Interval

"Days are where we live."  "For the days are long -- /From the first milk van/To the last shout in the night,/An eternity."  In the end, our life is a tangled skein of days.  From this welter, what can we retrieve, what remains with us?  Not days, but a handful of isolated, charmed moments.

The moments return, unaccountably, unbidden, in brilliant clarity. The days and years drop away.  Ah, yes.  So that was my life.  You may have known this at the time.  If so, you are fortunate.  Or you may come to know it only as a heart-catching pang of recognition -- distant, long-lost, but better late than never.

                                The Ash Grove

Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:
But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval --
Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles -- but nothing at all,
Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,
Could climb down in to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.
And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring
The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost
With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems (edited by Edna Longley) (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

Duncan Grant (1885-1978), "Girl at the Piano" (1940)

"The way leads on . . . The road leads on."  "Does the road wind up-hill all the way?/Yes, to the very end."  Life is a journey.  We've heard that often.  Yet it is a few brief intervals of lucent stillness that ultimately stay with us.  "Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval."  Evanescent.  But enough.  An aspect of eternity.

                            On the Road

Our roof was grapes and the broad hands of the vine
as we two drank in the vine-chinky shade
of harvest France;
and wherever the white road led we could not care,
it had brought us there
to the arbour built on a valley side where time,
if time any more existed, was that river
of so profound a current, it at once
both flowed and stayed.

We two.  And nothing in the whole world was lacking.
It is later one realizes.  I forget
the exact year or what we said.  But the place
for a lifetime glows with noon.  There are the rustic
table and the benches set; beyond the river
forests as soft as fallen clouds, and in
our wine and eyes I remember other noons.
It is a lot to say, nothing was lacking;
river, sun and leaves, and I am making
words to say 'grapes' and 'her skin.'

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (Hodder and Stoughton 1963).

Duncan Grant, "The Doorway" (1929)

Alpine

In a week such as this, when we are once again reminded of the presence of evil in the world, and are saddened at the loss of innocent lives, I suspect that many of us wonder:  how does one go about the business of living in times such as these?  We all know the answer to that question:  we must live in a manner that preserves and perpetuates everything that evil hopes to destroy.

Are poetry and art trivial and of no account in an age of barbarism?  Of course not.  They are never more important than in times such as these. The barbarians have no conception of what it means to be human.  Poetry and art embody all that is good and humane in civilization.  They stand as a direct reproach to, and a repudiation of, evil and barbarity.  Moreover, evil and barbarity cannot touch them.

                                     St. Ursanne

Leaving the viaduct on the left, and coming over the hill,
We came to a small town, four towers at the corners,
The streets narrow and not dark,
The children playing in green gardens by the waterside.

Was it at the Swan or the White Horse that we stopped?
We walked up to the church and the stone cloister,
Grass growing among the tangle of votive ribbons,
The wax flowers and the twisted wire.

We heard the town-crier ringing a bell under the town clock --
Something about a wandering cow and a job for a waggoner,
Then we looked at the watermill by the stone bridge,
And went back for a Rossi or a Cinzano.

That was at Eastertide, and the fields and meadows
Mellow with cowslips:  there were boys on bicycles
With bandoliers of jonquils, and there was an old lady
With a basket of primroses and violets.

It was a quiet town, and not yet broken,
The people kindly, and the priest "a good one as priests go,"
There was a football team, and a lad who enters from the country in the
          morning,
Singing:  Ohé Oh, Ohé Oh!

Michael Roberts, Orion Marches (Faber and Faber 1939).

The poem was first published in April of 1938, on the eve of that generation's age of barbarism.  The horror and suffering that followed are incomprehensible, and cannot be minimized or forgotten.  But do they render the poem irrelevant?  Quite the opposite.  The human world of the poem remains unchanged.

John Maclauchlan Milne (1886-1957)

"Mountainous Landscape with Fir Trees and a Lake" (1931)

In this post I intend to give mountains their due after my recent paeans to seasides.  But "St. Ursanne" brings to mind a wonderful seaside poem by   R. S. Thomas that has appeared here in the past.  In both poems, a quotidian scene casually unfolds before us.  (I do not use "quotidian" in a pejorative sense.)  Nothing of importance takes place.  Or so it seems.  Yet both scenes contain all of the beauty and truth of life.

