Poetry | Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard – Thomas Gray

May 24, 2013

Musical, eloquent, moral, the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is not only a beautiful poem in its own right, but opens a network of cultural pathways. It connects the reader to English history and to European literature: Dante, Milton, the classical writers. Its ideas about society and education are deeply relevant today. The first stanza is often memorized: not only a visual masterpiece, it has an impressive array of sound-effects. In fact, there is a striking quantity of alliteration stowed away in the whole poem’s tidy, iambic portmanteau. It’s particularly audible in the first four lines, where the mournful, vowel-heavy sounds of the cattle lowing and the bell’s tolling are grounded by the earthier throb of tired, heavy, mud-caked footfall

Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ was a poem of uncommon power on grief and the afterlife.

*********************************************

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If Memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

The applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet even these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Ev’n from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who mindful of the unhonoured dead
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely Contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
“Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove,
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.

“One morn I missed him on the customed hill,
Along the heath and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

“The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne.
Approach and read (for thou can’st read) the lay,
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”

The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth
A youth to fortune and to fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.

********************************

Meditation on Mortality — John J. Miller

Mr. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and national correspondent for National Review. This essay was featured in the WSJ recently.

Shortly afterAbraham Lincoln secured the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, a reporter traveled to Springfield, Ill., to learn about the candidate’s background. In an interview, Lincoln said his early life could be condensed into a single phrase: “the short and simple annals of the poor.”

The words didn’t belong to Lincoln, but rather to the 18th-century English poet Thomas Gray, and they came from “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.” Lincoln almost certainly had encountered Gray’s “Elegy” as a boy, possibly by one of those hearth fires in his family’s log cabin.

There was a time when most educated people would have recognized Lincoln’s reference: “Gray’s Elegy,” wrote Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf), “includes more familiar phrases than any poem of equal length in the language.” Its 32 stanzas burst with celebrated passages: “The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day”; “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”; “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”; and so on. Robert L. Mack, Gray’s definitive biographer, has observed that a recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations draws from 15 stanzas and reproduces 13 of them whole.

Gray was born the day after Christmas in 1716. He was one of a dozen children, but only he survived childhood. As a boy, he attended Eton College, and later he would write “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” a poem that is the source of what may be his best-known phrase of all: “where ignorance is bliss / ‘Tis folly to be wise.” Another poem, the amusing “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” apparently recounts a true story involving an unfortunate feline owned by Gray’s close friend Horace Walpole, a politician and writer.

For Gray, poems were the product of long, careful and hard work — and he often had trouble finishing what he started. In 1750, however, he sent a complete version of his “Elegy” to Walpole: “You will, I hope, look upon it in light of a thing with an end to it; a merit that most of my writings have wanted.” He appears to have fiddled with the elegy for at least four years and possibly as many as eight.

It begins with a description of a rural cemetery in darkness, turning to the fates of the people who lie six feet below. Do their ranks include “some mute inglorious Milton”? The poem goes on to ponder the pain of grief, the challenge of commemoration and the mystery of what lies beyond this life.

As a meditation on human mortality, its theme is one of the most common in literature. Yet the poem possesses uncommon power. When Walpole received his copy, he seems to have recognized its merits at once. He behaved as a publicist, distributing the poem throughout London. It struck at a popular moment for “graveyard poetry,” which mixed themes of death, gloom and Christian belief, prefiguring the coming Gothic movement. (Walpole, in fact, wrote what is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel, “The Castle of Otranto,” published in 1764.)

Yet Gray’s “Elegy” also rose above the ghetto of a genre, expressing universal ideas in lines that worked their way into collective memory. Samuel Johnson didn’t care for most of Gray’s poetry, but even he confessed an admiration for the elegy, praising its “images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

In 1759, on the night before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, British Gen. James Wolfe either recited the poem or listened to it read aloud (accounts vary). “I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow,” he is reported to have said. Wolfe defeated the French the next day, but he famously perished in the effort, providing a testament to what may be the central truth of Gray’s “Elegy”: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

It might be said that Gray’s path of glory started at a grave — and very possibly one occupied by his aunt, Mary Antrobus. She died as Gray composed the elegy and was entombed in the churchyard of St. Giles, in the village of Stoke Poges, west of London. Gray attended church services there with his mother, and they would have routinely walked by his aunt’s final resting place, in an activity that may have provided Gray with the determination to finish his poem.

Fans of the James Bond movies have caught a glimpse of the churchyard in the opening moments of “For Your Eyes Only.” Bond, played by Roger Moore, lays roses by his wife’s burial plot, in a scene filmed on the grounds that Gray immortalized. It looks a bit different from its appearance in Gray’s life. In 1924, the locals tore down the owl-haunted, “ivy-mantled” tower, fearing its imminent collapse.

Another grave lies there too: the one belonging to Gray himself. “On some fond breast the parting soul relies, / Some pious drops the closing eye requires,” he wrote in the elegy. Yet when he died in 1771, few people attended his funeral. As a lifelong bachelor, he had no wife or children to mourn him, and most of his friends didn’t even know he had passed. Walpole learned of Gray’s death from a newspaper.

His gravesite marker is modest. For a poet, however, Gray left behind the best kind of epitaph — one etched into a literary heritage.

Posted in Death, Poetry | Tagged Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Thomas Gray | Leave a Comment »

Auden Across the Decades – J. M. Pressley

May 20, 2013

Auden’s journey began with the mind and ended with the spirit. His rationality gave way to passion, which in turn opened the door to religious rediscovery. It is due to, not despite, this journey that Auden still reigns as a poetic master, and his depth progressively grows with study across the decades of his career. But, as Auden would undoubtedly argue, it is the poet’s duty to discover the relevant questions of one’s times — and to do so requires the type of journey which comprised the life of W. H. Auden

Mr Pressley’s website is here and filled with interesting stuff.

********************************************

Wystan Hugh Auden died in 1973 having accomplished a remarkable journey that spanned decades — and left him established as one of the premier poets of the 20th century. This journey began in England, deepened in America, and ended in Vienna, leaving an unrivaled legacy. It is a journey of both body and poetic voice, and is expressed forever in his verses. For a serious discussion of Auden the poet, it is necessary to explore the journey of Auden the wanderer, constantly reinventing himself along the way.

Auden was the son of a doctor, which had a profound and lasting effect upon his style of verse. As Stephen Spender says, “There is a dualistic idea running through all [Auden's] work which encloses it like the sides of a box. This idea is Symptom and Cure” (Spears, Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, 28). Moreover, the early interest of Auden in things scientific — he originally wished to pursue a career in biology or medicine like his father — shows heavily in his use of detail and his approach to verse.

Quite frequently, Auden’s lines are densely analytical in nature, or “diagnostic” as many critics have put forth. At the beginning of Auden’s career, this scientific-rational tendency was the predominant quality of Auden’s poetry. His intellectualism and psychology predilections are demonstrated markedly in works prior to 1932, such as “The Letter” (published in 1928).

The Letter

From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way.
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year’s arc a completed round
And love’s worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, spring’s green
Preliminary shiver, passed

A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But now,
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through,
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much, but not to come.

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb,
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different or with a different love,
Nor question much the nod,
The stone smile of this country god
That never was more reticent,
Always afraid to say more than it meant.

(Ellmann and O’Clair, Modern Poems: A Norton Introduction 410)

The above lines represent Auden in his youth, a prodigy, according to some critics. There is no playfulness of craft to this work reminiscent of Auden’s later periods — the syllabic meter is strict, using rhymed couplets of nine syllables per line in the first stanza and eight per line in the second with barely a hint of variety. There is, however, a cool analytical approach to the subject matter, almost impersonal. The central theme is the cycle of life as represented through a failed love.

