You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Make it POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

I read that 5^th century BC Athenian book sellers probably sold supplementary Sappho material. My first thought was that they weren’t book sellers yet. Then I mentally shuffled through alternate phrasing like scroll sellers, literary merchants, and pre-codex barkers, sympathized with the source, and decided there was no harm in book sellers. I had just been complaining that streaming services are killing album liner notes.

If you’ve ever read the liner notes accompanying the Steely Dan album The Royal Scam, you’ve missed a gem. There’s no greater rendering of coked up Los Angeles Me Gen slimeballs to be had. Read that and realize, of course they later wrote “Hey Nineteen.” That doesn’t make “Hey Nineteen” a bad song or The Royal Scam a bad album, it just gives insight into the minds behind the music, fuels personal distaste, and serves as another go-to in the the argument about judging the art separately from the coked up artist. Album art is still a going concern, relegated to iTunes or Amazon Music thumbnail icon art, but still. Liner notes are gone. I figured I sensed an million-dollar idea opening, but found a site already dedicated to collecting and archiving record art, scribblings, and really deep thoughts from Justin and Lance. And another. Neither seems to be raking in dough.

Sappho wrote lyrics meant to be sung to accompanying music. In her work she mentions specific types of harps, lyres, and flutes and then in art—she tops whatever they call the archaeological Billboards List for most appearances on recovered vases, potsherds and whole, for a female poet, Mediterranean category—with a variety of instruments. The ancients didn’t have sheet music, or if they did, we don’t have any. We have flecks of her metered verse. That combined with knowledge of what instruments were around probably results in more arguments than certainty of what a Sappho concert would have sounded like, but it’s fun for those drawn to figure out such things. Now, the source that mentioned supplemental material said the booksellers probably sold such things. “Probably” means some contemporary or classical source threw out a reference telling us such things existed, but we don’t have one to look at. That must be tantalizing to scholars.

Even if we decide some enterprising Sappho scroll seller invented the accompanying material in the 400s BC and revolutionized music publishing, that’s twenty-four hundred years of musicians and orbiting talent commentary sold with enlightening sleeve script. Surely he wasn’t the first. They’re older than that. In any case, pace hipster vinyl shops in Brooklyn and near microbreweries in other places, twenty-four hundred plus years of tradition got blown out of the water by Jobs and Bezos in twenty-five regular old not-hundred years; a kind of musing lost in time, like a perm in the rain.

I was reading about Sappho because of Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize for Poetry win. I don’t keep up with contemporary awards, but after her laurels were announced my Twitter timeline erupted in gleefully meanspirited astonishment with accompanying pics from The New Yorker pages of her less-than-spectacular original poetry. I’m open to the possibility that those were poor examples of her work, that for reasons beyond me The New Yorker passed on the good and cogent in favor of the discombobulated. The commentary consisted of “You don’t understand art,” volleyed back and forth with “Have enough backbone to call an naked Emperor naked.” Respected poets I follow didn’t make excuses for what was passed around. A few said uncongenial things about her poetry and listed luminaries more deserving, but almost all suggested that no matter how bad her originals were, her essays were superb. What caught me was how effusive most were about her Sappho translations.

When looking into a classical poet, I’m generally most interested in what translation would have inspired the poets I love whose praise brought the classical poet from the background to the forefront of my interest. A poet mentions the way Horace juxtaposes familiar words. I want to know what translation the poet favored, assuming the poet required a translation, because I want to know what he means, experience what he did, and avoid a translator who isn’t as observant of juxtaposition or whatever the praised quality is.

Henry Thornton Wharton’s Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation was a great influence on the Imagistes, for whom I’ve made no secret of my admiration. Ezra Pound recommends the book to the poet Iris Barry in a 1916 letter: “Wharton’s “Sappho” is the classic achievement. That you should find in any decent library.”

I only have the Pound side of the Barry/Pound correspondence, but I get the sense Barry was not so impressed as Pound. I can see her point. Wharton’s translations are in prose with each followed by several extant verse translations, some good, some meh, but none unavailable anywhere else. I assume that was Barry’s complaint, but whatever it was, she elicited an apology from Pound: “I’m sorry about the Wharton, only, as I remember it, he does give a decent and lucid prose translation, wherewith one can follow the Greek.” In the same letter to Barry, Pound writes, “Your poems are on the other side of a floor I have just stained and it is too wet and sticky to cross. You shall have them in a few days.” That has to be the lamest excuse one poet has given to another for not having read her stuff.

Barry’s opinion aside, Pound loved the Wharton text. Aldington loved the Barry text. Most tellingly, Hilda Doolittle, publicly known as HD, the Imagist most influenced by Sappho in all her purported ways, considered Wharton’s Sappho “a close companion throughout H.D.’s poetic apprenticeship,” according to Diana Collecott in “H.D. and Sapphic Modernism 1910-1950.”

The bulk of the surviving six hundred and fifty or so surviving lines of what’s believed to be the ten thousand she wrote, are range from romantic to racy, though not all. Secondary sources say she wrote mostly about family, occasion songs for wedding and the like, and hymns. Wikipedia drops the intriguing claim that she also wrote about “invective.”

This cleaves closest to invective I could find. It’s fantastically cruel.

Fragment 68
Sappho (c. 630-c. 570BC)
Translation by Henry T Wharton (1846–1895)

But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead.

Below his prose translation, Wharton features numerous verse translations by others. This is credited to “? Felton.” It seems Wharton was unsure. Cornelius Conway Felton (1807–1862), was an American professor of classics at, and later president of, Harvard. I lay no special claim to him being Felton referred to, but a quick search and Grok session suggests him as probable. Whoever the translator is, he or she writes starkly, as seems proper.

Fragment 68
Translation by “? Felton”

In the cold grave where thou shalt lie
All memory too of thee shall die,
Who in this life’s auspicious hours
Disdained Pieria’s genial flowers;
And in the mansions of the dead,
With the vile crowd of ghosts, thy shade,
While nobler spirits point with scorn,
Shall flit neglected and forlorn.

? Fulton provides a terrible example of what are known as “Sapphics” in that he neither attempts nor succeeds in trying to give a sense of a Sapphic stanza. There are few definitions of what a Sapphic stanza is as it’s an attempt to adapt Ancient qualitative verse, or verses that are punctuated with long and short syllables, to our stressed language. Wikipedia will tell you all about hendecasyllables and such, but The Poetic Dictionary by John Drury is more reasonable, matter of fact, and decisive:

“Quatrain in which the first three lines contain eleven syllables and the fourth line contains five syllables.”

Few practitioners follow the definition slavishly, but then neither do they any of the other definitions, so it’s as good a description as any. In English, expect stresses on syllables 1,3,5,8, and 10 in the first three lines and then at 1 and 4 in in the fourth line. On that last line, Drury invokes the Beatles:

“It is also a natural phrase rhythm in English, appearing frequently in expressions (‘Put up or shut up!’) and names (Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Rigby, Theodore Roethke.)”

I’ve spent a couple of days with various translations and putting aside the Anne Carson poetry debate online, her If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho stands out as exceptional. It seems to be an expression of the poet’s love for a young woman, though it’s argued that this is a wedding song and is congratulatory from a friend or relative’s point of view. The fragment is of an incomplete work.

Fragment 31
Translation by Anne Carson (1950- )

He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty

It’s common knowledge that Sappho was gay, that because of her fame as such, her native island, Lesbos, gives us the word lesbian. It’s not that cut and dry. Common knowledge may be off. In Classical Greek comedies she was frequently portrayed as a lusty and promiscuous heterosexual. Wharton didn’t think much of claims that she was homosexual, but can we chalk that up to Victorian prudery? Her work disappeared for hundreds of years. It surprised me, but from the 10^th or 11^th century until the 19^th, Sappho was known of but not known. Renaissance scholars blamed Gregory VII. The Pope had her salacious works destroyed, or some such. Per Wikipedia, sources say it’s more likely that she vanished because Attic Greek was the Ancient Greek that pervaded scholarship and she wrote in Aeolic dialect. Not many read her language so no one invested in laborious scribes to keep her front and center. Her homosexuality as reason for her low profile seems like projection from a modern view that accepts, rather than doubts her nature.

Little is known and lots is speculated about her life. She was high born. That seems to be consensus. Was she a music teacher, a priestess, an organizer of public events requiring songs, a quiet family woman? There’s someone who will say yes to all of those. There is evidence that she fell out of favor and was exiled to Sicily at a time involving political conflict. That would indicate that she was not just wealthy or prominent, but she or her family were involved in politics enough to be considered trouble. Maybe she jumped off a cliff for love. Maybe she didn’t. Not much is certain but the texts.

No matter what Sappho scholars debate, decide, and declare, Sappho is a lesbian icon to the modern world. As such she’s ingrained in the language. She was revered enough by the ancient world to be called “The Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.” That’s rarefied air.

Of all the fragments collected, there is only one whole poem, known start to finish. We have it complete from Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c.60 – c.7 BC), who included the work in his On Composition in corroborating scraps found on the grandly titled 2^nd century AD scrap Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2288, found at Oxyrhnchus, Egypt.

Below is the Wharton prose translation followed by one in verse by John Myers O’Hara who I gather was the reigning King of English Sappho translation after Wharton until Carson knocked the crown off his head. It is worth reading Carson’s version as well. Better still to buy her Sappho book and read the whole. Just keep away from the New Yorker stuff.

Ode to Aphrodite
Translation by Henry T Wharton (1846–1895)

Immortal Aphrodite of the broidered throne, daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray thee break not my spirit with anguish and distress, O Queen. But come hither, if ever before thou didst hear my voice afar, and listen, and leaving thy father’s golden house camest with chariot yoked, and fair fleet sparrows drew thee, flapping fast their wings around the dark earth, from heaven through mid sky. Quickly arrived they; and thou, blessed one, smiling with immortal countenance, didst ask What now is befallen me, and Why now I call, and What I in my mad heart most desire to see. ‘What Beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies she shall soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give, and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth.’ Come, I pray thee, now too, and release me from cruel cares; and all that my heart desires to accomplish, accomplish thou, and be thyself my ally.

Ode to Aphrodite
Translation by John Myers O’Hara (1870-1944)

Aphrodite, subtle of soul and deathless,
Daughter of God, weaver of wiles, I pray thee
Neither with care, dread Mistress, nor with anguish,
Slay thou my spirit!

But in pity hasten, come now if ever
From afar of old when my voice implored thee,
Thou hast deigned to listen, leaving the golden
House of thy father

With thy chariot yoked; and with doves that drew thee,
Fair and fleet around the dark earth from heaven,
Dipping vibrant wings down the azure distance,
Through the mid-ether;

Very swift they came; and thou, gracious Vision,
Leaned with face that smiled in immortal beauty,
Leaned to me and asked, “What misfortune threatened?
Why I had called thee?”

“What my frenzied heart craved in utter yearning,
Whom its wild desire would persuade to passion?
What disdainful charms, madly worshipped, slight thee?
Who wrongs thee, Sappho?”

“She that fain would fly, she shall quickly follow,
She that now rejects, yet with gifts shall woo thee,
She that heeds thee not, soon shall love to madness,
Love thee, the loth one!”

Come to me now thus, Goddess, and release me
From distress and pain; and all my distracted
Heart would seek, do thou, once again fulfilling,
Still be my ally!

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Make it POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

In 1857, Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded in which she expounded on her theory put forth in an essay in Putnam Magazine a year earlier: that William Shakespeare was the front man for a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen style collaboration that counted Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon (no relation) among their number, and that the works attributed to him were in fact theirs. Why did these men, all public, all admired, and all published, decided to slip behind the arras and prop up a Stratford boy?

Delia thinks they hid subversive code in there; code filled with revolutionary philosophy and anti-tyrannical broadsides. Consider a couple of factors: Around the time she published her theory, academics were having a field day speculating about biblical authors and whether Homer was a composite or not; questions of authorship were in the air. She was friends with Samuel Morse. Throw into the mix that Delia was batty and ended her life in an asylum, and you have a recipe for a pre-internet internet conspiracy.

She was brilliant in addition to batty. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a fan. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wasn’t a believer in her Shakespeare conspiracy, per Wikipedia, “retrospectively remarked that America had only two ‘producers’ during the 1850s, ‘Our wild Whitman, with real inspiration but checked by [a] titanic abdomen; and Delia Bacon, with genius, but mad and clinging like a tortoise to English soil.’” Whitman himself called her, “the sweetest, eloquentist, grandest woman.” Harriet Beecher Stowe thought well of her.

Despite counting himself among the unconvinced, Emerson helped get that first essay on the subject printed. Here’s a bit from it.

“How can we undertake to account for the literary miracles of antiquity, while this great myth of the modern ages still lies at our own door, unquestioned? This vast, magical, unexplained phenomenon which our own times have proceed under our own eyes, appears to be, indeed, the only thing which our modern rationalism is not to be permitted to meddle with. For, here the critics themselves still veil their faces, filling the air with mystic utterances which seem to say, that to this shrine at least, for the footstep of the common reason and the common sense, there is yet no admittance.”

There’s a bit of Candace Owens in there: “I’m just asking questions. I’m just asking questions.”

“For too long critics,” write Warren Hope and Kim Holston in The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Claimants to Authorship, and Their Champions and Detractors, “have depicted [her] as a tragicomic figure, blindly pursuing a fantastic mission in obscurity and isolation, only to end in silence and madness…” Or maybe not long enough, write I. There are plenty of arguments claiming an author other than Shakespeare wrote the body of work we attribute to the man—all of that’s bosh, in my opinion—worth wrestling with, but Bacon’s deserves to be viewed as most other literary cipher hunts. I can’t help thinking of poor Muriel Spark convinced Eliot peppered his poetry with secret communiques or Brendan McKay poking the code breakers by using their methods to find warnings about the JFK, MLK, and Rabin assassinations in Moby Dick. There’s always something for those who want there to be something.

In claiming that critics considered her a “tragicomic figure” for “too long,” Hope and Holston want you to dismiss that critics closer to her time considered Bacon tragicomic over an extended period. Sudden reversals make academic careers, but going against the grain has the grain to contend with and, though they range beyond, on the singular claim of Bacon, Hope and Holsten v Emerson doesn’t sound promising for Hope and Holsten.

I don’t think many gave credence to cipherous cabal imaginings, but those imaginings established a foothold.

Jump forward sixty years to John Thomas Looney. Looney sifted through Bacon’s suspicions and pulled, from among her list of supposed conspirators, the name Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford. De Vere, rather than William Shakespeare was the author of the plays and poetry we attribute to the latter, claims Looney, and then lays out a well considered biographical case.

Academics—and I suppose layabout web surfers as well—convinced that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare go by the charming collective name “Anti-Stratfordians,” possibly introducing a regional rivalry between themselves and what I hope are called “The Greater Avon Metroplex Bard’s Boys,” that resolves in choreographed finger snapping. Those among the Anti-Stratfordians convinced that the mind behind the work is de Vere are known as Oxfordians. To build the Oxfordian (not Broguian) claim, Looney shows that the Earl traveled to and was familiar with Italy, was familiar with courtly manners, goings on at Windsor, Latin and Greek, all as he proposed the true author must be. It is assumed that no one, especially a butcher’s son, could write so convincingly of such things without first hand knowledge.

Looney’s great at spotting coincidences and casting doubt. He’s an agile story teller and knows—I’m giving a Christian interpretation—intuitively the conspiracy weaver’s tricks of peppering fact with suspicion, hope with possibility, and gnosticism with vanity. It’s a great read. But in the end, all he’s done is throw down a hailstorm of questions and possibilities. We’re to make surety from what isn’t disallowed.

As to why de Vere needed to ghostwrite another’s career, Looney writes, “Generally, poets and poetry were scornfully regarded in the Elizabethan period, and young nobles would not risk losing caste by publishing under their own name.” I don’t know what to say to that. Sir Walter Ralegh wrote poetry and was well regarded for it. Spenser was adored. I could go on. Elizabeth herself was known to write verse. Few published, but publishing a collection of poetic miscellany was relatively new; Songs and Sonnets, also known as Tottel’s Miscellany after the publisher Richard Tottel, was England’s first published collection of poetry and it was still a novelty, released in 1557. It’s more the case to say that there were few early adapters.

Looney would have been on better ground to claim that courtiers and aristocrats of the time didn’t publish because they were landed and commerce was icky. A great many posthumous volumes by aristocratic authors came out, to no one’s shame; perfectly acceptable as no merchant’s greed infects the dead. But, as Looney admits later, de Vere did publish, or as Looney puts it, “effaced himself,” in 1576.

“As a poet, he deliberately effaced himself so far as publication was concerned from the age of twenty-six; notwithstanding that throughout his life and in the period immediately following his death his poetic eminence was recognised.”

So, what was Looney on about? Back to the question: Why did de Vere need to ghost write another’s career?

All falls apart if de Vere’s poetry doesn’t carry a passing resemblance to what the un-pilled go around calling Shakespeare’s work. It sort of does. And this is where it gets funny. The work presented as de Vere’s poetry is reminiscent of the poetry presented as Will Shakespeare’s, but the work presented as de Vere’s poetry may not be de Vere’s poetry.

Apparently, authorship of de Vere’s work needed adjudication. In steps Dr. Alexander Balloch Grosart (and I’m shaking my head that we have the full name, Delia Salter Bacon, putting salt so near a cured meat, that she’s batty as segue to a guy named Looney, and that someone who, through no fault of his own, got scooped up and tossed into a literary conspiracy theory has a middle name that sounds like bollocks.) In 1872, Dr Grosart studied a number of works purported to be by the Earl of Oxford, though several were previously published and attributed to Sidney. The doctor sorted them into two piles: those verifiably de Vere’s and those probably de Vere’s. For this we have to take the good doctor’s word, as did Looney. So, the poetry one man says is and is probably de Vere’s looks enough like the poetry that he says isn’t Shakespeare’s to prove that de Vere is the true writer of Shakespeare’s body. Upon this rock he built his house.

I like the poetry Grosart is comfortable calling de Vere’s. There are some oddities. The man likes questions:

from Love Thy Choice

Who taught thee first to sigh, alas, my heart?
Who taught thy tongue the woeful words of plaint?
Who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart?
Who gave thee grief and made thy joys to faint?
Who first did paint with colours pale thy face?
Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest?
Above the rest in court who gave thee grace?
Who made thee strive in honour to be best?
In constant truth to bide so firm and sure,
To scorn the world regarding but thy friends?

And:

from Echo Verses

Oh heavens ! who was the first that bred in me this fever ? Vere (Ver.)
Who was the first that gave the wound whose fear I wear for ever ? Vere.
What tyrant, Cupid, to my harm usurps thy golden quiver ? Vere.
What sight first caught this heart and can from bondage it deliver ? Vere.

Yet who doth most adore this sight, oh hollow caves tell true ? You.
What nymph deserves his liking best, yet doth in sorrow rue ? You.
What makes him not reward good will with some reward or ruth ? Youth.
What makes him show besides his birth, such pride and such untruth ? Youth.

May I his favour match with love, if he my love will try? Ay.
May I requite his birth with faith ? Then faithful will I die ? Ay.

And, though someone referred to by Looney as Prof. May says this one, among a few others of the twenty-two Grosart verified poems, is wrongly attributed to de Vere:

Doth Sorrow Fret Thy Soul.

Doth sorrow fret thy soul? O direful sprite.
Doth pleasure feed thy heart? O blessed man.
Hast thou been happy once? O heavy plight.
Are thy mishaps forepast? O happy than (then)
Or hast thou bliss in eld? O bliss too late:
But hast thou bliss in youth? O sweet estate.

These are extreme examples, but he’s liberal with questions throughout his work. I don’t think it would be out of line to challenge the Oxfordian claim on the grounds that were de Vere the author of Hamlet, we’d see signs: “To be or not to be. That is but one of many questions.”

