Poetry

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A furious poem:

My Mother: Freida Hughes

They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
But they do it annually, or weekly,
Some even do it daily,
Carrying her death around in their heads
And practising it. She saves them
The trouble of their own;
They can die through her
Without ever making
The decision. My buried mother
Is up-dug for repeat performances.


Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.

The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother’s death, will go home,
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless – a souvenir.
Maybe they’ll buy the video.

Watching someone on TV
Means all they have to do
Is press ‘pause’
If they want to boil a kettle,
While my mother holds her breath on screen
To finish dying after tea.
The filmmakers have collected
The body parts,
They want me to see.
They require dressings to cover the joins
And disguise the prosthetics
In their remake of my mother;
They want to use her poetry
As stitching and sutures
To give it credibility.
They think I should love it –
Having her back again, they think
I should give them my mother’s words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,
Who will walk and talk
And die at will,
And die, and die
And forever be dying.

[johncorrigan]

Blimey!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Blimey!

Quite! Freida Hughes is Sylvia Plath's daughter and the poem was written in response both to the "Plath Suicide" obssessives and, more particularly, to the Gwynneth Paltrow film about Plath and Ted Hughes. In some ways, the passion makes the artistry trip a couple of times (in ways that neither of her parents' ever did) - "peanut eaters" is particularly poor, I feel (do cinema-goers eat peanuts? Is "peanut eater" effective as an insult? Doesn't the inadequacy of the bathetic "eater" lessen the impact that she wants to make?) but the intensity of that passion overall - well, "blimey!", as you say.

[johncorrigan]

Out on the edge people wander the beaches and have done for ever. In his sparse careful language George Mackay Brown brings to life a really ancient time that has happened within my lifetime.

Beachcomber

Monday I found a boot –
Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.

Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.
Next winter
It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.

Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.
I tilted my head.
The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.

Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.

Friday I held a seaman’s skull,
Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones.

Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.
A Spanish ship
Was wrecked last month at The Kame.

Sunday, for fear of the elders,
I sit on my bum.
What’s heaven? A sea chest with a thousand gold coins.

.

George Mackay Brown

[Padraig]

See your George Mackay Brown, a Sheáin, and a Patrick Kavanagh sonnet at you.

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
'Here is the march along these iron stones'.
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

[Karafan]

From A.E. Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad'.


INTO my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

[vinteuil]

... I enjoy this single-sentence tour de force

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE

I dreamt one night — it was a horrid dream —
That I was dead, and made was the division
Between the innocent flesh and guilty spirit,
And that the former, with a white sheet wrapt round
And nailed up in a box, was to the bottom
Sunk of a deep and narrow pit, which straight
Was filled to overheaping with a mixture
Of damp clay, rotting flesh and mouldering bones,
And lidded with a weighty stone whereon
Was writ my name and on what days precise
I first and last drew breath; while up the latter
Flew, without help of wings or fins or members,
By its mere lightness, through the air, to heaven;
And there being placed before the judgment-seat
Of its Maker, and most unsatisfactory
Answer returning to the question: — "Wherefore
Wast thou as I made thee?" was sent down
Tumbling by its own weight, down down to Hell,
To sink or swim or wade as best it might,
In sulphurous fires unquenchable for ever,
With Socrates and Plato, Aristides
Falsely surnamed the just, and Zoroaster,
Titus the good, and Cato and divine
Homer and Virgil, and so many millions
And millions more of wrongfully called good
And wise and virtuous , that for want of sulphur
And fire and snakes and instruments of torture
And room in Hell, the Universal Maker
Was by his own inherent justice forced,
That guilt might not go scot-free and unpunished,
To set apart so large a share of Heaven
For penal colonies and jails and treadmills,
That mutinies for want of flying-space
Began t' arise among the cherubim
And blessed spirits, and a Proclamation
Of Martial Law in Heaven was just being read
When, in a sweat of agony and fear,
I woke, and found myself in Germany,
In the close prison of a German bed,
And at my bedside Mr Oberkellner
With printed list of questions in his hand:
My name and age and birthplace and religion,
Trade or profession, wherefore I had come,
How long to stay, whither next bound, and so forth;
All at my peril to be truly answered,
And upon each a sixpence to the State,
Which duly paid I should obtain permission
To stay where I was so long as the State pleased,
Without being prosecuted as a felon,
Spy, or disturber of the public peace.

Trompeter-Schlosschen, Dresden, April 15, 1854.

