Now

The angled, honey-yellow afternoon light has taken on the aspect of autumn, and the shadows of trees have begun to lengthen across the evening fields.  Yet still the swallows skim, swoop, and curve just above the dry meadow grasses.  Once again, the time has come to visit my favorite poem of August.

       A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun

And nothing is left except light on your fur --

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,

Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk

And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,

Without that monument of cat,

The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,

In which everything is meant for you

And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of.  It comes of itself;

And east rushes west and west rushes down,

No matter.  The grass is full

And full of yourself.  The trees around are for you,

The whole of the wideness of night is for you,

A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.

The red cat hides away in the fur-light

And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone --

You sit with your head like a carving in space

And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (Alfred A. Knopf 1942).

I will not attempt to pick apart this thing of beauty.  Long-time readers of this blog may recall my position on these matters: Explanation and explication are the death of poetry.  As it happens, it appears that Stevens may share my view: "once a poem has been explained it has been destroyed."  (Wallace Stevens, letter to Hi Simons (January 9, 1940), in Holly Stevens (editor), Letters of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf 1966), page 346.)  However, despite this statement, Stevens wrote several letters to critics and translators responding to their inquiries about what certain of his poems "mean."  This gives me license to offer two tentative thoughts. First, it may be helpful to recall Stevens' references in "An Old Man Asleep" (which appeared in my previous post) to "the two worlds": "the self and the earth."  Second, think of "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" and "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" (which also appeared in my previous post) as a lovely, complementary pair.  The self and the earth.

But we mustn't get carried away.  Consider this.  "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" was first published in the October, 1937, issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.  Five months earlier, Stevens wrote this in a letter: "One side of my bed there is nothing but windows; when I lie in bed I can see nothing but trees.  But there has been a rabbit digging out bulbs: instead of lying in bed in the mornings listening to everything that is going on, I spend the time worrying about the rabbit and wondering what particular thing he is having for breakfast."  (Wallace Stevens, letter to Ronald Lane Latimer (May 6, 1937), in Holly Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, page 321.)  A rabbit.  Just a rabbit.  Or not.

Albert Woods (1871-1944), "A Peaceful Valley, Whitewell"

On a hot and windless afternoon, birdsong nearly ceases.  The swallows vanish.  But, if you walk beside a meadow, you can hear the clicking and crackling of grasshoppers, unseen, jumping in the tall grass.  If you enter a dark wood, you may notice rustling in the bushes beyond the path.  The source of the sound remains a mystery. Everything is in its place.

                         One Almost Might

Wouldn't you say,

Wouldn't you say: one day,

With a little more time or a little more patience, one might

Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight

One of the moment's hundred strands, unfray

Beginnings from endings, this from that, survey

Say a square inch of the ground one stands on, touch

Part of oneself or a leaf or a sound (not clutch

Or cuff or bruise but touch with finger-tip, ear-

Tip, eyetip, creeping near yet not too near);

Might take up life and lay it on one's palm

And, encircling it in closeness, warmth and calm,

Let it lie still, then stir smooth-softly, and

Tendril by tendril unfold, there on one's hand . . .

One might examine eternity's cross-section

For a second, with slightly more patience, more time for reflection?

A. S. J. Tessimond (1902-1962), Collected Poems (edited by Hubert Nicholson) (Bloodaxe Books 2010).

Reginald Brundrit (1883-1960), "The River" (1924)

"To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time."  To "examine eternity's cross-section/For a second, with slightly more patience, more time for reflection."  Easier said than done, of course.  All of the ordinary days intervene.

"I wonder if you are haunted to the extremity that I am by this half-peaceful half-fretting sense of the incessant insecurity & fugitiveness of everything.  Every moment of the present wears a vaguely surmised suggestion that it is only pretending, that the conspiracy is just coming to an end.  I always seem to be on the brink of something; & so the future is hateful because it can't possibly come, or if it does, will only lead to other futures that can't.  And I long to get things over, to have them safe in memory -- beyond the guessings of foreboding and anxiety.  Even you are almost best in memory, where I cannot change you, nor you yourself."

Walter de la Mare, letter to Naomi Royde-Smith (April 24, 1911), in Theresa Whistler, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth 1993), page 183.

De la Mare wrote the passage in the letter the day before his thirty-eighth birthday.  In his eightieth year, this poem was published:

               Now

The longed-for summer goes;

Dwindles away 

To its last rose,

Its narrowest day.

No heaven-sweet air but must die;

Softlier float,

Breathe lingeringly

Its final note.

Oh, what dull truths to tell!

Now is the all-sufficing all

Wherein to love the lovely well,

Whate'er befall.

Walter de la Mare, O Lovely England and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1953).

De la Mare died in June of 1956.  Eleven months prior to his death, he said this: "My days are getting shorter.  But there is more and more magic.  More than in all poetry.  Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful."  (Theresa Whistler, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare, page 443.)

John Lawson (1868-1909), "An Ayrshire Stream" (1893)

Leaves And Clocks

The wistful exhilaration of autumn is all about the passage of time, isn't it? Yes, I realize that I am stating the obvious.  Moreover, you may well say: "But isn't everything about the passage of time?"  You will get no argument from me.

Wistful exhilaration ought to be something we feel every day -- every moment, as a matter of fact.  Consider this:  "Manage all your actions and thoughts in such a manner as if you were just going to step into the grave." Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book II, Section 11, in Jeremy Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1701).  This bit of advice is not morbid, nor is it intended to engender panic or a sense of impending doom.  And it is not a recommendation to embark upon a course of carpe diem hedonism. Rather, it is an instance of practical and ethical Stoic wisdom:  the present moment is all that each of us ever has; how do we intend to act?