Again, the Oxfordian stuff makes for fun reading, but there’s little there there. Four hundred years from now, there may well be a movement dead set on establishing Tommy Lasorda as author of Bob Dylan’s songs, or that Elvis Costello is the real Guy Ritchie. I can’t prove either is or isn’t the case. I’m just asking questions.

It’s a shame that de Vere couldn’t be left alone and considered without the Shakespeare question. He’s very good when not badgering like a four year old. This last is from the verified pile. The man who would be a King’s Man:

Revenge of Wrong.
Edward de Vere (1550-1604)

Fain would I sing, but fury makes me fret,
And Rage hath sworn to seek revenge of wrong;
My mazed mind in malice so is set,
As Death shall daunt my deadly dolours long;
Patience perforce is such a pinching pain,
As die I will, or suffer wrong again.

I am no sot, to suffer such abuse
As doth bereave my heart of his delight;
Nor will I frame myself to such as use,
With calm consent, to suffer such despite;
No quiet sleep shall once possess mine eye
Till Wit have wrought his will on Injury.

My heart shall fail, and hand shall lose his force,
But some device shall pay Despite his due;
And Fury shall consume my careful corse,
Or raze the ground whereon my sorrow grew.
Lo, thus in rage of ruthful mind refus’d,
I rest reveng’d on whom I am abus’d.
Earle of Oxenforde.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Mark Twain delivered this devastating comeback at a cocktail party when… or maybe it was Noel Coward. I can’t remember. It was one of those clever people back when memorable mots were bon and got traded around. If it was Churchill who said it, he would have been talking to Lady Astor. Gore Vidal or William F. Buckley? I suppose it could have been Dick Cavett, but he’s more contemporary. The jab’s too clever for anyone who was on TV and by the time Cavett made the scene, Mid-Atlantic was out of style and this is too pointed to have been said in anything but an English or Mid-Atlantic accent. Maybe it was one of those New Yorkers who wrote for the New Yorker? One of the Gertrude Steins? My friend’s great grandmother who shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart and was friends with Zoe Fitzgerald swears Lindbergh said it to Babe Ruth, but that Lindy was cribbing from something he heard Coolidge say to Chaplin.

There’s a genre of witticisms attributed to a cloud of dead eminences. “If you were my wife, I’d drink it,” “What can you hope but to be sunk in a bigger, more expensive ship,” and “In the morning I shall be sober, but you…” I’m pretty sure all of those are Churchill, but you know the flavor. I figured this was a recent phenomenon looking back on a fuzzy past, coinciding with declining standards and kids spending all their allowance on detective comics and the talkies. Know nothings like me from the age of Dumb and Dumber* hear something witty from the past through a telephone game of conversations and magazine articles, pick up bits, remember less, and are never so rude to challenge or verify chit-chat. We grapevine-didacts know, but don’t know. But it isn’t a recent phenomenon, at least not very recent.

Ninety-eight years ago, Dorothy Parker found herself a frequent victim of this cleverness attribution confusion. I’m reliably sure the following short verse is hers.

Oscar Wilde
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Oscar Wilde was fantastic off-the-cuff. Examples range from verified—The poet Lewis Morris claimed there was a conspiracy of silence against him, to which Wilde responded, “Join it.”—to the probable—When asked about the painter James Whistler, “That he is indeed one of the very great masters of painting, is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.”—to the apocryphal—On being asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare, “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

A lot of his more famous quips are taken from his plays. “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” and “I can resist everything except temptation,” are lines from Lady Windermere’s Fan. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” comes from The Importance of Being Earnest.

Wilde was a funny guy. You’d think that would mean he had few funny poems in him. It may be that he did and it may be that he got around to putting them down on paper, but I can’t, for the life of my afternoon, find any. There’s no sign of him in the Kingsley Amis edited New Oxford Book of Light Verse; the Index of Authors flows from “Wesley, Samuel” to “Wilmot, John, see Rochester, Earl of” smoothly, no apologetic wince or defiant chin marking absence. It wouldn’t surprise me if Amis left out a much loved author because he wasn’t so impressed himself, but Wilde’s wit is British marrow. Oxbridge first years cut their teeth on detached bemusement and eyebrow lift affectation.

My partial reading of the 12^th edition of Wilde’s Poems, first printed in 1878 but added to as new material was available (making posthumous editions nearly complete collections of the authors published verse) found no hilarity.

Funny was, as best I can tell, for plays and prose. His poetry is sensual, the voice often wistful, and frequently relies on classical references. Below is iambic pentameter in abab rhyme; Victorian boilerplate.

My Voice
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Within this restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts’ full pleasure—You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.

Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow has paled my young mouth’s vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.

But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.

I don’t know that I mean “Victorian boilerplate” as a snub. Modern interests me more, but that only tells you about me. Victorian poetry is rigid, but as with poets from any other time, the poets were expressive. That they restrained themselves in form doesn’t mean they conveyed less or captured something inferior. I think of Clapton and Merlot. As guitarists, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix were innovators. Eric Clapton stayed within guardrails but within those self-imposed limits, he was as or more soulful. Merlot is a fickle grape. It turns dull and lactic on the valley floor and lifeless on the wrong hill or right hill in wrong weather. For all the Merlot jokes in Sideways, it’s lost that the sacred bottle in that movie was a Merlot predominant Bordeaux. Only an orthodox approach brings out the grape’s best.

The form shouldn’t mislead. Wilde was not a conventional person. This is speculation on my part, but could it be that poetry was personal in a way that prose and theater were not? His plays were performed on a stage in front of an audience, so I’ll not comment further on whether it is or isn’t extroversion. With the prose, the plays made the public persona Wilde cultivated: bemused, erudite, whip-like. An armchair critic such as myself with an afternoon invested in figuring out the whys and wherefores of a complicated man has to wonder if Wilde saw poetry as a personal release. He was witty for the world. His poetry is maudlin (pronounced Magdalen).

Late in his life, he had cause to be maudlin. The details are not so well known, but the gist is: Wilde was arrested and charged with sodomy and gross indecency, found guilty of the latter, sentenced to two years hard labor, and spent his post prison years impoverished in self imposed exile in France. While missing from Amis’s New Oxford Book of Light Verse, he is included Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. It’s only one poem, but his inclusion among the Moderns is as surprising to me as his exclusion among the Lights.

Yeats chose “The Ballad of Reading Goal,” a telling of the days leading to the execution of one of Wilde’s fellow prisoners from, presumably, Wilde’s point of view. As the title implies, it’s written in a basic ballad form, so broken fourteeners in ababab, as sullen aspiring folk lore is wont to be written.

from The Ballad of Reading Goal

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.

So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.

There are faults in stress in the last two lines of both of the above stanzas. That’s not representative. On the whole the poem flows in well crafted and expected sing-song as a ballad should. I picked the flawed bits for what they describe: hard labor, bleak outlook, and resignation. There’s not a quip to be found.

Here’s one from before his legal troubles. He’s not beaten down, but restlessness and dissatisfaction wrap up a ball of defiance.

Tædium Vitæ

To stab my youth with desperate knives, to wear
This paltry age’s gaudy livery,
To let each base hand filch my treasury,
To mesh my soul within a woman’s hair,
And be mere Fortune’s lackeyed groom,—I swear
I love it not! these things are less to me
Than the thin foam that frets upon the sea,
Less than the thistledown of summer air
Which hath no seed: better to stand aloof
Far from these slanderous fools who mock my life
Knowing me not, better the lowliest roof
Fit for the meanest hind to sojourn in,
Than to go back to that hoarse cave of strife
Where my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin.

I chose the next poem because I liked “Tædium Vitæ,” and, since my intended column about what I presumed would be hilarious and clever Oscar Wilde poems fell apart, I reached out to any connection or segue I could find. Like “Tædium Vitæ,” “Tristitæ” is spelled with “Æ,” which I took to be the Old English letter Ash, adapted from ruins. Another poor assumption: “Æ,” in most cases when dealing with classical material, is a medieval Latin scribe’s e caudata, also known as the ae ligature. In any case, both poems have “Æ” in the titles and both traffic in ennui.

“Tristitæ” goes one further with an ae ligature in the title and an introductory quotation from Æschylus. It translates as “Sorrow, sing sorrow, but good shall prevail with power.”

Tristitæ

Αἴλινον, αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ’ εὖ νικάτω

O well for him who lives at ease
With garnered gold in wide domain,
Nor heeds the splashing of the rain,
The crashing down of forest trees.

O well for him who ne’er hath known
The travail of the hungry years,
A father grey with grief and tears,
A mother weeping all alone.

But well for him whose foot hath trod
The weary road of toil and strife,
Yet from the sorrows of his life.
Builds ladders to be nearer God.

Now, when told that Oscar Wilde was a humorous and witty writer, you can respond, “Yes, he often was.”

I’ll leave with a paragraph lifted from Wikipedia. It recalls one line dismissals in the vein of the Oscar Wilde that comes to mind when one says “Oscar Wilde,” as opposed to the one that measured syllables.

“London theatre director Luther Munday recounted some of Wilde’s typical quips: Wilde said of Whistler that ‘he had no enemies but was intensely disliked by his friends’, of Hall Caine that ‘he wrote at the top of his voice’, of Rudyard Kipling that ‘he revealed life by splendid flashes of vulgarity’, of Henry James that ‘he wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty’, and of Marion Crawford that ‘he immolated himself on the altar of local colour’.”

* Dumb and Dumber is on the list, with Titanic, Good Will Hunting, and Napoleon Dynamite, of movies people can’t believe I’ve never seen. For all I know Dumb and Dumber is Proustian, but for the clips. My apologies to fans if that is somehow the case.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Poets do not rightly achieve their renown for saying anything new, however, or for saying anything that any reasonable thoughtful, feeling person should not already know by the time he or she has reached some measure of advanced adulthood. Rather, we expect poets to share the common experience in uncommon ways, so that simple truths emerge renewed and refreshed, or else to share uncommon experiences in common ways, so that the rare experience of a single individual becomes accessible to all. Surely, Eliot has been doing just that throughout the Quartets, so that a man visiting an English country home or riding a subway or watching for fires after an air raid or kneeling in an ancient chapel or pondering the flotsam on a river is not only the same man but the same as every other person if he or she, too, were followed through the rich varieties of experience that the typical individual may undergo in a lifetime.”

— Russell Elliot Murphy, T.S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

Charles I rode into Little Gidding on May 2, 1646, alone. Behind him rode Cromwell or Fairfax or some combination of their forces loyal to Parliament. The king knew the place. Sometime in the previous decade he came to admire a gospel concord owned by Nicholas Ferrar, a former courtier who, after suffering financial losses betting on the Virginia Company, retreated to his holdings at Little Gidding for a life of prayer and contemplation. Ferrar invited others. A small religious community flourished under his, and later his brother John’s, leadership. There was no reason for him to believe Little Gidding could offer lasting sanctuary from the Parliamentarians, but the king was desperate. Afraid for the safety of the residents of Little Gidding, John hid him in nearby Coppingford. The king would be captured three days later and the faithful disbursed by force, never to reform, under suspicion of having done exactly what they did to aid the fugitive royal. But, if only for a night, Charles slept.

TS Eliot published “Burnt Norton” in 1936, intending it as a standalone poem. In it he considers an infinite God and wonders at the limits of human perception. Can a temporal being conceive of an eternal one? Does time parcel out bits of understanding, save us from confronting a vision of God so terrible it would destroy us were we to experience him whole? Man is in motion through time while God is perfect stillness; no need for desire’s impetus or fear’s escape. God is love and contentment. Eliot settles on moments of ecstasy, timeless trance like clarity where understanding seems ours, as the best contact with that stillness we can hope for.

Eliot began “East Coker” in the Fall of 1939, shortly after England declared war on Germany, as a companion to “Burnt Norton.” In that poem, he wrote of cycles within lives and generations, history and individuals. Sometime during this writing, he decided a third and fourth were necessary. The idea for Four Quartets was born. After publishing “East Coker” in 1940, he followed with “Dry Salvages” in 1941. In that third poem Eliot asks what are we to do? If God is incomprehensible, unknowable other than to saints blessed or chosen, what is the common man to do? His answer is an unsatisfactory “Your best as can be done in the moment.”

In 1942, “Little Gidding” was released. In the poem’s final stanza, Eliot tells us,

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.

We never escape the inescapable pattern explored in previous poems. A flavor of what happened before happens again and we start over. At best, we touch the eternal stillness and are overwhelmed. The ecstasy he wrote of in “Burnt Norton,” “where we started,” is reconsidered. We cannot experience God fully in our lives, but moments of peace outside, if not time, our troubles and expectations, give respite. He opens the first line of “Little Gidding” with the phrase “Midwinter spring,” calling immediately to mind his most famous poem’s reference to April, but that’s an aside. A midwinter spring is a time out of season, a break from the normal cycle, a step out of timeliness. We are in an ecstasy, removed to a vantage point to look on and consider the pattern.

Like all of the poems making up Four Quartets, “Little Gidding” is divided into five parts. Here, from Part I:

It would be the same at the end of every journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same,

This contemplation is a refuge, as was the religious community to the “broken king,” if only for a brief period. The next stanza contain my favorite (current favorite at least) lines from Eliot, from “You are not here to verify,” to “…has been valid.”

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

There are shafts of light illuminating dust in “Burnt Norton,” “wind that sweeps the gloomy hills,” and birds among other images. Eliot made the decision while writing “East Coker” that since “Burnt Norton” was rife with images related to airiness he’d weave an elemental theme into the series. “Burnt Norton” was air. He’d fill “East Coker” with allusions to earth and the as yet unwritten and untitled “Dry Salvages” with water. The last would be a poem of fire. While it was certainly not fortuitous for those involved, it may be poetically serendipitous that, while composing “Little Gidding,” Eliot served as an air warden in London. Free time was spent writing in the country, a refuge in itself from time spent among the flames and wreckage from German firebombing.

In the uncertain hours before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurring end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing

The dark dove, a German bomber, unleashed hell on London. The above passage begins a seventy line run of what the poet and critic James Matthew Wilson affectionately calls “cheap” terza rima meant to evoke Dante’s Inferno. During this stretch, the persona meets,

…some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.

The unknown master is not easily identifiable. He’s certainly a poet, but which? You might assume Dante by the form Eliot’s using, but then why not Virgil? Russell Elliot Murphy, who I’ve quoted as introduction to this article, throws out the possibility that it may be Dante’s teacher Bruno Latini who Dante casts in the seventh layer of Hell whose “features have been baked by the fiery rain falling on burning plains where sodomists are punished.” Murphy notices a great deal more than most. Per him, a reference to dancing might mean the then recently deceased friend of Eliot’s, W.B. Yeats, a ghost recalls Hamlet and so Shakespeare, a mention of a famous Provencal troubadour conjures Ezra Pound. He throws James Joyce out there too, but not convincingly. It’s probably meant to be all of them in this “compound ghost.”

In this gloaming, the persona loses identity as well: “I was still the same, / knowing myself yet being someone other.” Amidst horror and destruction, he wants answers from the master. It’s unspoken. The persona wants to know why there is suffering. Why is there evil? But he is put off by the master:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.

The cycle asserts itself. Each man must ask questions and find answers. Eliot was in his mid fifties when writing “Little Gidding.” Yeats had just died. Joyce had just died. He wasn’t an old man, but he was of an age to consider mortality in ways a young man doesn’t, to evaluate age’s accumulated wisdom and decide whether he has any, by what mechanism we accumulate it, and compare himself to others in his circumstance. The blurry man talks to the blurry master and wrestles with the revelation that they are contemporaries out of time. His experience is akin to theirs. There is no answer received from the ages because the question is ageless and what we learn is, like salvation, personal.

In the next section, Eliot quotes a fourteenth century mystic named Julian of Norwich:

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of things shall be well.

This is to say, the reason for suffering is beyond us, but don’t worry. At first, this rings as unsatisfactorily as the conclusion to focus on what you do in the now from “Dry Salvages.” He goes on in her voice, speaking of Charles I and the Civil War:

Those men and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And we shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

There is evil, but we must be subjected to evil in order to be cleansed. Evoking both the flamed tongues of German dive bombers and the flamed tongues of Pentecost, he writes:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

And, by association, we are back to the once great mansion named Norton, laid low by fire and made fallow for the questions Eliot began with in the first poem. A new cycle is set to begin as part of a greater cycle.

Poetry is moving when done well so we’ve grown to calling poetry moving as a matter of course. I don’t think I’ve come across anything like Four Quartets. As an act of poetry, it’s impressive. There are games and devices and demonstration of form mastery; enough of all for shelves of doctoral thesi. None of that would matter if it weren’t so satisfying. As four separate works, yes, but more so as one continuity.

As a work of Christian theology, it’s an edifice. A Christian is both flesh and soul, not either or. God is spirit, but became man and God. Again, both, not either or. In Four Quartets, Eliot appeals to the sensual through poetry and intellect through theological exploration. I don’t have to explain the synthesis because he took time to tell us himself in the section from Part I I quoted earlier:

And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the Praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

The poems are prayerful, and moving in the sense we mean when we first say moving, before we know to reach for the word as pat. Regarding the whole of Four Quartets, I’m four articles and seven thousand words into trying to convey what left me speechless.

I’ll leave with the entirety of Part V of “Little Gidding” and a meant, Amen.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

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.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

When last we saw the name Coventry Patmore in this space, he was getting inappropriate with a married and unreceptive Alice Meynell. There’s a Walter Stoneman photo of Alice’s mister, Wilfrid Meynell (rhymes with “fennel”), taken circa 1916, putting Wilfrid circa sixty-four years old. He’s a pretty robust looking sixty-four. Contrast that with an 1894 John Singer Sargent portrait of seventy-one year old Coventry Patmore. Old Coventry looks like Mark Twain on the tail end of a GLP-1 bender.

The most in-depth account of how the Meynells’ handled Patmore’s affections, and there’s between the lines stuff suggesting affections verged on obsession, is that Alice “ended their friendship.” For Patmore’s sake, I hope that’s all there was to it. I know the photo and painting capture the men as older, but regress them and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Meynell doesn’t put a pasting on slight Patmore.

In any case, I’m glad to run into Patmore again, this time catching him in a good light. He lent volumes of William Barnes poetry to Gerard Manley Hopkins. There’s no pinning down a single influence or spark that sent Hopkins to write so originally. Admiration for Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry came first. It’s hard not to notice similarities in what Barnes did and what Hopkins would go on to do. I’d throw Barnes’s work in a prominent spot among second tier influences. Everybody likes a redemption story, so remember Patmore as creepy only some of the time and give him credit for fueling Hopkins the rest.

Hopkins’s friend and eventual literary executor, Robert Bridges, wasn’t as much a Barnes fan, but when Hopkins expresses disagreement with him, we get questions. From a letter written by Hopkins to Bridges:

“I hold your contemptuous opinion an unhappy mistake he is a perfect artist and of a most spontaneous inspiration; it is as if Dorset life and Dorset landscape had taken flesh and tongue in the man. I feel the defect or limitation or whatever we are to call it that offended you: he lacks fire, but who is perfect all round? If one defect is fatal what writer could we read?”

Was the “lacks fire” assessment commentary on Barnes’s stylistic decisions? Barnes wrote a great deal in iambic, more often than not tetrameter, but made it pop with frequent hard consonant alliteration in nod towards old Anglo-Saxon tradition. Hopkins used those same alliterative punches, but out of meter and in ways that surprise and enervate, counting stresses with a varying number of unstressed syllables between; “Sprung Rhythm,” as he called it. Did he mean Barnes lacks energy? Maybe in comparison to himself, but certainly not when measured against most others.

Considering Hopkins was a Catholic priest and Barnes an ordained C of E curate, the lack of “fire” may have been a denominational slight. Hopkins famously puts “God’s Grandeur” front and center while Barnes is content to enjoy creation without attribution.

