Poems I Journey With 28

T.S. Eliot said in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in the sequence of poems called “Four Quartets,” that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality here, I contend, can be interpreted as all that wears us down as human beings as we try to negotiate our way through life, as we try to cope with its many highs and lows and make some meaning of our own journey through it. Again, I repeat this great poet’s words merely to highlight our need for some form of escapism from time to time: a good holiday, an inspiring read, celebrations of all kinds, concerts, drama, plays, music recitals, and all the cultural conventions and traditions that attempt to help human kind cope with the “jagged edges of existence” or “reality” as T.S. Eliot puts it in the above quoted poem.

Here, I’d like to return to two poems from the pen of our great national Nobel Laureate for Literature, W.B. Yeats and reproduce here for the readers of these musings two lovely refreshing poems that quite soothe my drooping spirits in these stressful days after a traffic accident.

Poem 1: The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888):

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Poem 2: The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Briefest of Commentaries

Yeats was born in 1865 and so he was only 23 when he wrote “Lake Isle of Innisfree” while he was 34 when he wrote the second poem. Eleven years is a long time in anyone’s life, and the second poem is obviously a far more mature and far deeper poem than the first. However, they are both written against the background of the nourishing and sustaining power of nature for us humans. In short, a good walk out in nature can heal many a broken heart and lift many a depressed spirit. These poems help me cope with life then at this first level, that is, at the level of the balm, the comfort and the healing that nature can offer us if we are open to her charms.

As Yeats grew older he became much more interested in what we in Ireland call the “Celtic Twilight” period, namely that Romantic turning back not alone to nature, but also to mythology and the strong links that mythology had with nature as it developed.  Also Yeats as a poet became far more enchanted with anything to do with mystery, mystique and, indeed the mystical. To commune with nature was to commune with the sustaining power behind that universe – the pagan Celtic gods as represented in that wonderful body of Gaelic Celtic mythology that he himself did much to preserve and to promulgate.

The “fire” that was in his head is a very potent line because it shows the passion for nature that is in Aengus’s mind and indeed in that of the poet himself. Again, Aengus cuts and peels a “hazel wand” and we are immediately enchanted with a magical act that brings us into a more mystical world to which we can escape from the harsh reality around us.  Everything around Aengus is magical and mystical and shot through with the powers of the gods of nature. There are moths on the wing there while the very heavens contain the mystical “moth-like stars” and the repetition of words serves to enchant us further as this is indeed the song of a wanderer through nature with all its healing attributes – indeed it yields up a “silver trout” to feed us on our journey.

Then we are invited into Aengus’s company as he lights a fire on the forest or wood floor, and then some mysterious person calls Aengus, or indeed us the reader, by our name. For sure, we are now in the mythical and mystical woods of the Celtic imagination, of the Celtic Twilight.  Indeed, we are so enchanted that we want to stay there with Aengus.  Like a fairy presence, this female voice changes into a beautiful girl who enchants Aengus and us the readers:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Reading the final verse, this commentator writing these few reflections feels old like Aengus in the poem: “old with wandering” or old and worn out from looking for meaning in an often sad and painful world.  But this final verse is full of promise and hope; full of beauty and truth; full of wisdom and inspiration, for we truly can live in an enchanted world when we read those wonderful final lines of this second poem:

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Poems I Journey With 23

Who amongst us does not at times wish to return to the more innocent and carefree world of childhood as we remember it, if only to escape the monotony of our daily lives or indeed its many troubles? In other words, nostalgia is no bad thing once it does not become an obsession that prevents us from dealing with problems that must be dealt with in our lives. One dictionary definition of nostalgia describes it as a wistful desire to return in thought or in feeling to a former time in one’s life, and in this sense it is mostly sentimental in thrust.  But we are allowed to be nostalgic and sentimental sometimes surely?

As I sit here writing these thoughts, I am travelling back precisely forty-seven years to the autumn days of 1969 when I was in fourth class primary school. We had a wonderful teacher called Seán Ó Sé (John O’Shea) who was an erudite teacher in most subjects, but who loved poetry and gave all of us an appreciation for its form, metre, rhythm and rhyme. I remember well his beating out the rhythm of any poem, whether in Irish or English, with his “bata mór” or “big stick” which he actually rarely used as he was essentially a kind and caring teacher. He would beat his “bata mór” on his old wooden desk.

