Landing Light - Don Paterson

This collection won both the Whitbread Prize and the T.S. Eliot in 2003, which is a bit epic.  And it IS great, despite the hole-picking I'm going through to try and appreciate it properly.  It lacked for me the stand out numbers I have usually found in collections that blow me away and which I usually use as a jumping off point for understanding the whys of a book.  It seems characterised more by tension and disparity than by an arching unity of idea.  I enjoyed it, and I need to read it a few more times - I can see the artistry, but I'm not in love.  That's such a personal thing with poetry.  It's an intimate exercise, the creative collaboration between poet and reader creates something that nobody else can experience and which neither expected.  The rhythms must echo in both, the allusions cast shadows in both imaginations, the imagery or the subject matter must whir in the lives of each.  There must be a stretching of minds, but that stretchin can sometimes lead to jumps that are too big to follow.

The  poems flit from form to form - there are poems in Scots and English,  some tell stories and some contemplate the soul, there is a translation (very free, as far as I can remember - my reading of Dante is many years old) of the forest of the suicides part of the Inferno and two poems described as 'after Rilke', there is a highly erotic poem that is nonetheless addressed to children.  Such variety is impressive.  This is why I can't find a real coherency in the collection I think.  It is undeniable that the man is a master of his art, but the poems don't stir or transfix me the way I want them to.  There is enormous skill with the language but it isn't foregrounded (which I usually love).  Subtle and probably lifelike and therefore difficult?  Or difficult to appreciate on one reading.  More work required.

The Wreck
But what lovers we were, what lovers,
even when it was all over -

the deadweight, bull-black wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang

like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port

and watched or unreal sober life
unmoor, a continent of grief;

the candlelight strange on out faces
like the tiny silent blazes

and coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs

into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,

gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down

to mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back

to back, then made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.

Don Paterson, from Landing Light (London, 2003)

In fact, just typing that out has made it more meaningful to me.  But even so the imagery is tangled.  The first part reflects the security of falling in love quite clearly despite the mixed metaphors - but the symbolism becomes less clear as the poem goes on.  The slipperiness of metaphor is one of the central joys of the poem.  Of course there is so much more to poetry than 'de-coding', but it's a natural thing to do when faced with words that seem to go somewhere and then slip sideways or turn back on themselves - and that's the fun part, that keeps the interest and piques curiosity.  It is there.  Perhaps comprehension is just further off than I'm used to?  Or not as natural to me as I have found with my favourites?

What a hug is.

The Hug
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

Thom Gunn, from The Man With Night Sweats

This is perhaps my favourite full length poem from this collection, which I've quoted before.  It's a beautiful, peaceful image a relationship.  Safe, close, warm, held and loved, yet still surprised and surprising.  I also love the idea of a 'grand passion...become familial'.  He's a very direct poet - there's no beating about the bush or confusion in his imagery.  The poetry comes from such subtle use of words that you barely notice how your reactions are steered.  I particularly like the use of the words 'stay' and 'dry' in the last line, which seem to me to suggest something of death.  The whole seems to conjure up something of Larkin's 1964 poem 'An Arundel Tomb', though that might just be me:

An Arundel Tomb
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin, from The Whitsun Weddings (London, 1964)

Potential

Once drained, what was once filled once only
once again waits – once more less and more than once before.
Once filled and once drained, at once ware of potence and impotence, wonder
on what once upon a time it was that once one wished one would wake
From or to.

Unfilled free for future or once full with fulfilment;
Full filled in, but – fulfilling fulfilled and filled maybe willing but too full
To be filled, so

When world-whirled we will st-st-stutter to a stop-start start.

British Library

It is a nest of the many alone,
All drawn to the honeycomb honeytrap -
Each grub has a cell with a single chair
And wireless umbilical wires one in.
Only a wanderer may spot the world
In laptop facets of the compound eye.
None leave nothing achieved solo again,
Progress mired by ink-trailed squared stacked paper.

And two found it.  One another.  Lips press
And smiles spread like wings filling the great room
As sunlight pouring through cathedral glass
Making beauty of a tawdry husk of stone.

I left smiling.  Industry unaided
Did not enjoin such cheerful joy so shared .

Day of writing.

