Poems I Journey With 20

The Dean of St Paul's, John Donne - early portrait

The ode is an ancient poetic form that dates back to ancient Greece. A simple definition runs thus: a poem in which a person expresses a strong feeling of love or respect for someone or something is an ode. A rather more precise definition would be that it is a lyric poem usually marked by exaltation of feeling and style, varying length of line, and complexity of stanza forms.  A classical ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist. It is an elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual and that describes nature intellectually as well as emotionally.  It was originally accompanied by the music of the lyre in ancient Greece and hence it is a distinct form of the lyric. Tonight I would like to offer the reader an Ode from the pen of the great Anglican Divine, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London and accomplished poet John Donne (1573 – 1631).

ODE by John Donne

                       I.

VENGEANCE will sit above our faults; but till
She there do sit,
We see her not, nor them. Thus blind, yet still
We lead her way; and thus, whilst we do ill,
We suffer it.

                      2.

Unhappy he whom youth makes not beware
Of doing ill.
Enough we labour under age, and care;
In number, th' errors of the last place are
The greatest still.

                      3.

Yet we, that should the ill we now begin
As soon repent,
Strange thing! perceive not; our faults are not seen,
But past us; neither felt, but only in
The punishment.

                       4.

But we know ourselves least; mere outward shows
Our minds so store,
That our souls no more than our eyes disclose
But form and colour. Only he who knows
Himself, knows more. 

Brief Commentary and Observations

St Paul's Cathedral, London

John Donne is a very complex and most interesting character.  He was well educated, but came from a recusant Catholic background with an uncle (his mother’s brother) being a Jesuit priest and translator named Jasper Heywood. His mother was a great-niece of the Roman Catholic martyr Thomas More. This tradition of martyrdom would continue among Donne's closer relatives, many of whom were executed or exiled for religious reasons. Needless to say, given this background, the young Donne converted to Anglicanism as anyone of us would if we prized our very lives. 

He travelled on the continent for several years in his early to mid-twenties and learned to speak both Spanish and Italian fluently. Needless to say, as any scholar of the time would be, he also was adept in both Latin and classical Greek.  He served also as a diplomat for some years. Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends as patrons. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. 

In 1601, he secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children, several of whom died either in childbirth or as infants. In 1615, he became an Anglican priest at the behest of the King, James I, although he did not want to take Anglican orders at all. In 1621, he was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. He also served as a Member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614. The subjects of Donne's poetry are (i) religious themes, especially the search for what might be termed true religion or the truth in religion, (ii) romantic love, (iii) sexuality – explicit enough in places – and (iv) mortality. He is known as the foremost poet of the group that is called the Metaphysical Poets and is a supreme exponent of the art of the conceit.  The poem I have offered the reader this evening is simply called Ode.

I like this poem as it may be read on two levels.  The obvious or overt level shows us the human being in all his/her flaws, unaware of the level of their sinning before the Almighty God, the Judge of our lives, and, consequently, possessing little or no guilt. The second level, I argue, would not really have been too obvious to readers of Donne’s own time, namely how little the human person actually knows himself or herself. In other words, we moderns can see that such lack of self-knowledge is in fact our lack of awareness of all our unconscious motivations. In this regard, I read the final stanza, which I repeat here, in such a fashion. We could do worse than contemplate the depth in those lines once again:

But we know ourselves least; mere outward shows
Our minds so store,
That our souls no more than our eyes disclose
But form and colour. Only he who knows
Himself, knows more. 

Poems I Journey With 18

We turn to literature for many reasons: for comfort, for escapism, for entertainment, to give us insight into life, to educate us, to challenge us and so on and so forth. A turning point for this present reviewer was his discovery of the local library. I remember joining the branch at Charleville Mall in north inner city Dublin when I was seven years of age. It was then that my love of books, for knowledge and for literature in general began. To take out two different books every two weeks was a delight for me and a brief embrace with the wonders of knowledge and indeed of life itself. Umberto Eco has declared in one of his books that the main purpose of literature is to learn how to die.  In my opinion he only took into account one side of the story in that declaration as it is my contention, and indeed, that of many others, that the main purpose of literature is to learn how to live and how to die. Life and death are inextricably linked realities. Poems are in a sense a distillation of prose literature, an intense expression of what is said in a more expanded and expansive way therein.

Carol Ann Duffy

This evening I would like to present the readers with a poem from the pen of another wonderful woman poet, namely, Carol Ann Duffy.  As the Wiki succinctly puts it:  “Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE FRSL (1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold the position.” See this link: Carol Ann Duffy

This poem works through a fairly standard technique or literary device called “personification,” where Duffy presents us with a feminine version of history, history as an old woman waking up in her bed and coming to realise all that has been done to her. Rather than saying anything more at this stage, let us read and reflect upon the poem:

History

She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand - twigs, stained gloves - 
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved 
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor. 

Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy covers some 2000 years of history since the birth of Jesus Christ in this poem and comments on how history, personified as a woman, might feel given the drastic changes that have occurred over those two millennia.  This personification is an effective conceit to get us thinking. The one problem I have with this poem is that perhaps the period covered in too broad a canvas that thereby renders the conceit somewhat too simplistic and consequently somewhat less than effective as a literary device here.  However, the message of the poem is clear:- we humans have really messed up and messed up very badly indeed.