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Week 639: From ‘The Passing of Arthur’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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This week’s offering is selections from the final book of Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, a work immensely popular in Victorian times, but I would guess little read now. It is not hard to see why: the poem has its virtues, being characteristically mellifluous, but it is too stuffed with Victorian piety and has just too many words for a more secular age not known for the length of its attention span. The dying Arthur, for example, despite suffering from a fatal head wound manages to sermonise at a length that would put any operatic diva to shame. Yet here and there visual and aural effects combine to create a hauntingly elegiac music.

From ‘The Passing of Arthur’

So all day long the noise of battle roll’d
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur’s Table, man by man,
Had fall’n in Lyonnesse about their lord,
King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land:
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

    Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:
‘The sequel of to-day unsolders all
The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep
They sleep – the men I loved. I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.
I perish by this people which I made, –  
Tho’ Merlin sware that I should come again
To rule once more; but, let what will be, be,
I am so deeply smitten thro’ the helm
That without help I cannot last till morn.
Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur,
Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how
In those old days, one summer noon, an arm
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Holding the sword – and how I row’d across
And took it, and have worn it, like a king;
And, wheresoever I am sung or told
In aftertime, this also shall be known:
But now delay not: take Excalibur,
And fling him far into the middle mere:
Watch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word.’

The bold Sir Bedivere duly takes the sword, but twice cannot bring himself to carry out the task, waste of a good sword and all that. The second time he comes back Arthur says he will give him one more chance and if he fails again ‘I will arise and slay thee with my hands’. At this point you feel Sir Bedivere might be excused for saying ‘Look, mate, if you’re feeling that chipper all of a sudden go and throw the damn sword in yourself’, but no, off he goes and this time duly throws the sword far into the lake, at which point out comes an arm, ‘clothed in white samite, mystic wonderful’ and clearly belonging to one who should be playing for the England ladies’ cricket team, and catches it by the hilt.

Sir Bedivere returns and reports, this time to Arthur’s satisfaction, and there is now a bit of a rush to get to the lake to catch a barge which will be coming to take the king away, but Sir Bedivere gives Arthur a piggyback and thanks to some nifty footwork by Sir B. over slippery ground – Tennyson here doing the kind of thing he does best, I think – they make it in time for Arthur to be taken aboard and welcomed by three queens.

    But, as he walk’d, King Arthur panted hard,
Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed
When all the house is mute. So sigh’d the King,
Muttering and murmuring at his ear, ‘Quick, quick!
I fear it is too late, and I shall die.’
But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk’d,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.
He heard the deep behind him, and a cry
Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.
Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels–
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon.

    Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge,
Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,
Beneath them; and descending they were ware
That all the decks were dense with stately forms,
Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream – by these
Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose
A cry that shiver’d to the tingling stars,
And, as it were one voice, an agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world.

Arthur takes his place in the barge, leaving a forlorn Sir Bedivere to make a rather plaintive appeal, which gives Arthur the chance for a final bit of sermonising, while the three queens, one imagines, wait rather impatiently in the background: ‘Don’t want to rush you, Arthur, but we really ought to get that head wound seen to…’

    Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
‘Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.’

    And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seëst – if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) –
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.’

    So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Week 638: Cotswold Ways, by Ivor Gurney

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Another of Ivor Gurney’s odd yet oddly compelling poems, that really shouldn’t work: a jumble of seemingly random images and eccentric syntax somehow held together by one passionate and highly individual voice. This one is not one of the war poems for which he became best known (see week 24) but draws on his beloved Gloucestershire, and it is possible that I have a particular affection for it because one hot July in 1989 I walked the Cotswold Way from north to south, and realised I was passing through Gurney country and experiencing as he must have done the same seethe of chaotic sensations: heat and light, the tart smell of dung on pastures, peacock butterflies on purple knapweed, cattle-troughs with clear dark water above the green and amber glimmer of flat limestones, shepherd tracks and pilgrim tracks, edged with meadowsweet and dusty cow parsley, churches cool as lilies in the blaze of the afternoon, sweet smells of hay, ripe smells of barley, acres of gold and auburn stubble, the blessed deep shade of beech woods, hill-forts and standing stones, the turf-clad vallum of Beckbury Camp and the mound of Belas Knap like a strange green space ship. And abbey and almshouse, country mansion and cottage, one can shuffle through that country knee-deep in history like autumn leaves.