When I was at the NPG the other day, I was browsing in the gift shop trying not to buy too many postcards.  I picked up Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats just to flick through while I was there. The poems of his I've read have been good, but nothing has gripped me absolutely. Then I found the following, after which the book came away with me:

Barren Leaves
Spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling:
Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing.

That's all there is of it, just those two lines. The first is a quotation from Wordsworth's 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads', which can be regarded as one of the first attempts to define what poetry should be in the modern age. Gunn's irreverent second line subverts the high minded Romantic ideal of poetry, poking fun at the old master and his own profession. It reinterprets poetry for our time, basely humanising it. The feminine rhyme in the couplet underlines the self-deprecating mood, as does the title - written down, left on shelves, and poetry loses its immediacy. A spurt of emotion, left for others to re-invigorate or not as they choose. Gunn even seems to be suggesting that those overflows of feeling, like spent semen, is un-recoverable. I love it.

And THEN, there were more, still about writing.

JVC
He concentrated, as he ought,
On fitting language to his thought
And getting all the rhymes correct,
Thus exercising intellect
In such a space, in such a fashion,
He concentrated into passion.

This time, it's a much more positive picture of poetry - the compression of thought into language results in 'passion' at the end. The writer character in this poem succeeds in creating something. Refining thought into poetry. The full Wordsworth quotation given in part in 'Barren Leaves' is as follows:

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."*

Gunn's poem describes this process almost exactly.

Finally, another two-liner:

Jamesian
Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.

I assume the title refers to Henry James...whose work I have never read. Anyone who makes a point of style out of long sentences doesn't immediately attract me to read him. But I do know that his novels spend a lot of time examining personal relationships...navel gazing, really. Gunn's couplet here doesn't make me any more likely to read any James, it has to be said. But it's an interesting concept of a relationship and the traps that it might be possible to fall into - style over substance, and all that. Too much thinking and not enough living.

I haven't finished the collection yet. There are more poems I'll quote when I have, I think, that aren't so comedic. I would recommend this to anyone at all though. It's accessible, joyous poetry. Exuberant and boisterous. Fun to part of. Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and the rest of them are great, don't get me wrong at all, but they require the right mood for reading. From what I've seen of this collection of Gunn's so far, you could pick it up any time and anywhere and take something away from it. Fantastic artistry.

*The full text of the 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads' can be found here, for anyone who has time for that kind of thing.

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

Been a while since a poetry post. I clearly miss my degree too much. Enjoy the pretty poem if the analysis is too self-indulgent!

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,)
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem) as from my present point of view, and might prove (as of course they would) nought of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely changed points of view;
To me these and the like of these are curiosly answer'd by my lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

Walt Whitman, from Calamus (1860)

Apparently, this is J. K. Rowling's favourite poem. That article says it's in Leaves of Grass but my collection clearly says Calamus so I went with that. And well she might pick it as a favourite. I don't know much Whitman and bookmarked this to read after someone mentioned it on Twitter. If someone mentions something as a favourite then I'm usually curious to see why, especially when it's not something I know a great deal about. Whitman was too American to feature on my course at university and I haven't really found a good way in yet.

This poem is fantastic. If you just read it for sense, you get the fact that the speaker finds the world confusing, but that it's all ok when he has a friend, a lover, with him. So far, so good. I'm not sure that it's the sort of thing the British Romantics were much into, though it's hard to say. The style is so different from that of, say, Tennyson who was writing at the same time, or of Wordsworth who was a little earlier. I don't recall this sense of vulnerability in Tennyson or Wordsworth, or even this much positivity for much of the time. Admittedly, I found both of them too wet and self-conscious and frankly emo to persuade myself to study them too long so I will freely accept correction on that subject. I love that last line though. When I first read it, I thought 'wedding poem' because of that fantastic sentiment there, though it would have to be perfectly read to convey the sense of it to anyone just listening and not following it along on paper. All the huge questions of existence are resolved by the presence of another and by the fact that they are there with you. What better summing up of a true relationship can there be? It's wedding season at Great St Mary's again, and I shall await someone choosing something other than 1 Corinthians 13 probably in vain...