James Henry [1798-1876]

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Johncorrigan's gift of the superb Mackay Brown poem reminded me of his fellow Orkadean (is that the correct spelling? Looks more like something from Whales!) Edwin Muir, of whom TS Eliot once wrote " ... I must admit that, in my youth, I gave very little heed to Muir's poetry.; it was not of the kind that I was trying to write myself, and it was not until after my own lines of development were well established that it began to appeal to me. A young poet is apt to be indifferent to the work of a contemporary who is following a different path from his own. But when I came to study the 'Collected Poems' ... I was struck, as I had not been before, by the power of his work. // Under the pressure of emotional intensity, and possessed by his vision, he found, almost unconsciously, the right, the inevitable way of saying what he had to say.

Orpheus' Dream

And there she was. The little boat
Coasting the perilous isles of sleep
Zones of oblivion and despair,
Stopped, for Eurydice was there.
The foundering skiff could scarcely keep
All that felicity afloat.

As if we had left earth's frontier wood
Long since, and from this sea had won
The lost original of the soul,
The moment gave us pure and whole
Each back to each, and swept us on
Past every choice to boundless good.

Forgiveness, truth, atonement, all
Our love at once -- till we could dare
At last to turn our heads and see
The poor ghost of Eurydice
Still sitting in her silver chair,
Alone in Hades' empty hall.

[french frank]

Famous French pome (I was unaware of its use by the BBC to signal the imminence of D-Day):

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure.

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

[Beresford]

What does "meopine" mean? It's not in my dictionary.

[french frank]

What does "meopine" mean? It's not in my dictionary.

Cf 'methinks'? At a guess?

[Padraig]

Famous French pome

Très triste, ff.

Ici un autre 'pome'

Tilly

He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.

Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough.

James Joyce from Pomes Penyeach

[Globaltruth]

In my Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art

- Dylan Thomas.

[johncorrigan]

At last to turn our heads and see
The poor ghost of Eurydice
Still sitting in her silver chair,
Alone in Hades' empty hall.[/SIZE][/FONT]

I'm no classicist ferney and always thought of the story from poor Orpheus' viewpoint - never thought of poor Euridyce - she had been airbrushed out of the future. Maybe it takes the Orcadian in Muir to talk of what is left behind. Haunting poem.

Global's Dylan Thomas poem brought another of Mackay Brown's poems to mind, if only because I read it the other night. Thought you might like it.

The Poet

Therefore he no more troubled the pool of silence
But put on mask and cloak,
Strung a guitar
And moved among the folk.
Dancing they cried,
'Ah, how our sober islands
Are gay again, since this blind lyrical tramp
Invaded the Fair!'

Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, interrogation of silence.

George Mackay Brown

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm no classicist ferney and always thought of the story from poor Orpheus' viewpoint - never thought of poor Euridyce - she had been airbrushed out of the future. Maybe it takes the Orcadian in Muir to talk of what is left behind. Haunting poem.

It is - aside from The Horses Muir is rather overlooked today, which I think is unfair on both his poetry and on today.

Global's Dylan Thomas poem brought another of Mackay Brown's poems to mind, if only because I read it the other night. Thought you might like it.

Ooh - I did!

Some wonderful work on the Seamus Heaney thread being supplied by Padraig - highly recommended. But for tonight (which, as I'm sure we all know is the birthday of Witold Lutoslawski -

Let other poets raise a fracas
'Bout wines an' vines an' drunken Bacchus,
An' crabbed names an' stories wrack us
An' grate our lug;
I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak' us
In glass or jug.

O thou my muse! guid auld Scotch Drink
Whether thro' wimplin worms thou jink,
Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,
In glorious faem,
Inspire me, till I lisp and' wink,
To sing thy name!

Let husky wheat the haughs adorn,
An’ aits set up their awnie horn,
An’ pease and beans, at e’en or morn,
Perfume the plain:
Leeze me on thee, John Barleycorn,
Thou king o’ grain!

On thee aft Scotland chows her cood,
In souple scones, the wale o’food!
Or tumblin in the boiling flood
Wi’ kail an’ beef;
But when thou pours thy strong heart’s blood,
There thou shines chief.

Food fills the wame, an’ keeps us leevin;
Tho’ life’s a gift no worth receivin,
When heavy-dragg’d wi’ pine an’ grievin;
But, oil’d by thee,
The wheels o’ life gae down-hill, scrievin,
Wi’ rattlin glee.

Thou clears the head o’doited Lear;
Thou cheers ahe heart o’ drooping Care;
Thou strings the nerves o’ Labour sair,
At’s weary toil;
Though even brightens dark Despair
Wi' gloomy smile.

The opening stanzas of Burns' Scotch Drink - there are another fifteen verses, but Burns can write me under the table!
Sláinte!