Most interesting — and typical of Auden — is the usage of scientific, in this case electrical, imagery in the poem. He uses terms like “arc,” “circuit,” and “shunting” in the context of the work, which I read as comparing the connection of a relationship to the connection of an electrical circuit. This provides a contrast with the more pastoral/natural elements of the poem: storm, bird, seasons, Spring and Autumn, etc.

This is Auden the post-Romantic; we don’t necessarily feel the grief of the voice character in this work, but are presented with a dialectical insight through the varying details provided within the poem. Although “The Letter” may be construed as more technically primitive and somewhat obscure as compared with Auden’s later craft, it reflects a style that would be refined and evolve into clever twists of form and content.

Auden began teaching at a school in Herefordshire in the Fall of 1932, and this marks a major milestone in his poetic development. To quote The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry:

In that mellow world his poetry opened like a bud, becoming more expansive and richer in surface detail. This is the start of the second “chapter,” the phase when Auden, drawing on Marx and Freud, was able to make a brilliant stream of connections between individual guilts and pleasures and the crisis that seemed to be eating away at European civilization. Simultaneously, his interests in the possibilities of verse forms burst out in a profusion of beautifully adroit sonnets, sestinas, and ballads (Hamilton, 22).

The period from 1932 to 1940 earned Auden the praise of his contemporaries as well, including T. S. Eliot who once said, “This fellow is about the best poet I have discovered in several years” (Davenport-Hines, Auden, 121). The following poem shows a more unrestrained Auden at work; Auden has latched onto the theme of grand Love, and shows an emotion in his poetry not entirely present in “The Letter”:

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good

(Mendelson, As I Walked Out One Evening: W. H. Auden, 43).

Once again, Auden chooses his details carefully, considering each one for their effect, and each detail is given even more prominence within the poem by the use of end-stops on each line. The poem operates on two distinct levels. First, the literal interpretation of a love who has died — it is that inner state of grief over love’s loss which his younger poems lack. Can the third stanza be more plain, or more eloquent in its understated grandiosity? Here Auden is less the clinician and more the participant, for all he decried showing oneself as a poet within the poetry.

On a more ephemeral level, one can read “Funeral Blues” as bemoaning the death of God, not an altogether unfamiliar theme following the first world war and with Europe facing the prospect of another. This poem was also written after Auden’s service in Spain, which left him disillusioned with the state of the world in many respects. Stanza four is as huge as stanza three is compact.

Because of this, however, and because of this departure from Auden’s usual detachment from subject matter, I view this poem as more of an elegy for God than for a lost lover. Although Auden uses hyperbole with elan in other works, it seems somehow misplaced given the circumstances if the subject is a loved one. In a sweeping gesture, Auden calls for an end to the world in the space of four lines, dismissing the notion that there can be any good left in the world with the passing of the subject of the poem. The imagery of the stars being dampened, or pouring out the oceans, is the utter annihilation of creation — as such, it represents the death of the Creator.

The final stage of Auden’s poetic journey, and the most problematic from the critical perspective, is comprised of the years after 1946 (when Auden officially became a U. S. citizen). Age and a rediscovery of Anglicism gave new artistic bents to Auden’s poetry. 1948′s The Age of Anxiety won Auden the Pulitzer, and his verses after began to take on a more meditative air — “too religious,” according to many of the critics who had earlier hailed Auden as a poetic genius. Or, as his biography suggests, “He was now widely misunderstood as a reactionary coward who had reneged on the radicalism of his youth” (Davenport-Hines, 266).

Auden’s quest for Love in the divine sense is typified within the tercets of his poem, “Archaeology”, which was published in the posthumous volume, Thank You, Fog:

Archaeology

The archaeologist’s spade
delves into dwellings
vacancied long ago,

unearthing evidence
of life-ways no one
would dream of leading now,

concerning which he has not much
to say that he can prove:
the lucky man!

Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing.

We do know that Man,
from fear or affection,
has always graved His dead.

What disastered a city,
volcanic effusion,
fluvial outrage,

or a human horde,
agog for slaves or glory,
is visually patent,

and we’re sure that,
as soon as palaces were built,
their rulers,

though gluttoned on sex
and blanded by flattery,
must often have yawned.

But do grain-pits signify
a year of famine?
Where a coin-series

peters out, should we infer
some major catastrophe?
Maybe. Maybe.

From murals and statues
we get a glimpse of what
the Old Ones bowed down to,

but cannot conceit
in what situations they blushed
or shrugged their shoulders.

Poets have learned us our myths
but just how did They take them?
That’s a stumper.

When Norsemen heard thunder,
did they seriously believe
Thor was hammering?

No, I’d say: I’d swear
that men have always lounged in myths
as Tall Stories,

that their real earnest
has been to grant excuses
for ritual actions.

Only in rites
can we renounce our oddities
and be truly entired.

Not that all rites
should be equally fonded:
some are abominable.

There’s nothing the Crucified
would like less
than butchery to appease Him.

CODA

From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all

our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,

being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.

(Mendelson, As I Walked Out One Evening: W. H. Auden, 302-304)

The analytical muse in this poem has been turned introspective, and ultimately the internal inquisition leads to a conclusion of morality. Auden uses science to demonstrate its own weaknesses, the frailty of human knowledge with such lines as “…has not much to say that he can prove: the lucky man!” and “guessing is always more fun than knowing”. Simply put, Man can be quantified, whereas faith cannot. Science, as represented through archaeology, can but give us temporal answers at best. But does study and human learning provide deeper insight? In this poem, Auden states with his typical, unique verve: “That’s a stumper.”

The end stanzas and coda provide the keys to unlocking Auden’s meaning in the poem. He has not succumbed to religion as Eliot did in later years, yet ends the work on the note of a sermon. History is merely a recording of the misdeeds of men, whereas there is a suffusing “goodness” that exists outside the boundaries of learning. If our collected knowledge is fallible concerning ourselves, then it cannot be expected to approach an understanding of God – only the endurance of faith suggested by the final line of the poem can provide that.

By comparison with his earlier work, Auden as represented in “Archaeology” is wistful. While he does not, as I read it, repudiate his scientific bent toward detail and analysis, he admits in this poem that it means little if not coupled with faith in something beyond the human experience. Love must have its place in the world.

Posted in Poetry, W. H. Auden | Tagged Auden Poem Archaeology, Auden Poem Funeral Blues, Auden Poem The Letter, Wystan Hugh Auden | Leave a Comment »

Choruses from the Rock – T. S. Eliot

May 16, 2013

Knowledge without Wisdom, Poster by Paulo Zerbato
“What we call “church” is too often a gathering of strangers who see the church as yet another “helping institution” to gratify further their individual desires. One of the reasons some church members are so mean-spirited with their pastor, particularly when the pastor urges them to look at God, is that they feel deceived by such pastoral invitations to look beyond themselves. They have come to church for “strokes,” to have their personal needs met. What we call church is often a conspiracy of cordiality. Pastors learn to pacify rather than preach to their Ananiases and Sapphiras. We say we do it out of “love.” Usually, we do it as a means of keeping everyone as distant from everyone else as possible. You don’t get into my life and I will not get into yours.”
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

We are taught by our secular educational masters that Eliot’s greatest poems were his early, bleak ones: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland. But this, I urge you, Choruses from the Rock, written some seventeen years after “Prufrock” and seven years after Eliot‘s conversion to the Anglican Church is just as worthy a candidate. Here we see Eliot, the older soul in search, who finally found what he was looking for in the Christian Church. Being that I’m pretty old myself, universally acknowledged as downright cranky and am searching in the Catholic Church, this strikes me as a beautiful poem and one of his best. Read it aloud in your solitary room and see if it doesn’t echo throughout your day:

Choruses from the Rock (1934)

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

You neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore
I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.