Wikipedia suggests that Whitman might be regarded as the father of blank verse - look at the line length in the poem and the lack of strong rhythmic, rhyming or even strong structural devices. It's real blank verse in that sense, but far from prose because of the conscious syntax and even type-setting. The hyphenation of 'may-be' all the way through apart from the first instance seems unlikely to be a mere whimsy of the period or of the later editor. Again, I haven't studied Whitman or American writing of this period, so it's possibly that 'may-be' was habitually hyphenated, but even if it was I like that it forces you to take more time over the phrase - both when reading to oneself or out loud. 'Maybe' is synonymous with 'might' in modern parlance. The way we use and understand the word today doesn't emphasise the permissive element in the word 'may'. Today's use seems to allow us to sit back and let things happen. The quick way that we throw the word about means that we never stop to savour the fact that there are several outcomes to something. This construction is more conscious of the fact that something may be or may not be. Whitman achieves what I have there with six words and italics in two words an a hyphen, and then intensifies the uncertainty by repeating it through the poem. Suddenly, it is more important to us that things have more than one possible outcome and that the speaker and we as readers are more uncomfortable about that. This level of confusion and concern is important because it heightens the relief we feel with the speaker when we discover that love and friendship are the things required for peace.

But the construction of uncertainty doesn't end with 'may-be' - he uses the phrase in conjunction with 'doubtless', 'may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions'. What are we supposed to make of that? Are they apparitions? The juxtaposition of the certainty and the uncertainty only makes our understanding even more slippery. And their are other things, like beginning the poem in the middle of a sentence that is never complete. In fact, all four of the first four lines are dependent clauses without an independent to stand with. They are all missing bits, and we are wrong-footed from the outset. The first nine lines proper of the poem are long run-ons, with interruptions in parentheses. They are hard to follow and one has to read them several times in order to unravel which clauses might go with which. The word 'nought' appears where one might expect 'naught' - the two words are similar but they don't mean the same. How does one resolve it? I went to read the poem in other locations to check that they were printed right. 'Nought' is a number; 'naught' is nothing. We don't normally draw a line between the two that says they are the same thing. ARE they the same thing? It opens more questions.

The second part of the poem is clear. The clauses are easily resolved into sentences albeit still long and complex ones that make sense and follow through, in contrast to the first part. There are no interruptions and no 'may-bes'. Clarity exists in the structure as well as in the sense of the words. It is as though the presence of the friend resolves the potentially complex syntax as well as the 'big questions'. It is all this that makes this poetry not blank verse. The emotional journey of the poem is greatly intensified by the poet's manipulation of our ability to comprehend it. I love it. It's so clever and so well done, and the sentiment is a beautiful one - for all it's a fairly twee resolution of the 'existential angst' theme that so much poetry relies on.

Not finished, I suspect.

My Easter

Make the best of it, my father said.
As though it were no hotwater mislaid keys sixfeet
of snow carcrash (no one hurt).
As though earth did not shake rocks
crack curtain split
and light did not flash
over silver (bromide) like nova through history.
He was keepcalm and carryon stiff
upperlip terror__________alert
No glow (worm): the blinded.
Me she we splitlocked
the blowtorch blue Light of the world.

Did you see the unknown soldieress walk again?

Here and now, not past and future.

I Keep Wondering’

I saw a mountain,
And he was like Wotan looking at himself in the water.
I saw a cockatoo,
And he was like sunset clouds.
Even leaves and little stones
Are different to my eyes sometimes.
I keep wondering through and through my heart
Where all the beautiful things in the world
Come from.
And while I wonder
They go on being beautiful.

Hilda Conkling

Don't wonder too much about the world, or you'll miss it. Don't analyse every moment, or every emotion, or every experience, in case you miss out on feeling. Wondering is fine, but it is not everything. There is a world out there to be missed without care.

Deathless dower.

Sonnet XIX - Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—
So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above,
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

These are the words set to music in a piece by the same name by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I'll put a recording up if someone will show me how and/or find me somewhere to leave it for a bit. I was going to sing it in a recital that never happened. The words only tell half of the beauty of this - the music is something amazing. I cling to moments remembered, trying to live in them and extend them beyond their natural length. The poem isn't about that; it's about enjoying a perfect moment with someone else with no mention of what happens after that. But when that moment is gone, what else can you do but hold on to it, for a never-dying promise between the two of you? Even if it falls away and apart, intangible, if you hold too tight.

I saw a play this evening. I need to write about that, too, but it's late.