Cotswold Ways

One comes across the strangest things in walks:
Fragments of Abbey tithe-barns fixed in modern
And Dutch-sort houses where the water baulks
Weired up, and brick kilns broken among fern,
Old troughs, great stone cisterns bishops might have blessed
Ceremonially, and worthy mounting-stones;
Black timber in red brick, queerly placed
Where Hill stone was looked for – and a manor’s bones
Spied in the frame of some wisteria’d house
And mill-falls and sedge pools and Saxon faces;
Stream-sources happened upon in unlikely places,
And Roman-looking hills of small degree
And the surprise of dignity of poplars
At a road end, or the white Cotswold scars,
Or sheets spread white against the hazel tree.
Strange the large difference of up-Cotswold ways;
Birdlip climbs bold and treeless to a bend,
Portway to dim wood-lengths without end,
And Crickley goes to cliffs are the crown of days.

Ivor Gurney

Week 637: The Fiddler of Dooney, by W.B.Yeats

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This is another one from the more populist end of W.B.Yeats’s wide-ranging oeuvre, being akin to other such early pieces as ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan’ and ‘The Host of the Air’ with their cast of priests and angels and fairy pipers, poems infused with a religiose sentimentality that certainly forms no part of my own agnostic sensibility. And yet I like it, even while remaining doubtful of its assertions. Are the truly good always the merry? I would have thought they were more likely to exist in a state of permanent frazzlement, as part of that cadre Keats defines as ‘those to whom the miseries of the world/Are misery, and will not let them rest’. And yet it may be that they do carry within them some fount of secret joy that only awaits its time to find expression, and that such a time, as in this poem, may best be provided by music.

Yeats comments: ‘A couple of miles from Innisfree, no four or five miles from Innisfree, there’s a great rock called Dooney Rock where I had often picnicked when a child. And when in my 24th year I made up a poem about a merry fiddler I called him ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ in commemoration of that rock and of all those picnics. The places mentioned in the poem are all places near Sligo.’

The Fiddler Of Dooney

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

W.B.Yeats

Week 636: The More Loving One, by W.H.Auden

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I suppose that this could be classed as one of Auden’s lighter pieces, but it does have that Audenesque quality of slipping effortlessly into the memory, a demonstration of what can still be done with those unfashionable things, metre and rhyme, and the sentiment is a serious enough one.

Given Auden’s own troubled relationship with his partner and collaborator, Chester Kallman, who found himself unable to comply with Auden’s demands for mutual fidelity, I have always felt that there was an undercurrent of pathos in this poem: Auden realising that he was indeed doomed to be the more loving one, and making the best of a bad job. But from what I have observed it seems to me that to be the more loved one has the potential to be equally trying, and that the most successful relationships tend to be those founded on a perfect balance of mutual incomprehension and irreverent badinage, in which such introspective calculations, if they exist at all, rarely surface.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.


W.H.Auden

Week 635: From ‘Sur la mort de Marie’, by Pierre Ronsard

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This celebrated sonnet by the French poet Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585; see also week 233) was first published in 1578. Officially it was written at the request of Henry III, who had just lost his mistress Marie de Clèves who died at the age of 21 in 1574, but its real inspiration was Ronsard’s loss of his own beloved Marie, a peasant woman called Marie Dupin who had also died young in 1573.

The poem turns on the one central trope of comparing the life of a beautiful woman to the life of a flower, and I suppose you could call Ronsard a poet of convention, classical in diction and sentiment, rather than a mould-breaker in the manner of, say, Villon. Yet few have ever done the conventional better than Ronsard at his best.

The translation that follows is my own.