And the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of
the Word,
Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;
Bestial as always before, carnal, self seeking as always before, selfish and
purblind as ever before,
Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on
the way that was lit by the light;
Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other
way.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened
before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has
never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned
upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?

There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem
And the holy places defiled;
Peter the Hermit, scourging with words.
And among his hearers were a few good men,
Many who were evil,
And most who were neither,
Like all men in all places.

In spite of all the dishonour,
the broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings.

Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or
lifeless
Joined with the artist’s eye, new life, new form, new colour.
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal
imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the
place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

The work of creation is never without travail

Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.

Posted in Poetry, T.S. Eliot | Tagged Choruses from the Rock, T.S.Eliot | Leave a Comment »

Reflections on Louise Glück’s October – Derek Jeter

April 3, 2013

OCTOBER – Louise Glück

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,
didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end,
didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body rescued,
wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden
harrowed and planted

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,
didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice
for the wind’s cries,
whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced,
when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is –

didn’t the night end,
wasn’t the earth safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds,
weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good
to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine
ochre and fire, even the fields shine.
I know what I see; sun that could be
the August sun, returning
everything that was taken away –

You hear this voice?
This is my mind’s voice;
you can’t touch my body now.
It has changed once, it has hardened,
don’t ask it to respond again.

A day like a day in summer.
Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples
nearly mauve on the gravel paths.

And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer

It does me no good; violence has changed me.
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,
with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;
bounty, balm after violence.
Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields
have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future,
I won’t believe you.
Tell me I’m living,
I won’t believe you.

Snow had fallen. I remember
music from an open window

Come to me, said the world.
This is not to say
it spoke in exact sentences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture
on each living thing. Pools of cold light
formed in the gutters.

I stood
at the doorway,
ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art,
I found in nature.
What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over.
In the thawed dirt, bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty

the healer, the teacher

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable
has entered them.

This is the light of autumn,
not the light that says
I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.
This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.

you will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be still passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

I am
at work, though I am silent.

The bland

misery of the world
bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with trees; we are

companions here, not speaking,
each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron
gates of the private houses,
the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist’s
duty to create
hope, but out of what? what?

the word itself
false, a device to refute
perception — At the intersection,

ornamental lights of the season.

I was young here. Riding
the subway with my small book
as though to defend myself against

this same world:

you are not alone, the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.

The brightness of the day
becomes the brightness of the night;
the fire becomes the mirror.

My friend the earth is bitter; I think
sunlight has failed her.
Bitter or weary, it is hard to say.

Between herself and the sun,
something has ended.
She wants, now, to be left alone;
I think we must give up
turning to her for affirmation.

Above the fields,
above the roofs of the village houses,
e brilliance that made all life possible
becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch:
the give nothing but ask nothing.

From within the earth’s
bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

my friend the moon rises:
she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

Several confessions to make here before reviewing Louise Glück’s October. I’m a cranky old man highly distrustful of women, not without exposure to many but almost because of that – particularly due to the corruption and dishonesty of my two sisters and my mother. Not that I don’t love them or didn’t love them, mind you, but because I loved them. Nothing fucks you up more than shitty people. Mark that down on your calendar somewhere. Stick it on your refrigerator door.

So after surviving what seemed to be more than a lifetime of betrayals and chaos, much of it due to the fault and weaknesses of that latter triumvirate of viragoes, my two sisters and mother, I have emerged in my October of life, much like Ms. Glück appears to have in hers.

That is an amazing sentence coming from someone who is admitting to such unrepentant sexist distaste for any woman poet or writer. PayingAttentiontotheSky is at once littered with all sorts of exceptions to my sexist prejudices, look at my love of Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Sayers, Anne Carson, Dorothy Day, Madeleine Delbrêl, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, Wislawa Szymborska and the incomparable Simone Weil.

At least those are the ones I have created special categories for or have selected poems that have deeply affected me. Obviously I am not who I claim to be, thank God. I don’t know why I cling to my misogynistic inclinations, perhaps it is the outgrowth of that “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” proverb that has reached the inconcludable heights of “Fool me six times…blah-blah-blah”

The reason I have this affinity for Louse Glück is that she is a poet for the survivor of violence and this is something that all PTSD vets and women who have experienced violence can find solace in. The narrator of October is searching for a way of being in the aftermath of her soul-robbing experience of violence. It begins with an awakening which is not quite so, a life lived in the half-light of disbelief:

didn’t the night end,
didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body rescued,
wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible
above the injury

Did all that really happen and is it really over? I remember those days coming back from Vietnam, the utter change from being there and then not. Later realizing I had never processed that sea change, it had just happened. I was numb to all that was alive around me. Then, blessedly I was overseas again, serving in Japan and of course none of that made sense at all. It never made sense again, really. It all seemed so pointless, until I came to rest with the Risen Christ:

when was I silenced,
when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

Am I not a survivor, the narrator seems to be questioning herself. And the gradual realization of that changed life of that half-light where “violence has changed me.” Withdrawn to the mind, no longer acknowledging her own bodiliness unable to awaken to the best of intentions:

It does me no good; violence has changed me.
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,
with the sense it is being tested.

What rescues Glück in her October epiphany is the inescapable existence of beauty, transcendent beauty. Beauty that can be experienced in so many different ways. For me I discovered it most recently in the arms of a lover to whom I had given a copy of Glück’s Collected Poems, which is where I found October, finding it as I did in my tried and truest way by opening the book and reading what I saw there. I call that my St. Augustine method of locating truth. OK if you don’t know that story you can find it here. Try it sometime, it works.

What I like about the poem, and you can see if you don’t agree after reading it, is how the narrator switches voices, perhaps tone of voice would be more precise. When she is closest to recalling her violence affected self, it becomes shortened and clipped. As she emerges into powerful reflections on what happened to her and searching how to be in its aftermath the voice regains its natural rhythm of full sentences:

Come to me, said the world.
This is not to say
it spoke in exact sentences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

And looked back on the older self, the one with the stilted voice, she had passed from being:

I stood
at the doorway,
ridiculous as it now seems.

And speaking of St. Augustine again this is the interplay of the mind, mens, observing itself, notitia sui with the affection, amor sui, of what Augustine identified with the imago dei of the human, the creature created in the image of God:

The ground of the intellect, the mysterious source from which all intellectual activity surges forth, Augustine called mens. It would be wrong to translate this simply as “mind,” for that reduces its meaning too drastically. Mens is closer to esprit in French or Geist in German, designating the full range of spiritual energy. Mens is capable of a doubling or mirroring activity by which it poses itself as an object for its own contemplation. This Augustine calls notitia sui, or self-knowledge.

Though this sounds rather abstract, we all acknowledge notitia sui whenever we say, “What was I thinking?” or whenever we engage in introspection under the guidance of a therapist or counselor, searching out our motives and bringing to consciousness our often unconscious impulses. And when mens comes to self-awareness through notitia sui, it falls in love. Again, we sense this whenever, through introspection or counseling, we come to a richer understanding of ourselves and experience, thereby, a deeper level of self-acceptance.

What Augustine finds so intriguing about these dynamics is that though their components are separate from one another, though they can be clearly distinguished one from the other, they do not constitute a dividing of the mind into three. For example, when I say, “What was I thinking?” I’m certainly distinguishing mens from notitia sui, but I’m not falling into schizophrenia.

It was precisely this tensive ambiguity that makes the analogy so apt. The Father, Augustine claimed, is the mens of God, the dark, elemental ground of the divine life. The Father is capable of a perfect and utterly interior act of self-othering. The mirror or Word of the Father, his notitia sui, is the Son. When Father and Son gaze at each other, they breathe hack and forth their mutual love, and this is the amor sui of God, or the Holy Spirit. Hence we have three dynamisms but not three Gods; we have a lover, a beloved, and a shared love, within the unity of one stance, not a one plus one plus one adding up to three, but a one times one times one, equaling one.
Fr. Robert Barron, Catholicism

This is a common device in poetry and literature and once you can identify its movement you can fully enter the mind of the writer and follow along easily with what they are saying. Glück’s approach to beauty is through nature, as is my lover Luisa’s. She loves being outside and would never be drawn to my apartment, particularly for the animals I keep and my own big-cat existence. All of which she hates but can’t escape from. But that’s another post for another day.