Of course, it could be than Hopkins was being conciliatory towards his friends for tranquility’s sake. In a later letter he writes that Barnes is “a perfect artist and of a most spontaneous inspiration; it is as if Dorset life and Dorset landscape had taken flesh and tongue in the man.” “Perfect” doesn’t “lack,” but context allows for exaggerations and concessions. Maybe he threw in “lack” to throw his friend a bone while presenting a counterargument. What’s certain is that Hopkins was very much impressed.

The first thing a reader notices about Barnes’s poetry is that the bulk is written in dialect, specifically the Dialect of Dorset, his home for most of his life save sallies to Cambridge as a student, a dozen years in nearby Wiltshire as a school master, and a two year stint as curate in Yorkshire. Be ready for a preponderance of Zs where you’d expect to find an S and, as you’ll see later, umlauts tossed about with the discipline of an 80s hair band.

from Zun-zet
William Barnes (1801-1886)

Where the western zun, unclouded,
Up above the grey hill-tops,
Did sheen drough ashes, lofty sh’ouded,
On the turf bezide the copse,
In zummer weather,
We together,
Sorrow-slightèn, work-vortgettèn,
Gambol’d wi’ the zun a-zettèn.

He’s not as strict with slack syllables as he could be, certainly not as much as his friend Tennyson and that host of contemporaries were, but it’s recognizable tetrameter, taking the fifth and sixth lines together as a single broken line.

You’ll notice the made up words “sorrow-slightèn” and “work-vortgettèn.” They mean “carefree” and “idle,” respectively. I’m not an agile enough linguist to tell you why he felt the need to insert his own creations in this case, but broadly he felt English should be free of foreign words and so invented compounds to suit. As a “linguistic purist,” he thought borrowed words diluted the language of the English people and he went so far as to advocate purging all Latin and Greek words, no matter how established.

He stated that a pure language is more comprehensible—though he’d probably say “heäd-fitten” instead of “comprehensible”—to the average speaker. Barnes spoke a great many languages. Per Wikipedia, he was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Russian, Welsh, Cornish, Old English, and, obviously, regular old (not Olde) English with and without the Dorset twang. Compared to him, we’re probably all linguistic simpletons so his claim to want to simplify for the average Joe may be less paternalistic than it was kindness born of astonishment at the limitations of even the tri-lingual around him.

As he was a remarkable poet, it’s possible he didn’t like the cacophony of mixing and matching or he liked the streamlined sound of a single tradition. I like to think he had a bit of OCD and knowing as many languages as he did meant he knew what words belong in what language and he didn’t like them touching, like a kid who freaks when the peas touch the mashed potatoes.

I’m joking about the OCD, but if I weren’t, I’d throw in that Barnes was an authority on grammar to back me up. His 1854 work Philological Grammar was well respected and he was considered an authority on the subject. The excellent anonymous biographers at Poetry Foundation tell me that he tutored a young Thomas Hardy. Hardy went on to work for an architect and at the drafting tables or wherever architects gather, discussion of literature and arts happened. It’s funny to me that Hardy wasn’t Hardy yet, so not an authority himself, but when grammatical or literary questions needed arbitrage, he would pop over to his old tutor’s for certainty.

Tokens

Green mwold on zummer bars do show
That they’ve a-dripp’d in winter wet;
The hoof-worn ring o’ groun’ below
The tree, do tell o’ storms or het;
The trees in rank along a ledge
Do show where woonce did bloom a hedge;
An’ where the vurrow-marks do stripe
The down, the wheat woonce rustled ripe.
Each mark ov things a-gone vrom view—
To eyezight’s woone, to soulzight two.

The grass ageän the mwoldrèn door
‘S a tóken sad o’vo’k a-gone,
An’ where the house, bwoth wall an’ vloor,
‘S a-lost, the well mid linger on.
What tokens, then, could Meäry gi’e
That she’d a-liv’d, an’ liv’d vor me,
But things a-done vor thought an’ view?
Good things that nwone ageän can do,
An’ every work her love ha’ wrought
To eyezights’s woone, but two to thought.

His most famous poem is probably “My Orcha’d in Lindèn Lea.” It was originally published as “My Orchet in Linden Lea” but changed, both title and a couple of minor spellings in the body, for the second edition. It’s my understanding that the second, as printed below, is the more common version.

The identical line ending each stanza provides a great example of a poetic device borrowed from Welsh and adjacent poetics called cynghanedd (pronounced kung-ha-neth) or cynghanedd groes, and meaning, more or less, “cross harmony” in English. It’s built around a caesura, in the middle of the line. I’m used to seeing a comma or semicolon announcing the pause, but there doesn’t have to be one.

The line “Do leän down low in Linden Lea,” breaks naturally between the fourth and fifth of eight syllables. The words in the first half, or hemistich, run consonants in the order D-L-N-D-N-L. In the second, the run N-L-N-D-N-L. Only the first consonants, D and N respectively, differ.

So,

Do LeäN DowN Low / iN LiNDeN Lea

I’d not read about the device before. It’s one to look out for. I’m sure we’ve all read over a use of it and noted viscerally, at least, the pleasant sound of the arrangement without spotting the structure.

Without further ado,

My Orcha’d in Lindèn Lea

‘Ithin the woodlands, flow’ry gleäded,
By the woak tree’s mossy moot,
The sheenèn grass-bleädes, timber sheäded,
Now do quiver under voot;
An’ birds do whissle auver head,
An’ water’s bubblèn in its bed,
An’ there vor me the apple tree
Do leän down low in Linden Lea.

When leaves that leätley wer a-springèn
Now do feäde ‘ithin the copse,
An’ païnted birds do hush their zingèn
Up upon the timber’s tops;
An’ brown-leav’d fruit’s a-turnèn red,
In cloudless zunsheen, auver head,
Wi’ fruit vor me, the apple tree
Do leän down low in Linden Lea.

Let other vo’k meäke money vaster
In the aïr o’ dark-room’d towns,
I don’t dread a peevish meäster;
Though noo man do heed my frowns,
I be free to goo abrode,
Or teäke ageän my hwomeward road
To where, vor me, the apple tree
Do leän down low in Linden Lea.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I read a lot of poetry that I like but don’t write about. There are a few that I like, want to write about, and set aside because I don’t have a fit for them yet; I imagine there are companion pieces and if I have patience and keep an eye out, I’ll find a tie-in for the set-aside, write about whatever thread links the works, and end up giddy for the convergence. That happened once, but mostly I have a bunch of tagged poems consigned to fester in the Rainbow app and torn-notepaper-bookmarked anthologies languishing on my shelves. Half the time I can’t remember which work called for the bookmark. Two sonnets on the even page, a villanelle on the odd; one of them caught my eye but the mood is gone, the association lost.

Today I’m sharing a few of the bookmarked poems I’ve been holding onto for a while. Fans of Jeopardy are familiar with the clue category “Potpourri,” filled with clues from a variety of categories that were left on the board, not called by players when time ran out. I thought of the stupid pun “Poet-pourri,” but before I made claim by saying it, I explained to my wife that I was writing about unrelated poems this week and asked if she could do a potpourri illustration. She jumped my stupid pun reveal with a blurted “You should call it “Poet-pourri.” Now I can’t prove authorship. At best, one of us plays Newton to the other’s Leibniz but I’m fine sharing the shame.

If you read last week’s POETS Day about the Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling, you might remember this stanza from his poem “The Constant Lover” where the poet puts on a smirk to congratulate himself for being true to the same woman for three whole days, forecasting that he may not stray for another few if his mood and the stars don’t kick-start a mercurial influence.

Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.

Richard Lovelace came in to the Court of Charles I right around the time Suckling got run off by Parliamentary warrants and in absentia verdicts of treason, but the there was a period where the two might have known one another. Suckling was a crummy gambler, a cheat, and a hell of a cricket player per John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. The same source calls Lovelace “a most beautifull gentleman,” “One of the handsomst men of England,” “an extraordinary handsome man,” all three in a meager 194 word biographical sketch. “…but prowd” is affixed to the third. The Cavaliers were the cool kids: jocks and wits and full of themselves.

It doesn’t surprise that Lovelace writes in sentiment with with Suckling. The former’s “Have I not loved thee much and long, / A tedious twelve hours’ space?” runs along and plays happily with “The Constant Lover.” Lovelace’s wrinkle presents his inconstancy as a boon for both himself and the lady and hints at the joys in other embraces they’d be denying themselves, not to mention the pleasures of their company they’d be denying others, and won’t we be happier should we come back to each other having sated our curiosity? “I have to sleep with her for us, baby.”

Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, PJ O’Rourke and the early National Lampoon guys put on a Cavalier attitude and it was hilarious. I doubt that attitude was as funny when those adopting it had swords and the King’s favor, but that circumstance is more than 300 years distant, so it’s funny again. “Eric Stratton, Pledge Chairman, damn glad to meet you,” and “Could you get three dates for my friends?”

I haven’t read enough of Lovelace’s work to give him his own POETS Day. I haven’t found enough of his work to judge, if I’m being honest. Still, this one’s memorable.

The Scrutiny
Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)

Why should you swear I am forsworn,
Since thine I vowed to be?
Lady, it is already morn,
And ‘twas last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.

Have I not loved thee much and long,
A tedious twelve hours’ space?
I must all other beauties wrong,
And rob thee of a new embrace,
Could I still dote upon the face.

Not but all joy in the brown hair
By others may be found;
But I must search the black and fair,
Like skillful mineralists that sound
For treasure in unplowed-up ground.

Then, if when I have loved my round,
Thou prov’st the pleasant she,
With spoils of meaner beauties crowned
I laden will return to thee,
Ev’n sated with variety.

JK Stephen is a poet I very much want to feature, but haven’t managed to find more than a mention of his work save the poem below. He apparently wrote two volumes of poetry mocking other poets and the state of literature in 19^th century England. Toss onto that that he was tutor to Edward VII’s son, cousin to Virginia Woolf, and was, depending on who you ask, either thrown from a horse into a moving windmill vane or hit by something tossed from a moving train, suffering a madness inducing head injury from whichever, and you can imagine I’m champing at the bit for more. Save the absence of access to his poetry, he’s damn near perfect subject matter-wise.

Among the bits of evidence pointing to his mania, Wikipedia tells us he plunged the “blade from a sword stick into bread.” I’ve done that. Also, he was “deluded that he was a painter of great genius.” Art is subjective. He drove “about dangerously in a hansom cab.” As if no one sped in the pre-FLOCK days. And, “he appeared at breakfast and announced, as though it were an amusing incident, that the doctors had told him that he would either die or go completely mad.” But he did go mad and die, so who’s zooming whom?

In any case, he’s spot on funny in the poem below.

A Sonnet
JK Stephen (1859-1892)

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmers with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times—good Lord! I’d rather be
Quite unacquainted with the ABC
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

Emily Dickinson was notoriously reclusive. That’s the thought that should be first and foremost in the readers mind when reading her poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” I messed up and let an intrusive thought supplant that and ruined the poem for myself.

Ezra Pound and, I believe, TS Eliot had a back and forth on the effects of art on art that came before. Pound contended that once the artistic tradition, as it marches along, casts an older work in a new light, the new interpretation supplants the old. I think Eliot stood up for the work and its author’s intent, whether or not that conflicted with other things he’d said or written. Well, score one for Pound. I read this, and I can’t explain why, envisioning the speaker as Audrey Hepburn in her black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and speaking with the voice of Fabienne, Bruce Willis’s character’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction. And new art cast a stupid shadow over old.

I wish I could explain why I imagined that persona and that voice, but I did, and I ruined the poem. Possibly for you too. Shame, but there it is.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Dont tell! they’d banish us — you know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell your name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!

As long as I’m mentioning Eliot, he had a wiry little eye-brightening smile he’d deploy at times. I like that Eliot; up to something. Too many photographs show the banker; pinstriped dour. It’s fun when he turns his smile on you. Edward Lear wrote silly nonsense poetry for children and later for adults. Eliot copies his style with the self effacing ditty below. I thought the title was plucked from the air—silly sounding for silly purposes—but Eliot had a dog named Cuscus and a cat named Mizra Murad Ali Beg after the writer Godolphin Mitford’s pen name. I’m learning not to assume Eliot does anything flippantly… even in the flippant poem below.

Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg
TS Eliot (1888-1965)

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With a bobtail cur
In a coat of fur
And a porpentine cat
And a wopsical hat:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth be open or shut).

Anthony Brode wrote a poem called “Flying Chaucer” for the March, 1956 issue of he Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I haven’t found that poem, but I can assure you, based on the title, that it is excellent. Brode’s hard to find much on. He wrote comic poems, one of which made its way into the Kinglsey Amis edited Oxford Book of Light Verse. Otherwise, there are titles mentioned, but no full texts I can find (granted, only in a quick look about.) I can’t even find a date of death, assuming he’s not still with us at one hundred and three.

One morning he read copy on a box of breakfast cereal, picked up on a beat close enough to the great Gerard Manley Hopkins’s distinct sprung rhythm, and ran with it. If he is still around, I’d like to shake his withered hand.

Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins
Anthony Brode (1923-??)

‘Delicious heart-of-the-corn, fresh-from-the oven
flakes are sparkled and spangled with sugar for a
can’t-be-resisted flavour.’—Legend on a packet of
breakfast cereal

Serious over my cereals I broke one breakfast my fast
With something-to-read-searching retinas retained by print on a packet;
Sprung rhythm sprang, and I found (the mind fact-mining at last)
An influence Father-Hopkins-fathered on the copy-writing racket.

Parenthesis-proud, bracket-bold, happiest with hyphens,
The writers stagger intoxicated by terms, adjective-unsteadied—
Describing in graceless phrases fizzling like soda siphons
All things, crisp, crunchy, malted, tangy, sugared, and shredded.

Far too, yes, too early we are urged to be purged, to savour
Salt, malt and phosphates in English twisted and torn,
As, sparkled and spangled with sugar for a can’t-be-resisted flavour,
Come fresh-from-the-oven flakes direct from the heart of the corn.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

This week I turned cartwheels in the surf. I exuberated. One passer-by was heard to exclaim, “By Goodness! He’s filled with beans.” Another called upon me to have decency and quiet the ruckus.

What catalyst, you ask, set off such an uncharacteristic reaction? I found John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Vol I. I can’t share on these pages, intended, for the most part, for public readings and sharing with our less deviant peers, the extomysis I experienced when recalling the wise admonishments of Frank Thomas, my ninth grade English teacher in explaining how to properly structure arguments: “You cannot have an ‘A)’ without following it later with a ‘B)’ or you look like an idiot [In the 80s you could call students idiots.] Write ‘First’ to open a paragraph and one of the next better damn [You could also say “damn” at them] well begin with ‘Second.’”

To whit: If there is a Brief Lives, Vol. I, there must follow a Brief Lives, Vol II. And there does.

Aubrey was a 17^th century philosopher and an archaeologist of sufficient renown that there are holes in rocks at Stonehenge named after him. Most interestingly from my angle, he was a hangover biographer. He gave to ruins and mental conundrums the hours of clarity and sobriety, but in the early mornings of the day, while his aristocratic palls slept off the previous night’s aristocrating, he dragged himself from bed to desk and wrote Schediasmata, as he called them, or “pieces written extempore, on the spur of the moment” as Wikipedia translates. The great bulk of these spur-of-the-moment writings were biographical sketches; notebook entries really. Swaths of the published volumes read like the marginalia notes of a separate work undergoing proofreading.

Endearingly, Aubrey has no compunction against hearsay, though he’s up front about sources. If a dock worker told him the Duke of X and Lady Y had a tryst behind the fishmonger’s, Aubrey makes sure we get the story and the dockworker gets the blame for telling it first. It’s a wonderful book that reminds me of Ezra Pound’s quip about ABC of Reading, his slapdash and barely-organized collection of commentary on poetry and prose: “I can’t believe people are buying my notebooks.” Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

Aubrey starts with Chaucer (“He taught his sonne the use of <the> astrolabe at 10; prout per his treatise of the Astrolabe.”) and goes on through what must be three- to four-hundred names. If you were an Englishman who made a stir before Aubrey’s death in 1697, odds are good you’re in there. Most of the names I don’t recognize, and those are probably just as interesting as the few known to me I’ve perused: Sir Thomas More (“His discourse was extraordinary facetious.”), William Shakespear (“…when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade [butcher], but when he kill’d a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech.”), Sir Walter Raleigh (“I remember that Mr. Thomas Child of Worcestershire told me that Sir Walter borrowed a gowne of him when he was at Oxford (they were both of the same College), which he never restored, nor money for it.”), and on and on. Trivial gossip should sell the book, but there’s decent history in there too. Verified stuff.

Today’s featured poet is Sir John Suckling, a cad, but a clever one (“I have heard Mris Bond say, that Sir John’s father was but a dull fellow (her husband, Mr. Thomas Bond, knew him): the witt came by the mother.” – Aubrey). He was sharp, witty, and described as a brilliant conversationalist. He was a soldier poet in the court of Charles I, and so counted among those known as the Cavaliers. The praised anonymous biographers at Poetry Foundation add emphasis: “A popular label for many poets in 17th-century Britain has been ‘Cavalier,’ and the person who usually comes first to mind is Sir John Suckling.”

It’s hard to classify these Cavaliers in modern terms. They were jock, wit, philosopher, and libertine. Suckling’s name means “landowner with tenant farmers.” His great-grandfather chose the name, changing from Esthawe, which means nothing I’m familiar with. As implied, Suckling was born to a landed family, but spent his time adventuring and skirt chasing. As a soldier he fought in various of Charles’s civil wars, in the Low Country, and in Germany. Apparently there was one-upmanship involved in aiding the King against the Scots. Nobles spent lavishly to impress. Suckling outdid all comers, spending £12,000 on horse and cavalrymen in silver and gold trimmed livery. His units were trounced and became something of a well turned out joke (“But Sir John Menis made a lampoon of it.” – Aubrey).

“He was the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest gamester,” writes a hungover Aubrey, “both for bowling and cards.” He was considered by some to be the finest cricket bowler in England, but I’m not sure that “finest” is what Aubrey means by “greatest” as the word is split to cover cards as well, and our soldier/poet regularly sold off properties to pay gambling debts. Maybe by “greatest” he means “most game.” There are report of Suckling spending days in bed practicing and strategizing at cards. Most credit him with inventing the game cribbage. And here’s another reason to doubt his card prowess: As gifts, he sent decks of cards to a number of noble houses that he enjoyed playing at. Had his strategizing and practicing been fruitful, he wouldn’t have had to mark the decks he sent, but he did, so they weren’t. It’s reported he won over £20,000 with his crooked decks. That’s nearly fitty-leven billions pounds in today’s dollars.

“Anno Domini 163- there happened, unluckily, a difference between Sir John Suckling and Sir John Digby (brother to Sir Kenelme) about a mistresse or gameing, I have now forgott,” Aubrey tells us. Suckling really stepped in it with this one:

“Sir John was but a slight timberd man, and of midling stature; Sir John Digby a proper person of great strength, and courage answerable, and yielded to be the best swordman of his time. Sir John, with some 2 or 3 of his party assaults Sir John Digby goeing into a play-house; Sir J. D. had only his lacquey with him, but he flew on them like a tigre, and made them run. ‘Twas pitty that this accident brought the blemish of cowardise to such an ingeniose young sparke. Sir J. D. was such a hero that there were very few but he would have served in the like manner.”

If it were gambling, this stands as the only consequence of Suckling’s cheating at cards I can find. That’s odd. That he was a cheat doesn’t escape any biographer be they hungover, praised anonymous, Wiki-vulture, or regular. All agree about the marked cards and scheming. If it was so well known, why was it so seemingly tolerated?