The awareness of time passed and of time passing is present, explicitly or implicitly, in nearly every poem that Thomas Hardy wrote.  As one might expect, this is particularly true of those poems of his which are set in autumn.

   The Upper Birch-Leaves

Warm yellowy-green
In the blue serene,
How they skip and sway
On this autumn day!
They cannot know
What has happened below, --
That their boughs down there
Are already quite bare,
That their own will be
When a week has passed, --
For they jig as in glee
To this very last.

But no; there lies
At times in their tune
A note that cries
What at first I fear
I did not hear:
"O we remember
At each wind's hollo --
Though life holds yet --
We go hence soon,
For 'tis November;
-- But that you follow
You may forget!"

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (Macmillan 1917).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Byroad near Kingoodie" (1962)

"But that you follow/You may forget!"  Hardy and Marcus Aurelius are of the same mind.  Yet, we mustn't go through life thinking of time as the ticking of a clock.  Life went on perfectly well for millennia in the absence of clocks.  The earth's "diurnal course" and its seasonal round sufficed. Eventually, bells began sounding from steeples and towers.  Music in the air.  Perhaps we should have left it at that.

                       Clock

We had the sun, stars, shadows.
Today
In Greta's house, a box
Of numbers and wheels
And cleek-cleek, click-clock, that insect
Eating time at the wall.

George Mackay Brown, from "Seal Island Anthology, 1875," in Voyages (Chatto & Windus 1983).

"Anyway, the thing about progress is that it looks much greater than it really is."  Ludwig Wittgenstein chose this as the "motto" for Philosophical Investigations.  (The sentence appears in a play written by Johann Nestroy (1801-1862).  A discussion of Wittgenstein's use of the quotation may be found in David Stern, "Nestroy, Augustine, and the Opening of the Philosophical Investigations," in Rudolf Haller and Klaus Puhl (editors), Wittgenstein and the Future of Philosophy: A Reassessment After 50 Years (2002).)

In his own words, Wittgenstein says this about progress:  "Our civilization is characterized by the word 'progress.'  Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features."  Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated by Peter Winch), Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press 1980), page 7.

So, yes, clocks represent "progress."  Of a sort.  I am haunted by thoughts of "time-saving devices" and of "multitasking."  Progress?

                             Empty Room

The clock disserts on punctuation, syntax.
The clock's voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats.
The clock insists:  a lecturer demonstrating,
Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone.

But time flows through the room, light flows through the room
Like someone picking flowers, like someone whistling
Without a tune, like talk in front of a fire,
Like a woman knitting or a child snipping at paper.

A. S. J. Tessimond, The Walls of Glass (Methuen 1934).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Stobo Kirk, Peeblesshire" (1936)

Yesterday afternoon, in the declining sunlight, I walked to the north beside a row of big-leaf maples, now emptied of leaves.  Each day the sun is setting further and further into the southwest.  The shadows of the bare branches of the maples stretched 50 yards or so to the northeast across a green expanse of grass.  The yellow, orange, and brown leaves that had departed from the maples were strewn across the sward.

The shadows of the empty branches were covered with fallen leaves.  One could imagine that the leaves had been reunited with the trees.

   Autumn in King's Hintock Park

Here by the baring bough
     Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
     Springtime deceives, --
I, an old woman now,
     Raking up leaves.

Here in the avenue
     Raking up leaves,
Lords' ladies pass in view,
     Until one heaves
Sighs at life's russet hue,
     Raking up leaves!

Just as my shape you see
     Raking up leaves,
I saw, when fresh and free,
     Those memory weaves
Into grey ghosts by me,
     Raking up leaves.

Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,
     Raking up leaves,
New leaves will dance on high --
     Earth never grieves! --
Will not, when missed am I
     Raking up leaves.

Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (Macmillan 1909).

"Earth never grieves!"  This is a cry of joy, not of despair.  Hence:  "New leaves will dance on high."  As I have noted here in the past, the thought that the seasons will continue to come and go long after each of us has turned to dust can be a comforting one -- a source of serenity.

James McIntosh Patrick, "White Poplar, Carse of Gowrie"

In this part of the world, we received a record amount of rainfall in October. It was a month of puddles.  On those days when the sun briefly emerged, the puddles were a wonderful gift.  Fallen leaves floated on the still water. The endless blue sky and the empty branches of trees filled the spaces between the drifting leaves.  There it lay:  the entire World.

     It is deep midnight:
The River of Heaven
     Has changed its place.

Ransetsu (1653-1707) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 366.  "The River of Heaven" (ama-no-gawa) is the beautiful Japanese name for what we, in English, call "the Milky Way."

The River of Heaven turns above us.  Leaves fall at our feet.  Everything is in its place.  The World is perfect just as it is.

     The autumn wind is blowing;
We are alive and can see each other,
     You and I.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 413.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Glamis Village" (1939)

Pause

The goal of the purveyors of popular culture is to steal Time from us. Popular culture is always about the pursuit of the newest and the latest chimera.  It loathes quiet space and reverie.  Hence the freneticism we see around us.  Mind you, it has always been this way.  Modern technology merely speeds up the proliferation and demise of the distractions provided to us by the thieves of Time.

Space was holy to
pilgrims of old, till the plane
stopped all that nonsense.

W. H. Auden, from "Shorts I," Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1972).

Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979) "The Cottage Window"

Let me be clear:  I do not claim to view popular culture from an Olympian height.  I am definitely not above it all.  How could I be?  I was born in the United States of America in the middle of the 1950s.  It has been a non-stop carnival of distraction since my arrival during the first term of the Eisenhower Administration.

I have no complaints.  I have the ability to choose.  And I am in no position to adopt an ironic, superior attitude to what goes on in this land, as long as no one is harmed in the process.

