Poetry

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Closing lines from Poem on his Birthday

Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Thangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thuderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.

Dylan Thomas

Miserable reggub was 35 when he wrote this! Must've been a particularly unpleasant pair of socks Caitlin gave him that day - but I agree with his counted blessings. Here the nogood boyo is himself reading the whole thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5QpQ3x42NQ

[agingjb]

Prompted by the recent "In Our Time" on John Clare, I was thinking of posting his poem "I Am". But it turns out that there seem to be two versions of the last two lines of the first stanza.

In The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse:

"Like shadows in love - frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live like vapours tossed"

In The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972):

"Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost"

anything known?

[Padraig]

Prompted by the recent "In Our Time" on John Clare, I was thinking of posting his poem "I Am". But it turns out that there seem to be two versions of the last two lines of the first stanza.

In The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse:

"Like shadows in love - frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live like vapours tossed"

In The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972):

"Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost"

anything known?

A guess any good jb?

Here is a third version -

"Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am - I live - though I am tossed."

I would guess that several drafts were made and rejected for your second example. The first does not scan too well, and is not a rhyming couplet. My example is a half-way house.

You've made me read some more poems by John Clare. I had forgotten how I had enjoyed the few I had read previously.

[agingjb]

Thanks. It is a trifle odd that the text of the best known poem of such an important poet is presented, without comment, in various forms; although I assume that the variations go right back to the manuscripts.

I've ordered "John Clare, Major Works", (eds. Robinson and Powell); maybe yet another version.

[johncorrigan]

I love Clare's 'Skylark'.

The Skylark


The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize—
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.

John Clare

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Much appreciating this new Clare sequence. On the question of the last lines of verse one of I Am! the circumstances in which it was written probably accounts for the "unedited" alternatives. I found this on the website of composer "Artsyhonker" (where do people get such stupid ideas for a webname from!):

The poem, written by John Clare, seems to have a few different versions of the fifth line in the first stanza. I set the one that I was given for the competition: “Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost”, which rhymes with the final line of the poem; but other versions include “Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes” or “Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost”; I don’t know the provenance of these different versions, but the version I was given does better justice to the words, given the metre, than the others. The last line of that stanza has some variations too.

But let's have it anyway:

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... and, given the forthcoming date, this poem, which was a great favourite amongst the fourteen-fifteen-year-olds when I did supply work in an all-boys' school some fourteen years ago:

First Love

I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.

And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.

Are flowers the winter’s choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed to hear my silent voice,
Not love's appeals to know.
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.


John Clare

[Padraig]

First Love? Last Love? Mary was his first love and he never forgot her. He imagined in his illness she was his wife, though he was already married.

Mary

It is the evening hour,
How silent all doth lie:
The horned moon she shows her face
In the river with the sky.
Prest by the path on which we pass
The flaggy lake lies still as glass.

Spirit of her I love,
Whispering to me
Stores of sweet visions as I rove,
Here stop, and crop with me
Sweet flowers that in the still hours grew -
We'll take them home, nor shake off the bright dew.

Mary, or sweet spirit of thee,
As the bright sun shines tomorrow
Thy dark eyes these flowers shall see,
Gathered by me in sorrow,
In the still hour when my mind was free
To walk alone - yet wish I walked with thee.

John Clare

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Oh, my stars! I didn't know that poem, Padraig - it's quite astonishing and almost unbearably moving. Many thanks, indeed.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think I've already posted this, but the Clare brought it to my mind - and today we can forgive the repetition, I hope:

On His Deceased Wife

METHOUGHT I saw my late espousèd Saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Joves great Son to her glad Husband gave,
Rescu'd from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint, 5
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was vail'd, yet to my fancied sight, 10
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

John Milton.

[vinteuil]

LAUSANNE

IN GIBBON'S OLD GARDEN : 11- 12 PM

June 27, 1897*



A SPIRIT seems to pass,
Formal in pose, but grave withal and grand:
He contemplates a volume in his hand,
And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

Anon the book is closed,
With 'It is finished!' And at the alley's end
He turns, and when on me his glances bend
As from the Past comes speech - small, muted, yet composed.

'How fares the Truth now? - Ill?
- Do pens but slily further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

'Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled:
"Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth"?'


* The 110th anniversary of the completion of the "Decline and Fall" at the same hour and place

Thomas Hardy [1840 - 1928]

[Padraig]

Hard done by Hardy hitting back?
I loved some of Hardy's novels but had little knowledge of his poetry back then. Now I leave his novels and try to catch up on his poetry, much of which I love.

I came across a loose leaf handwritten anthology in a box in a cupboard. No; it was my handwriting. I had had to produce the anthology as a teaching resource for use in schools - ranging from P1 to Secondary, and with an additional section from which an examiner could select, from the six poems therein, one which I would have to recite. My poems were by Keats, Arnold, Browning, Eliot, Auden and Frances Bellerby. It was the last one which I was asked to recite, and here it is:

The Summer Dove

There was dazzling sunlight on the day of my friend's funeral,
And the parson's surplice bellied like a sail in the summer wind.
I remember thinking: What a heavenly day for a burial -
As I heard about beauty like a moth-fretted garment,
About grass and flowers, and fleeing shadows,
The glory of the sun, and immortality.
Beautiful words I caught at the funeral service of my friend,
Fragment of a sentence here, and there another fragment,
In the summer wind tossed so lightly
And sent far adrift like thistledown over the shining meadows.