                             Abersoch

There was that headland, asleep on the sea,
The air full of thunder and the far air
Brittle with lightning; there was that girl
Riding her cycle, hair at half-mast,
And the men smoking, the dinghies at rest
On the calm tide.  There were people going
About their business, while the storm grew
Louder and nearer and did not break.

Why do I remember these few things,
That were rumours of life, not life itself
That was being lived fiercely, where the storm raged?
Was it just that the girl smiled,
Though not at me, and the men smoking
Had the look of those who have come safely home?

R. S. Thomas, Tares (Rupert Hart-Davis 1961).

John Maclauchlan Milne, "Loch Tulla" (1933)

A good poem is a complex and ever-evolving thing.  It has its origin in the minute particulars of the poet's personal experience of the world.  Those particulars are reconstituted and transformed through the poet's act of imagination.  A good poem is also an act of preservation:  it preserves the poet's imaginative response to a unique set of particulars.  This begins as a wholly personal act on the part of the poet:  Michael Roberts and R. S. Thomas felt compelled to preserve their experiences of a particular day in St. Ursanne and of a particular day in Abersoch.  But, by reading their poems, we in turn preserve and perpetuate those experiences.

Each of us comes to a poem with our own unique set of feelings, thoughts, and circumstances, all of which influence how we react to the poem.  This does not mean that we change the poem into what we want it to be.  (This is where most modern "literary criticism" goes wrong.)  Rather, the poem, which was a wholly personal act of imagination and preservation by the poet, now awakens a wholly personal response in each of us.

At this point, one of the wonders and beauties of poetry emerges:  each poem carries with it the possibility of commencing a never-ending and ever-multiplying chain of human responses.

                                 Rioupéroux

High and solemn mountains guard Rioupéroux,
Small untidy village where the river drives a mill:
Frail as wood anemones, white and frail were you,
And drooping a little, like the slender daffodil.

Oh I will go to France again, and tramp the valley through,
And I will change these gentle clothes for clog and corduroy,
And work with the mill-hands of black Rioupéroux,
And walk with you, and talk with you, like any other boy.

James Elroy Flecker, The Bridge of Fire: Poems (Elkin Mathews 1907).

There you have it:  by reading "Rioupéroux" we have just preserved and prolonged a sequence of human interaction that began when the poem was published in 1907.  James Elroy Flecker died of tuberculosis in 1915 at the age of 30.  But we have just renewed his life as a poet.

John Maclauchlan Milne, "Cioch na h-Oighe" (1942)

Bernard Spencer wrote the following lovely and moving poem after his wife Nora died of complications from tuberculosis in 1947.  Prior to her death, they had been planning a holiday in the Alps.

                          At Courmayeur

This climbers' valley with its wayside shrines
(the young crowned Mother and her dying flowers)
became our theme for weeks.  Do you remember
the letters that we wrote and how we planned
the journey there and chose our hotel; ours
was to be one "among the pines"?

Guesses went wide; but zigzag past that ridge
the road climbs from the Roman town; there stand
the glittering peaks, and one, the God, immensely
tossing the clouds around his shoulders; here
are what you asked for, summer pastures and
an air with glaciers in its edge.

Under all sounds is mountain water falling;
at night, the river seems to draw much closer;
darling, how did you think I could forget you,
you who for ever stayed behind?  Your absence
comes back as hard as rocks.  Just now it was
those hangdown flowers that meant recalling.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (Hodder & Stoughton 1963).

The lines "darling, how did you think I could forget you,/you who for ever stayed behind?" refer to the couple's frequent separations due to Spencer's foreign postings while he was employed by the British Council.  This included a long separation during the Second World War, when he was stranded in Greece and Egypt, while she remained in England.

Thus ends our brief Alpine tour (with a detour to Wales).  St. Ursanne, Abersoch, Rioupéroux, and Courmayeur as seen through the eyes of poets: all beyond the reach of evil and untouchable by barbarism.