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Yay! Carl sorted me out with somewhere to put some mp3s for a bit - recording here.

Religious.

The following is by C17th English poet George Herbert. I studied it repeatedly during my degree, because it's an interesting conceit and I could feed it nicely into T.S. Eliot's religious stuff. I like the tone and the image is comforting. It's one of the most beautiful rationalisations of the figure of Christ that I've ever come across, no matter what you believe.

Love

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
Love said, 'You shall be he.'
'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.'
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'

'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'
'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
'My dear, then I will serve.'
'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert, 1593-1633

An honest Burns Night.

I've actually never been to a proper Burns Night. I think it would be fun, though I draw the line at meaty haggis. Veggie haggis is actually really quite good, so I don't feel the need to eat too many innards. Even if it's slightly against my principles to waste parts of any animal. I come up against an ick factor too strong there. If you're curious about the actual content of a haggis, try this though (Guardian picture gallery with amusing captions, not too gruesome I promise!).

I also feel that at some stage I should try and read some Robert Burns, rather than just the famous stuff. The poem below is one of the famous ones, often sung or recited after the meal. The sentiment is sort of the hackneyed 'poor but happy' one that can be rather unpleasant in the wrong circumstances. Burns avoids the patronising tone by refocusing the idea on 'poor but honest', which is much less unpleasant.


Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave-we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

If you're after the more unintelligible Scots, try here. It's not perfect, but it should allow the sense of the poem to come through.

I like the pragmatism that comes across in this poem. It celebrates a independence of mind, common sense and self-respect as those qualities that make a man. The implication in the poem is that being a man (read, 'human') as hard as you can is the height to which we must aspire. I like the note that a prince can make a duke or a lord or whatever, but he can't make an honest man; that comes from somewhere else. It comes from the inside, and that is more powerful than the most outwardly powerful man in the world.

Honesty is important to me. The more things that happen, the more I believe that. I've had conversations about this several times recently. Some people suggest that hiding things from people for their own benefit is to be valued. I can see the logic. It's one that says, if you really care for this person, you will save them pain as far as possible; you will bear whatever it is for them. But this only works if you have faith in your ability to keep things to yourself and your ability to deal quietly with the ball of knowing that inevitably grows the more you don't talk about it. I'm hopeless at keeping secrets, and hate for other people to be keeping things from me - if I suspect there is something there, and I'm good at picking things like that up, I will needle until I know, even if it might be bad for me. It also depends a bit on the nature of the secret. If it's something that's going to fester, or that won't sort itself out on its own, then hiding is no help. Easy to say; damn near impossible to do. It's taken me a very long time to learn, in my bones rather than in my mind, that it really is better to find that way of sharing, no matter how hard the search might be, because otherwise the mass of the secret gets so large it completely blocks out everything else and there is no way forward. Relationshipness. Difficult.

I think that hiding things, in work, in relationships, creates suspicion - because anyone perceptive will sense something hidden, and anyone curious will try and find it out. And they might find out the wrong thing in the wrong way. At least if one does the telling oneself, one can make sure that things are put in the right way, and no details are confused. I think it saves worry in the future. If there is something that requires lying about or hiding, then it is something wrong, with virtually no exceptions. Keeping things from people for the purposes of surprising them and fun and whatever is entirely different. That goes for honesty with oneself, too - if there is an issue that has to be not thought about, then there is something to think about. Avoiding the issue does not make it go. This is something I have yet to teach myself, properly.

It's kind of hard to explain it. The level at which honesty is important to me goes very deep, and it's always hard to fit words around deep things. It's something that I remember my dad telling me in a 'lessons for life' kind of way. Not patronising or pompously, just telling me because he felt it was an important thing to say. If you're honest with the people around you, and with yourself, then you can't go too far wrong. Yorkshireman.

The importance I give to honesty feeds my need to share quite as much as I do with all sorts of people. I should perhaps do less of that, because other people think it's odd and sometimes intimidating. I did hide things, for a very long time, and all I found it achieved was pain of various sorts, so this is part of trying something else. But there's something about having no qualms about telling people things about myself, because it feeds an honest impression about me in their eyes, and because they're things that I have looked at for myself and feel comfortable about, I guess. That, and I appear to have had a fairly dramatic life over the last six or so years. Not stupidly so, in the context of some of the horrendous things that happen in the world, but enough I hope to have come to an understanding with myself about what is important and what can't hurt to share. And the more that people share of themselves, the better we will all understand one another and the more we can help one another. This is the number one reason, for example, for discussing mental illness and depression. It should be so much less of a taboo, because if more people were able to talk about their experiences then fewer people would feel alone in their pain, and the world would be a better place.

