Poetry

[Padraig]

. But for tonight (which, as I'm sure we all know is the birthday of Witold Lutoslawski

How remiss of everyone else! A belated greeting from me - what to choose?

On Maria Dancing

How gracefully Maria leads the dance!
She's life itself. I never saw a foot
So nimble and so elegant: it speaks,
And the sweet whispering poetry it makes
Shames the musician.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A couple of weeks ago, I posted Freda Hughes' furious poem about the prurient film made about her mother's death. To balance, perhaps we need her mother's poem about Freida's birth (the only poem poem I know of written by a poet to her unborn child):

You’re
By Sylvia Plath

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools’ Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.

[Padraig]

Never could make much sense of those photos of babies in the womb so common nowadays. This poem is better!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Never could make much sense of those photos of babies in the womb so common nowadays. This poem is better!

... the "colouring" that Plath's suicide has given her posthumous reputation so neglects the moments of utter joy in life that such writing makes clear she felt. (And the way she transforms the "bun in the oven" saying that so bemused her when she first heard it into "my little loaf" - at once joyful and creating the imagery of growing life!)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

In #36, Karafan gave us a poem from Houseman's A Shropshire Lad, which was a sort of Knaben Wunderhorn for English composers of a hundred years ago. I've never been much attracted to the nostalgia of "those blue remembered hills" - I only really started enjoying life once I was no longer a child and left the parental home. (Nothing sinister - I just didn't like being a child; all those adults telling me what to do! Brrrrr!!!) But I do prefer the understated cynicism of this:

"Is my team ploughing
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?"

Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.

"Is football playing
Along the river-shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?"

Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.

"Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?"

Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.

"Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?"

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.

[amateur51]

In #36, Karafan gave us a poem from Houseman's A Shropshire Lad, which was a sort of Knaben Wunderhorn for English composers of a hundred years ago. I've never been much attracted to the nostalgia of "those blue remembered hills" - I only really started enjoying life once I was no longer a child and left the parental home.

For me, Housman's 'nostalgia' is as much about a world out of reach, longed for but unattainable and unrequited, rather than lost.

A change of pace ...


Cats

Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned

To rules or routes for journeys; counter
Attack with non-resistance; twist
Enticing through the curving fingers
And leave an angered empty fist.

They wait obsequious as darkness
Quick to retire, quick to return;
Admit no aim or ethics; flatter
With reservations; will not learn

To answer to their names; are seldom
Truly owned till shot or skinned.
Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.


A.S.J. Tessimond

[Radio64]

Heard this one on Words and Music the other week ... stopped me in my tracks.

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

Preludes, T. S. Eliot


..am currently tackling The Waste Land...

[johncorrigan]

Heard this one on Words and Music the other week ... stopped me in my tracks.


And then the lighting of the lamps.

Preludes, T. S. Eliot

Elegant, R64 - this, from Edwin Morgan's Glasgow sonnets, contains distressing images, but with little hope:

(i)
A mean wind wanders through the backcourt trash.
Hackles on puddles rise, old mattresses
puff briefly and subside. Play-fortresses
of brick and bric-a-brac spill out some ash.
Four storeys have no windows left to smash,
but the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
mother and daughter the last mistresses
of that black block condemned to stand, not crash.
Around them the cracks deepen, the rats crawl.
The kettle whimpers on a crazy hob.
Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall.
The man lies late since he has lost his job,
smokes on one elbow, letting his coughs fall
thinly into an air too poor to rob.

from Glasgow Sonnets by Edwin Morgan

[Radio64]

Elegant, R64 - this, from Edwin Morgan's Glasgow sonnets, contains distressing images, but with little hope:

...

from Glasgow Sonnets by Edwin Morgan

Goodness!

[Tevot]

Here's a poem by Tony Harrison. I've seen him twice. Once at University - when he came to give a reading looking stern - pissed off (I sensed) and wearing a grey greatcoat (the highlight of which in my opinion was his reading of The Nuptial Torches) Then - a few years later - in the bar at Bradford's Alhambra Theatre where I felt he was looking happier- perusing old posters, photos and bill-boards. He seemed to be wearing the same greatcoat. Such durability. I must contact his tailor!

Anyway - Here it is

Long Distance II



Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

[amateur51]

Aubade


I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.


Philip Larkin

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

For me, Housman's 'nostalgia' is as much about a world out of reach, longed for but unattainable and unrequited, rather than lost.

But it is "the land of lost content" (and they are "blue remembered hills". Nevertheless, your comment and Karafan's posting made me re-read the poem again, looking for what you find in it - and I certainly got more out of it thinking in these terms . It doesn't have to be "childhood" that is "lost", as I'd always presumed.

And that Tessimond poem was fab! (Never heard of him/her before, but "Cats no less liquid than their shadows" is a marvellous line!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Here's a poem by Tony Harrison.

Tevot - you beat me to it! That excerpt from Long Distance was on my list of pieces to include - it's one of the most touching things anybody has written about bereavement. Many thanks for posting it.

[amateur51]

But it is "the land of lost content" (and they are "blue remembered hills". Nevertheless, your comment and Karafan's posting made me re-read the poem again, looking for what you find in it - and I certainly got more out of it thinking in these terms . It doesn't have to be "childhood" that is "lost", as I'd always presumed.

And that Tessimond poem was fab! (Never heard of him/her before, but "Cats no less liquid than their shadows" is a marvellous line!

The reason I was pushing the unrequited line is that a lot of Housman's poetry is filtered through a 'homosexual' (the concept of 'gay' as we understand it today barely existed then) sensibility, yearning for things are have never been and as far as H is concerned never will be - love, companionship, sex, etc. 'lost content' might be something genuinely 'lost' or it may be something denied to me as the price of my being true to my nature in this society ...?

I'm glad you enjoyed the Tessimond - he was a very popular poet in his time and is now largely forgotten. Here's another, one of his more popular ones (tho' i loved the line you picked out from 'Cats' )

The Man In The Bowler Hat

I am the unnoticed, the unnoticable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man who looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the colour of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.
I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too softly and seldom.

I am the man they call the nation's backbone,
Who am boneless - playable castgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

I am the rails on which the moment passes,
The megaphone for many words and voices:
I am the graph diagram,
Composite face.

I am the led, the easily-fed,
The tool, the not-quite-fool,
The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining, bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round


A.S.J Tessimond

[amateur51]

Stars and Planets


Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.

They seem so twinkle-still, but they never cease
Inventing new spaces and huge explosions
And migrating in mathematical tribes over
The steppes of space at their outrageous ease.

It's hard to think that the earth is one –
This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters
Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters,
Attended only by the loveless moon.

Norman MacCaig