He made enemies in romance as well, so Aubrey may be forgiven for forgetting what piqued Digby. Suckling vied for the hand of Anne Willoughby, probably because she was rich and he piled on debt. Per the praised anonymous PF folks, “The Willoughby affair became complicated, with other suitors involved, opposition from her father, legal injunctions, duels, and a brief imprisonment in November 1634.” He is believed to have carried on with his cousin Mary Cranfield, the Countess of Dorsett, and others. Several of his poems reveal a rogue’s eye towards the ladies. I highly recommend a few minutes reading the Poetry Foundation page for Suckling if for no other reason to take in their brief treatment of his poem, “Soldiers,” where they inform:

“Perhaps it should be pointed out that the “New Oaths” in this context are the protestations of true love in order to seduce a woman, that the “forty Healths” are not only toasts of ale (“stout”) but imply a lifetime (“forty”) of seduction and sex as well as bodily trials (“Healths”) when combined with “bear,” that “doe” means to have sexual intercourse and “bullets” also means ejaculation. The age-old motif of Venus and Mars, love and war, was a staple of the Cavalier poets.”

Here he is pretending a particular woman stays his caddish nature; less suggestive than “Soldier”… unless I missed something.

The Constant Lover
Sir John Suckling (1609-1642)

Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings,
Ere he shall discover
In the whole wide world again
Such a constant lover.

But the spite on’t is, no praise
Is due at all to me;
Love with me had made no stays,
Had it any been but she.

Had it any been but she,
And that very face,
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.

There’s a lot made of the Cavaliers’ allegiance to King Charles. They were said to be loyal folks. This put many in opposition to Parliament and their allies in Scotland as tensions grew that would eventually erupt into the First English Civil War. Suckling got himself into real trouble in what we now call the Army Plots of 1641.

The King’s advisor, Sir Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, sat imprisoned in the Tower. Suckling either conspired to, or supported those who did, march troops loyal to the King south from York to threaten Parliament. Though not marching with the army, Suckling and Henry Jermyn planned to separately attack the Tower and free Strafford.

Everything went agley. Suckling and his allies fled to France. Depending on who you believe, Suckling was set upon by a servant intent on robbing him and died from an infected wound gotten in the fray or, having envisioned a poverty stricken life on the run, as per Aubrey, “tooke poyson, which killed him miserably with vomiting.”

He took risks in every aspect of his life. There’s something admirable in that even when acknowledging how he cast people as means to personal ends. I still think John Wilmot holds the title as least reputable of POETS Day poets, but we have a first alternate now. Guys like this are why I read biographies. God love the childlike short sighted immediacy junkies blessed or cursed with immeasurable confidence.

He had a good ear, too.

A Doubt of Martyrdom

O for some honest lover’s ghost,
Some kind unbodied post
Sent from the shades below!
I strangely long to know
Whether the noble chaplets wear
Those that their mistress’ scorn did bear
Or those that were used kindly.

For whatsoe’er they tell us here
To make those sufferings dear,
‘Twill there, I fear, be found
That to the being crown’d
T’ have loved alone will not suffice,
Unless we also have been wise
And have our loves enjoy’d.

What posture can we think him in
That, here unloved, again
Departs, and ‘s thither gone
Where each sits by his own?
Or how can that Elysium be
Where I my mistress still must see
Circled in other’s arms?

For there the judges all are just,
And Sophonisba must
Be his whom she held dear,
Not his who loved her here.
The sweet Philoclea, since she died,
Lies by her Pirocles his side,
Not by Amphialus.

Some bays, perchance, or myrtle bough
For difference crowns the brow
Of those kind souls that were
The noble martyrs here:
And if that be the only odds
(As who can tell?), ye kinder gods,
Give me the woman here!

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I found Alice Meynell in Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. The Oxford verse series indexes by poem number, rather than page. So if you look in the back for Meynell’s “I am the Way,” you find it referenced as number 32, meaning the thirty-second poem in the volume rather than, as you’d expect from a lifetime of index use, that it is on page 32. But as it happens, “I am the Way” is both poem number 32 and found on page 32. I noticed that as I flipped though Yeats’s book and it fortunately struck me as portentous as portent gets on a sitting-around-reading afternoon. Otherwise, I might never have given Meynell the reading she deserves.

“I am the Way” is a fine introduction. She was a devout convert to Catholicism and known in her time as an enterprising publisher and renowned as an essayist. These days, she’s better known (only slightly better as few have ever heard or read her name) for her poetry. It is more likely that Yeats’s contemporary readers, even readers already drawn to the Oxford verse series, would know her prose. That speaks to the smashing power of her prose more than diminishes her verse; she was in the conversation as a possible Poet Laureate after the death of Tennyson and again after the death of Alfred Austin, though the position was never offered.

My wife and I once had drinks with NYT bestselling fantasy author Steven Brust. He talked about being “famulous,” a confabulation of fabulous and famous. He spent most of his life—grocery shopping, dining out, walking through museums—as anonymously as the rest of us. But whenever he wanted to feel famous, he would walk into a sci-fi/fantasy convention and get mobbed like a Beatle. Then he’d leave and go back to regular life as a regular guy. It was the best of both worlds; fame and adoration on tap. Meynell wasn’t quite a regular gal with a regular life. She was a publicly respected figure. Among poetry fans she was a great deal more. Not quite the bifurcated existence Brust revels in, but she was a star in different circles for different reasons. So, she worked with her husband. He promoted and produced Catholic journalism where she stuck to literary and social criticism. Among poets she was revered. She was, notes Alex Wong in his editor’s introduction to the collection Alice Meynell: Selected Poems and Essays, as the Inkling Charles Williams wrote, “‘the Catholic versifier, critic and protector of poets.”

It’s fitting that Yeats would begin with a devotional. The title is easily recognizable as John 14:6, to which she responds with an affirmation or acquiescence in the first line. She is confident in not knowing. She has faith that following is a goal in itself, even though she isn’t certain of the end. The persona accepts herself as a creature caught in time, “of process,” and incapable of knowing outcomes. For her it is the process—the way—that is salvation whether there is “repose” or not.

I am the Way
Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

Thou art the way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say
If Thou hadst ever met my soul.

I cannot see—
I. Child of process—if there lies
An end for me,
Full of repose, full of replies.

I’ll not reproach
The road that winds, my feet that err.
Access, approach
Art Thou, Time, Way, and Wayfarer.

The final stanza is clever. Are “Access” and “approach” commands or boons granted to those willing to follow? Kimberly Kristine Rodda, in her thesis, “Doubtful Forms: Uncertain Belief in Victorian Women’s Writing,” notes that with “my feet that err,” she sets up the reader to overly stress the second syllable in “Wayfarer,” where to fit the form, stress should land on the third. The poet teases: We stumble on a path, but that’s okay. The proper metric way is laid before us if we see fit and faithfully follow.

The way, the idea that salvation is found in doing, occurs again in a shorter poem.

Via, et Veritas, et Vita

“You never attained to Him.” “If to attain
Be to abide, then that may be.”
“Endless the way, followed with how much pain!”
“The way was He.”

The poems appear sequentially in the 1913 edition of Collected Poems of Alice Meynell. I don’t know how much involvement she had in the layout, but I’m operating under the assumption that the second serves as exclamation point to the first: “You shoulda!”

I read through Meynell’s Wikipedia page, her mini-bio by the excellent anonymous biographers at Poetry Foundation, her Britannica page, and Kimberly Kristine Rodda’s thesis and others before I got to Alex Wong’s introduction. Had I started with Wong, I would have read his admonition that “Meynell” rhymes with “fennel.” It was too late when I encountered it. Her name formed in my mental sound studio as “May-knell,” the shape of the word set over the course of an afternoon’s reading, and so it shall remain despite late findings. I could have mentioned “fennel” to you at the outset, but saved it till here around the middle to see what happens. Maybe you can course correct. I don’t think you can.

Both Wong and Poetry Foundation mention that Meynell had a bohemian upbringing, but neither offers much by way of how-so other than to tell us she grew up mostly in Italy, which seems evidence of an Italian upbringing. Her mother was an artist and musician and her father was the a scion of serial illegitimacy a couple of generations gone from a Jamaican plantation and distantly related to Elizabeth Barret Browning. Her father was also close friends with Charles Dickens, who’s said to have had a tremendous crush on her mom. I don’t know that any of that qualifies as bohemian.

She seems to have had a bohemian side as an adult. Like mom and dad, she had writerly friends. She counted among them D.H. Lawrence, Mrs. Browning and her husband, and Harriet Monroe, to name a few. She modeled for John Singer Sargent, which certainly sound salacious, even though I’ve found nothing suggesting it was. Wong prefaces a list including the poet Coventry Patmore, the poets/novelists George Meredith and Katherine Tynan, and the poet Agnes Tobin with “literary friends (or admirers, in more than one sense).” That sounds like it means what I think it sounds like, but evidence runs contrary.

Patmore was a problem. He became enchanted with Alice and then jealous of her husband. No affair occurred and the Meynells ended their friendship with the man. George Meredith had a crush, much like Dickens for her mother, but it was a playful one. “Admirer” is apt in his case. Memoirs, including one written by their daughter Viola, describe the Meynells as committed, chaste, vocally Catholic, literary salon folks with eight children, seven of whom survived past infancy. Theirs was a happy marriage.

Of the lost child, she wrote this touching work.

Maternity

One wept whose only child was dead,
New-born, ten years ago.
“Weep not; he is in bliss,” they said.
She answered, “Even so.

“Ten years ago was born in pain
A child, not now forlorn.
But oh, ten years ago, in vain,
A mother, a mother was born.”

“Renouncement” speaks of a potential scandal. Nine years before marrying Wilfrid Meynell, Alice fell in love with Father Augustus Dignam, the priest who ministered her catechism and received her into the Church. That’s sort of back to front. You usually hear about affairs with clergy as someone is on the way out rather than in. I can’t speak to whether her feelings were reciprocated, only that the relationship was reportedly never consummated. That may mean a torrid affair stopped short, there were letters, they exchanged glances, or it was entirely one sided. In any case, nothing but a poem came of it.

Meynell wrote “Renouncement” shortly after her 1968 conversion. She was wise enough to leave it out of her early collections, only publishing after twenty years passed. Reading, you get the sense that her renouncement is of her feeling for the priest, not the priest himself; that the “thee” in the opening line references her love for the man rather than the man.

Wong writes of the final sextet:

“a technical marvel of poetic movement, convincingly expressive of the struggle of conscious willpower to cope with the flooding power of what cannot always be kept at bay… as if she were repeating and prolonging the thought, excusing her dreaming self as much as possible while postponing the dream for as long as possible.”

It is said to be her most anthologized poem.

Renouncement

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the thought that lurks in all delight—
The thought of thee—and in the blue Heaven’s height,
And in the dearest passage of song.
Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng
This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright;
But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole day long.
But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away,—
With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gathering to thy heart.

I come across poets I’ve never heard of regularly. Finding on that I hope to return to often is a treat. I haven’t read beyond one of Meynell’s essays, so there’s that pile of happy reading realized as well. And I found her because I’m silly enough to giggle at the 32 page/index thing. Being goofy pays off every now and again. Felix Culpa.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

A copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

I’ve never heard of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I’ve read about him. Until earlier this week I knew he was a Dutch painter of repute, but little more. But I’ve only read about him; never heard his name spoken, so I’ve no idea how his name is pronounced. Wikipedia tells me it’s “BROY-gɘl,” but it also says “also” and then “BROO- gɘl.” You got two, you got none. I doubt the man wandered Flanders mouse-like, answering to a handful of first syllable variations so long as the caller followed with a shwa’d “gel.” At some point he declared a preference.

I read it as rhyming with “frugal,” not that I come across the name that often. I don’t know how W.H. Auden pronounced the name in 1938. He was in Brussels touring a museum that was then known as the Palais des beaux arts. The poet was struck by at least three, so he thought, of Bruegel’s paintings—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Census of Bethlehem, and The Massacre of the Innocents—then on display. Nearly sixty years after Auden’s visit, experts would determine that Icarus was in fact a copy by an unknown artist of a lost Bruegel, but Auden died thinking he’d seen the real deal and, given the man’s penchant for rewriting even some of his better works, thank goodness such knowledge didn’t set him to fiddling with the poem inspired by his visit: “Musée de Beaux Arts.”

To be fair, he fiddled a bit. The museum known as the Musée de beaux arts was called the Palais des beaux arts in 1939. It was under the title “Palais des Beaux Arts” that the poem first appeared in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing and again in the 1940 collection, Another Time. When the museum became the Musée de beaux arts after WWII, Auden or his publishers fiddled and Palais, having become Musée in fact, did so in print; the poem was retitled “Musée de Beaux Arts” as we know it now. The museum continued in flux. 2020 brought about yet another name change, this time to Musée Oldmasters, oddly enough using the Anglicized term “oldmasters” instead of “vieux maîtres.” Auden died without knowing about this either, so we receive the poem as it was after the first minor fiddling.

To recap: This week’s poem is by Auden, based on two paintings by a variably pronounced painter, a third formerly ascribed to the painter of the other two but now known to be painted by someone unknown, and titled and re-titled after the fashion of an indecisive art gallery. “Musée de Beaux Arts” stands apart from most of Auden’s other great works. He was a formalist, renowned for sonnets, villanelles, ballads, and the like. In “Musée,” he plays against that well earned reputation. He indulges in free verse, sets rhythm with abbreviated lines and caesura, slips in playful language. It’s not what you expect from him, but it is effective.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is the only painting named by Auden, but it is the two unnamed that he addresses first. The writer Scott Horton did a bit of museum display detective work and was good enough to share in his 2008 Harpers article, “Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts.” He confirms Census and Massacre shared the gallery with Icarus and matches Bruegel’s scenes Auden’s to verse.

Both of Bruegel’s confirmed paintings depict Biblical scenes in contemporary—16th century Flanders for him—settings. In The Census at Bethlehem, people go about their day unaware that Mary and Joseph are among them, ignorant of the momentous happenings in their midst. As Auden writes (the full poem is below) “…how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Children play in the snow. The extraordinary appears ordinary. Bruegel paints them as the others. There are no halos or shafts of light identifying the Holy Family.

In the second stanza, Auden considers The Massacre of the Innocents. Of the “miraculous birth”, he writes that children slaughtered by Herod’s men “did not specially want it to happen.” It’s a horrible moment in history, but one suffered specifically. Dogs still play.

Icarus takes us out of Flanders and into the classical past. Icarus drowns in the bottom right corner with his legs kicking above the water’s surface. A ploughman misses the mythical event as he watches his furrows. A shepherd and his dog look up the mountain, possibly on guard against immediate danger from predators. A ship in full sail continues in obeyance of orders or in the interest of commerce past the fallen legend. Many sources tell me that we are to see indifference. Man is a selfish creature who doesn’t look beyond his immediate needs. I don’t know that I agree. Rather, not all great events get to be selfish. Despite them, families must eat. The wolves must be kept from the door. Per Wikipedia, there’s a Dutch saying: “And the farmer continued to plough…” We have our own to pick from: “Life goes on,” or “Needs must,” among others.

Run of the mill needs are stubborn. Call it The Fall or biology, we are shackled with needs. No grandeur or horror will change that. The quotidian will insert itself. Struggles don’t fade because something awsome is happeneing over the hill.

There’s a new Auden biography by Peter Ackroyd, titled simply Auden. Ackroyd’s been chasing Harold Bloom for years now, trying to usurp the latter as our most prolific literary biographer and critic. Despite the breadth of subjects, he’s damned on point as he takes them. It should shock no one that I’m particularly fond of his Ezra Pound and His World (1980). I haven’t picked up Auden, but I’ve been mightily teased to do so by Joseph Epstein’s review in National Review, “The Lofty, Lonely Life of W.H. Auden.”

Auden was a slob. Sorry to wallow in the gossipy muck, but he did in actual muck. From Epstein, and so by extention from Ackroyd, on the places the poet lived: “Tennessee Williams remarked of another that it was ‘fantastically sordid, . . . with beer cans and newspapers all about the floor,’” and “his friend, the composer Nicolas Nabokov, noted ‘the permanent stink of cat piss.’” Piles of papers were everywhere; stains covered carpets and walls. One landlord successfully sued to recoup the cost of cleaning and repair. There’s more about his shaggy clothes, lack of underwear, and inattention to orderly living.

Apparently Ackroyd goes on about the poet’s face. I don’t know if that’s fair. Maybe it was poor living and neglect that left him wrinkled and cracked or maybe it was genetics. In either case, he looked rough. There were clefts where wrinkles appear as expected, and running against the grain, sharp scar like fissures made mock-perpendicular charges. His was not an enviable visage. Again from Epstein: “The painter David Hockney asked, ‘If that’s his face, what must his scrotum look like?’”

It was the Epstein article that caused me to reread “Musée des Beaux Arts.” He listed it among the few poems of Auden’s he thinks “pass the test of being intrinsically interesting and memorable.” It struck me after reading the article that the poet of the poem about the insistence of mundane life in the presence of great and momentous events wrote great poetic works—I have a higher opinion of Auden the Epstein expresses—while refusing to attend basic hygienic practices, immune to such insistence.

Musée des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

December 1938

Aside: Is it now settled that Van Gough was Van Gogh, and so “Van Goff,” all along?

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

Elinor Waylie, née Hoyt, was born in Sommerville, New Jersey. My experience with New Jersey folks tells me that she would have described herself as “From off Exit 17.” It’s possible she was closer to Exit 13 or, if you use I-78 instead of I-287, maybe Exit 29. Michigan folks do the hand thing and New Jersey-ites (Jersians?) have Exits.

She was born to a well-to-do and prominent family that was likely to look down on other prominent families when it came down to it because one of theirs, Elinor’s grandfather, was governor of Pennsylvania. Still more prominent families probably looked down on them in turn as politicians are vulgar and real wealth sees clear to control, rather than be, elected officials. Political success requires propriety. Her family had a history of courting public perception.

Her father moved the family to Washington, DC in 1897 when Elinor was twelve or thirteen. In 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt would appoint him to the position of Solicitor General of the United States. He was an impressive figure and sent his oldest daughter, Elinor, to Holton Arms, a Bethesda, MD girls school where she studied and mingled with the daughters of other impressive people. Holton Arms counts Jaquiline Kennedy Onassis and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as alumnae. Elinor Wylie was, per the excellent unnamed biographers at Poetry Foundation, “trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife…”

Back in the early 1960s, my mother went to Georgetown Visitation; a Catholic girls school not terribly far from Holton Arms. Mom didn’t have much patience for Holton Arms girls. She and her friends dated Landon and Gonzaga high school boys. Some of their dates’ friends asked girls from Holton Arms out and they would all end up at the same dance. She thought Holton girls should stick to dating St. Albans guys and keep all the smugness contained. There was one particular Holton Arms student she referred to as a “hussy.”

If I may continue the elipsed quote about Elinor from above by the excellent Poetry Foundation biographers, “…but she rebelled against that destiny and became notorious, in her time, for her multiple marriages and affairs.”

Mom’s time in high school came sixty years after Wylie’s and to my knowledge she never heard of the poet, but I feel confidence in the ways of tribal prejudice. I suspect Mom would nod knowingly about a rival school graduate. Elinor was a hussy.

This is a series about poetry, so I’m going to tear away from scandal for a moment to discuss some of Wylie’s work. Between 1921 and her death in 1928, she published four books of poetry and four novels and sold well in both genres. She’s an obscure figure in poetry now—there are nods to a recent rediscovery of her work among feminist critics so maybe a resurgence is underway, but I’ve noticed a habit of biographers to claim [X] is all the rage among [ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE Y] to build up a forgotten personal favorite—but was celebrated in her time. She hung out with Sinclair Lewis and Jon Dos Passos. If there was a Studio 54 in her time, she would pass right by the doorman.

My opinion is that she has some remarkable poetry, but there’s a lot that’s off. She hit early. Her first published collection, 1921’s Nets to Catch the Wind, was and is widely hailed as her best (all of this week’s selections are from that book, full text at Project Gutenberg.) I’ll start with one I don’t like because the poems I think fail all fail for the same reasons while those that succeed pull differing dazzling tricks from all manner of hats.

