Poetry as a Classification of Life

If asked who said BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY!, a great many readers would answer "Keats." But Keats said nothing of the sort. It is what he said the Grecian Urn said, his description and criticism of a certain kind of work of art, the kind from which the evils and problems of this life, the "heart high sorrowful and cloyed," are deliberately excluded. The Urn, for example, depicts, among other beautiful sights, the citadel of a hill town; it does not depict warfare, the evil which makes the citadel necessary.

Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge
that they are not identical. One might say that every poem shows some sign of a rivalry between Ariel and Prospero, (Shakespeare's TEMPEST) ; in every good poem their relation is more or less happy, but it is never without its tensions. The Grecian Urn states Ariel's position; Prospero's has been equally succinctly stated by Dr. Johnson: THE ONLY END OF WRITING IS TO ENABLE THE READERS BETTER TO ENJOY LIFE OR BETTER TO ENDURE IT.

From the DYER'S HAND and OTHER ESSAYS by W.H.Auden, 1949.

In this new thread I invite all to put down their thoughts on the subject of poetry and related subjects, and unrelated if that is the desire.

The thread is called Poetry a CLARIFICATION of Life.
As Roberto DeVinzenzo once said: "I such a stupid" when he signed his scorecard wrongly in the Masters Golf Tournement so many, many years ago. It cost him the victory. To his credit he took it like the great pro that he was.

I would like to share this poem entitled Grey, Mouse, Candle by Belgian surrealist Paul Colinet translated by Rochelle Ratner in Double Room:

Grey, the depths, the labyrinths, the sleepingbags; grey, the patient stairs; sly grey, grey brain, mischievous brain, grey, granaries of grey. Grey, the week; grey, the attic window overlooking grey fields, heaven’s grey eye, the messenger on the grey horse; bullet music, the angel caught in his grey snares.

Mouse, clever mouse who smiles with tiny grey eyes which go cri-cri; pointed mouse, spinning mouse, twinkling mouse; mouse who dots the grey quilt; mouse who says oui with a little cry, in the heaps of folded grey.

Candle, it's a castle. Day castle, night castle, castle of mice; castle of cats; castle that sings, winged castle, song of wings. Circle of virgins, candle-virgins radiantly turning, with bouquets of eyes and velvet mouths. Lace-collared candle, fairy candle, candle of Orpheus, French candle greyed from mouse-nests.

http://webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_six/Paul_Colinet2.htm

Ratner has two others in that issue and a slew of his poems she translated and published in the 70s, that she makes available here:

http://capa.conncoll.edu/colinet.htm

I like Colinet's poems and appreciate Ratner's work and ability translating them, so I like to call attention to them both when I get the chance. I have a Colinet poem, translated by Paul Bowles, on my profile page.

Two by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

ANECDOTE of the JAR

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

DISILLUSIONMENT of TEN O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By the white gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

The threads title is Poetry a CLARIFICATION of life, of course I screwed the thing up.

That is a lot easier to understand! I really like the Dr. J quote.

Great Slick. It's nice to know that we can have a little fun at each others expense and carry on without losing our balance. So many around here have a skin too few. Even my skin gets a little thin now and again but I always try to right the ship, almost immediately. I simply enjoy the idea of contact with so many prickly sorts. 'tnh' got under my skin one evening but I didn't hold it against her, eventhough she understands only too well "the voluptuous rubbing of two membranes" as Diderot described it. We should, all of us, follow Dr. Johnson's lead on these matters.

A couple years ago I had a sudden urge to read Boswell's Life of Johnson (unabridged) - boy that was a great read and I felt immeasurably richer for it.

Here's one from Naomi Shihab Nye.

Snow
by Naomi Shihab Nye


Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth
I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill
and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.
In those days we went out like that.
Even children went out like that.
Someone was crying hard at home again,
raging blizzard of sobs.

I dragged the sled by its rope,
which we normally did not do
when snow was coming down so hard,
pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name
as if we could be other people under the skin.
The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim
of the head where the hair starts coming out.
And it was a big one. It would come down and down
for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes.

How are you doing back there? I shouted,
and he said Fine, I’m doing fine,
in the sunniest voice he could muster
and I think I should love him more today
for having used it.

At the top we turned and he slid down,
steering himself with the rope gripped in
his mittened hands. I stumbled behind
sinking deeply, shouting Ho! Look at him go!
as if we were having a good time.
Alone on the hill. That was the deepest
I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.

How there can be a place
so cold any movement saves you.

Ho! You bang your hands together,
stomp your feet. The father could die!
The son! Before the weather changes.

The weather always changes, except in San Diego. A thought provoking poem, indeed.

'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.

Daniel Defoe

In historical events great men - so called - are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

From WAR AND PEACE

"Well," said the Head, "I will give you my answer. You have no right to expect me to send you back to Kansas unless you do something for me in return. In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets. If you wish me to use my magic power to send you home again you must do something for me first.

Help me and I will help you."
"What must I do? asked the girl."

"Kill the Wicked Witch of the West," answered Oz.

L. Frank Baum

Anna, that is a really wonderful poem. I have just been looking her up, and found one other poem. She is definitely someone whose work I have to get to know.

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

Thoreau

As for me, I concern myself more with forming than with dissipating clouds, with suspending judgment rather than with judging . . . I do not decide, I ask questions . . . I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad, that may come uppermost; I chase it as do young libertines on the track of a courtesan whose face is windblown and smiling, whose eyes sparkle, and whose nose turns up . . . My ideas are my trollops.

Denis Diderot

"My ideas are my trollops." Really, quite a motto there, Denis old boy.

10: Yes, her poetry is wonderful, and so evocative. My other favorite Arab modern poet is Nizar Qabbani who died a few years ago.

Poor, is that more from D'Alembert's Dream?

I have to get that book!

Delighted to see that Auden quote. I am a HUGE fan of Auden. More than Dickens and Dostoevsky, he has been the main intellectual influence in my life. The Dyer's Hand is exceptionally brilliant. Did you know that his collected prose is now out?

Thanks for all the other poems everyone.

Like a true cat you landed on your feet. Pay no attention to some of these yahoos who just like fucking up other peoples' pleasures, etc. The Play is the thing.
The quote is from RAMEAU'S NEPHEW, but appears elsewhere in the Diderot corpus. I get batted back and forth between the 'villains' of Voltaire, and the 'superstitious dogs' of Samuel Johnson. They play tennis with me and you must know the impact of the good Docktor's overhead smash. And the gimlet eye of that frenchman has a withering effect.
Of course Auden is great. He was buddies with my favorite modern poet Frost. I love to listen to Auden recite his poetry. I have some tapes that I get out now and then.
One last thing, Ck. out FW Dupee's works, very playful, his Henry James study is called KING OF CATS.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

THE QUIP
The merrie world did on a day
Wit his train-bands and mates agree
To meet together, where I lay,
And all in sport to geere at me.

First, Beauty crept into a rose,
Which when I pluckt not, Sir, said she,
Tell me, I pray, Whose hands are those?
BUT THOU SHALT ANSWER, LORD, FOR ME.

Then Money came, and chinking still,
What tune is this, poore man? said he:
I heard in Musick you had skill.
BUT THOU SHALT ANSWER, LORD, FOR ME.

Then came brave Glorie puffing by
In silks that whistled, who but he?
He scarce allow' me half an eie.
BUT THOU SHALT ANSWER, LORD, FOR ME.

Then came quick Wit and Conversation,
And he would needs a comfort be,
And, to be short, make an Oration.
BUT THOU SHALT ANSWER, LORD, FOR ME.

Yet when the hour of thy designe
To answer these fine things shall come;
Speak not at large; say, I am thine:
And then they have their answer home.