Returning to Glück’s approach to beauty through nature:

What others found in art,
I found in nature.
What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.

No voice, she recounts accurately. The pagans and their love of nature had everything except God, who although creator was not part of his creation, hence the lack of a voice. Nature reeks of God and leads us to Him but you cannot pray to it. Wallace Stevens will tell you the same thing in his The Snow Man:

The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

No, Ms. Glück’s awareness of beauty has awakened within her to a new autumnal sense of mind, one that has a new sense of appreciation for herself as survivor and is the subject of October. My lover and I have made the same journey with each other using profane love as our guide. That’s why this poem is so important to us; or, at least, I hope it will be. Because the one thing that love does for you is make you laugh and laughter shoots the world full of hope, something that Ms. Glück claims she has “forfeited.” Because I am Catholic I am privileged, really, to be still passionately clinging to what I love, as Ms. Glück is to her loves.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be still passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Section Five is her new view of the world:

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

That is true; there is only enough beauty for us to capture an awareness of the transcendental beauty that hovers over around and through our lives, shot through as it were. We cannot restore any of it, inadequate creatures that we are. We putter about the edges with our dismal science and attend to all the fatherless children growing up in stunned sadness. But candor, yes, that is something we can all provide to each other. It certainly is Ms. Glück’s talent.

She seems to deny one of the three theological virtues, hope, at the end of her poem but as I personally attested to above, love will shoot you so full of that you could no more eliminate hope than laughter from this world. One recalls Robert Frosts closing lines from Birches:

I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

All good Catholics who pray the rosary are hopeful swingers of birches, with a knowledge that encompasses our hope of resurrection of the body, where life can bear no more and in death, dips its top and sets us down again in heaven: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” October is a lovely poem, a good Catholic poem as I lay claim to it here, before my atheist lover gets her grubby hands on it, and I hope you enjoy it.

Posted in Louise Glück, Poetry, Reflections | Tagged Louise Glück, OCTOBER | Leave a Comment »

Birches — By Robert Frost

March 8, 2013

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.

I love this poem: the wisdom of an older man who transforms memory and faces death informed by his life. And who is to say he didn’t go by climbing a birch tree, climbing black branches up a snow-white trunk toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more and dipped its top and set him down again, touching the smiling face of a loving God. God bless us all.

*******************************************************

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.

He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

Posted in Death, Poetry | Tagged Birches, Robert Frost | Leave a Comment »

Louise Glück’s Poetry – David Orr

February 14, 2013

This was the last book I was able to press into Luisa’s hand. I hate to sound lovesick here because I am not, but at the same time I am dealing with the loss of my best friend. I never thought anyone could be quite so stupid as my Luisa.

If I were in love with someone and couldn’t tolerate it, I would at least have the sense to keep my mouth shut. Why bother to do anything about it? Love either bears fruit or it doesn’t and it you are on the “not bearing fruit” side of the argument, well, why not let the thing play out? A year or two later if nothing has happened, where is the harm in that? No one has led anyone on.

Nothing has been “manipulated,” as my Luisa so famously accused me of doing. My answer was (of course): “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” [1 Corinthians 13:4-8]

I wonder how that statement would read if it were cast to reflect Luisa’s life experiences (whose love, as it turned out, insisted on its own way and was both irritable and resentful.)

I would have endured anything for Luisa’s sake but she never had the faith in love to trust me to do that. It is such a sad story. And I am left to not insist on my own way, if I am to be loyal to my faith.

I recall now that I never answered her question correctly. She had asked “What happens if I never hug or kiss you, and I had taken that as “What happens if I never love you?” Or “What happens if I don’t love you?” Well if my love were untrue it would have ended.

But if it weren’t, nothing would have changed, because love never ends as St. Paul tells us above. I would have gone on believing that one day Luisa would have fully realized her love for me. “You have only to let it happen,” Louise Glück writes below.You see how intolerable my presence was to Luisa.

Reading this review and some of the Glück’s poems I see how this lover who abandoned me matched perfectly with a poet who is credited with having powers of even “the loneliest Gods.” Luisa, my loneliest Goddess. How can our story have ended when my love can bear all, believe all, hope all, and can endure all? But you can’t simply let your love happen?

*******************************************

Poetry has always been the handmaiden of mythology, and vice versa. Sometimes poets are in the business of collecting and tweaking existing myths, as with Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the Poetic Edda. Other times poetry applies a mythological glamour to stories and characters from history, legend or even other myths (the hero of the “Aeneid” is a minor character from the “Iliad”).

Then there are poets who equate the idea of myth with the supposedly irrational essence of poetry itself. Here is Robert Graves in 1948: “No poet can hope, to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, … with a monotonous chant of `Kill! kill! kill!’ and `Blood! blood! blood!” Which might sound more like a strip club picnic gone badly awry, but you get the idea.

The relationship between poetry and mythology is central to Louise Glück’s new Poems .1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40), if only because no poet of Glück’s generation has relied more overtly on what Philip Larkin once called “the common myth kitty.” A representative list of titles: “Gemini,” “Aphrodite,” “The Triumph of Achilles,” “Legend,” “A Fantasy,” “A Fable,” “Amazons,” “Penelope’s Song,” “Telemachus’ Dilemma;’ “Circe’s Torment;’ “Eurydice,” “Persephone the Wanderer,” “Persephone the Wanderer” (again). This is not even to count her 1992 book “The Wild Iris,” which is basically an allegorical system based on garden myths, legends and fairy tales are for Glück what heirloom tomatoes are for Alice Waters.

That’s probably inevitable, given her sensibility. Glück has always (and self-consciously) favored abstraction over particularity — from the beginning, she’s written lines that are almost completely devoid of the kind of chatty reportage and pop cultural name-dropping that have been common in American poetry since the death of Frank O’Hara.

A Glück poem is dreamlike, chilly, enigmatic. It is still. It is spare. It is almost aggressively concentrated. It revolves around words like “dark,” “pond,” “soul,” “body” and “earth.” It is the kind of poem that involves frequent use of the expression “it is.” It produces great effects with delicate shifts in tone, like an oceangoing bird that travels a hundred miles between wing flaps. Perhaps more than anything else, it relies on mood, suggestion and atmosphere: Glück is a master not of scenes but of scene setting.

And those settings are usually dark. In her first collection — called, alas, “Firstborn” (1968) — we find a tortured array of thwarted lovers, widows, cripples and angst-ridden families. Even the robins are woebegone (“The mama withers on her eggs”). The debt to Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell can be overwhelming in this early work, as in the first few lines of “The Lady in the Single”:

Cloistered as the snail and conch
In Edgartown where the Atlantic
Rises to deposit junk
On plush, extensive sand and the pedantic
Meet for tea…

This may as well have “Lowell 1959″ stamped on it. One sees the frightening outlines of what will become Glück’s preoccupations, but they’re awkwardly clothed in borrowed techniques, like ghosts muffled in L. L. Bean jackets.-But then, in her second book, “The House on Marshland” (1975), Glück comes disturbingly into her own. Suddenly the choppy waters of the early poems ‘become smooth, vast and almost completely lightless. The temperament that emerges is relentlessly critical both of itself and of the world it creates, and that criticism is delivered in lines that are, as Helen Vendler once put it, “hierarchic and unearthly.” Here is the beginning of “Messengers”:

You have only to wait, they will find you.
The geese flying low over the marsh,
glittering in black water.
They find you.