From ‘Sur la mort de Marie’

Comme on voit sur la branche au mois de mai la rose
En sa belle jeunesse, en sa première fleur,
Rendre le ciel jaloux de sa vive couleur,
Quand l’Aube de ses pleurs au point du jour l’arrose:

La grâce dans sa feuille, et l’amour se repose,
Embaumant les jardins et les arbres d’odeur:
Mais battue ou de pluye ou d’excessive ardeur,
Languissante elle meurt feuille à feuille déclose.

Ainsi en ta première et jeune nouveauté,
Quand la terre et le ciel honoraient ta beauté,
La Parque t’a tuée, et cendre tu reposes.

Pour obsèques reçois mes larmes et mes pleurs,
Ce vase plein de lait, ce pannier plein de fleurs,
Afin que vif et mort ton corps ne soit que roses.

Pierre Ronsard

As you see upon the branch, in the month of May,
The rose, so young and fair in its first bloom,
That the sky weeps, with envy overcome,
Bedewing its fine tint at break of day:

Such grace and love reposing in that spray,
It scents the gardens round, the woodland glades,
Until rain-beaten or sun-scorched it fades
Petal by petal in a slow decay:

Just so in your first youth and novelty,
As earth and sky were honouring your beauty,
Fate cut you down; as ash you lie today..

Receive then these my tears for threnody,
This vase of milk, these blooms, that of your body
In life and death, may only roses stay.

Week 634: The Innumerable Christ, by Hugh MacDiarmid

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This week, a poem for Christmas, if not exactly a Christmassy poem. It turns on the idea of other worlds throughout space and time needing to be redeemed from sin by the coming of their own Christ figure. I must admit that this is not a part of Christian doctrine I have ever understood: it seems to me that people need to take responsibility for their own sins and I don’t see how someone else suffering a painful death ostensibly on their behalf helps anyone. Be that as it may, I think MacDiarmid makes an eerily effective poem of the idea, conjuring up vast cosmic distances and alien worlds that are nonetheless united by a common experience of suffering and sacrifice.

MacDiarmid has often been criticised for inventing his own version of Scots dialect that no one ever spoke. But of course no one ever spoke like much of Shakespeare either. ‘What did you say, dear?’ ‘I said, the multitudinous seas incarnadine’. ‘Oh, right. Why not take a break, it’s nearly teatime anyway’.

kens – knows
whatna – what kind of
heids – heads
licht – light
’yont – beyond
oor – our
een – eyes
unco – strange, foreign
bairnies – children
lift – sky
doon – dow
cauld – cold
mune – moon
lang syne – long since
maun – must

The Innumerable Christ

Other stars may have their Bethlehem and the Calvary too. (Professor JY Simpson).

‘Wha kens on whatna Bethlehems
Earth twinkles like a star the nicht,
An’ whatna shepherds lift their heids
In its unearthly licht?

‘Yont a’ the stars oor een can see
An’ farther than their lichts can fly,
I’ mony an unco warl’ the nicht
The fatefu’ bairnies cry.

I’ mony an unco warl’ the nicht
The lift gaes black as pitch at noon,
An’ sideways on their chests the heids
O’ endless Christs roll doon.

An’ when the earth’s as cauld’s the mune
An’ a’ its folk are lang syne deid,
On coontless stars the Babe maun cry
An’ the Crucified maun bleed.’

Hugh MacDiarmid

Week 633: Love’s Advocate, by Phoebe Hesketh

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Another poem about grief by the fine and rather overlooked poet Phoebe Hesketh (1909-2005, see also week 60), that captures the way the mind, the ‘love’s advocate’ of the title, tries with small, inconsequential remembered things to fill the great absence in the heart.

Love’s Advocate

I remember sitting together in parks
leaning over bridges
counting trout and swans
holding hands under arches
kissing away suns
and moons into darkness.

I remember platform good-byes
last-minute trains
slamming us apart
and my non-self walking back alone.
I remember smaller things:
a pebble in my shoe
and you throwing a match-box on the Serpentine.

I stood still hearing the years
flow over and over
as over a stone
in a river-bed
polishing, cleaning, wearing away.
But I still remember the last day.