This post is preachy. I'm sorry if that's really how it's coming across. I'm more intending it as an interrogation of something I deeply feel. I'm not trying to convert anyone else to the same beliefs, though I am trying to explain myself a bit. Probably to myself more than anybody else.

Hidden for a while.

I'm going to not exist as myself for a while, or try to. Or at least stop trying to be myself. Be less than that. Rest a bit, I guess. So here's a piece of profound nonsense. I need another new poetry resource. I think I'll buy Rapture at the weekend, lest I publish EVERYTHING Jeanette Winterson thinks is good.

The Blue Guitar

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You cannot play things as they are.'

The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

And they said then, 'But play, you must
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.'

Wallace Stevens

UPDATE: I just found that this is a tiny excerpt of a much longer poem! I'll have to read it sometime and see what the rest of it says...

I like the silliness of it, and the highlighting of the moment of realisation that people have when the way that they perceive the world is shown to be wrong or not the whole thing, and the excitement of finding a new way of seeing or hearing.

----------

Coming back to this after an evening of thinking about it, it becomes apparent that my assessment of the poem is woefully incomplete. Which I would have picked up if I'd spent more time on my posting. Again. But it could be read in many more ways than the one I chose to focus on yesterday. The people could just as easily be demanding that the guitarist plays things as they are, not acknowledging that things are different on the blue guitar. There could be anguish in the poem from the fact that the musician cannot possibly do what the world demands of him. And there are more interpretations than that, too - it's impossible to pin down 'things exactly as they are' in the context of the poem. Perhaps that's the point.

Is it bad that I'm quite pleased to have learnt more html? I'm sure I'm losing street cred. At some point, you never know, I'll have a go at making this page look a little less generic, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Today Barak Obama became King of the World.

Or so it feels. The romance that has become associated with this whole handover of power seems to come from some medieval French story about chivalry and honour. Le Morte D'Arthur and elements of the Pentecostal Oath. In fact, maybe that's appropriate. Here is the man appointed by some higher order, who has come from low degree, or at least his race has in the history of America, recognised by a token and the hope of the people. But the Morte D'Arthur is not about a truly great king. It is about someone human, who make mistakes and is cruel and hurts his fellows - whose private life is a mess. There are disasters to which Arthur does not necessarily react in the best way he could, for all the veneration he earns and still does. I would rather Barak Obama tried to adhere to some of the values of chivalry that we do still espouse as a global community, than try to be the perfect image of kingliness that has transmuted itself into the idea of statesmanship. Of personal integrity, defence of the weak, fighting for right or, just as importantly, fighting against wrong. If he can do half of that, he will have earnt a measure of the hope that we as a world have allowed ourselves to vest in him.

Just food for thought, that I found the other day. See here for the reference.

What If

If you can keep your money when governments about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
If you can trust your neighbour when they trust not you
And they be very nosy too;
If you can await the warm delights of summer
Then summer comes and goes with sun not seen,
And pay so much for drinking water
Knowing that the water is unclean.

If you seek peace in times of war creation,
And you can see that oil merchants are to blame,
If you can meet a pimp or politician,
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you cannot bear dis-united nations
And you think this new world order is a trick,
If you've ever tried to build good race relations,
And watch bad policing mess your work up quick.

If you can make one heap of all your savings
And risk buying a small house and a plot,
Then sit back and watch the economy inflating
Then have to deal with the negative equity you've got.
If you can force your mind and body to continue
When all the social services have gone,
If you struggle on when there is nothing in you,
Except the knowledge that justice cannot be wrong.

If you can speak the truth to common people
Or walk with Kings and Queens and live no lie,
If you can see how power can be evil
And know that every censor is a spy;
If you can fill the unforgiving lifetime
With years of working hard to make ends meet,
You may not be wealthy but I am sure you will find
That you can hold your head high as you walk the streets.