Village Mystery
Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)

The woman in the pointed hood
And cloak blue-gray like a pigeon’s wing,
Whose orchard climbs to the balsam-wood,
Has done a cruel thing.

To her back door-step came a ghost,
A girl who had been ten years dead,
She stood by the granite hitching-post
And begged for a piece of bread.

Now why should I, who walk alone,
Who am ironical and proud,
Turn, when a woman casts a stone
At a beggar in a shroud?

I saw the dead girl cringe and whine,
And cower in the weeping air–
But, oh, she was no kin of mine,
And so I did not care!

There’s nothing wrong with the craftsmanship. Her stresses hit predictably. My problem is that this poem feels perfunctory. The capricious turn at the end is unearned. It’s a story removed from the poet’s life, which is not uncommon with her work. Swaths are fantastical or semi-so. This one dresses up as allegory but doesn’t deliver. It leaves me thinking the poem serves no purpose other than satisfying the author’s apparent want to seem mysterious.

Escape

When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I’ll build.

But first I’ll shrink to fairy size,
With a whisper no one understands,
Making blind moons of all your eyes,
And muddy roads of all your hands.

And you may grope for me in vain
In hollows under the mangrove root,
Or where, in apple-scented rain,
The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.

I could say a lot of the same about “Escape” as I did about “Village Mystery,” but I think this one works. The truth is I like and dislike it on alternate readings. As of the last, I was positive. Simple rhymes and portentious animals set a fairy-tale tone and the idea of running away is adolescent. It’s a wish from a teenager’s diary until the charmingly malicious last line.

And then, from nowhere comes “Wild Peaches.” It’s a bit long for this space so I’ll give the first and last of four parts.

from Wild Peaches

1

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town.
You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

In researching Wylie, I’ve read that she is an inheritor of Donne and the metaphysical poets. I’ve read her devotion to Shelley and Keats shines through. There’s none of that in “Wild Peaches.” Here she has the sharp economy of language you’d expect from a modern devotee of Imagism and an earnest adherance to Victorian form. Who does that? Maybe Thomas Hardy, but he wrote as Victoriana faded and Modernism emerged. Who does that anachronistically? It’s wonderful.

The sections I left out follow in tone with the first. Autumn frosts lie upon the grass and April pours the colours of the shell upon the hills. The fourth section takes a turn that should be dark but for the pleasure her persona takes in what unfolds.

There’s a great deal of her work I haven’t read, but I feel confident in calling this her triumph.

4

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meager sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

Wylie’s sister Constance married well and became Constance, Baroness von Stumm, wife of Baron Ferdinand Carl von Stumm. Her parents should have relished the social coup, but there were four other children. Brother Henry became an artist: not so bad. Sister Nancy became a romance novelist which isn’t scandalous per se, but an awful lot of those folks use pen names for a reason. Brother Morton married Eustace Bankead, sister of the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead. He later divorced her. Then he married her again. Then he divorced her. Then they remarried. Finally, a third divorce.

Elinor, as the oldest, made it clear from the get go that all would not be as her parents hoped for their family. At twenty years old, she eloped with a poet, or wanna-be poet son of a rear-admiral, named Philip Simmons Hichborn. She was miserable. Wikipedia says that during her marriage to Philip, “She also found herself being stalked by Horace Wylie, ‘a Washington lawyer with a wife and three children’, who ‘was 17 years older than Elinor. He stalked her for years, appearing wherever she was.’” That doesn’t sound like a promising beginning to a love story, but after four unhappy years with her first husband, she left him and their son to run off with the still married Horace. The press went wild and the families would have nothing to do with the two adulterers so Elinor and Horace ran off to England and hid out under the name “Waring.” Philip killed himself two years later.

Horace was able to secure a divorce and, with Philip dead, the couple married in 1916, six years after running off together. By then, the thrill was gone. Elinor was hanging out with the artsy set—Dos Passos, et al. One of her new friends took an interest in her amateur poetry. That man, William Rose Benét, became husband number three. That marraige didn’t work either so they separated and she moved back to England to live with another guy. At some point she started writing love letters to poor long-since cast off Horace.

On a 1928 Christmas visit to Benét, say the Poetry FOundation folk, “she asked Benet for a glass of water; when he returned with it, as Karen Stein recounted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ‘she walked toward him, murmured, “Is that all it is?,” and fell to the floor, dead of a stroke.’”

I didn’t expect to be as impressed by her work or that I’d enjoy the voyeur’s “tut-tut” as I have. She charmed me.

This last is her most anthologized, so probably best-known, work. Here you see Shelley.

Velvet Shoes

Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as a white cow’s milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Before JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf, there was William Morris’s King Gandolf. Before Tolkien wrote about the horse Shadowfax, Morris wrote about the horse Silverfax. Morris introduced both of the latters in his just-under-the-wire-not-posthumous 1896 novel, The Well at the World’s End. Tolkien didn’t steal. Theft in literature is generally more interesting than something that direct, but neither Gand-whatever nor whatever-fax were properly owned to begin with. Tolkien was doubtlessly inspired by Morris’s popular book, but both authors took names from Norse and Icelandic myth. They heard the same stories.

Plugged in fans and obsessives—I say that lovingly—of the genre credit Morris as one of the fathers of modern High Fantasy. Tolkien takes all the laurels, and deservedly so, for standing on earlier shoulders and leaping as high into the air as possible. Two of those shoulders were Morris’s; David Byrne shoulders.

These days, Morris is best known for textiles and design. He was a vocal socialist; important enough that those who take interest in the development of socialism, at least in England, have been at work on his Wikipedia page. Among the signs of ardents tinkering: his mother is described as “descended from a wealthy bourgeois family.” As an artist and artisan, he catered to what most outside of the struggle session green room call the middle and upper classes. His furniture was, and maybe still is, in St. James Palace and the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Hall. Per the biographer Fiona MacCarthy, he decried such work as “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.” But minister on he did, soldiering his way to increasing an already solid inherited fortune.

He took what was functional and added beauty. That doesn’t sound like much of a revolution, but he lived in post-Industrial Revolution England. Function held sway. His patterns, busy to modern tastes, adorned rugs, wallpaper, and book covers. Through his printing operation, the Kelmscott Press, he published the intricate Kelmscott Chaucer, a collection of Chaucer’s work decorated with Morris’s typography, layout, borders, and illumination and with illustrations by his partner and frequent collaborator Edward Burne-Jones. The two men worked on the volume on weekends together over the course of four years. Yeats called it “the most beautiful of all printed books.”

During his lifetime, there were those who knew him as a socialist. He’d tell any audience willing to listen all about his political and economic leanings. There were others who knew him as a designer. He was quite the name among those in the market. Primarily, he was known as a poet. As hard as it would be for one of his contemporaries to believe, he’s almost forgotten in that role now. This was the man Victoria offered the Laureate position after the death of Tennyson.

We prefer short lyrics these days. He went long. Here’s one of his few quick ones.

Pomona
William Morris (1834-1896)

I am the ancient Apple-Queen,
As once I was so am I now.
For evermore a hope unseen,
Betwixt the blossom and the bough.

Ah, where’s the river’s hidden Gold!
And where the windy grave of Troy?
Yet come I as I came of old,
From out the heart of Summer’s joy.

From that you get that he can be whimsical and you’d be correct in extrapolating that he works in traditional meter with rhyme. The bulk of his output was more involved. He wrote long, epic works, often Arthurian themed.

Below is an excerpt from one of his most popular works, “The Haystack in the Floods,” from his 1858 book The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems. The poem is set in withdrawal from the Battle of Poitiers during the Hundred Years War. Sir Robert de Marny, the only historical figure in the poem, though one whose manner of death is fictionalized by Morris, and his mistress Jehane are traveling with a small contingent when set upon and captured by the Frenchman Godmar and his men.

from The Haystack in the Floods

Along the dripping leafless woods,
The stirrup touching either shoe,
She rode astride as troopers do;
With kirtle kilted to her knee,
To which the mus splashed wretchedly:
And the wet dripped from every tree
Upon her head and heavy hair,
And on her eyelids broad and fair;
The tears and rain an down her face.
By fits and starts they rode apace,
And very often was his place
Far off from her; he had to ride
Ahead, to see what might betide
When the roads crossed; and sometimes, when
There rose a murmuring from his men,
Had to turn back with promises;
Ah me! She had but little ease;
And often for pure doubt and dread
She sobbed, made giddy in the head
By swift riding; while, for cold,
Her slender fingers scarce could hold
The wet reins; yea, and scarcely, too,
She felt the foot within her shoe
Against the stirrup: all for this,
To part at last without a kiss
Beside the haystack in the floods.

Godmar offers to spare Robert’s life if Jehane agrees to be his concubine. She refuses. Robert is killed and she faces a short life in prison before death by drowning in the Seine. It’s about true love and sacrifice; Poetic and Romantic and ideal in ways Morris’s own love life was not.

He was an early member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and, at least initially, great friends with the movement’s most famous painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1857, Morris met and was smitten with Jane Burden. Rossetti, at the same time, asked her to model for him, a phrase I assume carried more meaning in this instance than others. Morris married her. Rossetti continued to paint her.

Thanks to Rossetti, her face is immortal. He had many models, but if I were to say “She’s the woman besides his sister that he painted over and over again,” a passing fan of his would know who I meant. In his work she is Aurelia, Lady Lilith, Beatrice, Pandora, and more. The model and artist traveled together, attended events, and dined together. At one point Rossetti moved in with the couple. People talked. Whatever estrangements and tensions between Rossetti and Morris existed, this apparent affair was an accepted fact of life. Morris may have had a friend too, but one he cozied to after his wife’s modeling proved less a passing thing.

Aglaia Coronio and Morris wrote letters to each other. It’s assumed more, but there’s not more than suspicion. In fact there’s not much more than appearances and suspicion behind the Rossetti and Burden affair. Burden once said she never loved her husband. Even so, we speculate that she did love Rossetti. The Pre-Raphaelites were so much more circumspect than the Bloomsbury Group.

The Kelmscott Chaucer was only one expression of Morris’s fascination with Geoffrey Chaucer. He incorporated scenes from The Canterbury Tales into designs for furniture and murals. As a poetic homage, he wrote “The Earthly Paradise,” a single work with a prologue and, as described by The Norton Anthology of Poetry, “twenty-four tales on classical and medieval—especially Norse—subjects.”

These are the third and fourth stanzas from the poem’s six stanza dedication. It’s woeful, sung by a poet “born out of my due time” but he doesn’t despair. These aren’t futile lines.

from The Earthly Paradise

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names rememberéd,
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

I include this last poem because something about it struck me. It doesn’t fit in sound with other entries in the collection in which I found it: the same 1891 book, Poems By the Way which included the above “Pomona.” The stresses are compressed and rapid. The vocabulary is anachronistic, as are the contractions. It put me in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hopkins used Anglo-Saxon poetic devices; fierce alliteration, stresses measured per line rather than per place, and hard consonants for emphasis. That seems similar to what Morris does in “The Day of Days.” Hopkins was an obscure figure, contemporary with Morris but for all intents and purposes unknown until posthumous publication in 1918, well after Morris passed. It’s possible that Morris read Hopkins’ work, but unlikely. Did Morris find in his Norse research threads of the same poetics Hopkins found in his Anglo-Saxon dives? Instead of influence from one to the other, could Morris have tapped the same older Germanic root as Hopkins as Tolkien tapped the same Norse roots as Morris found his Gandalf? Am I imagining things?

I can’t say, but it struck me.

The Day of Days

Each eve earth falleth down the dark,
As though its hope were o’er;
Yet lurks the sun when day is done
Behind to-morrow’s door.

Grey grows the dawn while men-folk sleep,
Unseen spreads on the light,
Till the thrush sings to the coloured things,
And earth forgets the night.

No otherwise wends on our Hope:
E’en as a tale that’s told
Are fair lives lost, and all the cost
Of wise and true and bold.

We’ve toiled and failed; we spake the word;
None hearkened; dumb we lie;
Our Hope is dead, the seed we spread
Fell o’er the earth to die.

What’s this? For joy our hearts stand still,
And life is loved and dear,
The lost and found the Cause hath crowned,
The Day of Days is here.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

There’s a photograph of Leonora Speyer where she looks to be in her early twenties. She was born to some wealth. I can’t tell if her her family was idly comfortable or extravagantly rich. Her father, who died six months before her birth, was Count Ferdinand von Stosch originally of Monze, later of Washington, DC. There’s not much on her in the typical poet biography places and scant to zip on her father. He fought for the Union side in the Civil War, settled in Washington, and died at around forty years old; no information about rank or deeds or cause of death. He immigrated in the 1840s or 50s, so he was a kid when he came. That’s about it. Otherwise he’s an addendum to the bio of the daughter he never met.

An AI search–so take it or leave it–reports the photo is from some time in the 1890s, which I’d already assumed. Leonora showed an early proclivity for music and led a public life. She gave her first public performance in Washington at age ten: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. One source tells me she and her mother sailed for the continent in 1899, when Leonora was sixteen, to continue her musical studies in Brussels. Another tells me she debuted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age seventeen. It’s possible they went back for a visit, but I can’t find record of it. As best I can tell, she and her mother stayed abroad, first in Brussels and then in Paris with another violin teacher, until 1891 or 92.

Maybe they went back and forth, maybe she was seventeen when they left, maybe she was sixteen in Boston. No matter the details of her precociousness, Leonora was talented. She was a force on the piano as well as the violin, but there came a time to specialize. Whether she had a preference or felt she had a greater talent for violin is unclear to me, but she chose pure string violin over string/percussion piano in the end. Encyclopedia.com tells me she’d played the violin since her “chin was firm enough to hold it.” Having seen the photograph of her in her early twenties, my first though: “That must have been very, very, very, very early.” It’s not a flattering picture.

It’s hard to argue with a photograph, but you can chip away at veracity with lighting, shadows, and angle. Her second husband, Edgar Speyer, commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint a portrait of his wife. Sargent completed the work in 1907. It was to become iconic. Edgar ran the British arm of his family’s international financial business and helped put together financing for and did some overseeing of the construction of what became the London Underground. Ties to the family firm’s Frankfurt branch became problematic. In 1915, his naturalized citizen status was revoked and rather than live under wartime suspicion, the family left for New York. By this point, neuritis in Leonora’s shoulder had put an end to public concerts, but she still played salons. The couple bought a pair of homes in Washington Square and built in between, merging the two into a massive eleven-bedroom mansion with an immense music hall. Theirs was a popular place, as Emily E Hogstad writes at Interlude, “Debussy, Elgar, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and countless others visited the Speyers’ famous music room.” They held small concerts by world famous and rising musicians and composers. Gracing a wall of the hall was Sargent’s roughly six by three foot Lady Speyer, the talented, keen, and ever present patron-host. There’s nothing immoderate about her jaw in the painting.

Her friend Kahlil Gibran gives us four views of Leonora. He made several sketches of her but the one I’m referring to is a single piece with four images, Rushmore-like, each a variation of expression, done in charcoal. The leftmost shows her in profile. A prominent bump on her nose, and I suspect from the other sketches that the nose is exaggerated a bit, recalls antiquity; a face on a coin; she’s the noble lady. The next, at three quarters, is soft with compassion and concern. Moving right, the third stares ahead, a woman in full. The final, again in three quarters carrying on the suggested turning motion, strikes farseeing and dreamy.

That’s my interpretation. Gibran may have intended aspects of her life rather than of her personality. I’ll insist on the Roman nose profile representing nobility, but by the others Gibran may have meant one to symbolize mother, another musician, and the third the poet she became after neuritis took away the possibility of regular concert performances. The different views and turns of head cast more doubt on the 1890s photo. I’m wryly open to the thought that having expanded on the nose for Rome he softened the jaw across the range for his friend, mumbling about balancing the ledger as rationalization. It’s more likely that 1890s were a cruel time to be photographed.

There’s one last, and it’s beautiful. It’s a touched up photograph I came across on surfing websites. Whether the touch ups were recent computer washes or older paint brush accents on the original, I’ve no idea. There was a period where it was in vogue to have painters finish photos for a portrait-like appearance, but judging from her age in the picture, that practice’s time had passed. She’s older here than in the others–maybe sixty. The clothes, what we’d consider dowdy now but were likely fashionable at the time, help. The British series Midsomer Murders is based on a series of novels by Caroline Graham. They’re well-written and entertaining afternoon passers, but one line from her first book struck me as brilliant. Describing a wiry old woman putting on a raincoat, Graham writes, “She flapped into a Burberry.” It’s concise: elderly energy in the service of venturing out while unselfconciously bundled in frumpiness. That’s the first thing I thought of on seeing the picture. Second, there’s an archetype that pops up in British Science Fiction, notably in 1980s and 90s comic books, of a luminous homeless woman, shabby in her antiquated clothes. A segment of modern audiences equate that look with wisdom. I’m sure that figures into my impression, but on looking at this picture taken before the urban fantasy archetype popped up, I wonder at whether the archetype was distilled by genre writers or was just laying around waiting to be noticed.

Of course, her get up wasn’t frumpy at the time. The immediate thought on seeing a beautiful older woman is that she must have been gorgeous when she was younger. That’s not fair. I’m not certain it’s correct either. People fell in love with the woman in the touched up photo. She conducted crowds with music. She scorned a first husband, lost a second. She played and when she couldn’t she wrote. She taught poetry at Columbia University, served as president of the Poetry Society of America, and talked shop with Amy Lowell. She launched musical careers. Whatever she was or wasn’t but for taut skin doesn’t matter. There’s nobility, mother, concern, musician, poet, dreamer, teacher, and matter of fact acceptance. It’s a good picture. Optimistic.

Below is the opening section of the title work from her 1926 collection Fiddler’s Farewell, for which she won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. There’s sadness and optimism and acceptance throughout and for all the promise of the precocious musician, it was written by the seasoned woman who turned to poetry.

from Fiddler’s Farewell
Leonora Speyer (1872-1956)

Fold now the song within the songster.
Small sturdy one,
Roistering down the centuries,
Drunk with the fiddlers’ fingers,
(Never a dearth of these,
The living crowding where the dead have been),
Pure promiscuous dandled violin!

Cæsar of sound, my songs in passing, cry,
Morituri te salutamus!—and passing, die.

Fold now the song away.
Close the lid down
Upon the gradual dismay
Of disconcerted singing,
Unloose the fingers’ clinging
That has so lost its cunning,
Turn from the faltering renown,
Fame of the little town
After the flag-hung city;
Deny the ruin pity!
Pity? Yes, for the failing song
That like a droughty stream

Crawls, drips
Over an arid land,
(Yet deep enough to drown)—
O violin that slips
From the relinquishing hand,
Brown brightness hid—
Let fall the incurious lid.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Why are you still at work? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

“We mourn, but with the qualification that, after all, his life was a revel in the felicities of language.”
– Robert Frost from his introduction to King Jasper by Edwin Arlington Robinson

When Edwin Arlington Robinson won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1922, I imagine it was a fine day of congratulations and warm feelings from all the other poets. For three years prior, there had been what we now call the Special Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but that’s retconning. That was then known as the Columbia Prize, and stood apart. Harriet Monroe, writing in celebration of Robinson’s laurels threw in, “Four years ago, when the Poetry Society of America gave its first annual five hundred dollars to Sara Teasdale’s Love Songs, the award, being made in conjunction with the Pulitzer prizes, was falsely attributed to the same origin.” The Columbia put five hundred dollars in the winner’s pocket. The Pulitzer was worth one thousand. Neither was chump change in 1922, but double is considered by most who make their living in verse to be better.

Not that a true poet would ever consider something so crass as money, but on those odd occasions when the subject came up in conversation, it must have been nice knowing, for those of a zero-sum view, that there was more to be contested than had been before. When the second Pulitzer was awarded to Edna St Vincent Millay in 1923 and the third to Robert Frost, I assume along with standard jealousies the warm feelings continued.