At some point, however, one wants to get off the Tilt-A-Whirl.

In willow shade
where clear water flows
by the wayside --
"Just a while!" I said
as I stopped to rest.

Saigyō (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991), page 61.

William Ratcliffe, "Cottage Interior" (1920)

"Space was holy to pilgrims of old."  Auden seems to have had physical space in mind -- the distances we travel.  But I think the notion of temporal space is apt as well.

We have to be jealous of the temporal space that we are allotted, for, in the end, it is all that we have.  Popular culture abhors a vacuum.  I would humbly suggest that this is where poetry and art come in.  Poets and artists create a space -- an arrested, timeless moment -- that then becomes available to all of us.  But, with all that is going on around us, it requires an act of will to inhabit that moment.

                         One Almost Might

Wouldn't you say,
Wouldn't you say:  one day,
With a little more time or a little more patience, one might
Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight
One of the moment's hundred strands, unfray
Beginnings from endings, this from that, survey
Say a square inch of the ground one stands on, touch
Part of oneself or a leaf or a sound (not clutch
Or cuff or bruise but touch with finger-tip, ear-
Tip, eyetip, creeping near yet not too near);
Might take up life and lay it on one's palm
And, encircling it in closeness, warmth and calm,
Let it lie still, then stir smooth-softly, and
Tendril by tendril unfold, there on one's hand . . .

One might examine eternity's cross-section
For a second, with slightly more patience, more time for reflection?

A. S. J. Tessimond, The Walls of Glass (Methuen 1934).

Tessimond's poetry is full of references (both approving and disapproving) to the popular culture of his day, and he worked for a time as a copywriter in the advertising business.  He does not hold himself aloof from the modern world, nor does he disparage his fellow denizens.  He knows that we are all in this together.  As in these two poems, he often reflects in a wistful, affecting fashion about what has gone missing from our lives.

                           Empty Room

The clock disserts on punctuation, syntax.
The clock's voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats.
The clock insists:  a lecturer demonstrating,
Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone.

But time flows through the room, light flows through the room
Like someone picking flowers, like someone whistling
Without a tune, like talk in front of a fire,
Like a woman knitting or a child snipping at paper.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Ibid.

Anthony Eyton, "A Kitchen Range" (c. 1984)

Looking back at what I have written in this post, I fear that I sound annoyingly haughty or high-minded on the subject of popular culture.  But, as I said above, I have no complaints.  I am wholly a product of it, it is where I live, and I take the good with the bad.  Please take what I have written as an admonition to myself.  Something along these lines:

"Some think that sloth, one of the capital sins, means ordinary laziness," I began.  "Sticking in the mud.  Sleeping at the switch.  But sloth has to cover a great deal of despair.  Sloth is really a busy condition, hyperactive.  This activity drives off the wonderful rest or balance without which there can be no poetry or art or thought -- none of the highest human functions.  These slothful sinners are not able to acquiesce in their own being, as some philosophers say.  They labor because rest terrifies them.  The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved by effort (ratio) and knowledge received (intellectus) by the listening soul that can hear the essence of things and comes to understand the marvelous.  But this calls for unusual strength of soul.  The more so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and infects you with its restlessness.  It trains you in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances.  The true poise, that of contemplation or imagination, sits right on the border of sleep and dreaming."

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (Viking 1975), page 306.

                    Five Minutes

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape.  His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

Norman Nicholson, The Pot Geranium and Other Poems (Faber and Faber 1954).

Harold Jones, "The Black Door" (c. 1935)

Haven

As I suggested in a recent post, we ought not to think so much.

"Thoughts are in a great measure masters of things, and which is more, 'tis in your own power to think as you please:  Therefore don't suffer Opinion to cheat you any longer.  Disengage from the Tyranny of Fancy; and then as if you doubled some dangerous cape, you'll have nothing but a steady course, a smooth sea, and a land-locked bay to receive you."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 12, Section 22, in Jeremy Collier (translator), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself (1702), pages 231-232.

Here is another translation of the same passage:

"Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power.  Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner, who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay."

George Long (translator), The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus (Second Edition 1880), page 201.

Marcus Aurelius does not use "opinion" in our modern sense of, say, "opinions" about the political or social issues of the day.  Rather, his use of the word embodies the key Stoic concept that the only thing over which we have control in life is our own conduct, which includes our impressions of (i. e., our "opinions" about) external circumstances (past, present, and future).  Accordingly, we should not let those impressions run riot.  The world is what it is.  Thinking about what might have been, what ought to be at the moment, or what may lie ahead is a waste of time and energy.

               The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it.  I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past.  It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit (Macmillan 1975).

Christopher Meadows (1863-1947), "Saltcoats Harbour"

It is worth remembering that this is not a unique Stoic concept.  For instance, it is reminiscent of (to me at least) the idea of non-attachment that is found in Buddhism and Taoism.  Modern culture is constantly entreating us to devote our thoughts and attention to chimeras and fantasies (as well as to the media-fueled frenzy of daily "crises").  This is on top of our natural human tendency to worry about the past, the present, and the future.  Enough is enough.

Mind you, I am not claiming to be free of "the Tyranny of Fancy."  Nor am I lying at anchor in a calm harbor of non-attachment.  However, here's a good feature of the aging process:  things drop away; the absurdity and the emptiness of humanity's antics become more apparent with each passing year.  Peace and quiet seem to come of themselves, if one lets them (knock on wood).  "Peace comes dropping slow."  "Like noiseless snow, or as the dew of night."  Or so one hopes.