The voice here is strange in the word’s original sense – foreign — as if it were coming from an oracle who stopped worrying about humankind centuries ago. Having given us spooky geese, Glück adds in some deer (“How beautiful they are, / as though their bodies did not impede them”). The poem ends:

You have only to let it happen:
that cry — release, release — like the moon wrenched out of earth and rising
full in its circle of arrows

until they come before you
like dead things, saddled with flesh,
and you above them, wounded and dominant.

The key word here is “dominant,” which is Glück’s way of pointing out the covert will to power in the traditional Romantic nature poem (to see ourselves reflected in nature is to make nature our servant). Above all, Glück’s mature poetry is fixated on control.

This is true of all poets to an extent; the structures of poems are ways of organizing (that is, controlling) experience. But it’s one thing to want to control the way a poem looks, quite another to have dreamed up the beginning of “The Drowned Children,” which appeared in Glück’s collection “Descending Figure” (1980):

You see, they, have no judgment.
So it is natural that they should drown,
first the ice taking them in
and then, all winter, their wool scarves
floating behind them as they sink
until at last they are quiet.
And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.

“So it is natural”: obviously, it isn’t natural at all for children to drown — or to the extent it is natural, it should make us wonder what we mean by the word. Which is Glück’s point. The impersonal forces that really do control our lives (time, space, our own unconscious desires) operate in a way that transcends the day-to-day demands of car payments and deadlines. They’re not so much irrational as unrational, and they are implacable. That truth can be frightening, but as Glück’s first few books demonstrate, it can also be unsettlingly beautiful, in the way that a shark can be beautiful, or a tidal wave.

The type of control that most interests Glück, however, is the struggle for mastery among and within people. Her poems about relationships — romantic and familial – are focused relentlessly on the whip hand. On sisters: One is always the watcher, / one the dancer.” On sex: “A woman exposed as rock / has this advantage: / she controls the harbor.” On friendship: “Always in these friendships / one serves, the other, one is less than the other.” On mothers and daughters: Suppose you saw your mother torn between two daughters: What would you do/to save her /but be willing to destroy/ yourself.”

It’s an attitude all too easy to parody – not every disappointing week-end getaway is a ritual battle between archetypes – but in the strongest of Glück’s earlier poems, one sees how monstrous desires penetrate and determine our supposedly ordinary behavior, inciting quiet violence that we don’t even recognize as damage.

The depiction of those unconscious desires is one of the basic functions of myth. It explains why Glück – drawn as she is to questions of who is doing what to whom, and why — returns repeatedly to characters who aren’t people so much as embodiments of generalized anxieties, particularly anxieties about betrayal and desertion. (In “Gretel in Darkness,” Gretel addresses Hansel: “Nights I turn to you to hold – me /but you are not there.”) The’ problem is that this strategy can result in poems stranded in their own extremity, like forgotten trail markers in the Arctic.

Glück is well aware of this problem. So as she entered middle age, she began to add more obvious personal references to her work; “Ararat” (1990) is centered on her father’s death, “Meadowlands” (1996) on her divorce. She tinkered with colloquial language. She dabbled, in being, you know, funny. (“I thought my life was over and my heart was broken./ Then I moved to Cambridge”) In taking this route, she followed a narrative well established in American poetry. Roughly, the idea is that a, poet who is intense, closed and obsessed when young gradually learns to appreciate and understand the world giving rise to a personal, personable middle style that is richer than the furious early work.

It’s not a story that should be applied to Glück. While the poetry of her middle period is almost never bad, it can be self-indulgent in its general approach. Where previously Glück invoked myth in ways that preserved its essential strangeness (which is also its truth), she now began to invoke it in ways that felt more obviously like psychological diagnosis. Mythology, psychology and poetry are related but different ways of thinking about how we exist in the world, and while they often overlap to one another’s mutual benefit, it can be deadly to let one determine the other.

Or as Carl Jung put it, “If a work of art is explained as a neurosis then either the work of art is a neurosis or a or a neurosis is a work of art. In Glück’s earlier work we get lines from these from The-Garden” in 1980:

The garden admires you:
For your sake it smears itself with green pigment;
the ecstatic reds of the roses,
so that you will come to it with your lovers

But that astringency gives way to lines like these from “Vita Nova” in 1999:

In the splitting up dream
we were fighting over who would keep
the dog
Blizzard. You tell me
what that name means. He was
a cross between
something big and fluffy
and a dachshund

“In the splitting-up dream”: Now, Miss Glück, vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

If that were the end of the story, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. After all, no poet is required to keep the fire kindled for decades. If she can write 5, or 10, or a dozen very good poems over a career, then she has succeeded — and Glück has managed that feat easily. But there is another element to this particular myth.

Glück’s most recent book, “A Village Life” (2009), is one of her best, and it is good in a way that recalls her earlier work without imitating it. The poems are centered on an unnamed, imaginary village and spoken in the voices of various inhabitants (including a memorable earthworm). The darkness and air of unreality are typical Glück, but the atmosphere is something new. It has the sad hopefulness of the seasons: death, birth, death, rebirth.

More than anything, it has other people. Not other people whom we realize the real Glück probably knows, but people as imagined — which is to say, people who represent a deepening. of Glück’s sensibility. Here is a farmer speaking at the end of “A Village Life”:

In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,
meaningless but full of messages.
It’s dead, it’s always been dead,
but it pretends to. be something else,
burning like a star, and convincingly,
so that you feel sometimes
it could actually make something grow on earth.
If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.
I move through the dark as though it were natural to
me,
as though I were already a factor in it
Tranquil and still, the day dawns.
On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.

The lettuce is: a small thing, and so. is the market. But they are not nothing. And the creation of “not nothing” — that is the power given even to the loneliest gods.

Posted in Louise Glück, Loving Luisa, Poetry | Tagged Louise Glück, Loving Luisa | Leave a Comment »

Loving Luisa – Derek Jeter

January 8, 2013

The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that is at once the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

You know, I post all these theological musings on the nature of the person and sometimes the true significance of what is written may elude us. Fear not, my loyal readers, my tumultuous dumb animal life will illustrate what these things come to mean in the real world. Read on…

******************************************

The news is so ominous now that when Louisa comes here on Tuesday, she is going to have something to say. This follows our date last Friday which was a delightful time and just thrilling actually. It is amazing how love is able to infuse the mundane with an electricity that elevates it to the transcendent. Recall my post from High Society:

Bing: Tomato juice? How did you make this? It tastes fantastic.

Grace: I opened the can and poured it in the glass.

Bing: Why it’s marvelous! It’s just so…pecan.

That’s what is was Friday night: pecan. A meal at a Japanese restaurant with Louisa’s looking so happy. It’s hard not to be happy with the way Japanese sushi chefs plate a meal. It really is so beautiful you hate to touch it, never mind if you have some anorexic gene that makes you resist ploughing through it with unrestrained gusto. Louisa possesses that impulse, always a doggie bag for the ride home with her. She is “still full” on Saturday. She keeps her killer figure but I look forward to a little middle-aged fat. She’s too beautiful – the fat will either give her a new self-esteem and rest or cause her to obsess uselessly for lost youth – the former will eventually win out. I’m thinking the middle aged Sophia Loren here, more beautiful than her youthful bombshell could ever have been and recognized as a great actress, accomplished, finally.

We go back to my apartment and talk – we are always talking and I try to explain how my feelings for her slipped into higher gear. The restrained “willing the good of the other as other” somehow wound up in a fifth gear and I became like every other serial lecher, overwhelmed with desire.