But I wanted to laugh with my friend at the absurdity
Of all that dire solemnity
Where the black-rook mourners and the magpie parson gathered near the hole in the ground!
Whilst a lizard panted on the wall nearby,
And I caught an interested robin's bold appraising eye.
Then I grew drowsy with a dove's perpetual, soothing, cool and leafy sound.

Walking home by the field-path after my friend's funeral,
Aware of the indefinable singing of the summer day,
I thought: Well, everything goes on as usual,
After all the dead can never be so important
As the living; it is Life that is warm and urgent,
And Death certainly can claim no victory
For where's victory when whatever you touch simply crumbles away?
And for crumbling, what so appropriate as a hole in the ground?...
Then I grew drowsy with a dove's perpetual, soothing, cool and leafy sound.

Since that was how things happened yesterday
It seems strange that today
Hearing the cool-voiced dove I am suddenly blind in my pain.
Blind and wrung with the piercing of my sorrow...
And I must hear, oh I must hear the summer dove again
To-morrow, and to-morrow...

Frances Bellerby

[johncorrigan]

I'm not always Simon Armitage's biggest fan, but I really enjoyed the images he created in 'The Cinderella of Ferndale' which was this week's Saturday Poem in the Guardian Review.

The Cinderella of Ferndale

It was all about shoes. In that small town
there was hardly a foot she hadn’t dressed
or clamped and sized in the Brannock Device,
and barely a toe that hadn’t blenched
at the force of her thumb as she prodded and pressed.

Not known for her lightness of touch,
riding home one night at the back of the bus
she’d bungled a big tin of Dulux gloss
and a lurid delta of scarlet sludge
had fanned as far as the driver’s heels
to be walked by passengers onto the street.

Fifty years later those footprints still stand:
on pavements and kerbs, over zebra crossings
and under the bridge, round the boating lake,
across the surgery’s waiting-room floor,
through the chapel gates; footprints in fading red –
the same shade as her own front door.
Through which no Prince of Wales had ever stepped.

Simon Armitage

[johncorrigan]

Another Guardian Saturday poem that caught my attention.

There are no boring people in this world
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko 1932-2017, translated by Boris Dralyuk

There are no boring people in this world.
Each fate is like the history of a planet.
And no two planets are alike at all.
Each is distinct – you simply can’t compare it.

If someone lived without attracting notice
and made a friend of their obscurity –
then their uniqueness was precisely this.
Their very plainness made them interesting.

Each person has a world that’s all their own.
Each of those worlds must have its finest moment
and each must have its hour of bitter torment –
and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown.

When people die, they do not die alone.
They die along with their first kiss, first combat.
They take away their first day in the snow …
All gone, all gone – there’s just no way to stop it.

There may be much that’s fated to remain,
but something – something leaves us all the same.
The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish –
it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.

[Padraig]

Another Guardian Saturday poem that caught my attention.

There are no boring people in this world
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko 1932-2017, translated by Boris Dralyuk

John, partly in response to your kind words on Missing Persons, and if I may include Rob in that as well, I would like to offer a heroic little poem by your current favourite poet, proving, I think, the truth of Yevtushenko's assertion.

Crime and Punishment


Zig-zag sunlight in May, a young mother
Having spent the morning in St Stephen's Green,
Sitting up against a tree with a claret-red Penguin paperback
Crime and Punishment, Dostoevesky, her favourite author,
Her seven-year old son, her firstborn,
Sailing his dinky boat in the pond among ducks and swans,
Before the walk home up Lower Leeson Street,
Elects to nip in to University Church
To get confession, she going first, peremptorily,
Confessing the usual prescribed sin, 'impure thoughts',
Of which she has never had any in her life
As far as she knows but she has to confess something,
Penance of three Hail Marys and an Our Father
And 'a firm purpose of amendment' and an act of contrition, her little boy
Stumbling in after her, nervous but he's nervous
About everything, it's his nature, poor child,
Only for the priest to fling open the confessor's door,
His door, the priest's door, jump out and grab
The handle of the penitent's door, the confessional door,
And unleashes out of his trap-door gob a spittle-throated roar
At her seven-year old son, castigating him
For not following the proper protocol of Holy Confession:
'Confession is a sacrament, you little pup!'
She, thin, shy, fatigued, recuperating from pleurisy,
Asks the priest why he is roaring at her son.
He roars at her: 'How dare you
Speak like that to a priest!' Her son in tears of fright
Gripping her frock, her voice suddenly surfacing:
'Father, how dare you speak to a child like that,
You are not fit to speak to a child,
You should be ashamed of yourself,
You conceited, foul-tempered old ninny! I have a mind
Never to let my child go to confession again! I have a mind
To tell my husband who is a judge about you'. The priest
Stares down at her, her son stares up at her,
Both of them struck dumb by her leaping anger, by the whale
Of her anger, and in the silence
She holds hands with her son and she plunges out of the church,
Never again in her life to kow-tow to a priest.


Paul Durcan The Laughter of Mothers 2007