John Maclauchlan Milne, "Lairig Ghru" (1931)

From A Window

I am always skeptical of people who display a high degree of certainty about how the World works.  Such certainty is often grounded in politics, science, or theology.  Or narcissism.  Or madness.

How can they be so certain?  Part of me (a very small part) on occasion envies them:  such certainty makes things seem simpler.  It appears to provide an explanation for what confounds us.  (Seem and appears are the operative words.)  The World is beyond peradventure a confounding place, so I understand certainty's attraction.

Alas, my sole certainty is this:  the World shall for ever remain a mystery to me.  Take a look out the window.   Everything before you is a beautiful enigma.

                              From My Window

Now when the University students have abandoned
their game of bowls in the garden, with their cries of "Two" or "Six"
and the evening sky goes soured milk,

There are left the brightening windows of the rich owners of flats;
their meaningless finny gestures, dumb departures and entries;
a deaf man's theatre twenty times.

And quite indifferent towards the students or the rich
there are left the children of the poor, playing tag on a sandy waste,
and miles off southward ring the trams.

Alone on a building site a watchdog stalks by the fire,
wooed and repulsed by the jump-away flames, or raises its head
at a barking that chips a hole in distance.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (Hodder and Stoughton 1963).

Carlo Pedreschi, "View from Duncan of Jordanstone College" (1976)

The quotidian (I use "quotidian" in an entirely affirmative, non-pejorative sense) is suffused with ineffable mystery.  Each of us, for instance: quotidian souls, each with infinite value.

               From My Window

An old man leaning on a gate
Over a London mews -- to contemplate --
Is it the sky above -- the stones below?
     Is it remembrance of the years gone by,
     Or thinking forward to futurity
That holds him so?

Day after day he stands,
Quietly folded are the quiet hands,
Rarely he speaks.
     Hath he so near the hour when Time shall end,
     So much to spend?
What is it he seeks?

Whate'er he be,
He is become to me
A form of rest.
     I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs
     A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,
And not unblest.

Mary Coleridge, in Theresa Whistler (editor), The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (Rupert Hart-Davis 1954).

I admire Coleridge's deference and discretion.  She speculates, but she does not attempt to caricature or pigeon-hole the man.  And her speculations are gentle and lovely:  "I think his heart is tranquil, from it springs/A dreamy watchfulness of tranquil things,/And not unblest."

Cedric Morris, "From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London" (1926)

Do we ever truly know ourselves?  How, then, can we presume to know others?  The worst sort of certainty is that certainty which makes assumptions about the soul of another.

                    Neighbours

From the bay windows
Of the mouldering hotel across the road from us
Mysterious, one-night itinerants emerge
On to their balconies
To breathe the cool night air.

We let them stare
In at our quiet lives.
They let us wonder what's become of them.

Ian Hamilton, Fifty Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).

James McIntosh Patrick, "The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window" (1948)

"A single grain of rice falling -- into the Great Barn."  So writes Po Chu-i. Such a realization is a source of freedom, not a sentence of doom.

                                               At the Window

But then I drew up the curtain and looked out of the window.  Yes, there it still was, the old External World,  still apparently quite unaware of its own non-existence.  I felt helpless, small-boyish before it:  I couldn't pooh-pooh it away.

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (1934).

There it is.  Out into the World you go.

                          The Window

Looking through a narrow window day by day
They behold the world go by on holiday;
Maid to man repeating "Love me while you may,"
All go by them, none returns to them:  they stay.

They behold love pass, and life passing away,
And each day puts on the face of yesterday,
And their hearts are sighing "Love me while you may,
Love is lovely, life is passing:  'tis to-day."

All shall be to-morrow, still the elders say;
Many lenten morrows come and pass away,
And the world goes by, and as of old time they
Looking through a narrow window watch the way.

Arthur Symons, Love's Cruelty (1923).

Anthony Eyton, "Open Window, Spitalfields" (1981)

Moments

The fact that our life consists of a collection of moments, some more redolent than others, is not an argument for hedonism.  Hedonism gets in the way of appreciating the scene-by-scene movement of our lives.

The pursuit of pleasure or happiness or money or any of the other chimeras that are the staples of popular culture (and of its all-pervasive partner-in-crime, advertising) is an empty, ultimately unsatisfying, diversion. Frenetic hedonism has nothing to do with our soul.  We really ought to stop trying so hard.