My diabetes and neuropathy (nerve damage in my feet and legs)has left my cock deadened and impotent, so I am unable to obtain any sexual release. Any kind of reverie leaves me with a terrible physical ache. It’s a kind of punishment, really – a great way to control pornographic urges that I could never recommend. I’m not sure if she knows that about me (the impotence) although I recall telling her early on so that she shouldn’t worry about being alone with me in the apartment. Don’t worry, you will never find me throwing you over my shoulder and assaulting you – I’m not built that way any longer.

On Friday night walking across the parking lot at the movie theatre, I grabbed her hand and told her that since she was on a date that meant she would have to hold hands with me. She smiled, she was so happy (Did she give me a squeeze of the hand back? I think so.) and off we went like every other couple. I love her so much, I experience such delirium in those moments I should be ashamed of myself.

Holding hands is one of those acts of physical intimacy that couples on the road to divorce lose so tragically. For a husband the act signals a kind of primacy of role. I asked her one day if she knew the meaning of the word “husband,” and happily she didn’t. I reminded her of the related terms we find in plant or animal husbandry, the notion of caring and developing. I told her I wanted to be her husband and I would provide food for her soul – take her to see beautiful things and listen to beautiful music, entertain her with an evening at the movies, sit her down in front of a beautiful dish of food. Take her for a walk on a beautiful beach. Seducing Louisa would become my main occupation in life. But most of all it would be to challenge her with ideas and then listen to her.

There is a kind of abuse some women endure in a marriage that leads to divorce – not anything physical, no battery or anything – just the relentlessness of a reduced expectation by their spouses, of having to be around someone who has quit the relationship.

Yes, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” but it never survives being ignored and partnering with the emotionally unavailable. Even God demands we praise Him. It is one of the main ways we love with all our heart and all our soul and all our might. Those of us who meditate on the Rosary spend 40 minutes or so in a kind of divine conversation with Him. We “ponder” as Mary did (and in a kind of communion with her) the events of His life, constantly expanding and seeing the myriad connections with our own. It is a true meditation on ourselves and anyone who learns the practice is eternally grateful for it.

Would we really expect a spiritual relationship with God if we held ourselves in a kind of stony silence or were always busy with something else? Yet this is what Louisa endured for years with a husband who had abandoned any pretext of husbanding and worried only about control, keeping her barefoot and pregnant. As if you could control anyone so as to make them love you: think keeping the human as pet. Yet in the real fallen world this is a common occurrence.

The day I first felt that she loved me – she told me she would be unable to come and do the housekeeping for me – there was a sadness when she told me that and I was amazed. Why would anyone be sad at not seeing me anymore? Took me a while to figure it out but that was when I saw this young, beautiful woman for the first time. And I responded. How could I not?

Sometimes it meant just sitting out in the kitchen with her and talking to her, listening to her. How I loved that. It was like casting a rain of dew over a green meadow and watching a transcendent green pulsate with life, happiness and fulfillment. And so I fell in love. I didn’t mean to and I knew it was dangerous.

But I declared that love to her Friday evening when we took a break back at the apartment between dinner and the movie. I tried to tell her not to worry but I think I set off some bad vibrations that night. Too much, too fast, typical me. Wildly inappropriate, boundless passion; why can’t I learn to shut up?

The holding hands was fine but when she dropped me off in front of the building I couldn’t resist teasing her dominant role that evening: driving the car, dealing with directions and all that. Recalling the tensions of my teen dating life, I said, “Are you going to walk me to my door and give me a good night hug and kiss?” I got a pretty abrupt, “I’ll walk you to the door OK but no hug or kiss.” That rather cast a pall. You would have thought I had proposed forty minutes of heavy petting in the back seat.

I was still pushing the issue in an email on Saturday:

You were delightful last night, or at least up until the moment you refused to walk me to my door and give me a gentle hug and kiss. Those moments are rarer for you than a trip to the movies and you shouldn’t let them pass you by. As Rick told Ilsa in Casablanca, you may come to regret them, “Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

And that is when she kicked back:

I enjoyed our evening last night a pleasant memory that stayed with me today. For reasons I’m unable to articulate right now and even if I could I would not write in an email. I simply can’t meet for dinner tonight due to lack of appetite lately and too full from a range of emotions. I write this at the risk of adding to a list of regrets (not something I take lightly).

The issue of regrets had come up in an earlier conversation with her. I had told her a story of how I had abandoned my lover and gone back to my abusive marriage so that I could enable my Japanese wife to take over my business and establish herself. It took three or four years for me to realize that the wife would only respond with playing on my guilt over leaving her and stick to her self-destructive ways. What a loss on my part: I sacrificed myself and the woman I truly loved for nothing – absolutely nothing. Four years of unremitting misery.

I think of Thomas Merton looking back on the death of his father:

The Death Of His Father: Suffering
We went into the ward. Father was in his bed, to the left, just as you went in the door.

And when I saw him, I knew at once there was no hope of him living much longer His face was swollen. His eyes were not clear but, above all, the tumor had raised a tremendous swelling on his forehead.

I said: “How are you, Father?”

He looked at me and put forth his hand, in a confused and unhappy way, and I realized that he could no longer even speak. But at the same time, you could see that he knew us, and knew what was going on, and that his mind was clear, and that he understood everything.

But the sorrow of his great helplessness suddenly fell upon me like a mountain. I was crushed by it. The tears sprang to my eyes. Nobody said anything more.

I hid my face in the blanket and cried. And poor father wept, too. The others stood by. It was excruciatingly sad. We were completely helpless. There was nothing anyone could do…

What could I make of so much suffering? There was no way for me, or for anyone in the family, to get anything out of it. It was a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief. You had to take it, like an animal. We were in the condition of most of the world, the condition of men without faith in the presence of war, disease, pain, starvation, suffering, plague, bombardment, death. You just had to take it, like a dumb animal. Try to avoid it if you could. But you must eventually reach the point where you can’t avoid it any more. Take it. Try to stupefy yourself, if you like, so that it won’t hurt so much. But you will always have to take some of it. And it will all devour you in the end.

Indeed the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that is at once the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

And this is my great fear of Tuesday coming with Louisa – that she will step back from me.

The terrible cost of loving is performed by simply putting yourself out there: the utter stupidity of the older man and the younger woman. “No fool like an old fool,” they say. And there is nothing left to say but to watch Louisa withdraw back into the dumb animal of her suffering. I have hurt her and my grief is raw and real.

Recently, at night, I get up at two in the morning or so and sit in my stupid dumb animal apartment surrounded by my stupid dumb animal books and weep my dumb animal tears. The certified dumb animal of the place, my Siamese cat, Jussi, looks on with the wisdom of a superior being. He is such a useless shit, I think he practices a kind of Vajrayana Buddhism. He’s very smug for a cat.

I love Luisa so dearly. Can God rescue me from this?

And if she plans to have me submit to some tiny lecture on how she has withdrawn her love, well here is a well-thought out poem that I subscribe to:

If You Forget Me – Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

I need to be in her arms so much. I am a dishonorable man, crushed by the snares of life, seeking something so fragile I hold my breath so as not to break it.

Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

My sweet atheist, I wonder as you read “What musician holds us in his hand?” …What the hell is he talking about? How does she read love poetry? All this talk of soul and spirit: “…as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine…”

Posted in Autobiography, Loving Luisa, Poetry, Thomas Merton | Tagged High Society, Holding hands, Pablo Neruda, the emotionally unavaillable, Thomas Merton | Leave a Comment »

What The Thunder Said – T.S. Eliot

December 10, 2012

There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain

All three (Eliot, Stravinksy and Picasso) employed the technique of fragmentation of time and space. One could plausibly argue that Eliot’s The Waste Land is a Cubist poem, a series of disjointed angles and multiple perspectives. Both Eliot and Picasso were aware that technology and ideology had fragmented our perception of reality; in their art, they used that fragmentation as a starting point, and sought to move through it to new visions of unity.
Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

************************************************************

The following was suggested by Gregory Wolfe in Beauty Will Save the World: The final section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

V. What The Thunder Said

After the torch-light red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying

Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the roof-tree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon — O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

*************************************************

“The final section of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its events. The first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become “hooded hordes swarming” and the “unreal” cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land. Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared to claim the Grail; the renewal has come seemingly at random, gratuitously.