George Herbert

From THE NARROW BRIDGE OF ART:
the modern writer is one who follows every thought where it may lead him. He discusses openly what used never to be mentioned even privately. And this very freedom and curiosity are perhaps the cause of what appears to be his most marked characteristic - the strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated in his mind. Feelings which used to come single and separate do so no longer. Beauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain. Emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken on the threshold.
For example: It is a spring night, the moon is up, the nightingale singing, the willows bending over the river. Yes, but at the same time a diseased old woman is picking over her greasy rags on a hideous iron bench. She and the Spring enter his mind together; they blend but do not mix. The two emotions, incongruously coupled, bite and kick at each other in unison. But the emotion which Keats felt when he heard the song of the nightingale is one and entire, though it passes from joy in beauty to sorrow at the unhappiness of human fate. He makes no contrast. In his poem sorrow is the shadow which accompanies beauty. In the modern mind beauty is accompanied not by its shadow but by its opposite. The modern poet talks of the nightingale who sings 'jug jug to dirty ears'. There trips along by the side of our modern beauty some mocking spirit which sneers at beauty for being beautiful; which turns the looking-glass and shows us that the other side of her cheek is pitted and deformed. It is as if the modern mind, wishing always to verify its emotions, had lost the power of accepting anything simply for what it is.

Mrs. Woolf is fascinated by "the inexhaustible richness of human sensibility," and sees life in terms of "a myriad impressions," "an incessant shower of innumerable atoms.

In MODERN FICTION she attacks Wells and Co. for failing to do as she does:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. It is not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? . . . Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

She takes them further to task in her essay Mr. Bennett (Arnold) and Mrs. Brown (not the Mrs. B in Herman and the Hermits song of that title).

I think she's a little hard on the fellas, no matter.

Mrs. Woolf's goal is an not an appreciation (TONO-BUNGAY?), but and understanding of Life. She wants to know what life really is:

What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable - now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil i the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech - and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

Including H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, who had trouble doing it for themselves.

STATEMENT ON CRITICISM

A critic is meant to be a judge. So he must have judging qualities. What are these? First - attention. He must attend absolutely to what is going on, ie., the book. And his attention must endure to the end. This is not as easy as it sounds, as his own thoughts, especially if the book is good, will often strike across it. Then he must be impartial. He must read the book through and give a fair account of it. He must also have the judge-like (and God-like) quality of being no respecter of persons. It does not matter who has written the book, whether the author is old, young, man, woman, foreign, English, American, Black, or White. Only the book matters.
Nowadays it is supposed to be a great virtue to be young. Youth is an arithmetical statement of passing interest, each hour eats it up. Neither does it matter being a woman. 'There are too many women novelists,' I heard a critic say, (a very much indulged and important one, too). 'There are too many men novelists,' and how absurd it is. Nor does it matter being old. It can't be helped. A judge will have nothing to do with such considerations.
Attention, impartiality, and no regard for age or sex. So far the judge speaks. But when we come to the summing up, the judge's wig slips a little. For then, and only then, may our own opinions intrude. The judge in his summing up may have opinions only as to matters of law and its precedents. We as critics have grown our opinions out of life and books and pictures and friendships, and we may use them freely. And here, in our summing up, which is our critical article or review, and having first given a true account of the book, we may think of other books the author may have written, or other books on the same subject by other writers. We may even quote from other books, if there is space and our editor will allow; we may even quote from our own books and poems. But this is by way of decoration. It is the opinions that matter.
In the summing-up we may turn the sharp edge of our own opinions against the author's argument. This is legitimate , provided we do not use the book as a mere peg for it ( and provided also, I would suggest, that we sign our name to the article).
There is one other matter where the critic's summing up parts company with the judge's. The judge does not have to be interesting and enjoyable. I think a critic should be both. Though you may say that if he is the one, he will be the other too - both interesting and enjoyable. But how dull the dull ones can be! . . . like Tennyson's description of the dull fellow when he wrote (or something like it) . . . 'the meek Sir Edward with his watery eye and educated whisker'. No need to be like that.
Attention, impartiality, disrespecter of persons - these are the legal virtues of judgement (learning the judge must have, or he would not be where he is). To these add the critic's virtues of judgement - knowledge of life, art, books and people (that is already a good deal) and a gift for writing well. Enough I think. Enough to ask and a good deal more - you glum ones will say - than you will usually find.

P.E.N. News, Autumn 1958
Stevie Smith

Life as experience, exploration:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find the things like that on your way
as long as you keep thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony.
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

-C.P. Cavafy
.
.
.

Or, as Eliot would have it (from "Little Gidding"):

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

THE PEASANT AND THE CUCUMBERS

A peasant once went to a vegetable garden to steal cucumbers.
"I'll carry off this sack of cucumbers," he thought, "and with the money I get for them I'll buy a hen. The hen will lay eggs, she will sit on them and hatch a brood of chicks, and I'll feed the chicks till they grow, and then I'll sell them and buy a suckling pig. I'll feed the suckling pig till it grows into a sow, I'll breed her, she'll have a litter of pigs, and I'll sell them. With the money I get from the pigs I'll buy a mare. She will foal, I'll feed the foals till they grow, then I'll sell them. With the money I get from the foals I'll buy a house with a garden. I'll plant cucumbers in the garden, and I won't let anyone steal them - I'll keep guard over them. I'll hire a strong watchman, and from time to time I'll go out to the garden and shout: 'Hey, you ! Take care!"
The peasant was so carried away by his thoughts that he completely forgot he was in someone else's garden, and he shouted at the top of his voice.
The watchman heard him and came running out, He caught the peasant and gave him a good thrashing.

Leo Tolstoy
1872

God is the country
of the spirit,
and each of us is given a
little holding of ground
in that country;
it is our duty
to explore that holding
to gain certain impressions
by such exploring,
to stabilise as laws
the most valuable of these
impressions, and,
as far as we can,
to abide by them.
It is our duty
to criticise,
for criticism is
the personal explanation
of appreciation.

Dylan Thomas
letter to
Pamela Hansford Johnson

Before the intellectual
work of conceiving and
understanding of
phenomenon can set in,
the work of naming must
have preceded it, and have
reached a certain point
of elaboration. For it is
the process which
transforms the world of
sense impressions, which
animals also possess, into
a mental world, a world of
ideas and meanings. All
theoretical cognition takes
its departure from a world
already preformed by
language; the scientist,
the historian, even the
philosopher lives with his
objects only as language
presents them to him.

Ernst Cassirer
LANGUAGE AND MYTH

I threw
A single die
On the table
Of black marble

Saw
Not one side
Of the cube
Had a mark or a number
There was
Nothing

Die - Novica Tadic' (trans. Chas. Simic)
Collected in the horse has six legs

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of the generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of the judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

Pablo Picasso

Work at poetry 9 hours a day, never more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R3pjDWRKmQ&feature=related

I am such a lazy typist my next may well come from Ogden Nash.

The chief of all, of course, is that miserable fear of being sentimental, which is the meanest of all the modern terrors - meaner even than the terror which produces hygiene. Everywhere the robust and uproarious humor has come from the men who were capable, not merely of sentimentalism, but a very silly sentimentalism. There has been no humor so robust or uproarious a that of the sentimentalist Steele or the sentimentalist Sterne or the sentimentalist Dickens. These creatures who wept like women were the creatures who laughed like men. It is true that the humor of Micawber is good literature and that the pathos of Litle Nell is bad. But the kind of man who had the courage to write badly in the one case is the kind of man who would have the courage to write so well in the other.

G. K. Chesterton

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

T.H. Huxley

Any man with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a great deal about art. Art is a right and a human thing, like walking and saying one's prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a congestion and a kind of difficulty.
The artistic temperament is a kind of disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease that arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men - men like Browning or Shakespeare. There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art.

GREENERY-YALLERY
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874-1936

28
Candy
is dandy
But liquor
is quicker

-O.N.

pouriouser & pouriouser

Both in theory and in practice Frost is a Prospero-dominated poet. Preface to his collected poems:

The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that as vowels consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context - meaning - subject matter . . . . And we are back in poetry as merely one more art having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience. A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom . . . a clarification of life, I"VE GOT IT!, not necessarily a great clarification, IS THERE ONE?, such as sects and cults are founded on , but in a momentary stay against confusion.

