Tag Archives: poetry

Week 649: A Postcard from the Volcano, by Wallace Stevens

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This week another from Wallace Stevens (see also weeks 164 and 311), a poet that I continue to find myself drawn to yet frustrated by. Frustrated because I can never make my mind up as to whether his are free-floating works of the imagination, all right as far as they go but somewhat rootless and lacking in real substance, or whether they are in fact perfectly well rooted in reality, just not a reality which I as an English reader am culturally attuned to.

Clearly this poem is about what our posterity will and will not be able to make of our lives, about how much (or little) can be conveyed by our physical remains and by language. I do like a lot of the poem’s phrasing, but as usual for me with Stevens there are one or two stumbling blocks. I can live with ‘…the windy sky/Cries out a literate despair’, which has a fine ring to it even though I would be hard put to pin down its precise meaning. But what are ‘budded aureoles’ and how does one weave them? And I find the last line, ‘smeared with the gold of the opulent sun’, a bit strained and precious for my taste.

Still, I am aware that there are those for whom Wallace Stevens is by some margin the greatest American poet of the 20th century, so I remain hopeful of tuning my antenna better to his wavelength.

A Postcard from the Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once   
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes   
Made sharp air sharper by their smell   
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones   
We left much more, left what still is   
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow   
Above the shuttered mansion-house,   
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look   
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is … Children,   
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems   
As if he that lived there left behind   
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,   
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Wallace Stevens

Week 648: Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen, by Heinrich Heine

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This poem, from the 1827 collection ‘Buch der Lieder’, has its genesis in the young Heine’s slightly complicated love life. He was in love with his cousin Amalie, but she had no interest in the poet and anyway had feelings for another. But this other man in his turn did not reciprocate her feelings and married someone else, at which, at least according to Heine’s jaundiced and perhaps rather ungallant view of the matter, Amalie settled for ‘den ersten besten Mann’, the first man to come along, and married him, leaving poor Heine out in the cold.

If this poem with its line in neat ruefulness gives you the impression of reading a German version of A.E.Housman, that is not surprising: Housman once named Heine as one of the three principal influences on his own verse, along with the English ballads and the songs of Shakespeare.

The translation that follows is my own.

XXXIX

Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,
Die hat einen andern erwählt;
Der andre liebt eine andre,
Und hat sich mit dieser vermählt.

Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger
Den ersten besten Mann,
Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;
Der Jüngling ist übel dran.

Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu;
Und wem sie just passieret,
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.

Heinrich Heine

A young man loves a maiden,
Who would another wed;
This other loves another
And marries her instead.

The maiden out of chagrin
To have a husband still
Weds the first to come along;
The young man takes it ill.

The story is an old one,
Yet stays forever new,
And those to whom it happens,
It breaks their heart in two.

Week 647: Teens, by Molly Holden

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For me this poem captures beautifully that feeling of alienation mingled with relief that arises at a certain age, typically around thirteen, when you realise that human beings are interesting and some may even be lovable but that you have very little in common with most of them and you might as well stop trying to belong and instead do your own thing, contentedly brooding, like the poet here, at the shadowy edge of things. And of course, she is by no means the first poet to find delight in the dissolution of the self into the natural world: think of Keats with his sparrow pecking in the gravel, or Hopkins with his inscapes.

Teens

That was always my place, preferably
at dusk, in a slight rain
– below the drenched allotment bank,
by the bridge not often shaken by a train.

The neat hedge ended there, the fields began,
sloping to shrouded hills,
and the lane grew pot-holed, led only
to flowery pastures and abandoned mills.

There I would stand in the mizzle, watching
thirty martins or so
hawking silently above the meadows
high on black lines of flight, eerily low

as the heads of the grasse, swerving
only at solid hedge
and me, a contentedly brooding phantom,
at the lane’s, at the night’s edge.

Molly Holden

Week 646: Mountain Lion, by D.H.Lawrence

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I have never much taken to D.H.Lawrence as a novelist. The problem I have is with his characters, a rather intense lot who are like nobody I have ever known or would wish to know. Of course, from one point of view it is absurd to judge works of literature by how sympathetic you find the protagonists. ‘Yes, William, it’s very good, but this couple of yours, the Macbeths was it?, well, they’re not very nice, are they?’ And yet, for those of us who read for pleasure with no academic axe to grind, is it so unreasonable to prefer to spend our leisure time in the company of Elizabeth Bennet rather than Heathcliff, of Dorothea Brooke rather than Becky Sharp, of Anna Karenina rather than Raskolnikov?

But while D.H.Lawrence as novelist may not be my cup of tea, I find him as poet sometimes excellent, as travel writer and observer of nature sometimes superb. This week’s poem is from the collection ‘Birds, Beast and Flowers’, and is surely prescient in its sorrow for the diminishing otherness of the world.