The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of “what the thunder says,” as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables). According to these fables, the thunder “gives,” “sympathizes,” and “controls” through its “speech”; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder’s power.

The meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of “Shantih shantih shantih” — the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which passeth understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation

Form
Just as the third section of the poem explores popular forms, such as music, the final section of The Waste Land moves away from more typical poetic forms to experiment with structures normally associated with religion and philosophy. The proposition and meditation structure of the last part of this section looks forward to the more philosophically oriented Four Quartets, Eliot’s last major work The reasoned, structured nature of the final stanzas comes as a relief after the obsessively repetitive language and alliteration (“If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock / And also water…”) of the apocalyptic opening. The reader’s relief at the shift in style mirrors the physical relief brought by the rain midway through the section. Both formally and thematically, then, this final chapter follows a pattern of obsession and resignation. Its patterning reflects the speaker’s offer at the end to “fit you,” to transform experience into poetry (“fit” is an archaic term for sections of a poem or play; here, “fit” is used as a verb, meaning “to render into a fit,” to make into poetry).

Commentary
The initial imagery associated with the apocalypse at this section’s opening is taken from the crucifixion of Christ. Significantly, though, Christ is not resurrected here: we are told, “He who was living is now dead.” The rest of the first part, while making reference to contemporary events in Eastern Europe and other more traditional apocalypse narratives, continues to draw on Biblical imagery and symbolism associated with the quest for the Holy Grail. The repetitive language and harsh imagery of this section suggest that the end is perhaps near, that not only will there be no renewal but that there will be no survival either.

Cities are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed, mirroring the cyclical downfall of cultures: Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt, and Austria — among the major empires of the past two millennia — all see their capitals fall. There is something nevertheless insubstantial about this looming disaster: it seems “unreal,” as the ghost-filled London did earlier in the poem. It is as if such a profound end would be inappropriate for such a pathetic civilization. Rather, we expect the end to be accompanied by a sense of boredom and surrender.

Release comes not from any heroic act but from the random call of a farmyard bird. The symbolism surrounding the Grail myth is still extant but it is empty, devoid of people. No one comes to the ruined chapel, yet it exists regardless of who visits it. This is a horribly sad situation: The symbols that have previously held profound meaning still exist, yet they are unused and unusable. A flash of light — a quick glimpse of truth and vitality, perhaps — releases the rain and lets the poem end.

The meditations upon the Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the modern world. Asking, “what have we given?” he finds that the only time people give is in the sexual act and that this gift is ultimately evanescent and destructive: He associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading wills. Just as the poem’s speaker fails to find signs of giving, so too does he search in vain for acts of sympathy — the second characteristic of “what the thunder says”: He recalls individuals so caught up in his or her own fate — each thinking only of the key to his or her own prison — as to be oblivious to anything but “ethereal rumors” of others. The third idea expressed in the thunder’s speech — that of control — holds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and surrenders of the self that, ultimately, are never realized.

Finally Eliot turns to the Fisher King himself, still on the shore fishing. The possibility of regeneration for the “arid plain” of society has been long ago discarded. Instead, the king will do his best to put in order what remains of his kingdom, and he will then surrender, although he still fails to understand the true significance of the coming void (as implied by the phrase “peace which passeth understanding”). The burst of allusions at the end can be read as either a final attempt at coherence or as a final dissolution into a world of fragments and rubbish.

The king offers some consolation: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” he says, suggesting that it will be possible to continue on despite the failed redemption. It will still be possible for him, and for Eliot, to “fit you,” to create art in the face of madness. It is important that the last words of the poem are in a non-Western language: Although the meaning of the words themselves communicates resignation (“peace which passeth understanding”), they invoke an alternative set of paradigms to those of the Western world; they offer a glimpse into a culture and a value system new to us — and, thus, offer some hope for an alternative to our own dead world.”
From Sparknotes.com

Eliot’s Own Notes on What The Thunder Said

In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston’s book), and the present decay of eastern Europe.

357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) ‘it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats…. Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.’ Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.

360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.

I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.
Ernest Shackleton, South; reprinted in Roland Huntford, Shackleton

366-76. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos:
Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.

Already half of Europe, already at least half of Eastern Europe, on the way to Chaos, drives drunk in sacred infatuation along the edge of the precipice, sings drunkenly, as though hymn singing, as Dmitri Karamazov [in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov] sang. The offended bourgeois laughs at the songs; the saint and the seer hear them with tears.

392. The French version of ‘cock a doodle doo’

401. ‘Datta, dayadhvam, damyata’ (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka–Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489

The Hindu fable referred to is that of gods, men, and demons each in turn asking of their father Prajapati, “Speak to us, O Lord.” To each he replied with the one syllable “DA,” and each group interpreted it in a different way: “Datta,” to give alms; “Dayadhvam,” to have compassion; “Damyata,” to practice self-control. The fable concludes, “This is what the divine voice, the Thunder, repeats when he says: DA, DA, DA: ‘Control yourselves; give alms; be compassionate.’ Therefore one should practice these three things: self-control, alms-giving, and compassion.”

407. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:

…they’ll remarry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.

411. Cf. Dante’s Inferno, xxxiii. 46:

ed io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto
all’orribile torre.

Also H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346:

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it…. In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

424. V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.

427. V. Purgatorio, xxvi. 148.

‘Ara vos prec per aquella valor
‘que vos guida al som de l’escalina,
‘sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.’
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.

428. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.

The Latin phrase in the text means, “When shall I be as the swallow?” It comes from the Pervigilium Veneris (Vigil of Venus), an anonymous late Latin poem combining a hymn to Venus with a description of spring. In the last two stanzas of the Pervigilium occurs a recollection of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela myth (except that in this version the swallow is identified with Philomela); the anonymous poet’s mood changes to one of sadness, combined with hope for renewal: “The maid of Tereus sings under the poplar shade, so that you would think musical trills of love came from her mouth and not a sister’s complaint of a barbarous husband. . . . She sings, we are silent. When will my spring come? When shall I be as the swallow that I may cease to be silent? I have lost the Muse in silence, and Apollo regards me not.” Cf. Swinburne’s Itylus, which begins, “Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,/ How can thine heart be full of spring?” and Tennyson’s lyric in The Princess: “O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying south.”

429. The Prince of Aquitaine to the ruined tower

V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.

431. V. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.

433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word.

Posted in Poetry | Tagged Commentary and Notes on What The Thunder Said, What The Thunder Said | Leave a Comment »

O Tell Us, Poet, What You Do — Rainer Maria Rilke

October 18, 2012

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote some uncannily moving poems. The Duino Elegies are perhaps the greatest for meditative study, but he also wrote some hit singles like the gem below. It’s a vindication of the task of poetry, with an interrogator asking a sharp series of questions, to which the poet always gives the same, simple answer. “Ich rühme,” he says in Rilke’s original German, “I praise” or “I celebrate.” It’s interesting that the skeptic is so searching and eloquent in line after line, and the poet just stonewalls.
Fred Sanders, The Bible Institute of Los Angeles

O tell us, poet, what you do. –I praise.
Yes, but the deadly and the monstrous phase,
how do you take it, how resist? –I praise.
But the anonymous, the nameless maze,
how summon it, how call it, poet? –I praise.
What right is yours, in all these varied ways,
under a thousand masks yet true? –I praise.
And why do stillnesss and the roaring blaze,
both star and storm acknowledge you? –because I praise.