His poetic style is what Professor C.S. Lewis would call Good Drab. The music is always that of the speaking voice, quiet and sensible, and I cannot think of any other modern poet, except Cavafy, who uses language more simply. He rarely employs metaphors, and there is not a word, not a historical or literary reference in the whole of his work which would be strange to an unbookish boy of fifteen. Yet he manages to make this simple kind of speech express a wide variety of emotion and experience.

Be that as it may, she was in their song,
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it would never be lost.
Never again would bird's song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.
I hope if he is where he sees me now
He's so far off he can't see what I've come to.
You CAN come down from everything to nothing.
All is, if I'd a-known when I was young
And full of it, that this would be the end.
It doesn't seem as if I'd had the courage
To make so free and kick up in folk's faces.
I might have, but it doesn't seem as if.

The emotions in the first passage are tender, happy, and its reflections of a kind which could only be made by an educated man. The emotions in the second are violent and tragic, and the speaker a woman with no schooling. Yet the diction in both is equally simple. There are few words the man uses which the woman would not use herself, but none she could not understand; her syntax is a little cruder than his, but only a little. Yet their two voices sound as distinct as they sound authentic.

Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907-1973

1 and 32: I am having trouble coming up with expressions or examples of the Ariel side of things. Does only "romantic" poetry such as Keats etc. fit the bill? Coincidentally these poets also fit the "artistic temperament" mold that was so criticized by Chesterton... does no poet synthesize romantic excess and pragmatic experience or at least span the two? What about someone like Hopkins? e.e. cummings?

You formulate an excellent question. I look to Yeats as the Ariel-Prospero exemplar, if that is the word. Sails to Byzantium but ends in the neighborhood of Ben Bulben:

1
Swear by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in inmortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
When Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here's the gist of what I mean.

2
Many times a man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And Ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

3

You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
'Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

4

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentle Phidias wrought,
Michael Angelo left a proof,
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened,

Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.

5

Irish poets learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
Al out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

6

Under Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

CAST A COLD EYE
ON LIFE, ON DEATH.
HORSEMAN, PASS BY!

Most Modern Poets are of the Prospero persuasion, I'm afraid. But I'll be on the look-out for Prospero's Airy-Something.

Anna: You beat me to the O.N.!

All: I most like poetry that obscures a bit. Which might be clarifying in some transcendent way. If that makes sense.

Examples.

NATURAL SPEECH

Frost's tone of voice, even in his dramatic pieces, is that of a man talking to himself, thinking aloud and hardly aware of an audience. This manner is, of course, like all manners, calculated, and more sophisticated than most. The calculation is sound when the poems are concerned with personal emotions, but when the subject is one of public affairs or ideas of general interest, it may be a miscalculation. "Build Soil, a Political Pastoral" which Frost composed for the National Party Convention at Columbia Univ. in 1932, was much criticized at the time by the Liberal-Left for being reactionary. Reading it today, one wonders what all the fuss was about, but the fireside-chat I'm-a-plain-fellow manner is still irritating. One finds oneself wishing that Columbia had invited Yeats instead; he might have said the most outrageous things, but he would have put on a good act, and that is what we want from a poet when he speaks to us, not as private persons, but as citizens. Perhaps Frost himself felt uneasy, for the last two lines of the poem, and the best, run thus:

We're too unseperate. And going home
From company means coming to our senses.

Any poetry which aims at being a clarification of life must be concerned with two questions about which all men, whether they read poetry or not, seek clarification.

1) WHO AM I? What is the difference between man and all the other creatures? What relations are possible between them? What is man's status in the universe? What are the conditions of his existence which he must accept as his fate which no wishing can alter?

2) Whom ought I to become? What are the characteristics of the hero, the authentic man whom everyone should admire and try to become? Visa versa, what are the characteristics of the churl, the inauthentic man whom everybody should try to avoid becoming?

We all seek answers to these questions which shall be universally valid under all circumstances, but the experiences to which we put them are always local both in time and place. What any poet has to say about man's status in nature, for example, depends upon the landscape and climate he happens to live in and in part upon the reactions to it of his personal temperament. A poet brought up in the tropics cannot have the same vision as a poet brought up in Hertfordshire and, if they inhabit the same landscape, the chirpy social endomorph will give a different picture of it from that of the melancholic withdrawn ectomorph.
The nature of Frost's poetry is the nature of New England. N.E. is made of granite, is mountainious, densely wooded, and its soil is poor. It has a long severe winter, a summer that is milder and more pleasant than in most parts of the States, a short and sudden spring, and a slow and theatrically beautiful fall. Since it adjoins the eastern seaboard, it was one of the first areas to be settled but, as soon as the more fertile lands to the West were opened up, it began to lose population. Tourists and city dwellers who can afford a summer home may arrive for the summer, but much land which was once cultivated has gone back to the wild.
One of Frost's favorite images is the image of the abandoned house. In Britain or Europe, a ruin recalls either historical change, political acts like war or enclosure, or, in the case of abandoned mine buildings, a successful past which came to an end, not because nature was too strong, but because she had been robbed of everything she had possessed. A ruin in Europe, therefore, tends to arouse reflections about human injustice and greed and the nemesis that overtakes human pride. But in Frost's poetry, a ruin is an image of human heroism, of a defense in the narrow pass against hopeless odds . . .

W.H. Auden

37: Is that another Auden extract?

Yes. From a book of essays titled the DYER'S HAND, 1948.

111

O, for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means, which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renewed.
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection:
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.

Wm. Shake-speare, Sonnet 111

L. 10 refers to the use of vinegar as a prophylactic against the plague.

Of course Will-in-Overplus like Sogliardo wanted more than anything else to be titled Gentleman. His long immersion in the theatre made this next to impossible. Like Sogliardo, in Jonson's EVERYMAN OUT OF HIS HUMOUR, Shakespeare had to purchase his escutcheon, and of course it could not as it were be taken without mustard.
Sorry for the extra blather, I'm in a chatty mood, knowing that the fall is approaching and that I'll have much less time for these things.

Wallace Stevens knew the rust eaten grimy galleons of commerce and he knew the artists.

THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in the spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon -

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want or have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound -
Steel against intimation - the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last months newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream

Take from the dresser of the deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
They show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp afffix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

It's bedtime, and the genteel streets of Hartford, Connecticut, are as hushed as a graveyard. Wallace Stevens by day the affluent executive of an insurance company, contemplates . . .

Art, with its mercurial, all-encompassing climate, is Steven's escape from the tyranny of the lamp's beam.

Some poems:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1_MF_3U-Zc&feature=related

Deceiving elf!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xqkNem9xb0&feature=related

And no birds sing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phx7Emktmj4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGoNb9JUhVo&feature=related

Dylan Thomas didn't much like the Dirty Monk, but I like him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhWgG42NhLU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLtXPzxejxY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vddYmmxdKZo&feature=related

Sonnet 73
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tapx-qzZBk

The Allman brothers dared eat a peach.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2khDhfwsoE&feature=related

For the Common Wages
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUi3Q6k6c0Y&feature=related

Kitchen poetry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjlfkrUIvS4&feature=related

itsonlynaturrall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs2kFrGluKs

Oh what a beautiful day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp5HCDGJsvM&feature=related

"By genteelism is here to be understood the substituting, for the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility."

H.W. Fowler
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

A MALIGNANT NATURE

Thumbing through Frost's COLLECTED POEMS, I find 21 in which the season is winter as compared with 5 in which it is spring, and in 2 of these there is still snow on the ground; I find 27 in which the time is night and 17 in which the weather is stormy.
The commonest human situation in his poetry is one of man, or a man and wife, alone in a small isolated house in a snowbound forest after dark.

Where I could think of no thoroughfare,
Away on the mountain up far too high,
A blinding headlight shifted glare
Like a star fresh-fallen out of the sky,
And I away in my opposite wood
Am touched by that unintimate light
And made feel less alone than I rightly should,
For traveler there could do me no good
Were I in trouble with night tonight

. . . . .

We looked and looked , but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smokey lantern chimney,
How different from the way it ever stood?

In TWO LOOK AT TWO, nature, as represented by a buck stag and a doe, responds in sympathy to man, as represented by a boy and girl, but the point of the poem is that this sympathetic response is a miraculous exception. The normal response is that described in THE MOST OF IT.

Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And some one else additional to him,
And a great buck it powerfully appeared . . .

Nature, however, is not to Frost, as she was to Melville (MOBY DICK) malignant.

It must be a little more in favor of man,
Say a fraction of one percent at least,
Or our number living wouldn't be steadily more.

She is . . . by her apparent indifference and hostility, even, call's forth all men's powers and courage and makes a real man of him.
Courage is not to be confused with Romantic daring. It includes caution and cunning,

All we who prefer to live
Have a little whistle we give,
And flash at the least alarm
We dive down under the farm

and even financial prudence,

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all, Provide, provide!

There have been European poets who have come to similar conclusions about the isolation of the human condition, and nature's indifference to human values, but, compared with an American, they are at a disadvantage in expressing them. Living as they do in a well, even overpopulated, countryside where, thanks to centuries of cultivation, Mother Earth has acquired human features, they are forced to make abstract philosophical statements or use uncommon atypical images, so that what they say seems to be imposed on them by theory and temperament rather than by facts. An American poet like Frost, on the other hand, can appeal to facts for which any theory must account and which temperament must admit.
The Frostian man is isolated in space but also in time. In Frost's poems the nostalgic note is seldom, if ever, struck. When he writes a poem about childhood like WILD GRAPES, childhood is not seen as a magical Eden which will all too soon, alas, be lost, but as a school in which the first lessons of adult life are learned. The setting of one of his best poems, THE GENERATIONS OF MAN, is the ancestral home of the Stark family in the town of Bow, New Hampshire. Bow is a rock-strewn township where farming has fallen off and sproutlands flourish since the axe is gone. The Stark family mansion is by now reduced to an old cellar-hole at the side of a by-road. The occasion described in the poem is a gathering together from all over of the Stark descendants, an advertising stunt thought up by the governor of the state. The characters are a boy Stark and a girl Stark, distant cousins, who meet at the cellar-hole and are immediately attracted to each other. Their conversation turns, naturally, to their common ancestors, but, in fact, they know nothing about them. The boy starts inventing stories and doing imaginary imitations of their voices as a way of courtship, making their ancestors hint at marriage and suggest building a new summer home on the site of the old house. The real past, that is to say, is unknown and unreal to them; its role in the poem is to provide a lucky chance for the living to meet . . .

AMERICAN CHARACTERISTICS

Every poet is at once a representative of his culture and its critic. Frost has never written satires, but it is not hard to guess what, as an American, he approves of and disapproves of in his own countrymen. The ave. American is a stoic and, contrary to what others are apt to conclude from his free-and-easy friendly manner, reticent, far more reticent than the ave. Englishman about showing his feelings. He believes in independence because he has to; life is too mobile and circumstances change too fast for him to be supported by any fixed frame of family or social relations. In a crisis he will help his neighbor, whoever he may be -GWB forgot this during KATRINA -but he will regard someone who is always coming for help as a bad neighbor, and disapproves of all self-pity and nostalgic regret. All these qualities find their expression in Frost's poetry, but there are other American characteristics which are not to be found there, the absence of which implies disapproval; the belief, for instance, that it should be possible, once the right gimmick has been found, to build the New Jerusalem on earth in a half an hour. One might describe Frost as a Tory, provided that one remembers that all American political parties are Whigs.
W.H. Auden

Notes:
Dr. Johnson despised the Whig dogs. He also couldn't understand why the keepers of slaves were yelping for Liberty.

In Jan. of 1939 Auden went to live in America, he became a citizen in 1956, but returned to make his home in Oxford in 1972.

Good Drab!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G20T0NvxBjg&feature=related

An entertainer who understands the value of a second best effort. There was everything right with Shakespeare leaving his wife the second best bed, not that these two things are alike in all or any ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLKdH1S575U&feature=related

30 minutes long but well worth it. Galway Kinnell is the real thing. He excites the down or whatever is growing on the back of your neck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeH0BGdbpf8

Both?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xso6A_51w&feature=related

One side has to go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDr_SRhJs80&feature=related

What those poets won't get up to.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QugmT1SEIcg&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube...

I know the animation is bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_LH98uxL4k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_LH98uxL4k&feature=related

Auden paying tribute to Yeats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQgXx98IvGw&feature=related

The force that drives . . .http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPO2Kvqlms&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWqHP9l8EKo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfDdRVCt4A4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ik9z3YUJUc&feature=related

I hope y'all enjoy it to look up the rest of it.

On Auden:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEfBEaVHrIs&feature=channel

Hopkins:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlV6AptINsE&feature=channel

Yeats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVSau_T1w_8&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vSMRVe4bBQ&feature=channel

Yeats reading own poetry:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2FT4_UUa4I&feature=related

Easter 1916

Donne:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7C0Mk7HY54&feature=channel

Hardy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eavcTdX1tIk&feature=channel

The Mirror and the Lamp:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5eTrI3m_r4&feature=channel_page

LeftRight RightLeft
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo7_RtCI5dg&feature=channel

Poor:

anyone who views poetry as either classification or clarification of life is a friend of mine :-).

I come here, unbidden, perhaps unwelcome, not a member of this most illustrious group, but perhaps my good friend Murr will vouch for me.

I do not youtube. I DO read lots of poetry. I humbly draw attention of anyone interested in poetry to my thread, Polutropos's Polyphony, Part Ptwo, in ClubRead2009, where I have been posting my translations of one of the great poets of the 20th century, Nobel Prize winner, Jaroslav Seifert.

"Perhaps unwelcome?" my big fat arse! Polutropos, I've seen you around lots, why don't you link your Club Read here so we can access it easier? There's a "promote your blog or website or Club Read thread" here that I believe Solla restarted. Would be very pleased to read your translations. Perhaps you could give the salon a taste of Jaroslav Seifert, if you like? And I'm sending you an invite momentarily....

Er, I forgot...I can't send you an invite since I'm not a member of this group nor can be a member of this group even if I wanted to be a member of this group (long story). Poor-ious, would you send polutropos an invite? Or polutropos, consider this post an invite.

Thanks, B.

I DO know at least most of the long story, have followed it on the Snobs, and read Tim's pronouncements and yours...the Magnificent Lola's defense (I declared her Book Goddess some months back), the reconciliation...

I was also told by Wilf (another great man) that you will be doing a Master and Margarita read soon, and since that happens to be on top of my TBR mountain, I was hoping to join your group and discussion then.

My thread, I think, is here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/67750.

If I can master it technically, I will also post two of the poems here, so that people can get an idea from right here whether they want to bother following it elsewhere.

Ash Wednesday

by Jaroslav Seifert 1983
translated by A. Stancek 2009

Whoever has known our cemetery on the hillside
returns at peace.
It adjoins the convent garden
loved by Zeyer
where time has stopped already.

At the cemetery long ago
I surprised a swarm of bees.
The hive hung from the angel’s upreaching right,
finger pointing to the heavens.
The swarm roared silently
as when Frantisek Tichy
would play his mouth organ
between sips of his wine,
not allowing anything to disturb him.

What dance of death?
What horror?
I have friends there
and the painter Tichy among them.

For years an old clock
has been striking on my wall
looking back at the time
of my life,
rushing by so brashly.
It sobs with
each strike.

But of course this prespring day
with its cross of ashes
brings to mind always a mournful end
of everything
and a wistful farewell to all.

By chance really, I opened
my home wardrobe.
Several of my suits hang there.
I was not one to waste much,
the new suit has been there a long time.
It is made of rich English cloth,
pepper and salt,
and I have not worn it yet.

Perhaps I should offer a handshake
even to those empty sleeves,
shake them amicably
and with thanks bid them adieu.

And the diverse neckties!
In the last years they are sent
by Mrs. Marta Hodgkiss from London.
They are of fine polyester,
pastel-coloured.

And I must not forget.
For a long time now I have been carrying in my head
several tender poems
of girls, swallows and of roses
of sweet lovemaking.

Few things only in our lives
deserve a song.
But these songs I probably will not write after all,
and when the moment comes,
I will take them with me.

