both are strong with tenderness, too wild
With oneness to be severance-reconciled;
When even the touch of fingertips can shock
Both to such seesaw mutuality
Of hot-pressed opposites as smelts a tree
Tighter to its dryad than to its own tight bark;
When neither jokes or mopes or hates alone
Or wakes untangled from the others; when
More-warm-than-soul, more-deep-than-flesh are one
In marriage of the very skeleton, –

When, then, soil peels more flesh off half this love
And locks it from the unstripped half above,
Who’s ever sure which side of soil he’s on?
Have I lain seconds here, or years like this?
I’m sure of nothing else but loneliness
And darkness. Here’s such black as stuffs a tomb,
Or merely midnight in an unshared room.
Holding my breath for fear my breath is gone,
Unmoving and afraid to try to move,
Knowing only you have somehow left my side.
I lie here, wondering which of us has died.

Peter Viereck

Week 311: Anglais Mort à Florence, by Wallace Stevens

Posted on by
6

Every so often I have another go at reading Wallace Stevens, whose work I continue to find intriguing and frustrating in equal measure. Intriguing because the verse has such hypnotic cadences; frustrating because it seems to exist in some parallel universe where sometimes the words have meanings or associations that don’t seem to have made their way into mine. As a case in point, the last three stanzas here seem to me very fine, with the repetition of ‘But he remembered the time when he stood alone’ tolling like a bell, but what on earth are the police doing suddenly crashing in on the scene out of nowhere? Does this refer to some incident in a novel (possibly, from the poem’s title, a French novel) that I haven’t read? As usual, any enlightenment will be gratefully received.

Anglais Mort à Florence

A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.

Wallace Stevens

Week 310: From ‘King Lear’, by William Shakespeare

Posted on by
2

It seems that yesterday was National Poetry Day. Some years ago I did try to get involved in this, having been told that our local library was going to be mounting a display. Moved by a certain sense of duty to my poor publisher, I went along and enquired rather diffidently if they’d like to feature some of my own work, you know, local poet and all that. The kindly librarian explained to me that really her wall-space was reserved for more established names: Pam Ayres, Maya Angelou, Roger McGough, Shakespeare…. I was not surprised, of course, but I did feel the need to remind myself of exactly what this Shakespeare fellow had done to merit a place in such distinguished company. Back home I picked up my ‘Lear’ and it opened at this passage, where the old king has just been reconciled with his daughter and the poetry gathers in a pool of serenity before its last plunge over the brink of tragedy. And I thought to myself oh well, fair enough.

From ‘King Lear’, Act V, Scene 3

Lear: ‘No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon’.

William Shakespeare

Week 309: Fife Tune, by John Manifold

Posted on by
Reply

What appeals to me about this piece by the Australian poet John Manifold (1915-1985) is partly the enchanting lilt of its movement and partly its quality of wistful innocence – meaning no disrespect to our armed forces, but that’s perhaps not the first thing one would look for in a poem about a bunch of squaddies marching past a pretty young girl.

Fife Tune

(6/8) for Sixth Platoon, 308th ITC

One morning in spring
We marched from Devizes
All shapes and all sizes
Like beads on a string,
But yet with a swing
We trod the bluemetal
And full of high fettle
We started to sing.

She ran down the stair
A twelve-year-old darling
And laughing and calling
She tossed her bright hair;
Then silent to stare
At the men flowing past her –
There were all she could master
Adoring her there.

It’s seldom I’ll see
A sweeter or prettier;
I doubt we’ll forget her
In two years or three.
And lucky he’ll be
She takes for a lover
While we are far over
The treacherous sea.

John Manifold

Week 308: Forgotten, by Dannie Abse

Posted on by
3

Another one from Welsh poet and doctor Dannie Abse (1923-2014), written, I assume from the Vietnam reference, in the late sixties or early seventies. The theme is a common enough one in literature – that haunting sense of the other place, once known or dreamed of, that one can never quite get back to or come to: Alain-Fourner’s lost domain, H.G.Wells and his door in the wall, Edwin Muir’s childhood Eden, the unscheduled railway halt of Robert Graves’s poem ‘The Next Time’.

Forgotten

That old country I once said I’d visit
when older. Can no one tell me its name?
Odd, to have forgotten what it is called.
I would recognise the name if I heard it.
So many times I have searched the atlas
With a prowling convex lens – to no avail.

I know the geography of the great world
has changed; the war, the peace, the deletions
of places – red pieces gone forever
,and names of countries altered forever:
Gold Coast Ghana, Persia become Iran,
Siam Thailand, and hell now Vietnam.

People deleted. Must I sleep again to reach it,
to find the back door opening to a field,
A barking of dogs, and a path that leads back?
One night in pain, the dead middle of night,
will I awake again, know who I am,
the man from somewhere else, and the place’s name?

Dannie Abse