                    Evening Quiet

Early cicadas stop their trilling;
Points of light, new fireflies, pass to and fro.
The taper burns clear and smokeless;
Beads of bright dew hang on the bamboo mat.
Not yet will I enter the house to sleep,
But walk awhile beneath the eaves.
The rays of the moon slant into the low verandah;
The cool breeze fills the tall trees.
Letting loose the feelings, life flows on easily;
The scene entered deep into my heart.
What is the secret of this state?
To have nothing small in one's mind.

Po Chu-i (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture (Hokuseido Press 1949), page 175.

Dane Maw (1909-1989), "Scottish Landscape, Air Dubh"

Like all sound advice, this is easier said than done.  The mind is a perpetual motion machine, isn't it?  For someone like Po Chu-i, the stilling of thoughts can occur out in the backyard at the end of the day.  However, for those of us who are inveterate daydreamers, sunk in reverie (the mind ever humming away), there is a tendency to think:  "If only I could [fill in the blank], then I could begin to live."  Thus, for example, the notion of the perfect place tends to haunt us.

                                        Where?

You are in love with a country
Where people laugh in the sun
And the people are warm as the sunshine and live and move easily
And women with honeycoloured skins and men with no frowns on their
          faces
Sit on white terraces drinking red wine
While the sea spreads peacock feathers on cinnamon sands
And palms weave sunlight into sheaves of gold
And at night the shadows are indigo velvet
And there is dancing to soft, soft, soft guitars
Played by copper fingers under a froth of stars.

Perhaps your country is where you think you will find it.
Or perhaps it has not yet come or perhaps it has gone.
Perhaps it is east of the sun and west of the moon.
Perhaps it is a country called the Hesperides
And Avalon and Atlantis and Eldorado:
A country which Gauguin looked for in Tahiti and Lawrence in Mexico,
And whether they found it only they can say, and they not now.
Perhaps you will find it where you alone can see it,
But if you can see it, though no one else can, it will be there,
It will be yours.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (Heinemann 1947).

Frank Jowett (1879-1943), "A Sunlit Harbour"

But isn't thinking what humans do?  Isn't it in our nature to run through all of the possibilities, to consider all of the choices?  What's more, reading a poem involves thinking.  So does looking at a painting.  This post is arguably nothing but an exercise in escapism via thought.  I understand the point.   And I recognize that Stoicism, Buddhism, and Taoism are sometimes criticized for their "quietism."  (A wonderful word, actually.)

But, again, enough is enough.  We are too often in thrall to "the Tyranny of Fancy."  And "to have nothing small in one's mind" is, I think, something to aspire to.

                         Boats at Night

How lovely is the sound of oars at night
     And unknown voices, borne through windless air,
From shadowy vessels floating out of sight
     Beyond the harbour lantern's broken glare
To those piled rocks that make on the dark wave
     Only a darker stain.  The splashing oars
Slide softly on as in an echoing cave
     And with the whisper of the unseen shores
Mingle their music, till the bell of night
     Murmurs reverberations low and deep
That droop towards the land in swooning flight
     Like whispers from the lazy lips of sleep.
The oars grow faint.  Below the cloud-dim hill
The shadows fade and now the bay is still.

Edward Shanks, The Island of Youth and Other Poems (1921).

"Discharge Opinion, and you are safe; and pray who can hinder you from doing it?"

Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jeremy Collier), Meditations, Book 12, Section 25.

Stanhope Forbes, "The Inner Harbour: Abbey Slip" (1921)

Chimeras

As I have noted here before, I do my best to keep the news of the world out of my life.  However, by some sort of media osmosis, reports of, say, a president being caught in an oft-repeated bald-faced lie eventually seep into my consciousness.  Likewise, news of the latest social engineering scheme gone awry or of the most recent instance of governmental ineptitude, dissembling, and/or cupidity sooner or later washes ashore, like a sodden corpse.

But these are the usual run-of-the-mill occurrences out of time immemorial, aren't they?  Herodotus and Gibbon catalogued them for us long ago.  What separates our era from others is its noisome combination of political utopianism, credulous faith in science, and instantaneous media hysteria. (All products of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, by the way.)

Of course, each of us believes that our own soul (however one wishes to define that term) is not subject to manipulation or theft by this seductive triumvirate.  I delude myself in this fashion on a daily basis, and the next morning I have to begin my soul-preservation project all over again.

(Yikes!  What set me off on that bout of pontificating?  Turning on the TV, naturally.)

Algernon Newton, "The Surrey Canal, Camberwell" (1935)

                       Popular Press

I am the echoing rock that sends you back
Your own voice grown so bold that with surprise
You murmur, 'Ah, how sensible I am --
The plain bluff man, the enemy of sham --
How sane, how wise!'

I am the mirror where your image moves,
Neat and obedient twin, until one day
It moves before you move, and it is you
Who have to ape its moods and motions, who
Must now obey.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (1947).

Algernon Newton, "Birmingham with the Hall of Memory" (1929)

The way we live now is expertly diagnosed in the following poem, which was first published in 1951.  Imagine what has transpired in the ensuing 60-odd years.

                       The Chimeras

Absence of heart -- as in public buildings --
Absence of mind -- as in public speeches --
Absence of worth -- as in goods intended for the public,

Are telltale signs that a chimera has just dined
On someone else; of him, poor foolish fellow,
Not a scrap is left, not even his name.

Indescribable -- being neither this nor that --
Uncountable -- being any number --
Unreal -- being anything but what they are,

And ugly customers for someone to encounter,
It is our fault entirely if we do:
They cannot touch us; it is we who will touch them.

Curious from wantonness -- to see what they are like --
Cruel from fear -- to put a stop to them --
Incredulous from conceit -- to prove they cannot be --

We prod or kick or measure and are lost:
The stronger we are the sooner all is over;
It is our strength with which they gobble us up.