Apple Tree with Cobweb Strings

by Jaroslav Seifert, 1926
translated by A. Stancek, 2009

Apples, rosy-hued,
bent the royal trunk into a harp,
autumn hung it with cobwebs,
weep and play,
oh, my player!

We are not from the land where oranges ripen,
where grapevines, sweeter than lips
of Roman women
cling to Ionian columns;
a mere apple-tree is ours, sharply bent
by age and fruit.

And under the tree sits the one
who perhaps had seen
Parisian nights, Italian noons
and the moon over the Kremlin,
and came home to reminisce.

A soft and serene song,
one that could be played on those cobweb strings
I heard in verses.

Where do you go, searching for beauty,
the sea, cities and mountains,
Where will the trains take you, seeking peace
To heal wounds still aching?
Where?

The glances of women,
even their breasts, which could rock
your head into a rich, exotic dream,
are they not tempting?
A voice, fragrant with faraway lands, is calling you:
Your land is small!

Do you wish to remain mute,
as it speaks seductively to your desire?
It is after noon,
I will pick just one fruit from the apple tree
and inhale deeply.

To be on your own,
apart from the weeping of women, apart from their laughter,
to be at home, alone,
when that familiar song is calling me from the branches.

The fruitless beauty of foolish women
is not worth an apple.

Thanks for posting this and the link to your thread, which I don't think I had investigated thoroughly enough before. This is my first inkling of Jaroslav Seifert and I very much appreciate it! Do you have plans to publish or have you already published your translations?

Yes, I vouch for Polutropos, a friend, a gentleman and a scholar, and a superb translator. P, it's great to see you and your fantastic translations here.

Poorious, this thread is totally awesome. It's going to take me a couple of days to absorb everything, but our poetry interests seem to overlap/dovetail perfectly. Dylan Thomas: the true inheritor of Keats, and the only exponent of his Negative Capability I know of. Your scholarship and youtube citations are masterful.

I humbly submit this post to the thread.

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2007/12/poets-dylan-thomas.html

Right? Wrong? I do know that you are buzzing around the meat of the matter. Your humility makes it possible. For without that Quality you would be circling the elephant in vain with the other 4 sightless men.
I like to hew away at the thing slowly. I'm always careful, I think, to not mistake the map for the territory.
A big poem that helps us a little here is Shake-speare's Sonnet # 73:

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such a day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes my love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Dylan Thomas saw things with the Double Vision of Shakespeare. Glee-men see things that we can see for ourselves; poets, like Thomas and Robert Graves see things in all their comic and tragic beauty.

Thomas sang in his chains like the sea.
Auden:

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Auden's poem of Sept. 1939 had to do with more mundane matters but amounted to the momentary stay against confusion.

Thomas sang in his chains like the sea. Amen to that.

Very apt Auden quote as well.

I am moved at this point to post this, by Auden's great friend Stephen Spender.

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Thought I'd add some Classical Chinese - not that it's particularly relevant, just wanted to further diversify the offerings - so I opened my notebook and chose a short one. Sadly, not my translation (this one was rendered in English by Tony & Willis Barnstone and Chou Ping).

"Seeing a Friend Off," Li Bai

Blue mountains past the north wall,
white water snaking eastward.
Here we say good-bye for the last time.
You will fade like a hayseed blowing ten thousand miles away.
Floating clouds are the way of the wanderer.
The sun sets like the hearts of old friends.
We wave good-bye as you leave. Horses neigh and neigh.

Welcome to the salon amaranthic and polutropos.

#63 Wonderful poem. It reminded me I should add 100 Poems from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth to my library. Unfortunately I don't own the book so it's been awhile since I've dipped into it. Is the translation above part of a collection?

#60 Poor-ius, I took a poetry class that had an assignment to write a ghost of a sonnet. Actually, we were to write a strict sonnet, 14 lines, iambic pentameter, and one of the common rhyme schemes which I've forgotten (Italian, English?), and then progress from that to something looser that still contained the essense of a sonnet. I started by finding a sonnet to memorize as a way of internalizing the rhythm - I'm not a native speaker of iambic pentameter - and I chose that one, #73, by Shakespeare. Here is my ghost:

Tree Climber Sonnet

Arms wrapped around the low branch, I lift my legs up to hang
slothlike, pull my body over on top,
rub arms and legs. The bark scrapes my undersides tender.
Sturdy legs in the trunk’s first fork, I brace to reach and climb
up and up, until the limb’s circumference is no longer enough to hold
my forty odd pounds, distributed between handholds and toeholds,
higher than ever I’ve gone, when Billy comes to gather me home. “Up here,” I call.
His head leans back to find my voice, his face pale moon atop a sky of white t-shirt.
Eyes widen. He only says, “Mama wants us home now,” so I look
down to see only distance, no way back. Billy circles, directs
right foot down, just to the right, reach left, like guiding the blind
until body memory awakes, “I know,”
scuttle down the cracks and knobs, drop past the last small fear, and when
I get down remember to walk as though nothing had ever been lost.

:63 Great!

A fine talk on Poetry:

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/includes/templates/library/flash_popup.php...

"Hope is death! Life the cruel sport of the dark powers!"

E.T.A Hoffman from The Doubles.

Deathly Mood by Jiri Karasek ze Lvovic (translated by Kirsten Lodge)

My soul is gloomy vaulted cellar
where spider webs envelop every niche.
The breathe of mold and dust waft here, and light
strays in but rarely, fearful, pale and sick.

My soul is a vaulted cellar where only
old things are cast to slowly putrefy.
A gray shadow lurks there, long and silent,
and sometimes sighs in the oppressive, deathly quiet.

Camilla: You sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Casdilda.) No mask? No mask!

THE KING IN YELLOW: Act 1 - Scene 2

Speaking of which, I've done more thinking about this obscurity versus clarity. Is it possible I merely prefer my clarification in a more mysterious package?

I think The King in Yellow should be the next selection of the Oprah Book Club. ;)

Very good Sl: what does that package look like? Yes, there is no clarification, there is merely the attempt. The momentary stay against confusion. What is it?
It is, of course, about nature; it confesses a wish to escape from the hum-drum routine and embrace the unsophisticated life of the farm laborer; the poet desires, though without scandal, to wake up with the birds; he expresses the opinion that a plougghshare, not a pen, best fits his strength; a decorous pantheist, he is one with the rill, the rhyming mill, the rosy-bottomed milkmaid, the russet-cheeked rat-catcher, swains, swine, pipits, pippins. You can smell the country in his poems, the fields, the flowers, the armpits of Triptolemus, the barns, the pyres, the hay, and most of all, the corn.
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

The poem must account for every word and every rhythm: nothing can be extra, nothing can be out of place, nothing essential can be missing. It is because of this requirement for unity that the reader, encountering a poem and making the assumption that it IS a poem, has the responsibility of penetrating obscurity and understanding the relationships among all the parts - all the allusions, connections, verbal ambiguities, and syntactical complexities - of a poem.

more anon

I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book of passéist and D'Annunzian verse, on seventeenth Century handmade paper bordered with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, elaborate red initials, vegetables, mythological missal ribbons, epigraphs, and roman numerals. The book must be the Futurist expression of our Futurist thought. My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page. On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colors of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicolored variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words. - F. T. Marinetti

Or, if you prefer, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY8kVa0qB9Q - manifesto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn0dkz9Polg - zang tumb tumb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pt2xvCP7cg - battaglio di tripoli

That last may be the best of the three.

Yes, but when I play tennis I prefer to play with a net in place, as Frost said once.

71: The poem must account for every word and every rhythm: nothing can be extra, nothing can be out of place, nothing essential can be missing. It is because of this requirement for unity that the reader, encountering a poem and making the assumption that it IS a poem, has the responsibility of penetrating obscurity and understanding the relationships among all the parts - all the allusions, connections, verbal ambiguities, and syntactical complexities - of a poem.

That pretty much nails it. There is an interesting tension between a poet's distillation of experience and the license to gussy it up in the telling.

