Poetry

[vinteuil]

... I wonder if it's from the opera by Iain Bell which WNO are doing?

The cast there is -

Private John Ball Andrew Bidlack
Bard of Brittannia/HQ Officer Peter Coleman-Wright
Bard of Germania/Alice the Barmaid/The Queen of the Woods Alexandra Deshorties
Lieutenant Jenkins George Humphreys
Lance Corporal Lewis Marcus Farnsworth
Sergeant Snell Mark Le Brocq
Dai Greatcoat Donald Maxwell
The Marne Sergeant Graham Clark

My copy of In Parenthesis is in the loft, not conveniently to hand - which character has the Boasting Speech, including "I was the spear in Balin's hand... "?




.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

My copy of In Parenthesis is in the loft, not conveniently to hand - which character has the Boasting Speech, including "I was the spear in Balin's hand.

The Long Boast of Dai Greatcoat - on pages 79 - 84 of the most recent republication.

I wonder if it is the Michael Sheen reading that is used in the R3 Trailer?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_u98ZLptv8

[agingjb]

Thanks. It sounds like David Jones. It isn't the opera. The character is I think, Dai Greatcoat. The speech is from Part 4 (King Pellam's Launde), page 79 in the Faber edition. And I see that I posted too late - just.

Then again, Richard Burton?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Then again, Richard Burton?

Or maybe ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0211tcq

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

There is a recording of Burton reading the Boast on this recording:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Burton-at-BBC-CASSETTE-Richard/dp/B0000573SE

... but, having searched the entire youTube Burton "catalogue", I can confirm that it's not therein available!


There is a recording of excerpts from David Copperfield, with Uriah Heep played by Boris Karloff!

[Padraig]

Early to Bed

Old age is not my problem. Bad health, yes.
If I were well again, I'd walk for miles,
My name a synonym for tirelessness.
On Friday nights I'd go out on the tiles:

I'd go to tango joints and stand up straight
While women leaned against me trustingly,
I'd push them backward at a stately rate
With steps of eloquence and intricacy.

Alone in the cafe, my favourite place,
I'd sit up late to carve a verse like this.
I couldn't do it at my usual pace
But weight of manner would add emphasis.

The grand old man. Do I dare play that part?
Perhaps I am too frail. I don't know how
To say exactly what is in my heart,
Except I feel that I am nowhere now.

But I have tempted providence too long:
It gives me life enough, and little pain.
I should be grateful for this simple song,
No matter how it goes against the grain

To spend the best part of a winter's day
Filing away at some reluctant rhyme
And go to bed with so much still to say
On how I came to have so little time.

Clive James Sentenced to Life 2015

[johncorrigan]

There's a new programme started last night on BBC2 where Dan Snow and a team are re-creating the route of the Klondike Gold Rush. What a life those people must have lived. When I was a kid it was the stories of Jack London and old movies...and, of course, the poems of Robert Service. This reading from 'The Spell of the Yukon' was recited during the programme and it had me going for a look at the whole poem - went well with the landscape, I thought:

'There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace.'

Robert Service

[johncorrigan]

Perhaps not his greatest work, but since I read this when I was at school whenever I find myself on a bus as the lone passenger I think of Leonard Cohen's poem and love it all over again.
The bus

I was the last passenger of the day,
I was alone on the bus,
I was glad they were spending all that money
just getting me up Eighth Avenue.
Driver! I shouted, it’s you and me tonight,
let’s run away from this big city
to a smaller city more suitable to the heart,
let’s drive past the swimming pools of Miami Beach,
you in the driver’s seat, me several seats back,
but in the racial cities we’ll change places
so as to show how well you’ve done up North,
and let us find ourselves some tiny American fishing village
in unknown Florida
and park right at the edge of the sand,
a huge bus pointing out,
metallic, painted, solitary,
with New York plates.

Leonard Cohen

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.
Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A Favourite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.

Thomas Gray (1716 - 71)

[Padraig]

[FONT=Book Antiqua][SIZE=4]Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

A Favourite has no friend!

Thomas Gray (1716 - 71)

I think I would have saved her, and given up the 'glister' line!

Here is one for the goldfinch.