Benjamin Zephaniah

I actually prefer the original of this poem. Zephaniah is reactionary and specific, and for technical poetry the Kipling beats him hands down. The Kipling has rhythm and drive and sense missing from the update. But there are things in the new version that remind us how important the old one was, too. It acts as a critique. The final verse, I guess, is what I'd like to imagine as the life manifesto for someone in a position like Obama's. Very similar to the Pentecostal Oath, really. Speak for the common people. Keep your head. No arrogance. Work hard. Fight for justice. Have compassion. Be clear-eyed. Please? We, the world, need this from you. Perfect success is too much to hope for, but a worthwhile shot shouldn't be. What we want from our leaders hasn't changed in a thousand years. Have a crack. Like a strongman contest. Can YOU make the bell ring?

In an aside, I miss my copy of the Malory. I love that book. I need to re-read it, again. It might be written in C15th English in the Caxton edition, but it's such a wonderful story and really not impenetrable. It is, incidentally, one of the earliest works of fiction to be published in England (definition of 'work of fiction' dependent on your feelings about the Bible). If you can read Shakespeare, you will find this easy. I wrote so much on it for my degree - I ought to know chunks by heart. I probably still do. All of those images that you heard once, of knights and round tables and great deeds of adventure and love and betrayal, come from here (bar the odd French source of a similar period). They might be hackneyed now, but here is the first fresh telling of the tale. Go. Read like a child! I did.

Old things, re-found.

Edinburgh in August

Gentle, shiny August evening – a Saturday so no hurry.
That sceptre of our land the umbrella is held loosely in hand,
And jackets are removed to hang beside.
The passersby slip serenely through glinty shimmering tunnels of air
Towards evenings of blameless conviviality and simple pleasures.

I’m curled up half tired in a seat by the door to this weekend world;
Eyes squinting against the westering glare, musing
With a sort of unhurried elation, like familiar morning sex,
On simple, smooth, and gliding words to describe in glistening lines
The luxury of one evening’s decadent freedom.

The trailing fingers of the sun brush the hills and hollows of the town,
And warm breath leeches tension from frenetic life.
Through my half-closed eyes, I watch brilliant fireworks of orangey gold
Slipping behind buildings with a silent magnificence
That drowns the bumbling traffic and the bleating human voices.
I shiver a little as the light dims and the twilight lethargy fades out
To the glare of darkness.


This must be 3 years old at least. I can't find the original date. I remember it though. I need to find that simplicity again. I have it, but never the leisure to put it down.

Do I dare?

You

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell: the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger, ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin.
into my life, larger than life, you strolled in.

I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone’s face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like gift, like a touchable dream.

Tea

I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –
and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say
but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.

Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture, 2006 Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize

The images of new love are brilliant - the idea of enjoying the small things about someone, particularly visible in the second poem, is exciting and real. Of enjoying NOT knowing, knowing that you are going to learn. In the first poem, it is the idea that someone else can walk into your life seemingly unaware, unaffected, while you have to hide from the earthquake of their presence in the ordinary that is most effective. But if it's really love, then the invader and the invaded are the same person. That first poem speaks as an individual - that feels odd. One only has one's own feelings to write about, certainly, but an impression of mutuality is missing from the first poem. Isn't it? Though it is possible to love someone who does not feel the same. Is that really loving? Doesn't love demand some interplay between two people?

I have found a new resource for poetry, having nearly exhausted the books I keep around me. I have found a few things in it over the last few weeks, and inspiration for a few more things. She's a peculiar woman, that one. I'd be intrigued to meet her, though I wonder whether or not I'd actually like her. I get the impression I'd have got on with her younger self but not the person she is now. She has had a hard life, but that only makes her more interesting. I haven't finished with that site yet.

Not enough time to deal with hurting.

So here is, yet another, poem.

Comeclose and Sleepnow

it is afterwards
and you talk on tiptoe
happy to be part
of the darkness
lips becoming limp
a prelude to tiredness.
Comeclose and Sleepnow
for in the morning
when a policeman
disguised as the sun
creeps into the room
and your mother
disguised as birds
calls from the trees
you will put on the dress of guilt
and the shoes with broken high ideals
and refusing coffee
run
alltheway
home.