                              Pino

Pino, a hill-top village, slanting street
and at the corner a wall where gossips sit
in a row at sunset, like migrating birds,
backed by the sky and forty miles of plain.

Buses heading for somewhere else; the words
cart wheels grind and jerk or a peasant cries
as the white oxen lift their swinging throats,
somnambulists with long Egyptian eyes.

The 'National' inn, the sleepy, smiling maid,
the queenly, fat Madame in a dress of spots;
simple kindnesses like that harsh strong wine;
and two weeks blank of great events.  In fine

A time of waiting.  Most of our life is that.
But waiting sometimes vivid with the sign
of things amazingly connected; whether some
day of thunder or night with the Plough slung over
the road of foreboding and of dreadful hope,
the road to the towns and what there was to come.

Bernard Spencer, Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose (edited by Peter Robinson) (Bloodaxe Books 2011).  The poem was probably written in 1947, although the date is uncertain. The village that Spencer writes of is Pino Torinese in the Piedmont of Italy.

Spencer has a wonderful habit of moving from exact, evocative description to a gently-realized piece of wisdom.  Not a "moral" intended for our edification, mind you.  Rather, the observations of a sensitive man thinking to himself; someone who has lived, and who now finds himself considering where his life has led him, and what he has learned.

Thus, the lovely passage beginning:  "In fine//A time of waiting.  Most of our life is that./But waiting sometimes vivid with the sign/of things amazingly connected . . ."  There is no pontificating or posturing.  This is simply the product of a life lived.

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

Think about the moments in your life that have the most resonance for you, that mean the most to you.  I'd wager that few of those moments were planned:  they just happened.

                              The Boats

Five boats beside the lake,
pulled bows first up the shore; how hard it is
to draw them, from each angle changing, elegant:
their feminine poise, the 'just so' lifting sweep
of the light timbers round the flanks sucked thin
into the thirsty bows;
                                          the same or nearly
as makes no difference, since men settled first
near these magnolias, lived the different life
that is always the same; fished, traded, hammered, gossiped
wanted their food and wine, appeased the Powers,
meditated journeys
or turned and turned in their minds some woman's image,
lost or distant.
                                            Near this bench and the keels
someone has scratched in the dust the name ELSA.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (Hodder and Stoughton 1963).

As I have mentioned in the past, Spencer lived a peripatetic life.  He was employed by the British Council, and his postings took him to Greece, Egypt, Spain, and Austria.  While on those postings, he holidayed in various countries in Europe.  Hence, his poetry can be seen as a travelogue of sorts, consisting of vignettes of his experiences along the way.

But the words "travelogue" and "vignette" are far too limiting:  Spencer's poems are never merely reportage of local color.  They are, as noted above, exact and evocative in their descriptions of places and people.  Yet -- as in the poems that appear in this post -- his observations of the particular nearly always lead Spencer toward a low-key truth about how we humans live.  "Near this bench and the keels/someone has scratched in the dust the name ELSA."

Algernon Newton, "Canal Scene, Maida Vale" (1947)

I am very fond of the following poem, which has appeared here before.  But, because it exemplifies what I have been attempting (inarticulately) to say about Spencer's poetry, now is a good time to pay it another visit.

                              On the Road

Our roof was grapes and the broad hands of the vine
as we two drank in the vine-chinky shade
of harvest France;
and wherever the white road led we could not care,
it had brought us there
to the arbour built on a valley side where time,
if time any more existed, was that river
of so profound a current, it at once
both flowed and stayed.

We two.  And nothing in the whole world was lacking.
It is later one realizes.  I forget
the exact year or what we said.  But the place
for a lifetime glows with noon.  There are the rustic
table and the benches set; beyond the river
forests as soft as fallen clouds, and in
our wine and eyes I remember other noons.
It is a lot to say, nothing was lacking;
river, sun and leaves, and I am making
words to say 'grapes' and 'her skin.'

Bernard Spencer, Ibid.

If we have been fortunate and blessed, we know exactly what Spencer is talking about.  I first read this poem 25 or so years ago, but I have never gotten over these beautiful lines, and the truth they tell:  "We two.  And nothing in the whole world was lacking./It is later one realizes."