In 1925, Robinson won his second Pulitzer. In the audience of the poetry place where all the poets hang out, I imagine heartfelt applause on hearing, because EA, as he didn’t like the name Edwin, was a kinda dour guy but he wasn’t offensive. Maybe he was a little dark, but he was witty dark, not depressing dark. Still, as the crowd dispersed to cocktails and cliques coalesced, jocular between swigs, “You know, there are other poets out there.”

Follow with Amy Lowell in 1926 and Leonora Speyer in 1927. Come 1928, it’s Robinson again. Even Frost, who hadn’t yet won his second, third, or fourth Pulitzer and so was still on the proletarian side, would have been a bit up in arms. The new and immediately prestigious prize so far ran one for EA, two for the rest, one for EA, two for the rest, one for EA. Betting EA versus the field wasn’t a bad play. All the other poets got together in one of their poet places and presented Robinson with an ultimatum: Either EA stop winning Pulitzer Prizes or they’ll tell everyone that his parents wanted a girl and, milquetoast on his male emergence, didn’t name him until he was six months old and when they did, drew “Edwin” from a hat and pinned Arlington on because the stranger they’d just met who physically pulled the name slip was from Arlington, Massachusetts. EA didn’t win any more Pulitzers and the name thing got out anyway, but everybody left the negotiations back in the comfort of those warm feelings from earlier days.

At least that’s what I like to think happened. The wanted-a-girl thing is real. He hated his name. Other poets respected Robinson for his skill, but also because his was the age of “Make it new!” and while everybody was scrambling in various directions to poke and prod the limits of verse, he went a scant backwards and still managed to innovate. Robinson reverted to older forms in relation to the age. He didn’t like a lot of the popular liberties. Per the excellent Poetry Foundation anonymous biographers, Robert Gilbert wrote, “All his life Robinson strenuously objected to free verse, replying once when asked if he wrote it, ‘No, I write badly enough as it is.’” But he went forward with many of his contemporaries in dropping outdated poetic cant for a more straightforward diction. Poets had been at that to some degree at least as far back as Wordsworth, but the idea was suddenly front, center, and reinvigorated with writers like Frost full steam ahead on sound and sense and conversational rhythm. In fact, Robinson’s talent for New England folksiness maybe was a bit much for Frost, as Professor Nancy Carol Joyner writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Biographers of both poets report that Frost was extremely jealous of Robinson but the reverse was not true.”

Robinson’s charm lies in narrative. He was a great fan of the English poet George Crabbe (1754-1832), whose narrative poetry focused on common people and daily lives. Crabbe wrote in the time of the immortal insult, “silly girls who read novels,” and poetry ceded story to the longer prose. He was a throwback, married to heroic couplets like a… I can’t write “Pope revivalist” referring to Alexander Pope because people will think I meant “Papal revivalist” as if he was one of Dan Brown’s Opus Dei heirophants. He wrote in heroic couplets like Alexander Pope. As a surgeon, Crabbe spoke to folks across the social spectrum and either used their stories and fragments, or saw that there was worth in stories from other than courtesans and set to heroic meter, underlined the point.

Funnily, Crabbe published his first poem anonymously. It was a morality verse about the evils of alcohol. Later he’d write “Sir Eustace Grey,” one of his most celebrated works. “Sir Eustace Grey” presents the hallucinations of a mad man in a mad house and does it so convincingly, it’s widely believed that Crabbe wrote under the influence of opium, a habit he’s known to have picked up some fifteen or so years after his “drinking is bad” poem.

I don’t think I’ve read Crabbe, certainly not in an intentional way, so this is as conveyed by The Cambridge Guide to Literature In English: he imagined a parson perusing records of births, marriages, and deaths and with this vehicle in mind, wrote The Parish Register, a collection of interrelated stories set to verse. Clearly Robinson was impressed. The latter man took from the former the conceit of a community in which he could weave tales and through which he could pepper characters. He didn’t pick up the couplets, but both Crabbe and Robinson took from their predecessors what most of their contemporaries left fallow.

George Crabbe
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,—
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows,
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

Most of Robinson’s better known poems take place in Tilbury Town, a fictional community as a backdrop for vignettes; a device like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Hardy’s Wessex. Few poems mention Tilbury specifically. We’re to assume that this is around the corner or downtown and one denizen may know the other as all presume to share a common atmosphere.

At least two of these poems obliquely appear to be about his brothers. I know he had two. If there are other brothers out there I can’t find mention nor can I find confirmation that there were just the pat three boys. In any case, of the known, Dean was the oldest, Herman the middle, and EA the youngest.

Herman married Emma Löehen Shepherd, upsetting EA as he was in love with her despite an awkward difference in age. EA skipped the wedding and did some petulant poem writing. Things went poorly for Herman professionally, he drank, his wife and kids left him, and nineteen years after the wedding he died of tuberculosis.

Probably Robinson’s best known poem, “Richard Cory,” is about a wealthy man who outwardly has everything a man could want in life. And then he kills himself. The obvious intimation is that, despite appearances, we never know what troubles haunt a man. Emma claimed the poem was about her husband. Herman wasn’t rich, but he had everything EA wanted in Emma, so goes the interpretation.

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

The older brother Dean was a medical doctor who self-medicated for neuralgia, became an addict, and died as result of an overdose, possibly suicidal. The poem “How Annandale Went Out,” is told by a witness to euthanasia, possibly in defense of his complicity in a trial setting. This isn’t as vague an analogy to a brother as “Richard Cory.” The question isn’t whether it’s about Dean. The question is, is the witness representing EA in his guilt at not stepping in to prevent his brother’s decline and death? Or is the poem told from Dean’s point of view, a witness to his own suicide attempting to explain himself?

How Annandale Went Out

“They called it Annandale—and I was there
To flourish, to find words, and to attend:
Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,
I watched him; and the sight was not so fair
As one or two that I have seen elsewhere:
An apparatus not for me to mend—
A wreck, with hell between him and the end,
Remained of Annandale; and I was there.

“I knew the ruin as I knew the man;
So put the two together, if you can,
Remembering the worst you know of me.
Now view yourself as I was, on the spot—
With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?
Like this… You wouldn’t hang me? I thought not.”

Teddy Roosevelt’s son, Kermit, picked up and loved Robinson’s collection, Children of the Night, and passed it on to his father. Teddy loved the book and invited the poet to the White House. EA turned the invitation down. He was a poor poet and didn’t have the money for White House audience clothes. In response, the President set Robinson up with a well-paying job with the Customs Office with the understanding that he continue to work “with a view to helping American letters.” Roosevelt went further by convincing Scribner’s to print a second edition of Children of the Night and even reviewing it glowingly himself in the pages of Outlook magazine. I don’t know of another poet who’s received both a literal and figurative Presidential imprimatur.

With the end of Teddy’s term came the end of EA’s soundingly make work government job. He went back home to Gardiner, Maine as, after the death of Herman, did Emma. He was still smitten and started proposing. Two refusals were enough to convince him there was no prospect so he left for New York to be a drunken Bohemian for a while and hang out with other poets and artists. He’d head out of town, reside at various artists’ colonies for a spell and then wander back to New York. As I mentioned before, he wasn’t the most charismatic guy in the world, but there must have been something to his dark humor as, per Wikipedia, at these colonies, “several women made him the object of their devoted attention.” I’m sure his fame helped.

He had a lengthy relationship with Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones. Theirs was a loose affair. They spent time together at MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, separated, and took up again on the next mutual visit. He called her Sparhawk and, from Wikipedia, “She described him as a charming, sensitive, and emotionally grounded man with high moral values.” Also from Wikipedia, “They had a relationship that the poet D. H. Tracy described as ‘courtly, quiet, and intense.’” I mention her because her name was Sparhawk and that’s kind of cool, but also because their artist colonies seem so genteel. From my 21^st century perch the phrase is tainted by visions of white haired women with too many scarves marveling at how artistically arty they are or nightmarish hippie communes with acid babies and undrivable school buses rusting on berms. I blame Joan Didion.

In addition to the Tilbury Town folk, Robinson wrote Arthurian romances. His final Pulitzer was awarded for his 1927 release, Tristam, which was certainly his most popular book and possibly the last book-length original poem to be a bestseller.

Today’s final poem is autobiographical, so completes a trio of works about the known Robinson brothers. The man wasn’t comfortable in his time, a bit of an Arthurian courtier in Yankee New England. He liked the old forms.

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

Housekeeping: Someone named Jackson Hinkle is causing trouble in Iran. Apparently, he’s an influencer who took a trip to Tehran to shout “Down with USA” from stage at an IRGC approved rally. At least one Congressman has called for Hinkle’s arrest upon his return to America. If there is no arrest, keep an eye on these pages. Fonda laid groundwork. If Hinkle can go to another country we’re in military conflict with and cheer for our defeat, I think we might be able to do something about Ezra Pound’s public image. Pound was guilty as hell. He got on Italian radio and cheered on Mussolini while saying all manner of bad things about the US. Times change. Aid and comfort doesn’t move the needle like it used to. There are legalities to check into. We aren’t in a declared war, for instance, but there are bombs bombing. Lawyers cost money. Maybe an exploratory Pro-Pound Go-Fund Me? Again, keep an eye on these pages.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I’ve seen a flurry of tweets suggesting we’re on the precipice of sporting autocracy because no red card awarded in the World Cup had ever been overturned before yesterday. That’s not quite true. For starters, the upsetting violation of norms they’re referring to, the ruling on USMNT striker Folarin Balogun’s red from last Friday’s game against Bosnia Herzegovina, didn’t happen quite the way it’s being bandied as having done. The red card stands. The suspension is postponed until after the World Cup. Secondly, it’s not unprecedented. Manuel Francisco dos Santos, mononymed in the Brazilian tradition as Garrincha, was sent of in a 1962 semi-final against Chile but, after some testimony and cross examining of officials in an appeal, had his one game suspension commuted until after the tournament. This was not an inconsequential decision. Pele was sidelined early in the tournament. The additional loss of Garrincha, who won both player of the tournament and the Golden Boot for most goals, probably would have given the trophy to Czechoslovakia. But that was a while ago. The game has changed. Rules have changed.

Four players carded before the tournament have had their suspensions deferred or revoked so as not to coincide with this year’s World Cup. Argentina’s Nicolas Otamendi, Ecuador’s Moises Caicedo, and Qatar’s Tarek Salman were all set to miss one or two group games. After the bans were given, FIFA amended it’s rules. This doesn’t seem to be a case of FIFA acting on behalf of any one specific player. The organization wanted strong squads for their big to-do and these three were beneficiaries. Seperately, special intervention seems to have been made on Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo’s behalf. In qualifying he elbowed an Irishman in the face off-ball, got an immediate yellow, and after consulting replay, it was upgraded to a red. A later infractions board decided his offense was egregious enough to deserve a three game ban. In the end, he served a one game suspension in a warm up with Armenia and the other two hover over him to be forgiven assuming he plays nice during a probationary period. Fishy, but too much is made of Renaldo in relation to Balogun. None of the other suspensions quite parallel.

Balogun’s happened during the tournament. I like to think of the World Cup Finals as existing on its own. Injuries can’t be waved away so those creep in, but as can be controlled, everybody involved should start fresh and fully armed if we’re to decide the best national team in the world. Ban a guy for psychotic attacks or intentionally trying to break someone’s leg in the run up, but otherwise let all the teams come in with a clean sheet. The tournament should be decided by what happens in the course of the tournament. That should include consequences meted out to rule breakers. I don’t like the idea of postponing punishment for actions that affected the discrete outcome until after a champion is decided. Ledgers should be balanced, equilibrium maintained within the event.

The Balogun decision “has set a dangerous precedent,” according to Mark Ogden, ESPN’s Senior writer on World Cup and European soccer. “What happens if Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé receives a red card in the games to come? Will they also be given disciplinary immunity?” Since there is an appeals process of some sort in every league at every level, we know the answer. Were Ogden’s scenario to come, the player or team would appeal and those to whom they appeal would rule. There was a first appeal in the English Premier League, a first in the Bundesliga, and a first in Serie A. All three are still going concerns. It’s an oddity that anyone might think that only during their most celebrated and cherished extravaganza, FIFA would deny a mechanism to right mistakes.

This is why Mark Ogden gets the big bucks (I hope) and fancy title. FIFA does deny a mechanism to right mistakes. That surprised me. In the World Cup, there is no allowed post game reversal after a red card decision is given. There are, however, rules governing what a referee can look at during a game when reviewing a play to see if a red card should have been given.

There was no call on the Balogun foul at first. Either an on-field assistant or one of the VAR officials alerted the head referee to the incident. It’s in his discretion to review video. Here are the relevant parameters from the organization that codifies rules for FIFA, the International Football Association Board:

“The VAR can ‘check’ the footage in normal speed and/or in slow motion but, in general, slow motion replays should only be used for facts, e.g. position of offence/player, point of contact for physical offences and handball, ball out of play (including goal/no goal); normal speed should be used for the ‘intensity’ of an offence or to decide if it was a handball offence.”

Ogden quotes former Premier League referee Andy Davies, “only slo-mo and still pictures were presented to the referee.” I have my assumptions, but I am not privy to why it was decided that stills and slow motion are allowed only as supporting evidence. I bet there were debates and deliberations. I’m certain the final decision was not arrived at without consideration. What we have with Balogun is a technical violation.

FIFA isn’t saying it wasn’t a foul. They have a procedure for reviewing and ruling missed calls on the field and in this case they used stills and videos despite that being prohibited under the circumstances. Nit pickers and rule pedants unite. This one’s for you. Our man wasn’t given his Miranda warning.

That should end it. We should be done with the matter, but Trump is involved. The charge exploding on X, and I’m sure elsewhere, is that Trump strong armed FIFA and now everything reeks of illegitimacy. It’s been reported that US officials say Trump called only to ask about the rules, why the US player was suspended, and that FIFA assured him the ruling was already under review. Reports from those covering FIFA have corroboration from that body. Immediately after last Friday’s game, FIFA said there would be no appeal so, this is but one reason on a long list, I don’t put much faith in what FIFA says. Besides, it’s what both sides have to say.

Trump may or may not have asked them to review the red card situation. There was definitely a conversation on the matter between him and FIFA head Gianni Infantino. But did Trump ask Infantino to take any action? Axios White House reporter Mark Caputo quotes one of his sources as saying “If Trump had put his thumb on the scale and achieved this result, he would have a field day bragging about it.” That’s certainly funny and probably true. If the only reason the matter was investigated was because of pressure from the White House, there’s a hell of a scandal brewing.

To my knowledge, no one is questioning that, as Davies is quoted as saying by Ogden, only stills and slow motion were shown to the referee and that it was stills and slow motion on which he relied to make the call. In the end, the post game FIFA appeal or review got it right. FIFA says it was in the process of reviewing the situation despite their earlier statement that there would be no appeal. I hope that’s true. If not, FIFA has a review process it ignored. Does it never review unless prompted? Does it only sometimes review? Worse case: did it review and do nothing?

That would be a scandal. That would mean bias against the US and/or who knows how many other nations. If FIFA was not in the process of review, I hope Trump said something. Had it been an English player wrongly suspended, would he have gotten reprieve? Kier isn’t lighting a fire under anyone. Not every nation has a leader uncooth enough to stick up for them. Saying the process was already under review knowing that the card was given in violation of process saves FIFA another black eye and avoids questions about bias against any particular team.

My fear is that this affects our game tonight. How will those referees react? No one likes to be overruled no matter that they were right or wrong or agree with the heirarchical organization structure they’re part of. Even though the crew tonight is not the same one that officiated last Friday, they’re referees. Is there solidarity among the ranks? I figure there are three possible mindsets tonight’s refs have: They put impartiality front and center to reassure fans and showcase the integrity of the game. They misappropriate that urge for impartiality and, though not on purpose, call unfairly against Belgium to show that they are not biased against the US because of the perceived comeuppance. They crucify the US and even if we get out of this we’re hobbled by vindictive yellows.

Game’s at 7:00. Here’s to hope.

***

As to whether a foul should have been called against Balogun in the first place? I don’t think so. Per Ogden, Davies thought the call was incorrect, too. Here’s the rule from IFAB:

“Any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball from the front, from the side or from behind using one or both legs, with excessive force or endangers the safety of an opponent is guilty of serious foul play.”

I don’t think he lunged or challenged.

This guy has the video (click the tweet to get his full argument):

Happy 250. I don’t guess many need POETS Day encouragement, but Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s the Semiquincentennial. How blessed are we as a nation that this falls on a weekend?

They pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.

***

Thomas Campion (1567-1620) tried to squish English poetry into Hellenic meter. He wasn’t alone. Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney eyed the same goal. The latter two gave it up for iambic pentameter. Campion beat onward in a doomed campaign.

Classical rhythms don’t work in English. Listen to a romance language speaker. They inherited cadence from the Romans, and they from the Greeks. Syllable to syllable, they’re even. For all the stereotypes about spicy Spaniards and hot Latin lovers, their pitch and speed may vary from sentence to sentence and god knows there are arms in motion, but the actual speech is flat, practically monotone. They have their accentual moments, but those are not the rule. They stretch syllables. There are drawn out and compact vowels, but not much happening on the Y axis. English is bouncy.

Homer’s dactylic hexameter can be mirrored by an English dactylic hexameter, but Robert Fitzgerald, he of the great Iliad and Odyssey translations, found it constraining. In order to match the feel of Ancient Greek verse he took liberties. Homer’s dactylic foot was a long syllable followed by two shorts. The English dactyl is composed of a stress followed by two unstressed. It mirrors the Greek in form but the substitution is imperfect. Fitzgerald opted for some dactyls and some iambs and aimed for five or six stresses per line.

Arthur Golding rendered Ovid’s quantitative verse in iambic pentameter. Rolfe Humphries did the same. Both threw in feminine endings: that last unstressed syllable making pentameter plus one. You’d think it harder to match a foreign meter when translating someone else’s work than when composing an original. Golding and Humphries were bound by an existing concept and narrative. If the original work was about butterflies in the grass, they couldn’t change it to yaks in the grass because yaks scanned better. You could do that if there was no parent text. Spenser probably thought that way, as probably did Sidney. Both threw in the towel and went Chaucer’s iambic way. Campion soldiered on, but his poems presented as quantitative still fall into English stressed verse. He claimed otherwise, but reading aloud shows them prone to the ups and downs of our Germanic influence.

Homer’s Epic Hexameter, also called or Heroic Hexameter, isn’t the only Classical meter. Catullus and Sappho often wrote in Phalaecian hendecasyllable. This is an eleven syllable line which, using “–” for long and “u” for short, follows the pattern – – – u u – u – u – u. The English version substitutes stressed for long and unstressed for short, in line with the treatment Epic received. Our poets consider hendecasyllable vexing; technically difficult.

Attempts at bending hendecasyllablic works to English yoke are less known than translations of the great epics of Greek and Roman literature, but pretty much everything is less known than the Iliad and the Aeneid. They do exist. One by Alfred Lord Tennyson, in what poet Peter Kline called a “virtuosic show-off and a rebuke of ‘indolent reviewers,’” may be the most famous offering.

Hendecasyllabics
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him,
Lest I fall unawares before the people,
Waking laughter in indolent reviewers.
Should I flounder awhile without a tumble
Thro’ this metrification of Catullus,
They should speak to me not without a welcome,
All that chorus of indolent reviewers.
Hard, hard, hard it is, only not to tumble,
So fantastical is the dainty meter.
Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me
Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers.
O blatant Magazines, regard me rather—
Since I blush to belaud myself a moment—
As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost
Horticultural art, or half-coquette-like
Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly.