I was so convinced that the quote I was looking for (it spoke to essentialness and unity, like your last paragraph, poor-ious) was in the Poetics, but I couldn't find it. Have some old but relevant hat instead:

χρη ουν καθάπερ εν ταις αλλαις μῑμητικαῖς ἡ μία μῑμησις ἑνός εστιν οὑτω και τον μῦθον επεὶ πρᾱξεως μῑμησις εστι μιᾶς τε ειναι ταυτης και ὁλης και τα μερη συνεστάναι των πραγματων οὑτως ὡστε μετατιθεμενου τινὸς μερους ὴ αφαιρουμενου διαφερεσθαι και κινεῖσθαι το ὁλον · ὃ γαρ προσὸν ὴ μη προσὸν μηδὲν ποιεῖ επιδηλον ουδὲν μοριον του ὁλου εστίν.

Just as in the other imitative arts each individual representation is the representation of a single object, so too the plot of a play, being the representation of an action, must present it as an unified whole; and its various incidents must be so arranged that if any of them is differently placed or taken away the effect of wholeness will be seriously disrupted. For if the presence or absence of something makes no apparent difference, it is no real part of the whole. (trans. Penelope Murray and T. S. Dorsch)

Greek text via ancientgreekonline.com - I couldn't find my Loeb so couldn't type it up myself. I also cannot find my Liddell-Scott (I haven't touched Greek since the end of the academic year) so gave this text only a precursory skim to see if it matched up approximately or not. Perhaps someone more learned can tell me if the Greek is incorrect.

ETA: I took so long to transcribe the quote that my moment is past! I hope someone enjoys the Greek anyway.

And re: 64, I've been trying to track down the collection of poems I got it from but haven't had any luck. I'll let you know if I am successful.

Obscurity?!

Making the assumption that is IS a poem suggests one of the greatest obstacles to the reading of contemporary poetry. It is a necessary assumption. If the poet has not done his work properly, obscurity cannot be resolved, parts will not relate, and unity will not be achieved. The verse will not be poetry, and nothing the reader can do will make it so. Before engaging himself in this industrious work of resolving obscurity, then, the reader would like assurances that his labor will not be in vain. Here reputation - for better or for worse - plays a great part; the reader will perhaps be more willing to extend himself for a reading of a Thomas poem than for a reading of an unknown poet. The point of the discussion is that everything an author writes affects everything else he has written. We are more willing to trust his craftsmanship in one particular poem - and, consequently, to labor over its apparent obscurity - if we know the poet to be a responsible, capable, careful craftsman in his other poems.

more later

I think that some things are inexpressible but can be conjured up indirectly. Don't ask for examples right this moment...

If I understand the gist of this conversation correctly, my response would be that poets should not be subject to anyones definitions of what poetry is or should be or any rules to that effect. Poetry is a sacred personal thing and perhaps the best poets are those who speak only to a few isolated souls who understand and identify with what they are expressing.

I agree that some things are inexpressible but can be conjured up indirectly.

Without a Poetics there can be no, I hesitate to say, real poetry. The poets, who put the best words in their best order, come the closest to the conjuring of a thing, up. The best one's know that they only partially do the job, directly, indirectly, or whatever.

Dylan Thomas, no obscurantist, was that sort of craftsman. Poems, he said publicly, are pieces of hard craftsmanship made interesting . . . by the work he put into them. What he called the texture of a poem - the technique by which the words are made into poetry - was of primary importance. Definitions of poetry can include statements about meaning and feeling; but for Thomas the essential tenet (as he wrote to Margaret Taylor) concerned technique: the MEANING of a poem you cannot, as a poet, talk about in any way constructively: that must be left to the theoreticians, logicians, philosophers, sentimentalists, etc. It is only the TEXTURE of a poem that can be discussed at all. Nobody, I think, wants to talk, either, about how a poem FEELS to him; he finds it emotionally moving or he doesn't; and, if he does, there's nothing to discuss except the means, the words themselves, by which this emotional feeling was aroused. This texture was not, for Thomas, the result of surrealism, or of any uncontrolled uprush of subconscious thoughts. Instead, it was highly disciplined. When he wrote to Richard Church that he had never been, never will be, or could be for that matter, a surrealist, he entered a plea against the charge of obscurity in his own poetry. Every line IS meant to be understood; the reader IS meant to understand every poem by thinking and feeling about it, and not by sucking it in through his pores, or whatever he is meant to do with surrealist writing. And fifteen years later he responded to a question about his relationship to surrealism with a statement insisting on control and order: I do not mind from where the images of a poem are dragged up; drag them up, if you like,from the nethermost sea of the hidden self; but, before they reach paper, they must go through all the rational processes of the intellect.

(to be continued)

For me, a poem can clarify nothing and be a poem; just a felicitous arrangement of sounds or images; or, even, a bawdy joke. To the extent it may illuminate too, great! These other poems may not be life clarifying, but that doesn't remove them from the realm of poetry (or utility!)

I do think poetry can be an especially powerful tool of illumination. Just not limited to it.

Slick. Of course I wouldn't try to tell you what is a poem and what isn't. Whatever moves you is a poem. Even clarifying nothing, is a clarification. So, we just don't agree about how to play tennis. You are content to play without a net, etc. etc. I prefer the net. I also prefer to work on the different skills of the game. Backhand, forehand, volleys, overhead smashes, variety of serves, etc. etc. I value players like Rod Laver, Tony Roche, and 'Muscles' and you get your jollies from watching just about anyone who can pick up a racket. Well, that is not quite fair, but you get the drift. I admire a poet like Auden for his mastery of forms. Frost for his eldritch musick. Williams for his seeming disregard for form, etc. What wonderful musick. R.S. Thomas for his relentless vision. Anne Sexton for her cold eye. Yeats for all of these things. You'll be happy to know that I enjoyed 'A Coney Island of the Mind.' - or maybe not.

Speaking of Frost, poor, I'd like to offer a favorite of his that I think is apropos of whats been swirling 'round these parts of late . . .

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
--The Secret Sits

From A WITNESS TREE, 1942, to be precise 31 January, 1942. Swirling and swirling, that's the word.

The challenge of having to be clear about something you can't be direct about has led to a lot of good art, the evils of censorship (from within or without) aside.

Very nice thought but clear and indirect don't necessarily get along. In any event Slick, I'm just not that deep as you can plainly see.
Let me take a crack at it. You mean if I had Geitner & Summers et al. for advisors and I . . .
Oh no that doesn't work.

The label that Thomas chose to express his notion of the perfect integration of all the elements of a poem was inevitability; in a good poem, every word appears inevitable. In the course of a lengthy correspondence with the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, Thomas, responding to one of Watkins' poems, invoked this concept of inevitability and the congruent concept that a successful poem is an active, not passive, creation: all the words in your poem are lovely, but they seem so CHOSEN, not struck out. I can see the sensitive picking of words, but none of the strong, inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a happening, an action perhaps, not a still-life, or an experience put down, placed, regulated. . . . An inevitable poem, into which the poet has put all his effort, remains an active creation because it demands response. It is not a closed, finished, static object, for however taut, inevitably in order, a good poem may appear, it must be so constructed that it is wide open, at any second, to receive the accidental miracle which makes a work of craftsmanship a work of art. . . . This devotion to craftsmanship of shape and statement militates against any idea of Thomas as a poet of obscurity; he was a poet of ambiguity, but his intention was constantly directed at communication not a misunderstanding, between reader and poet. Again and again he pleaded for a literal reading of his poems. To Henry Treece, he asked only that his poems be taken literally. . . . A literal reading is not to be confused with a simple reading. Thomas, aware of the difficulties of his own poetry, dismissed Pamela Hansford Johnson's belief that a a good poem is a simple poem with the reply: that all good poetry is necessarily simple seems to me very absurd . . . It is the simplicity of the human mind that believes the universal mind to be as simple. . . There must be no compromise, he wrote to Miss Johnson, no compromise; there is always one right word. . . Such statements as these finally make reading the poems of Thomas easier. They dispel the idea that he was intentionally obscure. They establish in principle what his poems established in fact: poetry, for Thomas, was a craft or sullen art in which everything that was used - even ambiguity - had a reason and a place.