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

Revenants

This is a postscript to my post earlier this month about "Things."  It takes its cue from the final two lines of Jorge Luis Borges's poem of that name (which appeared in the post):

They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.

"Well, of course!" most of us would say.  But it is a sobering thought nonetheless.  Off we go into the ether, leaving all these things behind.  I won't presume to invest them with life.  But I cannot help but think that they continue to carry with them some trace of those who have departed.

Evan Charlton (1904-1984), "Hotel Garden"

                  Sale

Like a dream recurring
this house where trees crowd in
by the bend of a stream
pampas whispering in the rain;
through darkling rooms
press beautiful people
and avid fingers
are turning over and over
the delicate riches of old neighbours.

'Not friends, no, not friends,
or we wouldn't be here.
They have gone away now
(we mean they are dead)
leaving behind them
these Venetian lustres,
thick ropes of amber,
snuff boxes, netsukes, cream jugs, miniatures,
and that little French clock.
These delectable morsels
we coveted whenever we dined
at this dull cold house
can be Ours now, Ours. . . .'

'But the books, alas, are stained
and have been read too often'
(maybe far into the night
assuaging tears dropped down on them
that would explain the pity of it)
'they are no use now to Us
nor to anyone.'

Joan Barton (1908-1986), A House Under Old Sarum: New and Selected Poems (Harry Chambers/Peterloo Poets 1981).

I have nothing against estate sales.  But when I attend one I feel that I am intruding.  I understand that the erstwhile owners are "sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over."  But I feel their lives hovering about the objects on display.  Not in a spooky way, but in a bittersweet way.

And then the thought arrives:  So this is what it comes to.  These things. The thought comes without condescension (believe me), for I know that it will be exactly the same for me one day:  a few objects on a card table.

Evan Charlton, "The Intruder"

             In an Auction Room

How many deaths and partings spilled
this jumble in an upper room;
and every chair or mirror filled
with elbowing and smell of lives:
the gloom
of this tall wardrobe stopped the sun
entering a home; the great brass bed
stood in its throne-room, and its springs
and shining arms are crammed like mines
with regal illness and with love:
the terrible settee
with worn red flowers, the table de nuit,
the picture with the little man
walking the infinite road
to a West of gold;
these have all been (and are to be)
loves truer than our human mould,
or desperate walls
flung up against the shock of things,
what has no name; or growing old.

Bernard Spencer, Aegean Islands and Other Poems (1946).

Evan Charlton, "Hotel, River and Ruins" (c. 1980)

"Nostalgia For The Present"

I suspect that all of us have had the experience articulated in the following poem.  I have.  As I write this, two or three instances come immediately to mind.

     Nostalgia for the Present

At that very instant:
Oh, what I would not give for the joy
of being at your side in Iceland
inside the great unmoving daytime
and of sharing this now
the way one shares music
or the taste of fruit.
At that very instant
the man was at her side in Iceland.

Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alan Trueblood), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (edited by Alexander Coleman) (Viking 1999).

Some may say:  "Stop thinking so much!  Just live."  I am not unsympathetic to this view.  It is possible to slice things too thin, to overthink the riddle of Time and Existence.  On the other hand, Borges is simply reporting What Life Is Like.  In a beautiful fashion that most of us are not capable of.  Hence, poetry.

Dane Maw (1908-1989), "Woolverton and Peart Woods" (1970)

"Nostalgia for the present" is in the same territory as a feeling I have described here before:  an awareness, at the time something is happening, that you are experiencing something you will never forget.  The event being experienced need not be "life-changing" or "important" (e.g., a birth, a death, a calamity).  In fact, it is usually the case that this feeling comes out-of-the-blue on what seemed to be just another nondescript day.  And then you want everything to slow down, or freeze in place.  A vain hope, of course.

                         On the Road

Our roof was grapes and the broad hands of the vine
as we two drank in the vine-chinky shade
of harvest France;
and wherever the white road led we could not care,
it had brought us there
to the arbour built on the valley side where time,
if time any more existed, was that river
of so profound a current, it at once
both flowed and stayed.