Mapping the line brings a question. Hendecasyllable, as described by the Poetry Foundation: “typically a spondee or trochee, a choriamb, and two iambs, the second of which has an additional syllable at the end.” Using the previous symbols but with “–“ as stressed and “u” as unstressed, that means either [– –] or [– u] then [– u u –], [u –], [u –], and a stand alone [u]. This highlights a problem I have with diagramming, for lack of a better word, in metric feet. Why is there a choriamb?

I don’t mean “Why is there a choriamb in this line?” I mean “Why does a choriamb exist?” Instead of a single foot of [– u u –], why don’t we have two feet: a trochee [– u] and an iamb [u –]. It’s not uncommon for trochees to precede iambs. It’s an accepted practice to begin a traditional iambic pentameter sonnet with a trochee as the first foot and then complete the line with four iambs. No one—no one I’ve read—says such a sonnet begins with a choriamb followed by three iambic feet for a tetrameter line in an otherwise pentameter poem.

Hendecasyllablic reflects a syllable count, so foot number doesn’t matter in the above. But in a hypothetical, when one person says a line begins with an amphibranch [u – u] followed by an iamb [u –] another will correct by calling it an iamb [u –] followed by and anapest [u u –]. It’s u – u u – no matter how you parse it. This shouldn’t matter, but I find myself trying to divine patterns where there are none and see one person being dismissive of another’s scan when both are right. It should be a loose diagnostic, but there’s no reason to introduce unecessaries that confuse. When fringe subjectivity is already baked in, a chimera like the choriamb muddies. Ditch it. The metric foot system works; it just needs tidying. Forgive the frustrated diversion.

Towards that tidiness I was very happy on finding a description of Phalaecian hendecasyllable as an eleven syllable line with stresses on syllables 1, 4, 6, 8, and 10. It’s a simpler and more elegant explanation that doesn’t glue feet together for no reason. I was less happy when I realized that the Poetry Foundation stressed syllables 2 and 3 and left 4 unstressed. The very delicate and technically demanding was looking to be pretty flexible. That there are variations and disagreements about early stresses doesn’t make it less problematic; so I’m told and tempted to believe given the esteem in which successful examples in English are given. But, still.

It gets lost in his grandfatherly plain spokenness, but Robert Frost was a formidable craftsman. He played on sentiment and that’s what the public latched onto, but he was a student and innovator of form. Below is his go at hendecasyllablic poetry. It’s superficially a poem about searching for truth, but he knew his Tennyson. The first line’s reference to “Others” who “taunt” echos Tennyson’s indolent reviewers. He’s doing a little showing off himself.

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

In English, we naturally speak in iambs. We say “the HOUSE” with stress on the second syllable. We speak in trochee, too, though not as often. “THE house” stresses the first syllable and implies specificity. Poets want to guide us through a rhythm, but we’re habitual. Start us on iambs and we’ll carry on. Start us on trochees, and we may pause, revert to iambs, or carry on. In either case, once you’re in the middle of a rise and fall accentually we’re lost in troughs and crests and don’t care where we started so long as we keep on as we’re going. The hecadecasyllabic poet has to guide the reader through multiple changes in the roll of the language while making it seem natural.

It’s easy to fall into trochees all the way or try and “cheat” by starting with a preposition to take stress over its two word subject. Frost avoids pitfalls and easy ways all the while taunting his critics who say he has no depth. It’s a poem about looking deeper for something that may or may not be there. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you missed it, maybe you’re not as worldly as you think you are,” he implies and ends the poem on a relativistic note about truth. There’s no doubting his other message.

It’s an attractive pattern because many great works, continental as well as classical, are written in the style.

This is the meter of Dante’s Divine Comedy, usually translated in English as blank verse or iambic pentameter with or without terza rima. It’s the meter of Petrarch. Like Dante, his work is almost exclusively iambic pentameter in English. The other Dante, Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, similarly treated the hendecasyllables of Calvalcanti. Pound rendered Cavalcanti in free verse, maybe governed by the same philosophy as obtained when he translated Li Bai from Chinese: that where there is no workable equivalent, re-imagine the work in available terms as best match the spirit of the original. Pound did try his hand at the classic pattern in his own Canzones, loosely blending free verse and hendecasyllabic in a way makes me think I should have written loosely instead. Over and over, when presented with hendecasyllablic, our poets demur.

My favorite English example comes from Swinburne. There’s no hint beyond the title that he’s showing off though I think his is more perfect than either of the above. Read aloud, it works both inflected and in a wistful monotone. It shouldn’t surprise. Swinburne was known as a masochist. I imagine meticulous suffering over a difficult poetic task was right up his alley.

Hendecasyllabics
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of exultation,
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen ashes.
Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and planets
When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever.”

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Americans get a lot of flak for calling the World Cup game soccer. Jabs come for a variety of reasons. A nearly forgotten charge implied arrogance: how dare we abrogate the name “football” for our domestic favorite when there are so many other games—rugby, Australian Rules, soccer, Gaelic—under the umbrella. That one never landed. We call ourselves Americans at Mexican and Canadian expense so we aren’t about to get the vapors over a ball game. Now the world calls soccer “football” so that one’s more or less forgotten.

An odd new front paints “soccer,” our preferred term, as an Americanism; as an abomination spread by Yanks and maintained despite an otherwise global conformation to “football.” The claim that everybody else is down with “football” is specious, but put that aside. This one doesn’t land either. We’re the only ones measuring by an inch arbitrarily defined as roughly the length of three barley grains rather than using the scientific metric measurements which arbitrarily define a meter as one ten millionth of the distance from the pole to the midway point of the planet we happen to be on which only coincidentally approximates the comfortable yard. But put that aside, too. “Soccer” was the preferred English term until pretty recently.

The shift came mid 1970s, smack in the worst of crumbling empire malaise and right before their Thatcher pick-me-up. There wasn’t a whole lot of cultural confidence over there. England was a mess. John moved to New York, Paul to Scotland, and Ringo split time between London and LA. Only George, the quiet one, remained reliably in England. Like George, the English found themselves suddenly not on top of the world. Best blend in and keep their collective head down, avoid making waves, and if the continent says football, do what’s needed to fit in.

To be clear, “soccer” is an English invention, both game and word. Bobby Charleton, who slew a dragon for Manchester United and was the hero of England’s 1966 World Cup Winning “side,” titled his first memoir My Soccer Life and nobody batted an eye. This wasn’t a Sorcerer’s Stone concession to the American audience. There wasn’t My Football Life on one side of the Atlantic and Soccer on the other. As I’m writing, there’s a first edition copy of Pelham Books London release in decent condition available for £25 on eBay.

For all the scholastic magistry and Evelyn Waugh mystique Oxford University has amassed since Henry II hinted that University of Paris expats should come home, goofy students are goofy students the world over. For reasons that have nothing to do with being poncy, faddish aspiring scholars went through a phase in the late 1800s where they dropped a final syllable and tacked on an “-er” in its place. The trend turned Rugby Football into “ruggers.” There’s a colonial remnant of the fashion floating around college campuses in the US. If you’ve ever called a keg party a “kegger,” you’re among the afflicted and part of the great link tying scion Lords chasing a second with Iowa State marketing majors playing beer pong at the Sigma Nu house.

English public school sports clubs got together and codified a set of football rules for competition. That set of rules came to be known as Association Football until the Oxford kids got hold, shortened “Association” to “socc” and did the “-er” trick. There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, that an Oxford student and captain of the English national team, Charles Wreford-Brown (who’s Wikipedia page features a starch collared photograph of the man suited for the cover of a box of licorice cough drops), coined the word. I’ve read that some early pronunciations hilariously kept association’s sibilance and said it as “sosser.” I like to think a Latin teaching tradition put a stop to that.

Any assault on American usage of “soccer” has to reckon with Americans’ use of “football.” The word already means something here so that meaning has to be ridiculed and stripped to make way if the colonizing English are going to have us fall in line. The thrust of the attack is that in our football, the foot barely makes contact with the ball. “More like handball!” or some such refrain. That kinda works on Americans because our class divisions were never institutionalized in a sumptuary tradition. We’re not on the lookout for that kind of thing. I don’t know why the British buy it.

Before ruffly collars made the scene, the rich and landed jousted and played something akin to polo. If you couldn’t afford to join the horsey set, you played your games on foot. We came to call sports you play on horseback “equestrian.” We came to call sports you play on foot “football.” So goes the tradition. Rich people played running games too and no one calls tennis football. There are exceptions, but the general meaning was formed and it had nothing whatsoever to do with what body part strikes a ball. It’s about locomotion. Proto-sociologist Frederick Morton Eden (famed author of 1797’s 700 page smash hit The State of the Poor) wrote in the 1820s about a chaotic Perthshire game pitting married men against bachelors. He observed tackling, running with the ball, and throwing the ball to one another. The goal was to “hang” the ball, which meant putting it through a hoop. The one rule he specified was that “no person was allowed to kick it.” They called the game football. That’s because they played on foot.

There’s no etymology written by anyone without chip grease on their drunken fingers putting “soccer”’s origins anywhere beyond the Pale, though efforts at banishing the word are underway right at the line. Ireland’s governing soccer body is called the Football Association of Ireland, but Gaelic football is more popular. “Soccer” was and, though dwindling, is the common term for… soccer on the Emerald Isle. Australia changed its governing body’s name, swapping “soccer” for “football,” in 2005. New Zealand followed suit in 2006. That’s officialdom. The people are recalcitrant. The march toward “football” is underway, but where is the English outrage at all the other nations who do or mostly do as we do? Why aren’t they mad at Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, or Japan? Why is it just this game? They don’t get mad when I say “trunk” instead of “boot.” Steve Martin pointed out that the damned French have a different word for everything. Why aren’t the British getting arrested for Tweeting mean things about the French?

British folks and Americans familiar with mustache wax get upset because we call the Brits’ favored football variant “soccer.” That was their way right up until the end of the Apollo program. Our way has always been to call our most popular domestic football variant by the umbrella term “football” and to hell with all the rest in the category. We carry on the British tradition of referring to Association Football as Soccer. We keep the flame that they have abandoned in favor of the American way. It’s cultural appropriation: calling your most popular domestic football variant by the categorical term instead of by its specific name is our thing. “Soccer” is British. It’s “Football” that’s the Americanism.

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

In a 1579 letter from Edmund Spenser to Gabriel Harvey, Spenser brings up an organization he’d been invited to join by “Master Sidney and Master Dyer.” The Masters were Sir Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer, a pair of Elizabethan courtiers who acted as agents and soldiers abroad for Her Majesty. Sidney, at least, would be shocked that he’s remembered as a poet rather than envoy or governor. The organization was called The Areopagus, and it’s fairer to call it the proposed organization as it’s not known whether it ever made it past planning. No meetings are recorded.

Sydney may have been inspired in conceiving his literary club by the Wilton Circle, a literary circle of which Spenser is confirmed to have been a member, founded and led by Philip’s sister Mary Sydney and run by Sir Walter Ralegh’s half brother (possibly Humphrey Gilbert, though I haven’t found a site willing to lift whomever out of Ralegh’s shadow with more than “half-brother.”) The Wilton Circle is described by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as “the most important and influential literary circle in English history.” The Authorship Trust’s mission, depending on your disposition, is “just asking questions” regarding the authorship of plays ascribed to William Shakespeare, or a they’re bunch of conspiracy nuts on a snipe hunt. It’s also possible that Mary’s Wilton Circle postdated Sydney’s idea for the Areopagus. I can’t find minutes.

In either cases, poet’s circles abounded in the minds of Sidneys. Philip’s goal was to advance quantitative verse in English poetry. Thomas Campion (1567-1620) was playing around with the same thing at the time so he wasn’t a lone voice in the woods. It’s an awkward ask of our stress filled language, but the quantitative poets wanted poetic feet measured in syllable length reliant on long and short vowel sounds. Admiration for classical poetry in Latin and Greek fueled their attempts.

I like to think there was an Areopagus with an assembly but the focus is on Sydney and Spenser at the table. In my head there’s impassioned debate with leather bound books laid open, quills and ink pots set at each place like dinnerware, anachronistic scrolls for some reason, and everyone’s wearing heavy clothes and drinks red wine from metal cups. Late into the night and early into the morning they press this form and that until they in the end ashamed and humbled, yell “To hell with it!”, throw away the quantitative verse scheme and get on as we know they did: Spenser amazes with decidedly non-quantitative iambic pentameter in The Faerie Queene and his Spenserean stanza, and Sydney develops the English sonnet, taking from Petrarch and the Italians. Chaucer set the iambic course, Marlowe, Shakespeare (“Not so fast!” say the Authorship Trust), and Milton cemented iambic pentameter in the English tradition. Spenser and Sidney were its midwives at a time when direction was uncertain. No matter what their quantitative sympathies, both men did the honorable thing in the end. Pace Campion: Thank you, gentlemen.

Sydney’s poetry was passed around for friendly or courtly enjoyment. He never published in his lifetime. His sister, Mary of the verifiable circle, gathered and edited his poetry after his death. His great work is a series of one hundred and eight sonnets called Astrophil and Stella (sometimes spelled Astrophel and Stella) written to Lady Warwick, Penelope Rich, nee Devereux. A marriage was planned between twelve-year-old Penelope and twenty-year-old Philip. There was a lot of planning and hopes as both families saw benefits from the union but before nuptials were performed Sidney’s prospective father-in-law Walter Devereux died of dysentery. The arrangement fell to the side. By reports, Philip didn’t mind. He understood the dynastic nature of the pairing and she was just a kid he had nothing in common with. He married Frances Walsingham, Countess of Clanricarde (who would marry a Devereux after Sydney died.) Penelope married Robert Rich, 1^st Earl of Warwick. Over the years and subsequent meetings, he fell in love with her. She wasn’t a kid anymore.

Philip was a celebrated courtier and history tells he took to heart all the virtues extolled by such. There’s a mention in the series of a stolen kiss, but that may be wish casting. He stayed true to his wife and she to her husband, though it’s said she was miserable. The sonnets are a great pining; one of poetry’s celebrated could have beens.

I
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn’d brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”

The second sonnet is the saddest to me. In explaining, he rebukes himself. The entirety—the pairing, the arrangement, the dysentery—was beyond his control. Had he been immediately smitten, things would have ended the same way. He didn’t see her as he should have. She was revealed gradually.

II

Not at first sight, nor with a dribbèd shot,
Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed:
But known worth did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got.
I saw, and liked; I liked, but lovèd not;
I loved, but straight did not what love decreed:
At length to love’s decrees I, forced, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partial lot.
Now even that footstep of lost liberty
Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite
I call it praise to suffer tyranny;
And now employ the remnant of my wit
To make myself believe that all is well,
While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.

Was there ever a good time to be from Moscow? Was there a Golden Age?

Queen Elizabeth appointed Sidney Governor of Flushing, a harbor town in Zeeland, where he was to support Dutch Protestants against the Spanish. He was shot during a cavalry charge in the Battle of Zutphen. I can’t tell if he ordered the charge or not. He held the rank General of the Horse, which sounds lofty and in charge, but there may have been loftier personages present. The shot itself wasn’t deadly; he took a ball to the leg. Twenty-six days later, he succumbed to gangrene and died at the age of thirty-one.

His funeral procession through London was “the most elaborate ever staged,” according to Wikipedia. Over one hundred and twenty members of the Worshipful Company of Grocers were in attendance. Reading that sent me down a rabbit-hole, but I’ve emerged knowing the importance of royally-chartered livery companies and that a courtier such as Sidney was greatly honored to have been in membership.

After “the most elaborate ever staged,” Wikipedia mentions that the funeral almost bankrupted his father-in-law. That doesn’t sound like a sudden outpouring of emotion by the populace. There are also stories about his death that strike a skeptic: His leg was unarmored where he was shot because he spotted a soldier under him without that specific piece of armor and gave his so his inferior was better protected. What bad luck? Another hagiographic stretch has a dying Philip refusing water because another wounded man needs it more. Because that was it. The one canteen in camp.

They built him up a little.

XLVII

What, have I thus betrayed my liberty?
Can those black beams such burning marks engrave
In my free side? or am I born a slave,
Whose neck becomes such yoke of tyranny?
Or want I sense to feel my misery?
Or sprite, disdain of such disdain to have?
Who for long faith, though daily help I crave,
May get no alms but scorn of beggary.
Virtue, awake! Beauty but beauty is;
I may, I must, I can, I will, I do
Leave following that which it is gain to miss.
Let her go. Soft, but here she comes. Go to,
Unkind, I love you not! O me, that eye
Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie!

“Soft, but here she comes,” predates Shakespeare’s (“Ahem!” – TSAT) Romeo and Juliet’s “But soft, What light by yonder window breaks?” Astrophil was probably written in the early 1580s, and obviously before 1586 (unless there’s a Sidney’s Authorship Trust out there that would like to chime in.) No matter, Mary published her brother’s work in 1591. Romeo and Juliet was probably written between 1591 and 1595. “Soft” may have been a common “hush.” Still, we know Shakespeare read Sidney. Maybe he inspired one of the most famous lines in drama.

Back to building up Sidney: He didn’t need building up. From age eighteen he was an agent and advisor to the Queen. He fell in and out of favor, but that was the case with everyone Elizabeth noticed. One story in particular demonstrates his nobility.

William I of Orange met with Sidney to discuss the possibility of a Protestant League. Sidney more than impressed the Prince. William offered his daughter’s hand. Holland and Zeeland were the offered dowry. He wouldn’t be monarchy, but the courtier would have his own court, if minor league. He felt the move would be an affront to Elizabeth. I’m sure justified fear of the Queen’s wrath played a part in his decision to refuse, but offered a kingdom, he deferred to his oath. He was an impressive guy.

Next is the last poem of the series.

CVIII

When sorrow (using mine own fire’s might)
Melts down his lead into my boiling breast;
Through that dark furnace to my heart oppressed
There shines a joy from thee, my only light;
But soon as thought of thee breeds my delight,
And my young soul flutters to thee his nest,
Most rude despair, my daily unbidden guest,
Clips straight my wings, straight wraps me in his night,
And makes me then bow down my head and say,
“Ah, what doth Phoebus’ gold that wretch avail
Whom iron doors do keep from use of day?”
So strangely (alas) thy works in me prevail,
That in my woes for thee thou art my joy,
And in my joys for thee my only annoy.

Mary reportedly exercised a light hand editing and it’s assumed that the sequence is in an order determined by Philip. CVIII has the feel of a poem written to be the finale. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a fine poem. I feel like he mustered emotion; it weighed on him how to end just so. I like CVI. I wish he’d ended there, winding down.

CVI

O absent presence, Stella is not here;
False flattering hope, that with so fair a face
Bare me in hand, that in this orphan place
Stella, I say my Stella, should appear.
What say’st thou now? Where is that dainty cheer
Thou told’st mine eyes should help their famished case?
But thou art gone, now that self-felt disgrace
Doth make me most to wish thy comfort near.
But here I do store of fair ladies meet,
Who may with charm of conversation sweet
Make in my heavy mould new thoughts to grow:
Sure they prevail as much with me, as he
That bade his friend, but then new maimed, to be
Merry with him, and not think of his woe.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

TGIF is POETS for those without initiative. Make it happen. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Wallace Stevens started late. His first poetry collection held an impressive, by debut poetry collection standards, eighty five titles, but when the book, Harmonium, was published in 1923, its author was in his early forties. He’d had time to backlog.

I covered Stevens’s morning routine—composing in his head as he walked to his office at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company—in this space three years ago. In Harmonium, he wrestles with how he should see the world. Should he be grounded in the rational or loose in the imagination? The question is posed piecemeal and never resolved.