Roger McGough

The things that take you away from comeclose and sleepnow are not your mother, or someone so completely external. The guilt isn't for a simple one night stand. And there is more at stake than one simple night of happiness and comfort. It is the rest of life. It is everything, that is at stake. It isn't fleeting. That poem can only be read once. Comeclose and sleepnow. It only happens with one person. It doesn't. You dream it with others, and the speaker could be dreaming it there. It is only real with one person. Don't go. Don't go. Don't go. Don't go. Don't go. Don't go. Don't go. It was the nightingale and not the lark that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. Believe me, love, it was the nightingale! I'm sorry. I will have to take this down in the morning. But now, I don't care.

Not time.

So here is, yet another, poem.

Comeclose and Sleepnow

it is afterwards
and you talk on tiptoe
happy to be part
of the darkness
lips becoming limp
a prelude to tiredness.
Comeclose and Sleepnow
for in the morning
when a policeman
disguised as the sun
creeps into the room
and your mother
disguised as birds
calls from the trees
you will put on the dress of guilt
and the shoes with broken high ideals
and refusing coffee
run
alltheway
home.

Roger McGough

I love the cleverness with words. It could have been self-conscious in the playing with homonyms and rhymes (gilt/guilt, heels/ideals), but it just seems to be pleased to be able to play. The elision of certain words has the same playful feeling to it. I love the fact that the the dress of guilt and the broken ideals are things one has to put on - it's a show, not real, taken up at the insistence of external forces. Neither are things that, underneath the trappings, one really feels. The light of day hides the honesty of the night. The darkness is happy, the day is guilty. 'It was the nightingale and not the lark that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. Believe me, love, it was the nightingale!'* It is not until the policeman-day creeps insidiously into the room that there must be guilt, and consequences, and no coffee.

I love the image of 'talking on tiptoe'. I think it was about seventy percent of the reason I wanted to post it. It seems so appropriate for the moment where there has to be talking, but there is no wish to disturb the mood or the moment. Delicate, gentle. More than that. 'Comeclose and Sleepnow' couldn't happen if there wasn't the fragile and insubstantial softness of talking on tiptoe. I think the elision adds a childlike quality to the writing, and the sleep is very innocent because of it, despite the fact that we know that this is a poem that starts after sex. The sex is innocent and pure and childlike. The morning, the running away, is hard and external and disturbs the honesty of the two people and their feelings.

*Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 5.

Out of context.

I'm in the middle of thinking about something else. I wrote this when a friend of mine died, as a way of hiding from it, really. It isn't about her. It's about something entirely different. Fear of loving, I think. I just wanted it somewhere I could find it. I might have posted it on here before, but if I did I didn't tag it properly. Sorry if you've seen it before! Like I said, it's not relevant at the moment, but I just wondered where it was.

Wrap me in cotton wool: don’t let me touch
You lying there in your matchbox disused -
Where your sting’s curled in tight to your belly
And your hands are balled in to your heart.
You – circular, insular involved in
Yourself – don’t let me close, to protect
By entrapping, in an empty case
Once so full of quickened fire but no more.
You didn’t hide me or smother me
Or sting me and drive me back from you.
You didn’t move, and I closed the trap:
Your empty shell now lies in my lap.

Picture.

I Am Not Yours

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

Sarah Teasdale, written on the eve of her wedding to a man she didn't love, in 1914 when she was 30.

No agenda. This poem was set to music in the concert I was singing in tonight, and it just struck something. Enjoy.

P.S. I've edited the previous post with some more explanations...

Life as art. Control of existence. The thrill of the individual.

'One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.'

Oscar Wilde, 'Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young', first published in Chameleon in December 1894

'What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.'

Oscar Wilde, 'A few Maxims for the instruction of the Over-Educated', first published in the Saturday Review in November, 1894

'To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.'

'It will be a marvellous thing - the true personality of man - when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, it will help all, as a beautiful things helps us by being what it is. The personality of a man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.'

'The message of Christ to man was simply 'Be thyself.' That is the secret of Christ.'

'There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men.'

'Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.'

Oscar Wilde, 'The Soul of Man under Socialism', first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891

'I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art. I altered the minds of men and the colours of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation; drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less that what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase and all existence in an epigram.'

'At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.'

'It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.'

'...every moment should be beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the coming of the Bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the Lover.' (NB the references here are to the The Song of Songs)

Oscar Wilde, 'De Profundis', the letter written from Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas in the spring of 1897

'Preventing oneself from dying is not living.'

'Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting.'

'I am among those to whom the superfluous is necessary.'

Théophile Gautier, from the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, published in Paris in 1835

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley, 1849–1903

I'm tired today. I suspect some people will read the Wilde quotations especially as displaying a great arrogance in the man, which they do, out of context. But he was a great artist and an incredible man. What's the difficulty with him realising that? He was in enormous pain of the soul when he was writing 'De Profundis', and died not a great deal later. These quotations are, to me, about the relationship between living, truth and art. Ways I would like to be able to be, I suppose.

Here is the opposite, to the optimism of 'Invictus' above. We've moved on by more than half a century, and I suspect the pride and might and strength that was Britain in the late C19 has given way to post-war, post-colonial modernist and post-modern loneliness. I almost feel like writing a piece of comparative practical criticism, there's so much that could be taken from the two of them. If I ever have to set an essay for an English student of any sort...

Both poems express the isolation of humanity, but 'Invictus' imbues the solitary state of man with a proud dignity, whereas in Gunn's poem the 'individual' is resolute, guarding and wary. Both figures are soldiers, and imagery of war is present in both. The soldier of 'Invictus', though, is stalwart, proud, almost optimistic in the face of the enemy. Gunn's soldier is a guard; suspicious, alert - surrounded by mercenaries whose motives and intentions are not to be trusted. The figure is cut off and waiting for things to happen. He seeks, but does not find. 'Invictus' is much more engaged with his world - things happen to him. He is a victim of chance and circumstance, and suffers the buffets of time. But whatever menace the years bring, this man is certain of himself and his mastery of that. Despite the undoubted influence of chance, he himself has control. Gunn's speaker is not certain of himself, he tells us that he 'must/ Find out the limitation/ Of mind and universe.' He does not even suggest why, just that he does not know. There is no mastery here. This is the point at which the dates of the two poems can most clearly be felt; post-Freud and psychoanalysis, the self has become a frail thing. Before the 'discovery' of the subconscious, a man could be certain of his own mind. He need not be scared of it. Undoubtedly, many people in the C19th did feel scared of their own demons, but it was a much more nebulous and less universal thing than it became with the modernists.

The two endings are interesting, partly for their similarity. The epigrammatic two lines at the end of 'Invictus' must be some of the most oft-quoted in all English poetry. Their triumphant air in the face of the adversity of life is uplifting. But it is unrealistic. We know that we are not masters of our fates or captains steering the unknowable course of the soul. The Gunn ending is far more enigmatic but far more realistic, it seems to me. We are born into an unknowing, unformed, vaguely sinister existence - a fog, perhaps a barren wasteland or the possibility of a wasted existence - walk without assistance and alone through all the might-bes and the might-have-beens - all the hypotheses. The final line could be read bitterly, decrying the fate which cuts us off from the world with moats and sentries and darkness, or it, too, could have an element of triumph about it. By the end, the poem has moved past the point where the speaker is 'condemned' to individuality. It is recognised that no problem must be faced until it has occurred. Therefore, with eyes open, despite the fog, which echoes the darkness that Henley recognises in the other poem, we walk through our lives for ourselves - individual, in control, with nobody else responsible for our path. The thought is comforting and terrifying, and the two pieces catch the nuances.

Human Condition

Now it is fog. I walk
Contained within my coat;
No castle more cut off
By reason of its moat:
Only the sentry's cough,
The mercenaries' talk.

The street lamps, visible,
Drop no light on the ground,
But press beams painfully
In a yard of fog around.
I am condemned to be
An individual.

In the established border
There balances a mere
Pinpoint of consciousness.
I stay, or start from, here:
No fog makes more or less
The neighbouring disorder.

Particular, I must
Find out the limitation
Of mind and universe.
To pick thought and sensation
And turn to my own use
Disordered hate or lust.

I seek, to break, my span.
I am my one touchstone.
This is a test more hard
Than any ever known.
And thus I keep my guard
On that which makes me man.

Much is unknowable.
No problem shall be faced
Until the problem is;
I, born to fog, to waste,
Walk through hypothesis,
An individual.

Thom Gunn, something like the 1950s (I WISH I could find better references for this poem, I'd love to read the rest of whatever collection it's in)