Louis MacNeice

 

Snow

 

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes— 

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Caitriona O'Reilly

Clotho

after Camille Claudel
And in the end it was easiest to let go
of all that vigilance, the endless distaff-to-spindle rigour
of your compulsions, and allow the silks to snarl.
For a while, perhaps, you struggled to escape,
snared like an insect in your own allurements.
You had never believed that life was what happened to us.
Rather it was to strike sparks from stone repeatedly,
smoothing the planes with a morsel of bone
until your own eyes glittered in the veined torso. For here there is no place that does not see you . . .
You were a wilful girl, and wilful girls must learn
that to haul life from matter is a god’s concern.
And always there was something there you could not reach:
it flickered below the surface of the marble
like a candle behind a grimed window,
mocking your eager questions like an echo.

 from Geis (2015)

Donne

A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

         For I am every dead thing,

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

                For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

         I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

         Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood

                Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

         Were I a man, that I were one

         I needs must know; I should prefer,

                If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

What else could I possibly post on this day? A favourite poem by a favourite poet.  And a piece that proved to me that I couldn't write an academic essay about poems or books that I really love.  If it speaks to my heart, I can't put it through the intellectual mincer that grinds and sucks the life out of beautiful writing.  

The photo was taken this evening on a walk through the gardens of Villa Celimontana, not far from where I live in Rome.

Rumi

Undressing

Learn the alchemy true human beings
know: the moment you accept what

troubles you've been given, the door
will open. Welcome difficulty

as a familiar comrade. Joke with
torment brought by the Friend.

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes
and jackets that serve to cover,

then are taken off.  That undressing,
and the naked body beneath, is

the sweetness that comes after grief.

translated by Coleman Barks 

Kathleen Jamie

Moon

Last night, when the moon

slipped into my attic room

as an oblong of light,

I sensed she’d come to commiserate.

It was August. She traveled

with a small valise

of darkness, and the first few stars

returning to the northern sky,

and my room, it seemed,

had missed her. She pretended

an interest in the bookcase

while other objects

stirred, as in a rock pool,

with unexpected life:

strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,

the paper-crowded desk;

the books, too, appeared inclined

to open and confess.

Being sure the moon

harbored some intention,

I waited; watched for an age

her cool gaze shift

first toward a flower sketch

pinned on the far wall

then glide down to recline

along the pinewood floor,

before I’d had enough. Moon,

I said, We’re both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you,

the simple words of love? Say them.

You are not my mother;

with my mother, I waited unto death.

Source: Poetry (October 2012)

Rilke

Jane Kenyon

 After an illness walking the Dog

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
The he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.
The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.
Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.
A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems 1997, Graywolf Press

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.

Julio Cortazar

Autumn Summary

 

In evening’s dome each bird is a point of memory.
It’s amazing sometimes how the year's fervor
returns, returns without a body, returns for no reason at all,
how beauty, so brief in its violent love,
saves us an echo as night falls.

And so, what can you do but stand there slack-armed,
your heart overloaded and that taste of dust
that was a rose or a road—
Flight outflies the wing.
Without humility you know this remnant
was wrung from the dark by the work of silence?
that the branch in your hand, the dark tear
are your inheritance, the man with his story,
the lamp shining its light.

Blake - A Poison Tree

A Poison Tree 

I was angry with my friend; 

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe: 

I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

And I waterd it in fears,

Night & morning with my tears: 

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles. 

And it grew both day and night. 

Till it bore an apple bright. 

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine. 

And into my garden stole, 

When the night had veild the pole; 

In the morning glad I see; 

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
William Blake  

Blake is one of my favourite artists - a mystic, a visionary, precise, a wild thinker, a Kipling's cat. I first came across A Poison Tree when I was at school: at seventeen I enjoyed its rhythms, cleverness and glee. But it spoke to me in a different way decades later when I was living a life riven by jealousy, betrayal, anger and despair. And I felt completely powerless.

I hated the corrosive bite of jealousy, hated the weakness, knew I was in the wrong and resented it. My salvation, always but especially then, was art. The colours of my life then were the bilious green of jealousy, the red of passion and anger, the purple of grief for what I had lost, and the black of despair. I put them all into this textile piece, inspired by Blake and by George Eliot who wrote Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love and One of the tortures of jealousy is that it can never turn its eyes away from the thing that pains it.

'Jealousy' is one a few cathartic pieces I made during that spiky time but it is my favourite. Every step of its creation released a different painful aspect of an impossible situation. And while it didn't, couldn't, change that situation it was my shouting into the tempest, my Medusa moment.

Felicity Griffin Clark 'Jealousy' (120x95cm)

Keats and Shelley

On Saturday we went to Keats-Shelley House to hear English actor Julian Sands read from KSH's own edition of Keats' and Shelley's poems (for which he also wrote the preface, and was kind enough to sign after the perfomance).

KSH is a tiny museum right next to the Spanish Steps, where Keats lived and died in 1821. The museum has beautifully preserved the house as it was in Keats' time, including the small bedroom and bed where he died of tuberculosis.

Julian Sands gave a wonderful performance, informal and friendly, infused with his enthusiasm for Keats and Shelley's work and sensitive to the nuances of language and meaning. I love reading poetry, but 'On First looking into Chapman's Homer', 'Ozymandias', 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'To a Skylark' are almost over-familiar to those of us who studied literature in the 20th century, and my tastes have moved on to other writers, in and outside the canon. But hearing someone read these poems with passion and understanding and vigour was almost like hearing them for the first time, but with a delicious layer of knowing, and remembering what is was like to discover them as a teenager.

The last poem of the Keats section of the program was one I hadn't seen before - his last poem, a fragment written in the margins of a manuscript, short, unfinished but full of potent images of mortality and contradictions- is it chilling and/or comforting?

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chilly thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.