The poem must account for every word and every rhythm: nothing can be extra, nothing can be out of place, nothing essential can be missing. It is because of this requirement for unity that the reader, encountering a poem and making the assumption that it IS a poem, has the responsibility of penetrating obscurity and understanding the relationships among all the parts - all the allusions, connections, verbal ambiguities, and syntactical complexities - of a poem.

Very well said that man! You may have offered us the best poetics we need, poor, far more practical and profound than Aristotle, who was a dreadful literary critic, Amaranthic, IMO, and had not the slightest understanding of art.

For some unaccountable reason, I have only just noticed this thread. Must be the rain. Very interesting contributions from everyone. It's just this kind of conversation that makes this group the best on LT!!!!!

I will have more to contribute later after this class I have to teach.

Murr - agreed on Aristotle for the most part (and yes, much prefer poor's version for its concision). Sorry if this particular connection that leapt to mind was too crude or too obvious.

I thought I had another nice Classical Chinese poem, this one from the T'ang dynasty, but my photocopied translation has lost itself. So here's an I.O.U. for an on-the-fly rough translation later in the day.

oh don't apologise please. I was talking about Aristotle generally, not your selection.

Can't wait for the Tang of Chinese poetry!

Just to clear up a little, the 'poetics' are the ideas of Dylan Thomas. I was going to make this clear towards the end of my current string, but was sidetracked by other things. The quote that TCMr singled out was from a letter to PHJ. I will be more precise in the future as I have gotten a timely and much appreciated tip on how to organize these matters more efficiently. I am a tyro in the electronic world, but am learning, I think, everyday.

We can't swallow every word, of course:

Lovers and madmen have such seething
brains
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, the poet
Are of imagination all compact . . .

Wm. Shakespeare
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Mere poets are as sottish as drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical, and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet. . .

John Dryden
"NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE EMPRESS OF MOROCCO," 1674

My favorite poets include Robert Graves, W.H.Auden, Kenneth Rexroth, et al. Poets who seem to know just about everything. Whatever they turn their attention to becomes a kind of poetry. Robert Frost: few know that he had more Greek, Latin, and that sort of thing, than Eliot or Pound. Pounds poetry looked hard and was not as hard, Frost's looked easy but was sometimes as difficult as the Gordian knot. Frost and Wm. Carlos Williams were extremely nimble poets. They along with Auden were most mindful of what is known as sprezzatura. The ability to carry off something very difficult and make it look easy - among other things.

"Whatever its actual content and overt interest," said Auden in 1956 ( in his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University), "every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct - it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and happening."

A poem that does this better than most, this praising, is Gerard Manley Hopkin's PIED BEAUTY:

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change
Praise him.

XXX
Sinner's Rue

I walked alone and thinking,
And faint the nightwind blew
And stirred on mounds at crossways
The flower of sinner's rue.

Where the roads part they bury
Him that his own hand slays,
And so the weed of sorrow
Springs at the four crossways.

By night I plucked it hueless,
When morning broke 'twas blue:
Blue at my beast I fastened
The flower of sinner's rue.

It seemed a herb of healing,
A balsam and a sign,
Flower of heart whose trouble
Must have been worse than mine.

Dead clay that did me kindnes,
I can do none to you,
But only wear for breastnot
The flower of sinner's rue.

Alfred Edward Housman 1859-1936
Eldest of seven children of a Bromsgrove solicitor.
Born at Fockbury (Worcestershire), he became a great classical scholar. In 1911 he became Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and held the post until his death.

The poem above is from LAST POEMS 1922.

He didn't write a great many poems. He wrote only when the spirit of Poetry was with him. He had a great feel for translating the Latin Poets of antiquiity. But after all they are mere translations, and can do only what a translation can do.

Oh I adore Houseman. His simple rhymes and rhythms hide great depths of feeling. His verse has been put to music by many of the greatest English composers, especially George Butterworth's magnificent song cycle A Shropshire Lad.

I thoroughly recommend Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love which is about Houseman's relationship with Moses Jackson, among other things.

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2006/10/ae-housman-on-consolations-of.html

I dearly love old bookmen like Robert Lynd and S.P.B. Mais. They write in the Plain Style about books and life. Of course they are largely forgotten today, though I do my level best to keep their names alive - as best as I can:

. . . Hardy's superb descriptions of the beauties of the Dorset which he has made all his own are reserved for his prose epics; he never approaches the majesty of the opening chapters of THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE in any of his descriptive poems; he is rarely in his poetry merely descriptive at all. At his sweetest, he uses the scenery, say, of the Cornish coast as a background and a setting for his wife's portrait. Not that he cannot crystallise in the most exquisite form any mood of Nature which he wants to pin down, more particularly, of course, the harsher ones.

"I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And winter's days made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon the earth
Seemed fervourless as I"

His wonderful manipulation of diverse metrical forms, his passionate love for his wife and his never-to-be-forgotten sense of loss when she died, beautifully expressed in imperishable verse, his keen, penetrating philosophy, his delight in the mere telling of a story, all combine to make this all too slim body of work of rare and lasting value.
His sense of the musical was evident to anyone who studied the lyrics in THE DYNASTS, but his amazing success with every sort of metrical and rhythmical experiment that he tried are not so commonly recognized. The point to be kept in mind is that he attains that success with the ordinary, everyday speech of us all. Here is none of the dreamy, sensuous language of Keats or Coleridge, heavy with romance words; his is the vocabulary of the satirist, of Swift, Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic, intellectual, bare . . . he has followed no school and founded none. He disdains to employ any tricks to cajole the multitude to listen to his pipings; consequently, the Caesar to whom he appeals for judgement is posterity. He will never create a furor among his contemporaries; he has remained isolated and aloof all these years and may well be content to remain so for the remainder of his life. He already has to suffer, while alive, the doom of being a classic, and therefor talked about and read by the million, in his novels. He has to endure the vitriolic abuse of the orthodox, who see in his intellectual straightness and hard-won theories of life only the vapourings of a village artist, and finally, like so many other great poets, he has failed altogether to obtain recognition for his purest work owing to the blindness or slackness of contemporary criticism.

From
SHAKESPEARE TO O. HENRY, Studies in Literature by S.P.B. Mais, London, Grant Richards Ltd. St. Martin's Street, 1923

Then to the earthen Bowl did I adjourn
My Lip the secret Well of life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd- While you live
Drink!-for once dead you never shall return.

One of my favorite pomes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diMtRo0R9Us&feature=fvw

for Peter Heyworth

At Twenty we find our friends for ourselves, but it takes Heaven
To find us one when we are Fifty-Seven

SONG OF THE ROSE

The red garden rose we planted
Has fair and stately grown;
Our fondest hopes were granted.
Scarlet heavy-scented flowers
Beguiled our summer hours:
Blessed those are who a garden own
Where such a rose-tree flowers.

Though, through the pine woods wailing,
The winter wind makes moan,
Its rage is unavailing.
Long before the autumn ended,
Our roof with tiles we mended:
Blessed those are who a roof still own
When such a wind comes wailing.

from CITY WITHOUT WALLS and Other Poems
W.H. Auden
1969

Not sure if I'm doing this one right (I'm a beginner with Arabic); perhaps someone who is more experienced with that language can tell me if I'm mangling it horribly.

Nizar Qabbani

كتبت فوق الريح
اسم التي احبها
كتبت فوق الماء
لم ادر انّ الريح
لا تحسن الإصغاء
لم ادر انّ الماء
لا يحفظ الأسماء

I wrote on the wind
the name of her I love
I wrote on the water
I did not know that the wind
does not listen well
I did not know that the water
does not remember names

Writing on water and wind: well, it doesn't seem to matter if you didn't catch properly this that or the next thing. The value is in doing it anyway, it seems to me. Though the wind will have its say with me too, don't it?

One more time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp0n_O9n9LU

~96, Murr I concur. Housman & Butterworth!

Although I am unable to contribute usefully to this thread in the round, due to an appallingly weak attitude to poetry in general, I do have a feeling for a certain kind of english pastoral, nostalgic verse.

Put it to music and I like it even more.