Portrait of Thomas Hood

After this brief introduction, let me offer the reader a poem called “I remember, I remember” from the pen of Thomas Hood. For me this poem brings me back into that old classroom when I was just a sensitive little boy of eleven years of age. So, I am unapologetically indulging in nostalgia and sentimentality now, and sure why not!  Thomas Hood(1799 – 1845) was an English poet, author and humourist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, the Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. Other poets that were his contemporaries were the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the many other lesser Romantic poets. Obviously Hood would not have been as famous, yet his work was indeed very popular. The poem “I remember, I remember” needs little or no commentary. It is enough to read it and reflect upon it meditatively and if it is sentimental superficially, I believe that it contains a certain deeper truth worth hanging on to. Enjoy, even for the briefest of moments. 

I Remember, I Remember

I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon
Nor brought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily cups--
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
The summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy. 

Poems I Journey With 21

A young S.T. Coleridge

One of my favourite Romantic poets is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was lucky to study him from two angles, once in an English Literature course at undergraduate level and once at the level of philosophical theology whilst studying at postgraduate level. That means that I have been lucky to have studied both his poems and his literary/theological/philosophical prose works. Coleridge (1772 –1834) was a complex individual and an extremely erudite dilettante, being a poet, a literary critic and philosopher as well as being an avid walker and lover of nature. He was also a wonderful raconteur who loved to regale his friends with stories and witticisms. Again, he was more Dionysian than Apollonian in temperament, yet in his philosophical and theological musings he could readily access and use profitably and aptly the higher reaches of logical argument and thought, thereby embracing both heart and head in a splendid and felicitous harmony.

With his friend and colleague William Wordsworth, Coleridge was a founder of what is called the Romantic Movement in England. His most anthologised poems and well known poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan while his major prose work Biographia Literaria is an amazingly erudite, eccentric and extremely sui generis  work of his literary imagination. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was and is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture through his studies in the German language and German philosophy at Gottingen University.  Coleridge, as a result of his concentrated studies, coined many familiar words and phrases, including “suspension of disbelief, the “esemplastic power of imagination” and many more. He is noted as a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism. In short, then, we may summarise by saying that it was through Coleridge’s writings and translations that German transcendentalism entered the English and American Romantic Movements.

On a personal level, throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Some have speculated that he had bipolar disorder, though that is impossible to prove definitively. However, it is important to note that he became an addict of opium through its medicinal and all-too-easily attainable form called Laudanum. All of this feeds into the wonderfully complex and inspiring thought of a great poet and marvellously talented critic.

The poem I wish to offer the reader this evening is one of what is called his “conversation poems” namely “Frost at Midnight.”

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. 

Briefest of Commentaries

Here in this wonderful poem we encounter the very quintessence of Romantic poetry: an openness to the splendour, wonder and magic of nature where even “[t]he frost performs its secret ministry.” In other words, from the very first line of this poem we encounter the mystery of nature in the wonderful patterns frost forms all around us on a winter’s night. It is important to note that Coleridge attributes power to the frost, namely the power to perform a ministry or ritual that brings the believer into communion with the very heart of nature, namely the Creator revealed through the mysterious and wondrous patterns performed by a minister called “frost.” Again, what we have here is the personification of nature in the workings of the frost. It is significant, also, the Coleridge ends the poem with a second reference to the frost’s ministry in the third last line of the last stanza.

From the first we are drawn into the profound solitude that obtains in the poet’s country cottage in Cumbria. We encounter all the sights and sounds of Coleridge’s surroundings depicted in wonderfully clear and vivid images: “my cradled infant slumbers peacefully,” “the thin blue flame lies on my low-burnt fire,” the “film which fluttered on the grate,” “the old church-tower,//Whose bells, the poor man's only music,” “My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart//With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,” “For I was reared//In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,” and so on and so forth.  Unlike his father, his son Hartley will be reared, attuned to the sounds of nature and not in a great and noisy city. Again, all these images and this last aspiration for his son are essentially Romantic in nature, that is, they serve to help us to commune with God in and through nature.