What I cannot remember is how I felt –
mind, love’s advocate,
must remind heart
of the end, the abyss.

The bottom of the world remains;
each day climbs to a new start.

Phoebe Hesketh

Week 632: Elegy for Jane – My student, thrown by a horse, by Theodore Roethke

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Here we see the subject of last week’s elegy writing an elegy of his own for one of his students who died after a fall from a horse, Theodore Roethke having been a notable teacher of the young. It is a poem that walks the edge both of feeling and expression, yet in the end triumphs through an obvious sincerity coupled with a humility, a recognition that the poet’s grief is a marginal one, lacking the entitlement of someone with familial or romantic ties to the young woman. The language sometimes seems on the point of veering off into the merely poetic – ‘And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose’ is a bit too Dylan Thomas for my taste – and yet this slightly over-the-top imagery is sufficiently reined in and redeemed by the touching simplicity of the closing stanzas.

Pickerel: a young pike. It might be thought that being described as having a smile like a pike, even a young one, is not entirely complimentary, especially remembering Ted Hughes’s lines (see week 553): ‘Finally one/With a sag belly and the grin it was born with’. But I suspect that Roethke is thinking here not of the pike’s apparent facial expression but of the shy, elusive nature of the young woman’s smile, like the shadowy flicker of a fish moving underwater.

Elegy for Jane – My student, thrown by a horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow,
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Theodore Roethke

Week 631: Dream Song 18: A Strut for Roethke, by John Berryman

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It is hard to think of a poet more different from last week’s Richard Wilbur than his contemporary John Berryman (see also weeks 120 and 342): Wilbur formal, fastidious, controlled sometimes to the point of decorousness, Berryman wild, constantly verging on the uncontrolled, a manic driver on the cliff roads of language. Yet apparently they got on well enough together, and I can only say that at their best both of them work for me: taken in isolation Berryman’s fractured syntax, his stylistic affectations can be irritating and yet somehow, against all the odds, the words cohere into an effective whole.

This is another of Berryman’s elegies for poet friends, who seem to have predeceased him in considerable numbers, such that in another poem he wonders why he alone ‘still breasts the wronging tide’. This one is for Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), a fine poet who drew his inspiration mainly, but not exclusively, from the natural world, as reflected in the last two lines.

Dream Song 18: A Strut for Roethke

Westward, hit a low note, for a roarer lost
across the Sound but north from Bremerton,
hit a way down note.
And never cadenza again of flowers, or cost.
Him who could really do that cleared his throat
& staggered on.

The bluebells, pool-shallows, saluted his over-needs,
While the clouds growled, heh-he, & snapped, & crashed.

No stunt he’ll ever unflinch once more will fail
(O lucky fellow, eh Bones?) – drifted off upstairs,
downstairs, somewheres.
No more daily, trying to hit the head on the nail:
thirstless: without a think in his head:
back from wherever, with it said.

Hit a high long note, for a lover found
needing a lower into friendlier ground
to bug among worms no more
around um jungles where ah blurt ‘What for?’
Weeds, too, he favoured as most men     don’t favour men.
The Garden Master’s gone.

John Berryman

Week 630: For the Student Strikers, by Richard Wilbur

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This poem by the American poet Richard Wilbur (see also weeks 29, 144, 264, 355 and 417) was written in 1969, at the height of the protests by American students against the US government’s military involvement in Vietnam. It was composed at the request of a radical student newspaper, who felt that Wilbur was sympathetic to their cause, as indeed he was, but its humane and reasonable tone was not quite what they were expecting, and at first it found its way to their wastepaper-basket. But then, and some credit to them, they had second thoughts and retrieved it.

There may be different causes now, but in an age where there is an increasing tendency to shut down opposing points of view, or simply shut the ears to them, the poem’s message seems as valid as ever, even if the probability of anyone taking notice of it may be even smaller than ever.

For The Student Strikers

Go talk with those who are rumoured to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind towards force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening
Changes of heart.

They are your houses, the people are not unlike you,
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman’s son.

Richard Wilbur