If someone, being chaste, brave, humble,
Get by them safely, he is still in danger,
With pity remembering what once they were,

Of turning back to help them.  Don't.
What they were once was what they would not be;
Not liking what they are not is what now they are.

No one can help them; walk on, keep on walking,
And do not let your goodness self-deceive you:
It is good that they are but not that they are thus.

W. H. Auden, Nones (1951).

Remember:  it is "our fault entirely" if we encounter these "ugly customers," and we must never forget that "they cannot touch us; it is we who will touch them."  But here's the rub:  we must be "chaste, brave, humble" in order to "get by them safely" -- a tall order when we have been schooled in "wantonness," "fear," and "conceit."  How prescient Auden was in that choice of words!  Have a look at the (non-natural) World out there today:  a non-stop carnival of wantonness, fear, and conceit.

Is Auden over-simplifying?  Perhaps.  But the heart of what he says rings true.  "Walk on, keep on walking."

Algernon Newton, "The House by the Canal" (1945)

Life As A Work Of Art, Part Three: "The Prologue Often, And Then No Play"

The theme of this series of posts is the poetic conceit that life is akin to a work of art.  Perhaps the best-known instance of the conceit is the passage from Shakespeare's As You Like It:  "All the world's a stage, /And all the men and women merely players . . ."  Of course, Shakespeare was neither the first nor the last to employ this idea.

At some point in our lives, the thought may occur to us that we are playing (whether by choice or by fate) a role in an unfolding entertainment of some sort.  Whether that entertainment is drama, comedy, tragedy, or farce is the (unanswered) question.

                         Charles Ginner, "Flask Walk, Hampstead" (1922)

               Masque of All Men

In the cold-windy cavern of the Wings
With skeletons of unused sets above them
The actors' painted heads clustered,
Clustered and whispered.  One head whispered,
'This has been my life:  the Prologue often,
And then no Play.  Or when the play has come
The players have departed, the parts being played
By understudies, makeshifts, shifting
The balance, the play, the purpose:
The lines dissolving and the play transposing
Itself into another, an unrehearsed;
So that the prompter, script discarded, idly
Sits in the echoing cavern
Among cold winds beneath the unused sets.'

And others whispered, 'Your life?  Yes, and mine.'
'And mine.'  'And mine.'  'And mine.'
                                                            'And mine.'
                                                                   'And mine.'

A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (1947).

Tessimond's description of the life we actors lead seems apt:  there never is a script, is there?  Nor a prompter.  I am reminded of the dream in which you show up to take an exam on the final day of class and suddenly realize that you have not attended any of the lectures and have not read any of the required course materials.  You are on your own.

                                                        Charles Ginner
                               "Flask Walk, Hampstead, at Night" (1933)

Walls

In "Portrait of a Romantic" (which I posted earlier this week), A. S. J. Tessimond describes a Romantic as one who "tries to climb the wall around the world."  This image reminded me of a poem by C. P. Cavafy which is not necessarily about Romanticism, but does involve, well, walls.

                              Walls

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can't think of anything else:  this fate gnaws my mind --
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Princeton University Press 1992).

                                  Richard Eurich, "Studio Window" (c. 1964)

Now, before coming too quickly to the conclusion that Cavafy was a paranoiac, we should consider a few things.  First, although he worked as a clerk in the office of the Third Circle of Irrigation in the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria, Egypt, Cavafy's life was not conventional.  He perhaps had good reason to feel isolated or cut-off from the world around him.  But, from what I have read of his life, he seems to have been an equable, mild-mannered person.  Which is not to say, of course, that his life was devoid of passion.

Second, who among us has not had a walled-in sensation from time to time?  For instance, think about the 20th century for a moment.  Doesn't the very thought of that century give you a feeling of claustrophobia?  Or, on a lighter, more contemporary, note, consider two words:  "reality television."  Thousands of years of civilization have brought us to this flowering of human potential.  One might get the sense that the wall-builders are -- without consideration, pity, or shame -- assiduously at work all around us as we speak.  But perhaps I am just being paranoid.

                    Richard Eurich, "Snow Shower over Skyreholme" (1937)

Here is an alternative translation of the poem by Daniel Mendelsohn. Unlike Keeley and Sherrard, Mendelsohn has followed the couplet arrangement and rhyme scheme employed by Cavafy in the Greek original.

                                 Walls

Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they've built around me enormous, towering walls.

And I sit here now in growing desperation.
This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:

because I had so many things to do out there.
O while they built the walls, why did I not look out?

But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.
Imperceptibly they shut me off from the world without.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Daniel Mendelsohn) (Alfred A. Knopf 2009).

                           Richard Eurich, "The Road to Grassington" (1971)

"You Like It Under The Trees In Autumn, Because Everything Is Half Dead"

The line "He likes the half-hid, the half-heard, the half-lit" in A. S. J. Tessimond's "Portrait of a Romantic" got me to thinking of a poem by Wallace Stevens.  Given his belief that Imagination is the source of a well-lived life, Stevens certainly has a Romantic side.  Although the ostensible subject of the following poem is "metaphor," the Romantic preoccupations with Imagination, transience, and mortality are present as well.

                         William Rothenstein, "Wych Elm in Winter" (1919)

        The Motive for Metaphor

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon --

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound --
Steel against intimation -- the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer (1947).

I need to correct myself:  the subject of the poem is not "metaphor"; rather, the subject is "the motive for metaphor."  It is the activity that is of crucial importance in our lives.  In the titles of a few of his poems, Stevens makes the point better than I can.  For instance:  "Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination."  Or:  "Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is."  Or: "Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It."  (As I have noted before, simply reading the table of contents or the index of titles of one of Stevens's collections is a delight in itself.)

