Neruda

Ocean

Body purer than a wave,
salt that washes the line,
and the luminous bird
flying without roots.

Full Woman, Fleshly Apply, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Tennyson

Tennyson's poetry is not popular nowadays, but I am a bit of a fan of things Victorian - as well as Tennyson, I like William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites and Julia Margaret Cameron, but Tennyson is almost the archetypal Victorian with his literary career spanning much of the nineteenth century. So far, so bourgeois! 

Published in Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1830 Mariana is not strictly speaking a Victorian poem. For context, in 1830 Coleridge and Wordsworth were still alive but Keats, Shelley and Byron had all flamed into fame and died during the previous decade. Victoria herself wouldn't come to the throne for another seven years, and the other Behemoths of Victorian literature (Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes) were in the future.  For me there are echoes of Donne's Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day  - another poem full of lost love, cold and darkness.

It is often linked to Millais painting of the same name (painted in 1851), which certainly conveys the ennui of Tennyson's Mariana, but I think the feel of the poem is much more like some of the works by Samuel Palmer, like this one held in Tate Britain, an ink and gouache on card made around the same time. The world is monochromatic, darkening, the mood is solitary and wistful.

Samuel Palmer, Landscape Girl Standing, c1826 

©Tate Photo ©Tate CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

Mariana in the Moated Grange

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;

She could not look on the sweet heaven,

Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,

She drew her casement-curtain by,

And glanced athwart the glooming flats.

She only said, "The night is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:

The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen's low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn

About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "The day is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,

And o'er it many, round and small,

The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarled bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said "I am aweary, aweary

I would that I were dead!"

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creak'd;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,

Or from the crevice peer'd about.

Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound

Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound

Her sense; but most she loathed the hour

When the thick-moted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day

Was sloping toward his western bower.

Then said she, "I am very dreary,

He will not come," she said;

She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!"

HD

Eurydice

I

So you have swept me back,

I who could have walked with the live souls

above the earth,

I who could have slept among the live flowers

at last;

so for your arrogance

and your ruthlessness

I am swept back

where dead lichens drip

dead cinders upon moss of ash;

so for your arrogance

I am broken at last,

I who had lived unconscious,

who was almost forgot;

if you had let me wait

I had grown from listlessness

into peace,

if you had let me rest with the dead,

I had forgot you

and the past.

II

Here only flame upon flame

and black among the red sparks,

streaks of black and light

grown colourless;

why did you turn back,

that hell should be reinhabited

of myself thus

swept into nothingness?

why did you glance back?

why did you hesitate for that moment?

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth,

above my face?

what was it that crossed my face

with the light from yours

and your glance?

what was it you saw in my face?

the light of your own face,

the fire of your own presence?

What had my face to offer

but reflex of the earth,

hyacinth colour

caught from the raw fissure in the rock

where the light struck,

and the colour of azure crocuses

and the bright surface of gold crocuses

and of the wind-flower,

swift in its veins as lightning

and as white.

                               III

Saffron from the fringe of the earth,

wild saffron that has bent

over the sharp edge of earth,

all the flowers that cut through the earth,

all, all the flowers are lost;

everything is lost,

everything is crossed with black,

black upon black

and worse than black,

this colourless light.

                               IV

Fringe upon fringe

of blue crocuses,

crocuses, walled against blue of themselves,

blue of that upper earth,

blue of the depth upon depth of flowers,

lost;

flowers,

if I could have taken once my breath of them,

enough of them,

more than earth,

even than of the upper earth,

had passed with me

beneath the earth;

if I could have caught up from the earth,

the whole of the flowers of the earth,

if once I could have breathed into myself

the very golden crocuses

and the red,

and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,

the whole of the golden mass,

the whole of the great fragrance,

I could have dared the loss.

                              V

So for your arrogance

and your ruthlessness

I have lost the earth   

and the flowers of the earth,

and the live souls above the earth,

and you who passed across the light

and reached

ruthless;

you who have your own light,

who are to yourself a presence,

who need no presence;

yet for all your arrogance

and your glance,

I tell you this:

such loss is no loss,

such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls

of blackness,

such terror

is no loss; 

hell is no worse than your earth

above the earth,

hell is no worse,

no, nor your flowers

nor your veins of light

nor your presence,

a loss;

my hell is no worse than yours

though you pass among the flowers and speak

with the spirits above earth.

                               VI

Against the black

I have more fervour

than you in all the splendour of that place,

against the blackness

and the stark grey

I have more light;

and the flowers,

if I should tell you,

you would turn from your own fit paths

toward hell,

turn again and glance back

and I would sink into a place

even more terrible than this.

                              VII

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts, no god

can take that;

I have the fervour of myself for a presence

and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss

knows this;

though small against the black,

small against the formless rocks,

hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,

hell must open like a red rose

for the dead to pass.

full moon scraps

to add to this online chapbook, some visuals - my artwork, my photos, my past moons

John Siddique

Ivy Moon

At the end were only words.
The words survived our flesh.

The you said, let it be dark,
and it was dark,

and I said as long as there
are words we go on.

There is no separating out.
Speak in to the dark and it is good,

and we made a firm promise of
those words, there will be no division.

We took back the day and night.
Undid our concepts of heaven and hell.

Spun the day and the night back
into the clock.

Let us be dark, without image.
No longer trying to see what is good.

John Siddique Recital Salt Publishing 2009

John Siddique

I discovered John Siddique's poetry in mid-2010 with his fourth collection Recital, An Anthology (Salt Publishing 2009).

I must admit that a major drawcard (at first) by his use of a Genesis lyric as a poem title, but then I was drawn into his world of gentle observation and commentary and found that reading his poems felt like reading his heart. 

You've got to get in to get out
The world will impinge into your need
for silence, into your prayers. In the hardest seconds
of your life, your neighbours will be drunk,
booming hip-hop through thin inconvenient walls.

At the lighting of your candles, in the moment
you need to focus - the apex of your flame,
the voice of the Holy Spirit, someone
will be vacuuming, talking, ringing up change,
a bin wagon bleeping as it reverses, builders
swearing into the distance you put by pulling into
yourself. It sounds like they are calling your name.