A Charm of Goldfinches

The pair of us were sitting alone in the empty public house -
The door wide open to the city street - on a summer's morning,
Drinking two quiet pints, myself and Justin.
Justin ventured a single rhetorical question:
'Did you ever set eyes on a charm of goldfinches?'
High up in the corner of the ceiling
Hung a cage with a goldfinch:
A scarlet-faced bird with a yellow bar on its wing feather
And a black-and-white chequered rump and tail.
Without uttering, we ordered two more pints
And the barman skedaddled back out again into the lounge.
Justin put two fingers to his lips and winked at me,
Got to his feet and strolled over to the corner,
Stood under the cage and unlatched it.
The goldfinch on its perch peering down
Into Justin's eager, kindly, glittering eyes -
And Justin looked back down at me -
And space stations of silence seemed to orbit us,
Which amounted in actuality to maybe thirty seconds
And without a tinkle the goldfinch swooped out of the cage
And flew around the bar room,
Diving, circling, darting, weaving, whirling, veering, hopping,
Before flying straight out into the street
Never to be seen again - by us.
Justin in his blacker-than-coal sleek black beard
Under his sleek, thick mane of blacker-than-coal hair
Smiled the most extravagantly other-worldly smile
I had ever seen him smile
And we folded our arms
Across our breasts
And swallowed, as deeply from enlightenment
As from our pint glasses.
Out on the street he rubbed his hands together with gratification
An Lasair Choille, Mac Duarcain - cried Justin - Flame of the Woods,
Son of the Melancholy Man, Thistle-Seed Glutton!
We bid farewell to one another
And until death did us part
Neither of us would ever speak of that summer's morning again.

Paul Durcan The Days of Surprise 2015

[johncorrigan]

Thanks Padraig. Paul Durcan just keeps on giving. Still can't thank you enough for introducing me to his work.

On the subject of cats and birds, and I hope it's not too early, but here's another tale of the freed bird.

Christmas Sparrow

The first thing I heard this morning
was a soft, insistent rustle,
the rapid flapping of wings
against glass as it turned out,

a small bird rioting
in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of transparency into the spacious light.

A noise in the throat of the cat
hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap in a basement door,
and later released from the soft clench of teeth.

Up on a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a small towel and carried it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, it burst
from my uncupped hands into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
and disappearing over a tall row of hemlocks.

Still, for the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms whenever I thought
about the hours the bird must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,

its eyes open, like mine as I lie here tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.


Billy Collins

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight-moment's forest:
Something else is alive
beside the clock's loneliness
and this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window, I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper in darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches leaf, twig;
Two eyes serve a movement that Now
and again Now, and Now, and Now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings; an eye
A widening, deepening greenness
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about his own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks;
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

[Padraig]

Inspired, ferneyhoughgeliebte!

The Country Fiddler

My uncle played the fiddle - more elegantly the violin -
A favourite at barn and cross-roads dance,
He knew The Sailor's Bonnet and The Fowling Piece.

Bachelor head of a house full of sisters,
Runner of poor racehorses, spendthrift,
He left for the New World in an old disgrace.

He left his fiddle in the rafters
When he sailed, never played afterwards;
A rural art silenced in the discord of Brooklyn.

A heavily-built man, tranquil-eyed as an ox,
He ran a wild speakeasy, and died of it.
During the depression many dossed in his cellar.

I attended his funeral in the Church of the Redemption,
Then, unexpected successor, reversed time
To return where he had been born.

During my schooldays the fiddle rusted
(The bridge fell away, the catgut snapped)
Reduced to a plaything stinking of stale rosin.

The country people asked if I also had music
(All the family had had) but the fiddle was in pieces
And the rafters remade, before I discovered my craft.

Twenty years afterwards, I saw the church again,
And promised to remember my burly godfather
And his rural craft, after this fashion:

So succession passes, through strangest hands.



John Montague 1929 - 2016 (d 10 December)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKmxxSb8Tj0

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Thanks, Padraig - I'd've missed the recent death of Montague without your post (what a year!); that "tranquil-eyed like an ox" is a stroke of genius.

I think I've posted this one before (maybe even a couple of times) around this time of year, but it bears repetition:

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day

It is 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.

John DONNE

[Ferretfancy]

There's a new programme started last night on BBC2 where Dan Snow and a team are re-creating the route of the Klondike Gold Rush. What a life those people must have lived. When I was a kid it was the stories of Jack London and old movies...and, of course, the poems of Robert Service. This reading from 'The Spell of the Yukon' was recited during the programme and it had me going for a look at the whole poem - went well with the landscape, I thought:

'There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace.'

Robert Service

Dan Snow, a man almost entirely humourless who gives us earnestly worded lectures. Off goes the switch.