It all boils down to "desiring the exhilarations of changes."  These changes are wrought by Imagination and Reality (the World outside) engaging in a constant back-and-forth:  "Where you yourself were never quite yourself/And did not want nor have to be."  Each side is empty and cold without the other.  A Romantic notion.

                                Francis Dodd, "Willow in Winter" (c. 1925)

"He Tries To Climb The Wall Around The World"

I suppose that all of us have a Romantic streak in us.  I am not speaking of "romantic" in the Hollywood-Valentine's Day sense.  Rather, I am thinking of the Wordsworth-Keats-Bronte sort of Romanticism that is, according to the OED, characterized by "an emphasis on feeling, individuality, and passion rather than classical form and order."  To wit:  sublime vistas, windy heights, misty vales, vast watery depths, immortality and mortality, love and Love (requited and unrequited, found and lost, fleeting and deathless).

Our tendency toward Romanticism of this sort usually waxes in our teens and twenties, when the World seems invested with a great deal of passion (with passion's attendant ups and downs).  In those years, one is liable to find oneself exclaiming (or sighing) "O, World!" quite often.  After that, Romanticism begins to wane as reality inevitably sets in.  But we never entirely lose it.  Nor should we.  It would be sad if we did.  (Within reason, the Stoic in me says.  Skip the mid-life crises and the "lifestyle" -- horrible word! -- options of the modern age.)

                     John Nash, "The Garden under Snow" (c. 1924-1930)

The following poem by A. S. J. Tessimond describes very well, I think, the Romantic in us all.

                    Portrait of a Romantic

He is in love with the land that is always over
The next hill and the next, with the bird that is never
Caught, with the room beyond the looking-glass.

He likes the half-hid, the half-heard, the half-lit,
The man in the fog, the road without an ending,
Stray pieces of torn words to piece together.

He is well aware that man is always lonely,
Listening for an echo of his cry, crying for the moon,
Making the moon his mirror, weeping in the night.

He often dives in the deep-sea undertow
Of the dark and dreaming mind.  He turns at corners,
Twists on his heel to trap his following shadow.

He is haunted by the face behind the face.
He searches for last frontiers and lost doors.
He tries to climb the wall around the world.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Selection (1958).

                              Richard Eurich (1903-1992), "The Window"

"Desire For Something None Can Say"

Thomas Hardy's old woman "raking up leaves" in his "Autumn in King's Hintock Park" brought to mind the opening lines of the following poem by A. S. J. Tessimond.  Beyond this, I'm not sure that the poems have much in common -- apart from autumn.

                                                Noel Spencer (1900-1986)
                                            "Cloth Hall Mills, Dewsbury"

                    Autumn

Already men are brushing up
    Brown leaves around the saddened parks.
At Marble Arch the nights draw in
    Upon expounders of Karl Marx.

By the Round Pond the lovers feel
    Heavier dews, and grow uneasy.
Elderly men don overcoats,
    Catch cold -- sniff -- become hoarse and wheezy.

Grey clouds streak across chill white skies.
    Refuse and dirty papers blow
About the gutters.  Shoppers hurry,
    Oppressed by vague autumnal woe.

The cats that pick amongst the empty
    Gold Flake boxes, sniffing orts
From frowsy fish-shops, seem beruffled,
    Limp of tail and out of sorts.

Policemen are pale and fin-de-siecle.
    The navvy's arm wilts and relaxes.
With more than usual bitterness
    Bus-drivers curse impulsive taxis.

A general malaise descends:
    Desire for something none can say.
And autumn brings once more the pangs
    Of this our annual decay!

A. S. J Tessimond, Collected Poems (edited by Hubert Nicholson) (Bloodaxe Books 2010).

My response is:  "Ah, it isn't that bad!"  However, I do understand what he means by "vague autumnal woe."  Although I never feel "oppressed" by it. Wistful perhaps.  Bittersweet perhaps.  But never "oppressed."

I also understand what he means by "desire for something none can say." But I wouldn't link it to "a general malaise" that "descends" with autumn. After all, isn't "desire for something none can say" a description of the human condition in general, rather than just a feeling peculiar to autumn? I only presume to speak for myself, of course.

                                  Trevor Makinson, "Street Scene" (1948)

Hospital Poems, Part Five: "And If I Am Lucky, Find Some Link, Some Link"

I have previously suggested that Bernard Spencer (1909-1963) is a "neglected poet."  Thus, I am pleased to report that his poems have recently come back into print (Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose, edited by Peter Robinson, Bloodaxe Books).  As I noted in my earlier post on Spencer, his poetry reminds me of that of Louis MacNeice (they were, in fact, acquaintances; they both died too young in September of 1963). Perhaps the resemblance has something to do with an urbanity of tone, together with a certain irony, with a bit of reserve thrown in.  (I suppose that this description fits a number of English poets of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties.  A. S. J. Tessimond comes to mind, for instance.)

Spencer worked for the British Council in various European (usually Mediterranean) countries.  His poetry vividly reflects all of the locations in which he lived.  At one point, he contracted tuberculosis, and, as a result, spent some time in a hospital in Switzerland in 1948.  The following poem is about that hospital stay.

               William Ratcliffe (1870-1955), "The Conservatory Window"

               In a Foreign Hospital

Valleys away in the August dark the thunder
roots and tramples: lightning sharply prints
for an instant trees, hills, chimneys on the night.
We lie here in our similar rooms with the white
furniture, with our bit of Death inside us
(nearer than that Death our whole life lies under);
the man in the next room with the low voice,
the brown-skinned boy, the child among its toys
and I and others.  Against my bedside light
a small green insect flings itself with a noise
tiny and regular, a 'tink; tink, tink'.

