Poetry

[Keraulophone]

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

A sonnet composed by Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in October 1816, when he was just 20 years old. The poem focuses on Keats’s initial encounter with an English translation of Homer’s poetry by George Chapman (c. 1559-1634), likening the experience to that of an astronomer discovering a new planet or an explorer sighting an unknown land.


Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
.

[Petrushka]

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise
.

PG Wodehouse was fond of quoting this line following some improbable escapade by Bertie Wooster so just reading it again raised a smile.

[Keraulophone]

PG Wodehouse was fond of quoting this line following some improbable escapade by Bertie Wooster so just reading it again raised a smile.

Thomas Beecham on Ethel Smyth:
‘She was an absolute portent of activity - physical and mental. She was on the go from morning till night, and I suspect from the greater part of night till morning. She swam into my ken when I was giving, for the first time anywhere, the whole of the Mass of Life of Delius. She was very taken with it.’ (Musical Times, July 1958)
.

[Joseph K]

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
.

[Constantbee]

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

A sonnet composed by Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in October 1816, when he was just 20 years old. The poem focuses on Keats’s initial encounter with an English translation of Homer’s poetry by George Chapman (c. 1559-1634), likening the experience to that of an astronomer discovering a new planet or an explorer sighting an unknown land.


Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
.

This sonnet featured in a Wigmore Hall discussion programme I enjoyed last week:

https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/keats-a-brief-life-in-nine-poems-and-one-epitaph-202104151200

Still available to view and recommended.

It was beautifully read by speaker Ruth Rosen, who managed to demonstrate how meaning can be conveyed or enhanced in a poem or passage of text when it’s well read, something I listen out for in choral evensong broadcasts where the readings are sometimes garbled or rushed.

This being Keats' bicentennial year I hied myself onto the catalogues of local public libraries to search for Lucasta Miller’s book – and found it closer to home than I expected to, which was pleasing as it hasn't been out long. I doubt whether the book will make recommended student reading lists, but it’s a great read written by an enthusiast for enthusiasts. Lucasta Miller is none other than Mrs Ian Bostridge btw.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1117474/keats/9781787331617.html

[Keraulophone]

https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/keats-a-brief-life-in-nine-poems-and-one-epitaph-202104151200

Lucasta Miller’s book

Thanks for these tips, Cb. I’ve ordered the book.

I enjoyed Omnibus’s The Last Journey of John Keats in February. It’s worth looking out for a repeat on BBC 4 (why is it FOUR?).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000t0ht

.

[Padraig]

[QUOTE=vinteuil;845062]

Laertes

Michael Longley

Many thanks for that, v. Should have known the poem, but did not. However, I am now reminded that I bought his Collected Poems back in 2016 when on a trip to Bellaghy, and now I will start on a journey through the nine volumes. Here is one that quickly caught my eye from the first volume :

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, I think of you
Wakening early each morning to write,
Dressing with care for the act of poetry.
Yours is always a perfect progress through
Such cluttered rooms to eloquence, delight,
To words - your window on the mystery.

In your house in Amherst Massachusetts,
Though like love letters you lock them away,
The poems are ubiquitous as dust.
You sit there writing while the light permits -
While you grow older they increase each day,
Gradual as flowers, gradual as rust.

Michael Longley from No Continuing City 1969

[johncorrigan]

Inspired by Keats.

My Gran Visits England by Grace Nichols

My Gran was a Caribbean lady
As Caribbean as could be
She came across to visit us
In Shoreham by the sea.

She'd hardly put her suitcase down
when she began a digging spree
Out in the back garden
To see what she could see

And she found:
That the ground was as groundy
That the frogs were as froggy
That the earthworms were as worthy

That the weeds were as weedy
That the seeds were as seedy
That the bees were as busy
as those back home

And she paused from her digging
And she wondered
And she looked at her spade
And she pondered

Then she stood by a rose
As a slug passed by her toes
And she called to my Dad
as she struck pose after pose,

'Boy, come and take my photo – the place cold,
But wherever there's God's earth, I'm at home.'

Grace Nichols

[vinteuil]

.


A Bookshop Idyll

Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY
Comes the brief POETRY shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

'I travel, you see', 'I think' and 'I can read'
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
Girls aren't like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
They write about it,

And the awful way their poems lay open
Just doesn't strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
We sat up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn't write.

Kingsley Amis [1922-1995]

.

[Padraig]

To celebrate the reopening of our best bookshop I bought a book yesterday - Derek Mahon, New Selected Poems. It's a great read, and though I have not made my way through all the poems yet I have no difficulty in finding several well worth sharing. Here is one, with a visual aid as an introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxU6kk24mho

At the Butler Arms

No boats this week, too choppy, so we watch
from a spread table beneath
a Charlie Chaplin photograph
who often came here for a holiday;
or we drive over to Finian's Cove to study
the eight-mile stretch

of water between here and Sceilig Mhichil
where the old anchorites
and monks who chose the place and raised
a church, two chapels and six drystone huts,
survived on dulse and mackerel
out in the haze.

No pleasant woodland there, no grazing deer
such as the others knew
above fly-bubbling salmon streams ashore,
in field and forest beneath oak and yew -
not calm, contemplative ease
but violent seas.

Six hundred years of plainchant and response,
gannet and cormorant; six
centuries of the 'crude bronze crucifix'
in Finian's church, chalice and canticle,
prayer book and reading candle,
thistles and campions.

How could you get inside their bony heads?
Wrapped up in mystic mists,
they spent the hours and years
wrestling with the hot flesh in their cold beds,
their backs to Europe and the wars,
talking to ghosts.

What news of the great world, of Gaul and Rome,
Iona and Cappadocia? Some,
but late; prostrate at Easter in the nave
they listened to the whistling wave
and saw the sun sink in an infinite ocean
world of its own.