You might find this site useful, I have used it on several occasions. It has mention of Houseman and Jackson:

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/housman/bio.html

"Housman was gay. Moses Jackson was not; he was a beefy rowing blue — someone who had earned the equivalent of an American varsity letter — up in Oxford on a science scholarship. Homosexuality he called 'beastliness' or 'spooniness'. And that for Housman meant a lifetime of unfulfilled loneliness."

101: Looks OK to me. Of course my Arabic is a tad rusty...

It's a beautiful poem though...

There is a lovely volume of Nizar Qabbani's love poetry translated by my first Arabic teacher, Bassam Frangieh, that has the Arabic side by side with the English. Do you have that one?

Zeno!!! A herring!

The Butterworth/Housman cycle is very rare, and complete performances of the whole thing are almost impossible to find. The only things I can grab from Youtube are these:

a homemade recording of John Shirly Quirk singing the first song in the cycle. He sings it much too fast, in my view, and the recording quality is not very good. It does however give you a flavour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xMPichAUrM&feature=PlayList&p=23262F206E...

And this, putting together Vaughn Williams and Butterworth's settings of the same Housman poem: Is My Team Ploughing:
Butterworth's version is the second one. Probably the greatest song in the English song repertoire: sparse, empty, chilling. Performed here by another quintessentially English gay couple, Peter Pears and Ben Britten:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6GYLs-SrOw&feature=related

And some more English Pastoral verse/music for you: Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting of Housman's Is My Team Ploughing:

People took A Shropshire Lad into the trenches....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvP0Lnh1-Q&feature=related

Ian Bostridge. Incredible.

'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.

Butterworth was killed by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme on August 4 93 years ago.

At the risk of hijacking an interesting thread and turning it into the Housman Appreciation Society annual general meeting, I will just quickly say that I am also with you on Vaughan Williams, Britten and Pears.

I have also dug out my CD of the Butterworth Shropshire Lad songs (sung by Benjamin Luxon). These are combined on the CD with VW arrangements of Songs of Travel and the ten Blake songs.

As I write, I hear 'The Lads in their hundreds' unravelling before me:

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow
come in for the fair,
There's men from the barn and the
forge and the mill and the fold,

The lads for the girls and the lads for
the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads
that will never be old....

...possibly the first and last time I will be seen quoting poetry.

Is my team ploughing is coming up next...will listen to it with particular interest after that testament.

107...we welcome hijackers...just so long as they do not violate tos.

Housman away 107, that's what this thing is all about. We're not a bunch of voters tip-towing through the tulips, or the back alley with nosegay in place. Swing from the hip, man.

Well I've always admired poets who had a good feel for Nature. Compton Mackenzie, Norman Douglas, Robert Lynd, and while they are not all strictly poets, they have a feel for the green-stained dress as few others. Add to this group P.G. Wodehouse. This from FULL MOON, 1947:

Tipton Plimsoll stood on the terrace, moodily regarding the rolling parkland that spread itself before his lack-lustre eyes. As usual in this smiling expanse of green turf and noble trees, a certain number of cows, some brown, some piebald, were stoking up and getting their vitamins, and he glowered at them like a man who had got something against cows. And when a bee buzzed past his nose, his gesture of annoyance showed that he was not any too sold on bees either. The hour was half-past two, and lunch had come to an end some few minutes earlier.

The American money man hadn't much feel for Mulberry Trees, etc.

105: Thanks. I am never sure what I'm doing when a preposition comes into play - I find that in so many languages they can approach untranslatability, too.

On the volume of Qabbani's love poetry: I actually do not have that volume, although I'll keep an eye out for it now, but it is referenced in a footnote in the reader I just borrowed from the library where I also found the Arabic for the poem. Incidentally, the reader was compiled by Frangieh as well...

I know nothing about Housman am am appreciating my gradual enlightenment!

http://everything2.com/title/Illic+Jacet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doG-gMlJxy8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qW3noziaEc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN5k9wauu94&feature=related

From A Shropshire Lad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VHr4eCOtWs&feature=related

One of my all-time faves, probably an overly anthologized classic, but oh well. It's published so often for a very good reason: it resonates w/many, and indeed, it is so true. Though I'm not sure if this diminuitive piece should be on this thread necessarily, or over on the nefarious death thread. What do you guys think? Since I'm feeling hopeful and optimistic (upbeat even - and it's only Tuesday) at the moment, I believe it belongs here on the life thread:

Resume

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

-- Dorothy Parker

WINTER HEAVENS

Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They awaken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
Life glistens on the river of death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
And this is the soul's haven to have felt.

George Meredith
1888

The Plain Style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R6UH3k4ksg

V

DIFFUGERE NIVES

Horace: Odes iv 7

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, THOU WAST NOT BORN FOR AYE.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn, with her apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, what'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams:
Come WE where Tullus and where Ancus are,
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then my heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

A.E. Housman

The young Charles L. Dodgson was seven years old. He was expecting a present , this is what he got from the elder Charles Dodgson:

As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the street Ironmongers, Ironmongers. Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment - fly, fly, in all directions, ring the bells, call the constables, set the town on fire. I will have a file and a screw driver and a ring and if they are not brought directly in 40 seconds, I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole town of Leeds, and I shall only leave that because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it. Then what a bawling and a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs and babies, camels and butterflies, rolling in the gutter together - old women rushing up chimneys and cows after them, ducks hiding themselves in coffee cups and fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases.

This from a High Churchman, from a long line of High Churchmen, a scholar, a hard driving clerical type with a feeling for the nonsensical. It's interesting to ponder on the sources of old Charles Dodgson's nonsense inclinations.

Poor-ious, a whole new can of worms, now this may warrant its own thread.

I have, in point of fact, been thinking about nonsense a lot recently (and not just recently if my wife's opinion is taken).

It is different to the absurd, and to the deliberately provocative. But what is its meaning? Is it a pure exuberance in the workings of the imagination?

Or is there something darker underneath? Dodgson? Lear? Milligan? Strange creatures under a very thin veil of conventionality (if that).

Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote an article (found within Words of Mercury) in which he opens thus:

"Pure nonsense is as rare among the arts as an equatorial snowdrop".

I really have no insights but a lot of questions here.

Zenomax. I am prepared to get a thread started on nonsense, but none of that nonsense of which your astute wife talks about. I'm kidding, of course. Let's ask a whole lot of questions. It seems to me that my nonsense suits your nonsense. Are you familiar with Francis Huxley's THE RAVEN AT THE WRITING DESK? Let me know what you think.

Well, nonsense is as nonsense does.

I am not familiar with Huxley's book, but see a citing of it on the Wikipedia page on Dodgson.

By the way there is an external link on the same wikipedia page to a site which claims Dodgson was the first 'Python':

Lewis Carroll is the original Monty Python. His ability to think logically enabled him to travel along a line of absurdity with perfect logic. There are innumerable instances in the Monty Python series that are reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s style of humour. On the other hand, you could transpose some Carrollian scene or line into a Python sketch and find that it fits in very well.

These are issues which may be expanded upon in a thread. I say let us go for broke.

Shall we start a thread and fire in as much nonsense as we can come up with? There's plenty. There should be few rules, if any. We shall follow the nonsense where it leads. Do you have any thoughts on what we should we name this thread? When should we begin this looking into nonsense? I say sooner than later.

suggestions:

The Thread of the Absurd?
The Thread of Complete and Utter Nonsense?

I agree sooner too.

Compleate and Udder Nonsense, I say.

Do it.

Yes, strike while the iron is hot.

Strijken ( strike ) means ironing in Dutch !
You just dropped an exquisite nonsensical sentence

What, never?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlJw08uMvE4&feature=related

Was fun. Thread closed.

Well just because

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-ay8karWz0&feature=related
They still make me smile

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5udpASWmVY&feature=related

A clarification

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Pbbcfjw4c&feature=related

Seraph to Ox
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJS01yOfipE&feature=fvw

woo-who
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgUs7yWnDJ8&feature=related

Al
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md4_ywlw2aI&NR=1

Mr Dave

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXeqblkA6Y0