I remember when Donna Tartt’s A Secret History came out. My mother’s kitchen table review was that it’s a great book, but she put all she’s ever learned and considered into it and she won’t have anything else to say for five to ten years. That was in 1992. Tartt’s second book came out in 2002. Stevens spends a great deal of energy trying to sort himself. He wrote sparingly through the 20s, not writing regularly again until 1933 and not publishing another bound volume until Ideas of Order in 1936. Harmonium received harsh reviews. Mark Van Doren dismissed him from the genre by writing in The Nation, per Wikipedia, that Stevens’ wit “is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular.” There were nice things written too, but the negatives weighed on him. Maybe he, like Tartt in Mom’s pinning, spent his store. Maybe the critics brushed him back. Maybe he had to reconcile vers libre with actuary tables.

Reception wasn’t all bad. Van Doren was an influential guy, but I’d trade three of his rookies for one of Harriet Monroe’s base cards. Her approval was paramount. In the incunabular days of Poetry, she wrote, per Wikipedia:

“[T]here was never a more flavorously original poetic personality than the author of this book. If one seeks sheer beauty of sound, phrase, rhythm, packed with prismatically colored ideas by a mind at once wise and whimsical, one should open one’s eyes and ears, sharpen one’s wits, widen one’s sympathies to include rare and exquisite aspects of life, and then run for this volume of iridescent poems.”

That should have buoyed him. He should have also been inured to charges of nonsense. He’s famously hard to decipher, threads his poems with an idiosyncratic symbolism and teases those who tried to put together a key, and prizes sound and fluidity over communication. He knew he was being problematic.

Edmund Wilson wrote of Stevens, “Even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well.” I don’t know that readers of this first book came so disposed to indulge though he certainly earned trust over a career. Stevens kept his notebook scribblings. Some of those aphorisms and begun thoughts were published as the section “Adagia” in the posthumous collection Open Posthumous in 1957. Among them: “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully,” and “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”

That should be liberating; license to read for the joy of sound. He mocks the code breakers’ claims that in his poetry blue signals imagination and red reality, but then right there on the pages, repeated for all to see, is blue heralding imagination and red meaning reality. Instead of liberation, we get humility. Approach the poems knowing something is meant, but not necessarily something comprehensible. Most have straightforward elements while hinting there is more. Is there? Sometimes yes. I think. Maybe always. Have fun with it.

The Plot against the Giant
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la … le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

There is everything innocent about the above poem, but if you were ever a middle school boy, you’ve already giggled at three women trading plans to bring down something large. Read that Stevens hid erotic meaning in some of his poems—“never inadvertently crude,” his friend Marianne Moore wrote of him, leaving me to wonder if she meant he was occasionally advertently crude—and know that sometimes his poems are just a cigar, and you’re left wondering who’s the dirty one? Is it the poet? Am I being puerile? Get to the line with “labials” and “gutturals” and I’m off the rails. I’m not imagining things. The nuns can’t have been right.

“The Place of Solitaires” is safely said to be about the aims of Stevens’s idealized poet. He’s to stir the imagination. He tells us this without reference to blue, which has to infuriate the code breakers. Green, which is mentioned, purportedly means “the physical.” No matter the color scheme, he prizes motion. Ideas don’t stand still. If my reading is correct, the poet’s goal is better served conveying images and concepts in transition to give a sense of the whole rather than trying to render a moment in precision. A poem is not a photograph and requires a mindset to compose.

The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

There’s a longer poem, broken into six Roman numeralled parts, called “The Comedian as the Letter C,” in the middle of Harmonium. It’s about Crispin, a poet searching for his place. He starts in Bordeaux, travels to the Yucatan, Florida, and ends up in North Carolina. In the early 1900s there was a school of poetry known as Local Color. Stevens wasn’t much of a fan. Locality Writers felt it was important to tie themselves to a region. It wasn’t just poets. William Faulkner is a prime example. “Comedian” is the poet rejecting that he’s tied to his place and in his travels, finding that there isn’t a place. At the same time, he considers his figurative place as a member of society. There are obvious parallels between Crispin and Stevens, the poet and insurance man. He lives in the imagination and in reality. To which, if either, does he belong?

He doesn’t satisfy himself with an answer, but claims advantages to not knowing. He’s not lost in the imagination or bound to reality. He can exist in either and see both from an outside perspective.

It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.

Romantic notions can grow stale, but he was in and out. There were no Pevensies yet to compare himself to, but withdrawing to reality left a longing and a quickening. Lucy longed to return to Narnia, loving it with an intensity she may not have had she stayed. Did those without quotidian lives allow the fantastic to fade? For Stevens, the place of solitaires retained a sense of risk.

All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.
But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

In Part VI, Crispin settles and has a family. His travels are done, Byronic shirts and waistcoats put away. Is he still a poet?

Because he built a cabin who once planned
Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?

The question nags.

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument
Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?
Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

Harmonium is not all existential struggle. Far from it. Even in his ennui he’s playful. Louis Untermeyer called him “childish.” Gorham Munson dubbed him “a dandy.” That stuck. Twenty years later Yvor Winters argued that dandy didn’t cover it. He suggested “hedonist.” I think Stevens was funny.

from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is just that. Some were funny, like the above. Some flippant. Others sublime or reverent. The next is numinous if you went to a thesaurus looking for a synonym for “sublime” but with a shade towards mystery.

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

He loved to mention birds; palm trees too, but birds. There are peacocks, grackles, toucans, hawks, falcons, and flamingos. Obviously, blackbirds. That’s from a quick flip back through. There are more. He gets on a phoenix kick in his later work, but not yet in Harmonium. I have no idea what the code breakers make of all that.

There is no resolution to his predicament at the end of the book. He doesn’t know how to go forward. He eventually figured out a path, but whether he went back to writing having resolved his dilemma or having made peace with its nagging, I don’t know.

Stevens ends Harmonium with his mind set one way, a moment later set another, and again.

The Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

TS Eliot titled the third of his Four Quartets “The Dry Salvages” after a rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing village and seaside retreat where the St. Louis based Eliot family spent their summers when the poet was a boy. Dry Salvages derives from an original French name for the formation transformed by time, mishearings, and local accent. Eliot tells us in a parenthetical preceding the poem, “presumably les trois sauvages,” Anglicized over time but, he instructs, “pronounced to rhyme with assuages,” so not as yet a fully English subject.

As with all of the Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” manages competing images presenting a theme. There’s a great deal going on and a great many ways to spend a thousand words on an aspect without touching on any number of other aspects. In this poem, the opening and recurrent image is that of water. The river is present, flowing, perceptible action. The sea is unknowable depths. Water rises from the sea, rains and forms oceans and back to the sea. The sea is the past and the future. We cannot know which or guess at more than the surface. The river is with us, changing in the moment. It is present. The idea permeates.

This poem deals with transition and our perception of it. “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets, considers the cycle binding past, future, and present, that we are trapped in change, “Desire itself is movement,” a stillness central to the circular cycle of time and motion is the incomprehensible begotten God, and our hoped-for ecstasies or perceptions of the divine. In the second, “East Coker,” Eliot presents generational cycles, shows that as men we are limited to experience what time allows, and concludes that to be near God we must live every moment in concentration, though no revelation is guaranteed. A life of contemplation and worship may be well and good for saints and mystics, but what, asks the speaker in “The Dry Salvages,” about the rest of us? What of a plumber or farmer who makes possible the generational churning? How are they to attain communion?

In answer, Eliot invokes Krishna, Mary, and Jesus.

In the epic Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna asks Krishna what he must do in battle to be victorious. Russell Elliott Murphy, in his Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot, explains that in the ancient Sanskrit text, Krishna responds “Think of me,” because “the teaching is that one becomes one with ’whatever sphere of being / The mind of man may be intent [on] / At the time of death.’” With that in mind, Eliot plays with Heraclitus’s observation that “No man steps in the same river twice,” to introduce the idea that we are forever lost, or possibly dying moment to moment. With every change we are a different person. What we were ceases to be. I am not the same person I was when I began this thought because now I am a person who has begun this thought.

As with the two poems before, the third section of “The Dry Salvages” takes place in a train or a subway. In this incarnation, the train ride, in a few lines described as an ocean voyage, is the fixed present in a never ending journey from past to future, a transition from what you were to what you will be.

from Part III of The Dry Salvages
TS Eliot (1888-1965)

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station.
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think “the past is finished”
Or “the future is before us.”

We were never in the past. We remember it, but we are not the person who was anymore. We will never be in the future. That is for someone who remembers us, but is more. No matter how we struggle, we’re forever of the moment, bracketed by a past and a future that we, as we are, cannot be a part of. We’re reminded of the limitations spelled out in “Burnt Norton,” that we are trapped by time. We’re analogous to generations as spoken to in “East Coker.” We are neither our ancestor nor our progeny. We are here.

Let me be a goofy fan for a moment: “That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here,” is, to me, among his most memorable lines. He uses “that” instead of “the” in the line “You are not the same people who left that station.” It’s a nice touch. There’s a distance implied. A person who just left might say “the station.” “The” connects as it is specific—the one known to the speaker—where “that” suggests a station observed. The person who was there is in the past, the present can only look back. Eliot is in the details.

Another passage that stands out, this one from Part II, laying the ground for the section above:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the later a partial fallacy,
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

All the struggles and adaptations, the leaps forward and retreats, the dead ends explored, all of the mechanics of natural selection led to man as we are now and enlivened with niche beasts our populated world. Everyone knows that the process is ongoing but we don’t consider that we’ll one day be primitive. Or if we do, as an “of course” set in a distant and ignorable future. But here we are on the train.

In answer to the main question: The plumber and the farmer must live in the moment. The average person possessed of the same need for meaning and communion as the saint but lacking the drive or pressed with competing priorities should attend to their role in the pattern. Being only in the present, attend to the present; each personal incarnation at a time in its time; do his part to make the past and anticipate the future.

Eliot ends the poem in Part V with,

For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

Eliot recalls Part IV of “Burnt Norton” where the speaker asks if man rejects God and sets himself as supreme, will “Fingers of yew be curled / Down on us?” If man is the end all be all, what happens when man is gone? Does the universe cease? Will yew roots—the yew stands as a symbol of the churchyard—grow downward towards your grave? If so, by what power? By what will once yours is gone? How well thought out is your blasphemy?

Here, the yew presages a sort of immortality. Eliot insists there is something greater if we cleave to it. Like Arjuna, we will be victorious. We take part in the cycle as one man in generations and one being in a divine plan. Fixed in the present, our part is forever now.

The primary appeal to Mary comes in Part IV, which is a short prayer for safety for those at sea. The appeal is presaged in Part II in the passage below with the reference to Jesus as “the calamitous annunciation,” the occasion of the eternal in contact with time and our salvation. In the six stanzas leading to the lines including “superficial notions of evolution,” man’s lot is described as “In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,” and “forever bailing.” He is adrift and in a struggle he will not see end.

Here, Eliot shows he is a master of form. Man is part of a pattern, a working greater than himself. He can’t always see that. His life is short and the pattern weaves long. Eliot gives us this plight in these six stanzas set as a modified sestina. Classically, a sestina has six stanzas of six lines each with the final word of each line repeating as the last word of a different line in the next stanza cascading to a set pattern. In Eliot’s sestina, the last words of each first line rhyme rather than repeat, as is so with second lines, third, etc. without cascading. There’s no recognizing a pattern from looking at a single stanza. To do so requires a long view. The form embodies the thematic assertion. It’s poetry.

from Part II of The Dry Salvages

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

This is not an Evangelical poem, but it is inescapably Christian as it is an attempt to comprehend great mysteries by one raised in a Christian tradition. Murphy writes “Suffice it to say, for Eliot at least, those values and beliefs, when the inform any work of literature, do so not in order to indoctrinate or proselytize the prospective reader but because they form a part of the author’s actual life experience.” All must be considered from Eliot’s perspective. So death in a moment is not absolution from individual responsibility. That he warned us off with “superficial notions of evolution” as “a means of disowning the past.” Death is a curtain we cannot pass back through, a metaphor for a barrier. In that light, there is clarification. We are not the person we were a moment ago but we are not reborn sinless and pure. We are the creator writ small of both and all past and all coming momentary accumulations of our experiences. We are in need of salvation.

CS Lewis used the Tao as a stand in for a shared morality (let Eastern philosophers, hacky sack mystics, and Lewis scholars unite and mob me for the simplicity.) He was making a point arrived at through Christianity, but one he felt should be shared and could be similarly embraced by those of any faith. As a laurel, he reached outside his faith for a word to show the concept was not exclusive. So does Eliot pull Krishna. In that sense, it may be Evangelical, if at a slant. It is a reasoning process.

For the full text of the poem, click here.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Will was a ready-made friend assembled off-site and brought in as a palliative by my parents. Mom and Dad made us move. There was no consultation. The new house wasn’t that far from the old neighborhood from their perspective, but they had a Buick. I knew the distance by a twelve-year-old’s bicycle reckoning. My old friends were a crow’s fly mile away now but there were obstacles. Cahaba Road’s ups and downs, Montclair’s traffic, and a well perimetered country club enforced isolation. All my friends were there and I was stuck here. Will’s dad used to work with my dad and lived a few blocks away from our new place. They signed us up for the same soccer team.

It worked. Will was, and is, a good guy. I’m friends with his older brother Kevin, too. That last part wasn’t the case until much later. Kevin didn’t take to me at first. That wasn’t my fault. Our school went grades five through twelve. Kevin was a high school senior and Will and I were in sixth and seventh grade, respectively. Kevin had spent the summer tuning, buffing, and otherwise worshiping his powder-blue late sixties Mustang. The car was a showpiece, but in a muscular way, and would have ushered in a new age of Kevin high school ascendancy as he drove past the lower lot, slowly circled past main entrance, and eased into a reserved senior parking place. But his mom told him he had to drive me and Will to school with him every morning. We didn’t figure in the triumph.

The first morning he picked me up, I was told to get in the back with Will. Kevin glared at us. “I don’t hear a fucking word out of you two. Got it?” and Blaupunkt-ed The Producers’ “She Shelia” to crisp ear-shattering eleven. That was our morning every day for a month.“I don’t want to…” and Blaupunkt Producers followed by “Piece by Piece” by The Tubes. The woofers thumped my braces. We only lived a mile and a half from school so I never found out what mixed tape magic followed at the three spot.

Come early October, I bailed and decided to skateboard for the rest of the year. As a result, I met a ton of older kids. Damn near every student en route to school would slow and ask if I wanted a ride. I was in seventh grade, but a minute’s worth of vagabond travel a day in this or that upperclassman’s car in the morning and seniors would pass by me and my friends in the halls with a “Hey, Ben.” I was known by older kids. I felt cool. I also picked up on schedules and knew when to thank for but refuse a ride because “it’s a nice day” if there was a better chance of hitching along with Jenny of the tight sweaters and large chest. She had blond hair and a comfy red BMW 318i. There was a spell where she dated a fellow senior who drove a cherry red late sixties Mustang—not quite the equal of Kevin’s—and he was covetous, I guess, because on mornings when he drove her to school they’d zip right by. She’d wave as they passed. That’s something. I endured their short affair and slipped back into accepting the kindness of less attractive strangers. I was thrilled when they broke up. She ended up at Harvard. Her kid and mine have been in a few plays together. Unbelievably nice person.

Outside of situations where having a younger brother and his dork friend spoiled a summer’s worth of garage work and distracted from acid washed sunglasses, Kevin was a pretty good guy to hang around with. The summer following our move to the neighborhood, I went off to camp with Will and another guy named Will from the other end of the street. Kevin was one of the councilors. The three of us would sign up for all Kevin-led trips and activities because he treated us like lieutenants.

Near the end of the month long session, you’d go off in groups of ten to twenty with three or four councilors for a two night, three day delve into the woods, in one direction or another, to cook hot dogs on the end of a stick and maybe put your arm around a girl’s shoulders by the camp fire. Kevin led a hike to a waterfall, a trickle, really—we were expecting some grand Niagara-like wall of noise and spray the way they talked it up—dropping nine or ten feet into an icy cold swimming hole. Somehow, he arranged it so the Wills and I got horses. We needed to ride up ahead and scout or some nonsense. I don’t know how he conned the administration, but we had four saddled and two packed. Will, Will, and I did almost all of the unnecessary galloping across open spaces.

One night I almost kissed a girl named Heather. Her friend, a girl named Mickey who smoked, told me Heather liked me and I should give it a try. I did put my arm around her at the campfire and we decided to go together for the remainder of the term until we all went home, which was maybe four days.

As an aide-de-camp-councilor, I helped screw together the scaffold to set over the fire. On that, we set metal grills for burgers and steaks at night and iron skillets for messy eggs and bacon in the morning. My proximity to power impressed Heather. It was a good gig.

One morning, Kevin, who is now a chef in adulthood, made a spectacular amount of bacon and a resulting spectacular amount of grease. After he pulled bacon and set it in buffet pans, he poured a half a pot of coffee in to the smoldering skillet, making a few pops and a lot of steam. Everyone but Heather and me was off fighting about line-cutting at the folding table buffet. He called us over, pulled us into conspiracy. “You want to try this.”

He tossed a bit of butter in and stirred. Next, he pulled a bag of white bread from the mess box, took a few pieces and passed it to us. We all dipped and ate. Heather didn’t like it. There were cracks that would have shown had we not gone our separate ways. Kevin called it red eye gravy and I thought he invented it.

More than a few red eye recipes claim to be original or authentic. I don’t believe there’s an original recipe. Cooks deglaze with liquid. A pan sauce made from coffee and grease was inevitable and doubtless discovered on every trail and through every pass since Sufi monks invented jitters in the 15^th Century, or whatever other story of the first brewed coffee is ascendant of a moment.

Camp Mountain Lake went to hell a few years after I left. The place shut down and was abandoned. A Facebook page popped up so old campers were able to trade snapshots from endless summers. A few intrepid alums explored the old site and posted archaeological pics of overgrown cabins and barely recognizable boathouses. Someone bought it a few years ago, redid and repaired the place, and reopened as a glamping compound. Hipsters got it.

Below is red eye gravy made at home by older people with air conditioners. Full stop. Hipster takeover of my former camp is coincidental and not to be extended metaphorically to besmirch the recipe.

Gentrified Camp Mountain Lake Red-Eye Gravy

• 1 shallot, minced

• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced

• 8 oz. Pancetta, diced

• handful flat leaf parsley, chopped

• 2 cups coffee, or more as needed

• chicken stock, if needed

• unsalted butter, as needed

• flour, all-purpose is fine

• optional: some heat – pepper flakes, cayenne, Tabasco, habanero – whatever you like and however much you choose

Finely chop the shallot, garlic, and parsley.

Set a skillet over medium-high heat. Get it good and hot, add pancetta and make grease.

Cook the pancetta until it’s ready to eat. If you’re not a frequent pancetta cooker, it doesn’t take much. You’re basically browning cubes of bacon so firm it up and let it develop some darker colors—a little char is nice. Add the shallot, and continue, stirring everything around now and then for thirty seconds. Add the garlic and continue stirring for thirty more. Pour in the coffee, let half or so boil away. Sometimes I add chicken stock if the coffee is too astringent, sometimes I don’t. Make that call yourself. Throw in the parsley and whatever heat, if any, you prefer. I used a pinch of cayenne and added a pinch more after tasting at the end.

I’ve gotten lazy with roux and that’s made a difference in my life. I used to fret over ratio, wonder if this or that calls for toasted flour, and overall make like I’m fete-ing Cajun royalty rather than trying to get whatever’s in front of me to stick to the back of a metal soup spoon. Now I put a few pats of butter on a cutting board, pour a little flour over it, and mash it with my thumb. It’s a little more involved than I make it sound. There’s pinching with one or two other fingers, but that’s about it.

I don’t care how much pseudo-roux I make as long as it’s enough. Take a few chips or flakes of roux and whisk it in. Repeat until it looks thick enough. After that, taste for salt and pepper and serve.

This was great over chicken thighs but not terribly photogenic. Here it is in glory with a polenta cake.

Upscale campfire grub. Yell “Come and get it!” and dance a chuckwagon cookie jig while dressed like Fred Astaire.