Strong winds continue, so no trip this time.
Still, it could be predictable to climb
to the immense height and the whole shocking
reach of the Atlantic (with special care
since there's no handrail there).
No going back,

is there, to that wild hush of dedication,
to the solitude, the intense belief,
the last rock of an abandoned civilization
whose dim lights glimmered in a distant age
to illuminate at the edge
a future life.

Derek Mahon

[jayne lee wilson]

John Berryman, Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

("Henry" is a principal character in the sequence, kinda Berryman and not-Berryman, who has suffered some intense yet unnamed loss...)

[silvestrione]

John Berryman, Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

("Henry" is a principal character in the sequence, kinda Berryman and not-Berryman, who has suffered some intense yet unnamed loss...)

Nice to be reminded of this, thanks, Jayne.

[silvestrione]

To celebrate the reopening of our best bookshop I bought a book yesterday - Derek Mahon, New Selected Poems. It's a great read, and though I have not made my way through all the poems yet I have no difficulty in finding several well worth sharing. Here is one, with a visual aid as an introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxU6kk24mho

At the Butler Arms

No boats this week, too choppy, so we watch
from a spread table beneath
a Charlie Chaplin photograph
who often came here for a holiday;
or we drive over to Finian's Cove to study
the eight-mile stretch

of water between here and Sceilig Mhichil
where the old anchorites
and monks who chose the place and raised
a church, two chapels and six drystone huts,
survived on dulse and mackerel
out in the haze.

No pleasant woodland there, no grazing deer
such as the others knew
above fly-bubbling salmon streams ashore,
in field and forest beneath oak and yew -
not calm, contemplative ease
but violent seas.

Six hundred years of plainchant and response,
gannet and cormorant; six
centuries of the 'crude bronze crucifix'
in Finian's church, chalice and canticle,
prayer book and reading candle,
thistles and campions.

How could you get inside their bony heads?
Wrapped up in mystic mists,
they spent the hours and years
wrestling with the hot flesh in their cold beds,
their backs to Europe and the wars,
talking to ghosts.

What news of the great world, of Gaul and Rome,
Iona and Cappadocia? Some,
but late; prostrate at Easter in the nave
they listened to the whistling wave
and saw the sun sink in an infinite ocean
world of its own.


Strong winds continue, so no trip this time.
Still, it could be predictable to climb
to the immense height and the whole shocking
reach of the Atlantic (with special care
since there's no handrail there).
No going back,

is there, to that wild hush of dedication,
to the solitude, the intense belief,
the last rock of an abandoned civilization
whose dim lights glimmered in a distant age
to illuminate at the edge
a future life.

Derek Mahon

Superb! Thank you so much. I love especially the way the rhymes work, a kind of fittingness that reinforces the 'rightness' of the phrasing and perception.

(I must have this poem somewhere, but seem to have missed it before)

[silvestrione]

Alone, in silence, at a certain time of night,
Listening, and looking up from what I'm trying to write,
I hear a local train along the Valley. And " There
Goes the one-fifty", think I to myself; aware
That somehow its habitual travelling comforts me,
Making my world seem safer, homelier, sure to be
The same to-morrow; and the same, one hopes, next year.
" There's peacetime in that train." One hears it disappear
With needless warning whistle and rail-resounding wheels.
"That train's quite like an old familiar friend", one feels.

Sassoon (which gives the third-last line additional weight).

[vinteuil]

.

In one of these excursions, travelling then
Through Wales on foot and with a youthful friend,
I left Bethkelet’s huts at couching-time,
And westward took my way to see the sun
Rise from the top of Snowdon. Having reached
The cottage at the mountain’s foot, we there
Rouzed up the shepherd who by ancient right
Of office is the stranger’s usual guide,
And after a short refreshment sallied forth.

It was a summer’s night, a close warm night,
Wan, dull, and glaring, with a dripping mist
Low-hung and thick that covered all the sky,
Half threatening storm and rain; but on we went
Unchecked, being full of heart and having faith
In our tried pilot. Little could we see,
Hemmed round on every side with fog and damp,
And, after ordinary travellers’ chat
With our conductor, silently we sunk
Each into commerce with his private thoughts.
Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself
Was nothing either seen or heard the while
Which took me from my musings, save that once
The shepherd’s cur did to his own great joy
Unearth a hedgehog in the mountain-crags,
Round which he made a barking turbulent.
This small adventure – for even such it seemed
In that wild place and at the dead of night –
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before. With forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up
With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts,
Thus might we wear perhaps an hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chanced, the foremost of the band –
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor had I time to ask the cause of this,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash. I looked about, and lo,
The moon stood naked in the heavens at height
Immense above my head, and on the shore
I found myself of a huge sea of mist,
Which meek and silent rested at my feet.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the sea, the real sea, that seemed
To dwindle and give up its majesty,
Usurped upon as far as sight could reach.
Meanwhile, the moon looked down upon this shew
In single glory, and we stood, the mist
Touching our very feet; and from the shore
At distance not the third part of a mile
Was a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The soul, the imagination of the whole.

A meditation rose in me that night
Upon the lonely mountain when the scene
Had passed away, and it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an under-presence
The sense of God, or whatsoe’er is dim
Or vast in its own being – above all,
One function of such mind had Nature there
Exhibited by putting forth, and that
Which circumstance most awful and sublime:
That domination which she oftentimes
Exerts upon the outward face of things,
So moulds them, and endues, abstracts, combines,
Or by abrupt and unhabitual influence
Doth make one object so impress itself
Upon all others, and pervades them so,
That even the grossest minds must see and hear,
And cannot chuse but feel.

William Wordsworth [1770-1850]

The Prelude [1805 text] book 13, 1-84

.