A Nun stands rustling by, saying good night,
hooded and starched and smiling with her kind
lifeless, religious eyes.  'Is there anything
you want?' -- 'Sister, why yes, so many things:'
England is somewhere far away to my right
and all Your letter promised; days behind
my left hand or my head (or a whole age)
are dearer names and easier beds than here.
But since tonight must lack for all of these
I am free to keep my watch with images,
a bare white room, the World, an insect's rage,
and if I am lucky, find some link, some link.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).

The phrase "all Your letter promised" in line 17 may refer to his first wife Nora, who died of tuberculosis-related heart failure in June of 1947.  His lovely poem "At Courmayeur" (which I have previously posted) is based upon their planned holiday in the Alps that was foreclosed by her death.

                      William Ratcliffe, "Regent's Canal at Hammersmith"

Noise

I have decided that I am going to ignore this year's presidential election in the United States.  I hasten to add that this is not intended to be some sort of grandiose political/philosophical/cultural statement on, say, the status of republican democracy.  I am not raising a white flag at the thought of enduring four more months of media mendacity.  Nor am I throwing in the towel at the horrific prospect of watching a series of mind-numbing, soul-destroying (my mind and my soul) debates between the candidates.

No, the rationale for this dereliction of civic duty is very simple:  noise reduction.  We live in a time when noise -- whether it is absorbed through the ears or through the eyes -- assails us from all sides.  We dwell in a Bedlam which consists, not of the cries of the mad in a dark Victorian asylum, but of a never-ending airport concourse in which CNN blares from television monitors 24 hours a day.  Have you ever tried to escape from that sound?  Why add to the cacophony?  The choice, after all, is ours.

             Anne Isabella Brooke, "Near Masham, Wensleydale" (1954)

               Latterday Oracles: Noise

Listen to me and you will not need to listen
To your own voice thin as a shred of paper uncurling,
Your laughter empty and brittle as an eggshell:
Your thoughts thrown back in your teeth by the cynical wind.

You will not hear the diffidence of breath,
The importunacy of blood, denying death,
The pulse's halt and start,
The morse code of the heart,
Or your two hands whispering together, unquiet as air-stirred leaves.

Listen to me and you will not need to listen.
I am your rampart against silence, time,
And all the gods with empty arms, and eyes
Cold as mirrors, cold and white with questions.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2010).

      Anne Isabella Brooke, "Wharfedale From Above Bolton Abbey" (1954)

"Only A Man Who Lives Not In Time But In The Present Is Happy"

"Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy."  So wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein.  (The statement appears in his Notebooks 1914-1916, as translated by G. E. M. Anscombe.)  Easier said than done, of course.

                               Duncan Grant, "Girl at the Piano" (1940)

"To-morrow -- double Janus-headed to-morrow -- blessing and curse of frail humanity.  But for thee, the pleasure of to-day would be Heaven, but for thee, to-day's load of misery could not be borne, but for thee, we should be immortal, and but for thee, I should make my will this instant.  What art thou?  Nothing -- here in Time, where all is to-day.  Everything in that eternity which is but a succession of To-morrows."

Mary Coleridge, in Edith Sichel (editor), Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge (1910), page 217.

Coleridge's references to immortality and eternity are reminiscent of something else that Wittgenstein wrote:  "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Proposition 6.4311 (translation by David Pears and Brian McGuinness).  An alternative translation (by C. K. Ogden) is:  "If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present."

      David Chatterton (1900-1963), "Vase with Yellow Chrysanthemums"

All of this can quickly become too abstract, too hard to get a grip on.  The goal -- again, easier said than done -- is to free ourselves of the tyranny of the clock and the calendar.

                         Empty Room

The clock disserts on punctuation, syntax.
The clock's voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats.
The clock insists:  a lecturer demonstrating,
Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone.

But time flows through the room, light flows through the room
Like someone picking flowers, like someone whistling
Without a tune, like talk in front of a fire,
Like a woman knitting or a child snipping at paper.

A. S. J. Tessimond, The Walls of Glass (1934).

                                            Norman Clark (1913-1992)
                            "Flying Kites by a Gas Works near Bexhill"

"The Unwept Waste"

In his "Whisper of a Thin Ghost" (which appeared in my previous post),   A. S. J. Tessimond warns us against living life in a "Coat of Caution" and of heeding the advice of "the books of the Careful-Wise."  Easier said than done, of course.  Nonetheless, I can see what Tessimond is getting at.  The following poem provides, I think, a good companion-piece to "Whisper of a Thin Ghost," for it considers the cost of what-might-have-been.

       The Unwept Waste

Let funeral marches play,
Let heartbreak-music sound
For the half-death, not the whole;
For the unperceived slow soiling;
For the sleeping before evening;
For what, but for a breath,
But for an inch one way,
The shifting of a scene,
A closed or opened door,
A word less, a word more,
Might have, so simply, been.

The final tragedies are,
Not the bright light dashed out,
Not the gold glory smashed
Like a lamp upon the floor,
But the guttering away,
The seep, the gradual grey,
The unnoticed, without-haste-
Or-protest, premature,
Unwept, unwritten waste.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (1947).

                                          Charles Mahoney (1903-1968)
               "Woodburner with Pink, Violet, and Red Flowers in a Vase"

I suppose that the "message" of this poem might be: carpe diem!  However, I'm not sure if it is that simple.  I detect a sense that these "half-deaths," these things missed by "a word less, a word more," might not have been salvageable by attempting to seize the day.  It may be that ending up with a certain amount of "unwept waste" is part of what it means to be human. But perhaps I am being too pessimistic.  Then again . . .