There are those who will tell you that Rilke is not a Christian poet or that he rejected Christianity. Many have rejected the Christianity that dominated their particular age. I rejected mine for the longest of time which is why I am understanding of Rilke and his rejection perhaps. There is too much in Rilke’s writings that move my Catholic heart for me to believe that he was not one of us if not for the simple reason his idea that poets, like the Christian man, the original homo adorans before the fall, praises. The poet revives this vestigal memory we all possess from the Garden.

Micah Mattix, an assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University wrote this review of Letters on God and Letter to a Young Woman By Rainer Maria Rilke was featured in the WSJ a few months ago. I don’t agree with a lot that he wrote but I appreciated his attempt to make a few sharp clarifications:

****************************************************

Death was central to Rilke’s view of life. To embrace death meant embracing the “incomprehensible,” another name for God.

It’s fair to say that the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was bedeviled by God, or what the poet called God. In “Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter” (1906-07), God is a mountain, Rilke writes, in which “I climb / and descend all alone and lose the way.” In another early, uncollected poem (1909), he addresses God as “you, whom I cannot take hold of now, anywhere.”

For Rilke (1875-1926), God is difficult to grasp not because he is absent but because he has been pushed to the corners of our mind. “Could one not see the history of God,” Rilke writes in one of the “Letters on God” now being published in English for the first time, “as if it were the side of the human condition that was never visited, always put off, saved up for later, and eventually missed out on altogether?” The poet’s duty is to find him again.

Annemarie S. Kidder’s translations of these two essay-like letters show how central this search was to the poet. The first was written in Munich on Nov. 8, 1915, not long after the French blockade of the city during World War I. Writing to a female admirer of his only novel, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” (1910), Rilke, perhaps with the war at the forefront of his mind, quickly turns to the question of how it is possible to live when life is so “incomprehensible.”

It isn’t, he answers, unless we embrace all that is beyond our control, including death. We wrongly treat death as unnatural, Rilke argues. We bracket it out when we should accept it as part of the cycle of life. “When a tree begins to bud,” Rilke writes, “both death and life spring up in it.” To embrace death is to embrace the “incomprehensible,” which, for the poet, is another name for God.

Rilke was raised a Catholic, and there are echoes in his work of Christ’s pronouncement that “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Yet he came to reject the Catholic church, due to what he saw as his mother’s superficial religiosity. Sophia Rilke (née Entz), who came from a well-to-do family in Prague, would often take the young Rilke on pilgrimages and to churches.

If the family could not be wealthy, they could at least be “spiritual,” she seems to have believed. While the poet was deeply attached to his mother in his youth, he came to despise her overbearing nature and what he called “her absent-minded piety.” In his poetic cycle “Visions of Christ” (1896-98), which he refused to publish in his lifetime, and in the second “letter on god” published here, Rilke rejects the principle tenet of the church — the divinity of Christ — fashioning instead his own sense of spirituality.

In this second letter, written in 1922 in the guise of a factory worker and addressed to the deceased poet Emile Verhaeren, Rilke asks: “Who is this Christ that is meddling in everything?” For Rilke, Christ is holy to the extent that he embraced death and, therefore, life. He is an example of a life fully lived. “I cannot believe,” the poet writes, “that the cross was meant to remain; rather, it was to mark the crossroads.” People who worship Christ, Rilke writes, are “like dogs that do not comprehend the meaning of an index finger and think they have to snap at the hand.”

For Rilke, “degraded Christianity” has wrongly disdained sex, which has resulted in its “distortion and repression.” His own version of Christianity celebrates boundless sex as a form of participating in the mystery of one’s own life. (This is a view, no doubt, that was at least a little convenient for a poet who, to put it delicately, maintained a number of complicated relationships with women.) He comically lauds in this letter the debauched popes “weighed down by illegitimate children, mistresses, and victims of murder.” “Was there not more Christianity in them,” Rilke asks, “than in the lightweight restorers of the Gospels; namely, something alive, unstoppable, transformed?”

As these letters show, Rilke’s search for God was really a search for self. In finding himself, the poet hopes to find what he calls God but what most Christians would call devilry. His rather strange definition of death as part of God helps to explain Rilke’s divine angel in his most powerful poetic sequence, “The Duino Elegies” (1923).

In his earlier poems, God had been our “neighbor” who hides in “lowly” places. The poet watches attentively for the divine being’s “groping hand.” But in “The Duino Elegies,” God is replaced by a powerful angel. While this angelic spirit is still associated with the everyday, it is also something to be feared. “Every Angel,” Rilke writes, “brings terror,” but in facing the angel, the poet faces death, “names” God and thus provides his life with a fullness of being.

This volume also collects several letters that Rilke wrote to Lisa Heise between 1919 and 1924. Rilke was in his 40s at the time of the first letter; Heise was 26 . Her husband of three years had left her and her 2-year-old son. She sensed a kinship with the poet after reading “Book of Images” (1902) and wrote him. Rilke generously responded.

If Rilke is sometimes self-absorbed, his letters to Heise show him to be a patient and well-intentioned correspondent who genuinely cares for his interlocutor. While he is often philosophical — Rilke attempts a definition of womanhood, addresses the relationship between the artist and his work, and again discusses death — he also labors to help Heise deal with her sense of solitude (a subject on which Rilke was an expert) and shows sincere concern regarding her living arrangements, her son and her health. He also opens up to Heise. “My internal gardening,” he writes in one letter, “was magnificent this winter.”

In his final letter to Heise, her situation much improved, Rilke writes: “And what does living mean but this courage to fully grow into a cast, which one day will be broken off from our new shoulders.” The result, he says, will be a joyful freedom. The poet would die two years later. Whether he himself experienced this joy only God knows.

Posted in Poetry, Ranier Maria Rilke | Tagged O Tell Us Poet What You Do | Leave a Comment »

BLUEBERRIES – By Gil Allen

August 24, 2012

All June
and July, berries,
enough berries, more
than enough, berries for the birds
and us! Each morning
we’d go out in the still
and savor, marveling
in low sunlight at their burgeoning
abacus, subtracting,
the ripest, the best.

Now Carolina August
and only a few
remain — ones we’d have passed
over, or thrown away, it only seems
moments before. Yet we pluck,
and find, in their barely
bitter, a remembered
flavor — then happen upon one
cluster our soured mouths swear
the sweetest of the season.

When I was a boy I picked blueberries. We would walk over to a swampy lowlands and step into another world of mosses and fallen trees. If the mosquitoes weren’t bad we could spend an afternoon. My mother would spread a blanket and we would scurry off to fill out coffee cans that father had fashioned with a handle of string. It was a perfect afternoon for mother because each of us was off on our own and she could sit and read a book, one of her period romances no doubt. Purple tongues betrayed the child who was not working for a blueberry pie or a blueberry upside down cake. We all dutifully reported from time to time with our coffee cans filled and dumped them into the larger basket that mother had brought with her. There was also a picnic with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and devilled eggs. We made careful to pick only the largest berries leaving the smaller ones to grow for later in the summer. Everything seemed perfect.

Posted in Autobiography, Poetry | Tagged blueberry picking | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard – Thomas Gray

Auden Across the Decades – J. M. Pressley

Choruses from the Rock – T. S. Eliot

Reflections on Louise Glück’s October – Derek Jeter

Birches — By Robert Frost

Louise Glück’s Poetry – David Orr

Loving Luisa – Derek Jeter

What The Thunder Said – T.S. Eliot

Eliot’s Own Notes on What The Thunder Said

O Tell Us, Poet, What You Do — Rainer Maria Rilke

BLUEBERRIES – By Gil Allen

Pages

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

Blog Stats

Top Posts

Subscribe

Archives

Recently Featured Books

Follow “Paying Attention To The Sky”