We two.  And nothing in the whole world was lacking.
It is later one realizes.  I forget
the exact year or what we said.  But the place
for a lifetime glows with noon.  There are the rustic
table and the benches set; beyond the river
forests as soft as fallen clouds, and in
our wine and eyes I remember other noons.
It is a lot to say, nothing was lacking;
river, sun and leaves, and I am making
words to say 'grapes' and 'her skin'.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).

Dane Maw, "Scottish Landscape, Air Dubh"

                    While You Slept

You never knew what I saw while you slept.
We drove up a wide green stone-filled valley.
Around us were empty heather mountains.
A white river curved quickly beside us.
I thought to wake you when I saw the cairn --
A granite pillar of that country's past --
But I let you sleep without that history.
You did, however, travel through that place:
I can tell you that your eyes were at rest
As the momentous world moved beyond you,
And that you breathed in peace that quarter hour.
We seldom know what is irreplaceable.
You sang old songs for me then fell asleep.
I worried about what you were missing.
But you missed nothing.  And I was the one who slept.

sip (Glen Coe, Scotland, c. 1986).

"And nothing in the whole world was lacking.  It is later one realizes."

Dane Maw, "Langdale Falls, Westmorland"

Ionic

Given that I am residing in a Mediterranean, classical Greek daydream world at the moment (courtesy of The Greek Anthology), a visit to C. P. Cavafy is appropriate.  Cavafy's entire body of work is a dreamy amalgam of the ancient Alexandrian-Grecian-Roman-Mediterranean world and the less-than-enchanted (well, somewhat tawdry) modern world, so it is hard to choose where to begin.

The following poem captures, for me at least, Cavafy's old-in-new world. I've posted it here previously (in three different translations), but I'm not averse to circling back when the mood strikes.  As I have noted before, Cavafy has a marvelous knack for intermingling the ancient and the modern.  If you surrender to him, you may find yourself wondering where you are.  Here?  Alexandria in the age of the Ptolemies?  Or perhaps on a hillside on the golden coast of vanished Ionia, looking out over the Aegean Sea.

                      Ionic

That we've broken their statues,
that we've driven them out of their temples,
doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they're still in love with you,
their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
your atmosphere is potent with their life,
and sometimes a young ethereal figure,
indistinct, in rapid flight,
wings across your hills.

C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), in C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (Princeton University Press 1975).

Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013), "Richmond Park II" (1999)

Bernard Spencer is also very good at this intertwining of the ancient and the modern.  Wherever Spencer lived or visited, he unerringly divined the essence of the place, including the echoing revenants of its history.

               Delicate Grasses

Delicate grasses blowing in the wind,
grass out of cracks among tiered seats of stone
where a Greek theatre swarmed with audience,
till Time's door shut upon
the stir, the eloquence.

A hawk waiting above the enormous plain,
lying upon the nothing of the air,
a hawk who turns at some sky-wave or lull
this way, and after there
as dial needles prowl.

Cool water jetting from a drinking fountain
in crag-lands, miles from any peopled spot,
year upon year with its indifferent flow;
sound that is and is not;
the wet stone trodden low.

There is no name for such strong liberation;
I drift their way; I need what their world lends;
then, chilled by one thought further still than those,
I swerve towards life and friends
before the trap-fangs close.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).  When first published in Spencer's The Twist in the Plotting in 1960, the poem was titled "Feathery Grasses," and it began:  "Feathery grasses blowing in the wind."

Spencer said this of the poem:

"After crossing the plain [of Anatolia] we drove over the mountains to look at the remains of some ancient Greek towns on the south coast of Turkey. These towns, although overgrown with grass and weeds, often have recognizable remains of temples and theatres standing, with their semi-circular tiers of stone seats.  So much emptiness and all those ruins put me in a state of melancholy excitement.  I was half-attracted by it and half afraid . . .What is the trap?  What was I afraid of?  Later, at his request, I read the poem out to John Betjeman, and he cried out 'Oh!  Eternity!'  That is as good an answer as any."

Bernard Spencer, Madrid University Lecture (March 1962), in Collected Poems (edited by Roger Bowen) (Oxford University Press 1981), page 137.