Mountain Lion

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow and inwardness of the Lobo valley.
What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?

What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?

Qué tiene, amigo?
León—

He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.

He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

Hermoso es

They go out towards the open;
We go on into the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave.
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow flash of a mountain lion’s long shoot!
And her bright striped frost face will never watch any more, out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice of the mountains of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion!

D.H.Lawrence

Week 645: The New House, by Edward Thomas

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I find this a very sad poem, while recognising that for the most part sad writes deeper than happy. One’s home should be a place of sanctuary,  and moving into a new house, at least when one is young, should be a time of excitement and new beginnings, not of bleak forebodings as here. But of course for Edward Thomas, who spent most of his adult life as a poorly rewarded reviewer and hack writer, his home was also his place of work, and thus bound up with his feelings of dissatisfaction, of spending his spirit on uncongenial tasks he knew to be unworthy of him – a common enough situation for most of us but one especially lacerating for the sensitive man who came so late to the discovery of his true gift and had so little time to enjoy it.

The sentiment of the last two lines seems ambiguous. Is Thomas finding some dour consolation in the thought that his troubles are transient and will end with nothing having changed, while the timeless elementals of the earth continue on their uncaring way? Or does the thought of this future wind merely intensify his desolation, his sense of time lost or ill-spent, but either way never to be recaptured?

The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
    I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
    Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
    And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
    Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
    Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
    Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
    Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
    After these things should be.

Edward Thomas

Week 644: Blackthorn Day, by David Sutton

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It has been a cold grey couple of months, though snowless our way, but as I write there are actually gleams of sun, so I am hoping this one of my own might prove timely and strike a few chords with fellow spring watchers.

Blackthorn Day

A western wind, sudden and soft as May,
Long looked for yet amazing: perfect spring,
The year’s first windflowers, blossom in the wood,
The new air tart with nettle-growth and dung.
A day like hope: how quickly we forget
The soul’s long winter, when the sleet winds blew.
We surface now like dolphins into light.
To wait time out seems all we had to do.

It will not last, of course: we shall awake
To ordinary greyness and the rain.
So be it then: I would not wish a world
Unseasoned by such sweet recurring pain
Nor ask a heaven, that had no escape
From cloudless summers of eternal now
To mortal spring again, and blackthorn hope
For one day only, perfect on the bough.

David Sutton

Week 643: Der Tod der Geliebten, by Rainer Maria Rilke

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This was the first Rilke poem I ever came across, and I was intrigued by its rich sound effects – the pattern in phrases like ‘leis aus seinen Augen ausgelöst’ is somewhat remininscent of Welsh cynghanedd – while at the same time wondering if a native German reader might find them a little over the top. Written in 1907, in its preoccupation with death it can be seen as a forerunner to his longer poem ‘Orpheus und Eurydice’, and his ‘Die Sonette an Orpheus’.

It may seem that in an age that has largely lost its confidence in an afterlife, Rilke’s poem savours of wishful thinking, but of course, if you are going to disallow wishful thinking in art you are going to say goodbye to a great deal of human culture.

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Tod der Geliebten

Er wusste nur vom Tod was alle wissen:
dass er uns nimmt und in das Stumme stößt.
Als aber sie, nicht von ihm fortgerissen,
nein, leis aus seinen Augen ausgelöst,

hinüberglitt zu unbekannten Schatten,
und als er fühlte, dass sie drüben nun
wie einen Mond ihr Mädchenlächeln hatten
und ihre Weise wohlzutun:

da wurden ihm die Toten so bekannt,
als wäre er durch sie mit einem jeden
ganz nah verwandt; er ließ die andern reden

und glaubte nicht und nannte jenes Land
das gutgelegene, das immersüße –
Und tastete es ab für ihre Füße.

The Death of the Beloved

He only knew of death what all men know:
It bears us to a silent world below,
And yet when she, not torn away from him,
But softly taken, like a light grown dim,

Across to unknown shadows made her glide,
And when he knew that they on that far side
Now like a full moon had her maiden’s smile,
Her gentle ways, her goodness without guile,

It seemed then that he knew them all, the dead,
As if, through her, he had become related.
The others talked and did not understand,

But he, the unbelieving, named that land
The well placed one, the one forever sweet,
And felt it out in spirit for her feet.

Week 642: Is My Team Ploughing?, by A.E.Housman

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‘Is my team ploughing’ is poem XXVII in A.E.Housman’s 1896 collection ‘A Shropshire Lad’, and shows the poet’s skill at adapting the question and answer format of folk ballads for his own mordantly humorous purposes.