In conclusion, let me repeat here the final eleven lines of the poem, which essentially sum up the Romantic credo to which Wordsworth et al subscribed and that S.T. Coleridge so eruditely wrote about in his prose writings.  With that thought I leave the reader to contemplate these last lines of this great poem:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

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 17

A young Adrienne Rich

I like reading new and unusual poems from as many different cultural backgrounds as the English language will allow me. The poem I wish to offer for the reader’s perusal and reflection is one by the American Jewish poet Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012). The following poem I loved for its clarity of expression and for a new, if unusually realistic, insight into love that I had never actually considered before. Poems, like all good literature, should break new ground both in language and form, in content and ideas. This, Rich does with an ease that almost camouflages her consummate skill as an author. The poem I have chosen here is called “Translations.”

Translations
December 25, 1972

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political.

The Briefest of Commentaries

An older Adrienne Rich

I love people who push against convention, not in an anarchic sense, I hasten to add, but in a well thought-out and considered fashion. They are, of course, correct in their presuppositions, intuition and consequent reasoning, because, after all, nothing in the world is either “black or white,” or “cut and dried.” Rich belongs to this marvellous group of questioning authors who push against convention, not to bring the state of things to a crisis or to a state of collapse, but to advance a broader more inclusive agenda. Rich was married, and with her husband, who ended his life at a tragically young age of 45, parented three sons. In her late forties she began a lesbian relationship with Jamaican-born novelist and editor, Michelle Cliff, a relationship which lasted until her death. So her experiences of life were broad and unconventional.

What I like above this poem is that there are many renditions that could be given of poems from one language to another. Such renditions will depend upon the understanding of the text by the particular translator. Let us be aware of how we translate or interpret things, Rich seems to be saying to me. Let me not look on life solely from my own perspective. Let me try and see it through another optic if I can at all. I also like the conversational tone of the poem. Rich draws us into the conversation as she addresses the reader (her lover, her companion, her friend or whoever) in the second person singular.  The following four lines leap off the page for me:

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

Ah yes, I recognise such a woman myself in my mother and in many of the women whom I have met in my time: women who baked for and in love; who fought for and in love; women who were sorrowful because they suffered much in loving. Then, the single word “obsessed” that has its own line, indeed, its own stanza all to itself is most apt indeed. Women are obsessed, and then she tells us with what in the first word of the next stanza, should we ever be in doubt.  Of course, that obsession is with Love. That very stanza is worth reproducing here again for our timely reflection:

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

There is a marvellous mix of observation of all womanly occupations and preoccupations with her personal experience in this poem. As well as the usual occupations like ironing and household tasks we have the image of a woman typing a manuscript till dawn – a definite experience personal to a poet. Then, like the scene from a film, we are presented with the image of a woman trying to communicate with her ex-lover by phone. Again this scene is cinematic in quality:

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom

she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

Here we have an account of the man’s disloyalty, and indeed his betrayal of her to her sister to add salt to the wound of love. And yet all this grief, or indeed much of it, is caused by the narrow ageements accepted by more conservative society, by a politics of narrow conventions. There is much freedom pointed to in this poem. We, as readers, are invited to ponder these social conventions critically and to question our own prejudices and presuppositions. Such is the task of all good literature and certainly that of all good poetry:

Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy

and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief

is shared, unnecessary
and political.

Poems I Journey With 16

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861) was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. She was vehemently anti-slavery even though her father had earned much of his wealth from that much maligned, exploitative and cruel industry. She had married her husband Robert Browning in secret and went with him to live in Florence, having been disinherited by her father. Emily Dickinson was an avid fan of Barrett Browning and the latter’s work greatly influenced the American poet who admired her as a woman of achievement. Her popularity in the United States and Britain was further advanced by her stands against social injustice, including slavery in the United States, injustice toward Italian citizens by foreign rulers, and child labour.

Here, let me offer the reader of this blog two poems from Barrett Browning’s pen, “A Musical Instrument” published posthumously and her most frequently anthologized poem “How do I Love Thee?” Both poems speak eloquently for themselves and are rather ethereal and mystical in tone and sentiment. Barrett Browning was extremely spiritual and religious and a gifted linguist and scholar, all self-taught.  She knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew and translated many pieces from the early Fathers of the Church into English and read the Hebrew Bible. All her life she was sickly, but her delicate physical condition did not prevent either her intellectual or spiritual insights and visions.

A Musical Instrument

I.

WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan,

Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

And breaking the golden lilies afloat

With the dragon-fly on the river.

II.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,

From the deep cool bed of the river:

The limpid water turbidly ran,

And the broken lilies a-dying lay,

And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

III.