Thus, "Delicate Grasses" is likely set in one of the regions known to the ancient Greeks as Caria (birthplace of Herodotus), Lycia, or Pamphylia. Ionia, the setting of Cavafy's poem, is immediately to the north of Caria. Ionia and Caria lie along the Aegean Sea.

Jeffrey Smart, "The Steps"

Mediterranean

My recent meanderings in The Greek Anthology have me daydreaming of golden classical landscapes and seascapes.  Idealized landscapes and seascapes, I readily concede.  Without barathrums, for instance.  Still . . .

Bernard Spencer (who I have previously identified as a "neglected poet") spent a great deal of time in the Mediterranean as an employee of the British Council, and became stranded in Egypt during the Second World War.  His poems about the region -- first Greece, then to Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, and later to Spain -- are lovely and evocative.

Helen Lavinia Cochrane, "Song of Spring" (c. 1939)

            Aegean Islands 1940-41

Where white stares, smokes or breaks,
Thread white, white of plaster and of foam,
Where sea like a wall falls;
Ribbed, lionish coast,
The stony islands which blow into my mind
More often than I imagine my grassy home;

To sun one's bones beside the
Explosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea
(The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam,
Familiar of famous and deserted harbours,
Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.)

To know the gear and skill of sailing,
The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses,
Stories of Turks and smoky ikons,
Cry of the bagpipe, treading
Of the peasant dancers;

The dark bread
The island wine and the sweet dishes;
All these were elements in a happiness
More distant now than any date like '40,
A. D. or B. C., ever can express.

Bernard Spencer, Aegean Islands and Other Poems (1946).

The "grassy home" (line 6) to which Spencer refers is England.

Helen Lavinia Cochrane, "Almond Blossom, Majorca"

                                   Olive Trees

The dour thing in olive trees
is that their trunks are stooped like never dying crones,
and they camp where roads climb, and drink with dust and stones.

The pleasant thing is how in the heat
their plumage brushes the sight with a bird's-wing feeling:
and perhaps the gold of their oil is mild with dreams of healing.

The cold thing is how they were
there at the start of us; and one grey look surveyed
the builder imagining the city, the historian with his spade.

The warm thing is that they are
first promise of the South to waking travellers:
of the peacock sea, and the islands and their boulder-lumbered spurs.

Bernard Spencer, Ibid.

"The dour thing . . . The pleasant thing . . . The cold thing . . . The warm thing . . ." is a nice back-and-forth progression.  And Spencer captures the telescoping of Time -- with the olive tree as a constant and as a mute witness -- very well:  ". . . and one grey look surveyed/the builder imagining the city, the historian with his spade."

I spent my teenage years in a part of California where wild peacocks roamed the dry hills.  I remember the brilliant, ever-turning blues of their heads and bodies and tails.  (And the sound of their screams!)  Thus, I think Spencer's "the peacock sea" is exactly right.

Helen Lavina Cochrane, "Olive Gatherers" (c. 1939)

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"

"Delicate Grasses"

I cross a field on my daily walk.  In that field I have worn a path.  Six months ago I was walking the path on a cold afternoon when suddenly a curtain of snow swept across it off of Puget Sound.  The wild grasses were grey and fallen.  I was deep in a wintry Robert Frost mood at that time, and I remember thinking of lines from his "Desert Places":  "Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast/In a field I looked into going past."

Now, near summer, the grasses in the field are four to five feet high in places.  I have to search to find my old path through the swaying stalks.  It brings back memories of walking down rustling rows of tall corn in Minnesota when I was young.

                    Delicate Grasses

Delicate grasses blowing in the wind,
grass out of cracks among tiered seats of stone
where a Greek theatre swarmed with audience,
till Time's door shut upon
the stir, the eloquence.

A hawk waiting above the enormous plain,
lying upon the nothing of the air,
a hawk who turns at some sky-wave or lull
this way, and after there
as dial needles prowl.

Cool water jetting from a drinking fountain
in crag-lands, miles from any peopled spot,
year upon year with its indifferent flow;
sound that is and is not;
the wet stone trodden low.

There is no name for such strong liberation;
I drift their way; I need what their world lends;
then, chilled by one thought further still than those,
I swerve towards life and friends
before the trap-fangs close.

Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).

                         Peter Christian Skovgaard, "Oat Field" (1843)

"Life In A Day"

Life in a day. 
     -- Louis MacNeice, "Les Sylphides"

Days are where we live.
     -- Philip Larkin, "Days"

We two.  And nothing in the whole world was lacking.
It is later one realizes.  I forget
the exact year or what we said.  But the place
for a lifetime glows with noon.
     -- Bernard Spencer, "On the Road"
  
The days that remain with us are rarely the planned-for days or the waited-upon days. The days that remain with us do so unaccountably, unwontedly.  Those that remain -- in, say, an angle of light or a color -- are, I think, best left wordless.

'Why, yes, -- we've pass'd a pleasant day,
While life's true joys are on their way.'
-- Ah me!  I now look back afar,
And see that one day like a star.
     -- William Allingham (1824-1889)

          The Spirit's Epochs

Not in the crises of events,
   Of compass'd hopes, or fears fulfill'd,
Or acts of grave consequence,
   Are life's delight and depth reveal'd.
The day of days was not the day;
   That went before, or was postponed;
The night Death took our lamp away
   Was not the night on which we groan'd.
I drew my bride, beneath the moon,
   Across my threshold; happy hour!
But, ah, the walk that afternoon
   We saw the water-flags in flower!
     -- Coventry Patmore (1823-1896)

                                                      Water-flags

Neglected Poets: Bernard Spencer

The poetry of Bernard Spencer (1909-1963) reflects the fact that he spent most of his life as an expatriate, working much of the time for the British Council as a teacher, lecturer, and administrator.  His poems -- few and far between -- have as their locales Greece, Egypt, Italy, Spain, and Austria.  During the Second World War, he was stranded in Cairo, where he was one of the poets (including Lawrence Durrell, Keith Douglas, and Terence Tiller) associated with the journal Personal Landscape.  He died in Vienna at the age of 53.

His verse is conversational in tone, but at the same time it is elegant and exact.  It reminds me at times of the later poetry of Louis MacNeice (with whom Spencer was acquainted).  I am not suggesting that Spencer's poetry was directly influenced by that of MacNeice, only that the two of them independently shared a similar style.  (Coincidentally, they both died in September of 1963.)  The following two poems provide only a brief introduction to Spencer's poetry.         

             At Courmayeur

This climbers' valley with its wayside shrines
(the young crowned Mother and her dying flowers)
became our theme for weeks.  Do you remember
the letters that we wrote and how we planned
the journey there and chose our hotel; ours
was to be one 'among the pines'?

Guesses went wide; but zigzag past that ridge
the road climbs from the Roman town; there stand
the glittering peaks, and one, the God, immensely
tossing the clouds around his shoulders; here
are what you asked for, summer pastures and
an air with glaciers in its edge.

Under all sounds is mountain water falling;
at night, the river seems to draw much closer;
darling, how did you think I could forget you,
you who for ever stayed behind?  Your absence
comes back as hard as rocks.  Just now it was
those hangdown flowers that meant recalling.

With Luck Lasting (1963) in Collected Poems, edited by Roger Bowen (Oxford University Press 1981).  Although I am, in general, not a proponent of attempting to link a poet's poems to specific events in the poet's life, I think that one should know that "At Courmayeur" was written after Spencer's first wife died at a young age of tuberculosis. 

               On the Road

Our roof was grapes and the broad hands of the vine
as we two drank in the vine-chinky shade
of harvest France;
and wherever the white road led we could not care,
it had brought us there
to the arbour built on a valley side where time,
if time any more existed, was that river
of so profound a current, it at once
both flowed and stayed.

We two.  And nothing in the whole world was lacking.
It is later one realizes.  I forget
the exact year or what we said.  But the place
for a lifetime glows with noon.  There are the rustic
table and the benches set; beyond the river
forests as soft as fallen clouds, and in
our wine and eyes I remember other noons.
It is a lot to say, nothing was lacking;
river, sun and leaves, and I am making
words to say 'grapes' and 'her skin'.

Ibid.

                  Turner, Mont Blanc from above Courmayeur (1810)