The poem was famously set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I suppose the price we have to pay for such sublime pieces of music as ‘Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis’, ‘Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus’ and ‘Job: A Masque for Dancing’ is Vaughan Williams’s penchant for making ghastly drawing-room arrangements of other people’s poems. Housman himself did not like the result at all and was particularly annoyed to discover that Vaughan Williams had cut out verses 3 and 4 – ‘how would he like it if I started cutting bars out of his music?’, but Vaughan Williams was unrepentant and defended himself stoutly, saying he felt that ‘a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as “The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal”’. Reluctantly I have to agree that those two verses are indeed no great loss.

XXVII

‘Is my team ploughing,
      That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
      When I was man alive?’

Ay, the horses trample,
      The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
      The land you used to plough.

‘Is football playing
      Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
      Now I stand up no more?’

Ay, the ball is flying,
      The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
      Stands up to keep the goal.

‘Is my girl happy,
      That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
      As she lies down at eve?’

Ay, she lies down lightly,
      She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
      Be still, my lad, and sleep.

‘Is my friend hearty,
      Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
      A better bed than mine?’

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
      I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
      Never ask me whose.

A.E.Housman

Week 641: Lament of the Old Woman of Beare, by Anon

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This is my own take on the famous Old Irish lament, poignant in its depiction of old age, that I mentioned in a reply to a comment a couple of weeks back. I have not on this occasion included the Irish text because my version is more a distillation than a translation as such, omitting some stanzas and being rather free with others, so it would not contribute much to a word-for-word understanding of the original. More literal translations are available online.

The poem is thought to have been written in the late 8th or early 9th century. The Old Woman of Beare was originally an immortal mythological figure, to be equated with the Cailleach, ancestress of races and creator of the landscape, raising mountains and cairns, but by the time of the poem’s composition she has come to be seen simply as a very old woman who has outlived friends and lovers and now consorts with a Christian saint, much as Finn’s son Oisin was seen. It is a pity to lose the  mythological dimension, but on the other hand it does bring the human side into focus, making the old woman the epitome of grandmothers throughout the ages, railing against the ravages of time and deploring the mores of the young while remembering her own colourful past.

Lament of the Old Woman of Beare

(after the Irish)

I who was young am old.
Ebb-tide has come to me.
The days of my life flow outward,
The days of my life like the sea.

I am the Old Woman of Beare.
I used to wear a dress
Brand-new each morning. Now
I walk in nakedness.

When we were young we loved
Men; the girls today
Care for riches more.
The men have passed away.

Swift chariots and steeds
That bore off every prize –
Their day passed long ago.
Every good thing dies.

Look at these arms now.
They used to circle kings.
The bones stick through the flesh.
On them no wedding-rings.

The Stone of the Kings on Femen,
Mighty Ronan’s chair –
Their cheeks of stone are withered.
How shall flesh ones fare?

Femen’s plain I envy.
It has a yellow crop.
My crop is grey: I must
Wear this veil atop.

The waves of the sea are talking,
The wind blows up their spray.
Fermuid who was my darling
Will not come today.

I know where the kings’ sons are.
They rowed across the sea.
Under the reeds of Alma
The lads that lay with me.

The flood-tide and the ebb,
The fluxes of the main,
I have known them all.
They will not come again.

The ebb is with me now.
No second flood will come.
I wait for the winds to be silent,
For the voice of the sea to be dumb.


Week 640: The Journey Back, by Seamus Heaney

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I find the first line of this poem rather arresting but also teasingly ambiguous. What is it that Seamus Heaney is surprised at – the fact that Larkin’s shade appears to him at all or the fact that it quotes Dante? Given Larkin’s record with foreign languages (‘Do you read much foreign poetry, Mr Larkin?’ ‘Foreign poetry? No!’) my money is on the latter. Though of course this carefully cultivated philistinism could just have been part of Larkin’s self-protective façade, his understandable distrust of critics and academics who know everything about poetry except how to write it, and Heaney could be gently poking fun at that façade. Anyway, it is a generous and perceptive tribute from one poet to another who had indeed celebrated ‘the heartland of the ordinary’ but who had not always been so generous in return (I believe Larkin’s private name for Heaney was the Bogman).

The Journey Back

Larkin’s shade surprised me. He quoted Dante:

‘Daylight was going and the umber air
Soothing every creature on the earth,
Freeing them from their labours everywhere.

I alone was girding myself to face
the ordeal of my journey and my duty’
And not a thing had changed, as rush-hour buses

Bore the drained and laden through the city.
I might have been a wise king setting out
Under the Christmas lights – except that

It felt more like the forewarned journey back
Into the heartland of the ordinary.
Still my old self. Ready to knock one back.

A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry.

Seamus Heaney