High on the shore sate the great god Pan,

While turbidly flowed the river;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can,

With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed

To prove it fresh from the river.

IV.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,

(How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes, as he sate by the river.

V.

This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan,

Laughed while he sate by the river,)

The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed.'

Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

He blew in power by the river.

VI.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!

Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

Came back to dream on the river.

VII.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, —

For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Elizabeth's husband Robert Browning and their son Robert Junior, called Pen

How Do I Love Thee?
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet XLIII
from Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1845 (published 1850)

Poems I Journey With 15

Old depiction of Horace

There is much richness in the classics, that is in Latin and classical Greek texts. Unfortunately, I never got to study classical Greek at school, though I did study Latin to Leaving Certificate level. Being reasonably good at languages, I also loved studying the poems of Virgil, Horace and Ovid and so on. Much of what I learned over forty years ago is unfortunately lost somewhere in the recesses of my memory.  Retirement will certainly entice me to reacquaint myself with the Latin language and some of the texts of those old poets. I remember well Horace’s agricultural metaphors and his love for wine. I’m sure the reader of these lines will know that most famous of quotes from his pen, namely “carpe diem” or “seize/pluck the day.”  These few lines from that famous Ode are worth quoting here for the beauty of the language: “Tu ne quaesieris — scire nefas — quem mihi, quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoë .... dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” = “Do not ask — it is wrong to know (it is impossible to know) — what end (quem finem) the gods have in store for you or for me, Leuconoë .... while we talk (discuss) envious time flees away: pluck the day, and believe as little as possible in tomorrow!”  I wish I was at home in Latin so that I could translate the verses given on my own. I had to use an on-line dictionary and Google translate and compare to other translations.  Still I enjoyed the activity as I began to remember some of my old Latin skills.

The reason I begin this post with a diversion into an Horatian Ode is that I should like to share a poem from the great Professor, classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman (1859 – 1936) with you all this evening. He was steeped in all things classical and is reckoned to be one of the greatest classical scholars of the twentieth century. Such poets as those listed above and many others from both Latin and Greek would have influenced my chosen poet.

XXXI

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger

When Uricon the city stood:

'Tis the old wind in the old anger,

But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

At yonder heaving hill would stare:

The blood that warms an English yeoman,

The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,

Through him the gale of life blew high;

The tree of man was never quiet:

Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:

To-day the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

Briefest of Commentaries

A.E. Housman

This poem occurs in a collection called A Shropshire Lad and was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down. His colleagues and students were surprised by the emotional depth and vulnerability it revealed in an apparently distant and self-contained man.  This poem is the 31^st poem, its title designated in Roman numerals as XXXI of some 63 poems in the collection.  In the distance, some five miles to the north of Wenlock Edge, is a forested hill, the Wrekin (pronounced REE-kin).

“Holt” is an old Germanic word (and English, with its Anglo-Saxon ancestry, is a Germanic language) for a wood, a forested area.  “Hanger” also comes from an old Anglo-Saxon term; it means a wood on a slope, like the forest on Wenlock Edge. The wind blew through those woods “when Uricon the city stood.”  He is taking us back to Roman Britain — Britain after the Romans had invaded and settled there.  His “Uricon” was the Roman city Viriconium/Viroconium, also called Uriconium, which lay where the present day town of Wroxeter lies, several miles west of the Wrekin.  It was the fourth largest Roman City in ancient Britain.

As a classicist, A.E. Housman is reminded of Roman Britain.  As he views the restlessness of the fleecy trees on Wenlock Edge and on Wrekin hill or mountain he becomes aware of his own restlessness and realises that such discomfort has been part of the human condition for hundreds of years. We are in the province, of course, of what was classically called “pathetic fallacy,” namely the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature. Here “'Tis the old wind in the old anger,” and then we have the recalling or imagining of how a Roman soldier or official might have felt over 1500 years before:

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

At yonder heaving hill would stare:

The blood that warms an English yeoman,

The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

A.E. Housman is moved by the restlessness of the wind in the trees and by his own inner restlessness as part of the human condition. He feels deeply his own continuity with the sympathies and emotions of another human being from more ancient times, especially with how a Roman soldier or official might have felt standing in the same spot as the poet. This is a wonderfully simple but an extraordinarily powerful poem from a very fine poet.