                                   Charles Mahoney, "The Plant Table"

How To Live, Part Sixteen: "Whisper Of A Thin Ghost"

A. S. J. Tessimond had a somewhat disenchanted view of the world. However, his outlook was softened by his humor, and by the fact that he did not exempt himself from his sometimes rueful assessment of how we try to make it through life.  In the following poem, Tessimond warns us of the danger of becoming a thin ghost.  I suspect that he was acquainted with this fate.

          Whisper of a Thin Ghost

I bought the books of the Careful-Wise
And I read the rules in a room apart
And I learned to clothe my flinching heart
Against hate and love and inquisitive eyes
In the Coat of Caution, the Shirt of Pride.
And then, the day before I died,
I found that the rules of the wise had lied:
That life was a blood-warm stream that ran
Through the fields of death, and that no man can
Bathe in the stream but the naked man.
And that is why my ghost now must
So grope, so grieve, as grieve all those
In whom death found no wounds to close,
In whom dust found no more than dust.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (1947).

As is often the case with Tessimond's verse, the formal qualities of the poem are unobtrusive, perhaps because of the conversational tone.  Thus, one might not notice at first that "Whisper of a Thin Ghost" is a sonnet (with an uncommon rhyme scheme).

                         Marion Adnams, "Spring in the Cemetery" (1956)

"Whisper of a Thin Ghost" brings to mind Frank Ormsby's "My Careful Life," which I have previously posted.  For instance, these lines by Ormsby fit well with Tessimond's "books of the Careful-Wise" and "Coat of Caution":

But still my life cries: 'Work and save.
Rise early.  Stay home after five

and pull the curtains.  They are blessed
-- prudent, abstemious -- who resist.

All things in moderation.  Share
nothing.  Be seemly and austere.'

Frank Ormsby, A Northern Spring (The Gallery Press 1986).

                           Ernest Procter, "All the Fun of the Fair" (c. 1927)

If Only

It is time for a respite from "extinction's alp" (Philip Larkin) and the municipal bus ride to the River Styx (Norman MacCaig).  I am skeptical of utopias (philosophical, theological, political, artistic, or otherwise). However, I am willing to entertain any dreams that humanity may come up with.  (Unless those dreams involve telling other people how to live or what to do.  This, of course, disqualifies approximately 99% of utopian schemes.) For instance, I am willing to acknowledge (albeit reluctantly) that people are entitled to believe that "Imagine" is John Lennon's best song, and that it provides a possible blueprint for reality.  (I, on the other hand, would opt for "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "If I Fell," or a dozen or so other of his songs.)

Still, I am willing to give the dreamers a hearing.  Thus, I offer the following poems by A. S. J. Tessimond and Michael Hartnett.

               Algernon Newton, "The Regent's Canal, Paddington" (1930)

                              Daydream

One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no-one will wonder or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason, even in the winter, even in the rain.

A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (1947).

         Algernon Newton, "Birmingham with the Hall of Memory" (1929)

          There Will Be a Talking

There will be a talking of lovely things
there will be cognizance of the seasons,
there will be men who know the flights of birds,
in new days there will be love for women:
we will walk the balance of artistry.
And things will have a middle and an end,
and be loved because being beautiful.
Who in a walk will find a lasting vase
depicting dance and hold it in his hands
and sell it then?  No man on the new earth
will barter with malice nor make of stone
a hollowed riddle:  for art will be art,
the freak, the rare no longer commonplace:
there will be a going back to the laws.

Michael Hartnett, A Farewell to English (The Gallery Press 1978).

Shall we take Tessimond and Hartnett at their word?  Are they on the level? Perhaps Thomas Hardy, that old Pessimist, got it right in "The Oxen":

                     . . . Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
   'Come; see the oxen kneel

'In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
   Our childhood used to know,'
I should go with him in the gloom,
   Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917).

                 Algernon Newton, "The Surrey Canal, Camberwell" (1935)

"On, On Let Us Skate Past The Sleeping Willows Dusted With Snow"

Over the past few posts I have inadvertently stumbled into a sort of contemplation of Life and Fate from a cosmic perspective.  It all began innocently enough with Christina Rossetti's "Love hath a name of Death." From there, one thing led to another.

A return to Earth is in order.  Perhaps an ice-skating excursion with Charlotte Mew (following our earlier excursions with Edmund Blunden and A. S. J. Tessimond) will do the trick.  Although, come to think of it, Mew is not exactly the jolly, happy-go-lucky ice-skating type . . .

                             Eliot Hodgkin, "Six Cape Gooseberries" (1954)

                              Smile, Death

Smile, Death, see I smile as I come to you
Straight from the road and the moor that I leave behind,
Nothing on earth to me was like this wind-blown space,
Nothing was like the road, but at the end there was a vision or a face
               And the eyes were not always kind.

    Smile, Death, as you fasten the blades to my feet for me,
On, on let us skate past the sleeping willows dusted with snow;
Fast, fast down the frozen stream, with the moor and the road and the
  vision behind,
    (Show me your face, why the eyes are kind!)
And we will not speak of life or believe in it or remember it as we go.

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).  Please note that line 8 is a single line, but the length limitations of this format do not permit it to appear as a single line.  The other (somewhat idiosyncratic) line indentations are Mew's own.

                    Eliot Hodgkin, "Feathers and Hyacinth Heads" (1962)

In a note to the poem, John Newton (the editor and annotator of Mew's Complete Poems) states:  "This poem and 'Moorland Night' are perhaps the poems of Mew's that show the clearest signs of her enthusiasm for Emily Bronte's poetry."  Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).  I would venture to say that, in "Smile, Death," Mew gives Bronte a run for her money when it comes to gloomy moorland meditations.

In any case, I suppose that we have now returned to Earth from the cosmos, after a fashion.

                             Eliot Hodgkin, "Seven Brussels Sprouts" (1955)