April

I'm certain I'm not the only young man or woman whose budding interest in poetry was quickened by happening upon the following lines:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (Boni and Liveright 1922).

I seem to recall that the presence of April, my birth month, played some role in why I was smitten with the lines.  But I could be misremembering.  On the other hand, I was a melancholy, bookish lad (some things never change), so I suspect my recollection may be accurate.  In any case, the lines have remained with me for nearly fifty years, even though my affections have long since migrated from The Waste Land to Four Quartets.

All of which leads (in a roundabout fashion), dear ever-patient readers, to our annual visit to my favorite April poem:

                         Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin 2004).  The poem was originally published on April 19, 1952, in Kavanagh's Weekly.  Ibid, page 280.

Allan Gwynne-Jones (1892-1982), "Spring Evening, Froxfield"

I suppose one might argue that "Wet Evening in April" is not a true "April poem" at all.  One expects something along these lines: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough . . ."  Or something even more effulgent and, yes, flowery:

                                   April, 1885

Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh;

The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:

All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:

The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower

At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth.

On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower

In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.

Robert Bridges, The Shorter Poems (George Bell & Sons 1890). Caught up in his enthusiasm for the month, Bridges includes sprightly internal rhymes within the first five lines.

Or perhaps something more restrained, but still evocative of the month's beautiful and hopeful course:

                    April

Exactly: where the winter was

The spring has come: I see her now

In the fields, and as she goes

The flowers spring, nobody knows how.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (Carcanet Press 1994).

Mind you, I am quite fond of each of these poems, and they have appeared here on more than one occasion.  Still, April would not be April without its characteristic tinge of melancholy.  All of those cherry, plum, and pear petals drifting down beneath a blue sky, carpeting the green grass and the sidewalks.  It's wonderful how April and October share a similar bittersweet wistfulness and wistful bittersweetness, isn't it?  Every six months, year after year, the falling of petals and the falling of leaves.  Trying to tell us something.

William Wood (1877-1958), "April Weather"

Ah, well, everything in the World and in our life eventually comes around to our evanescence, and the evanescence of the beautiful particulars that surround us.  "But it is a sort of April weather life that we lead in this world.  A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm."  (William Cowper, letter to Walter Bagot (January 3, 1787), in James King and Charles Ryskamp (editors), The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, Volume III: Letters 1787-1791 (Oxford University Press 1982), pages 5-6.)  This is lovely, but perhaps too dramatic.  Life is a matter of petals and of leaves.  And of gratitude.

          Pear Blossoms by the Eastern Palisade

Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green —

when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town.

Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering —

in a lifetime how many springs do we see?

Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o (Copper Canyon Press 1994), page 68.

Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959), "The Cornish April"

Becoming A Poem

Those who have departed often return unexpectedly.  One then feels ashamed for having failed to properly attend to one's memories of them. This is not a matter of ghosts or of spirits, but of full-bodied presences in the mind's-eye:  when they return, they are right there in front of us.  Silent.

          Last Poem

Stand at the grave's head
Of any common
Man or woman,
Thomas Hardy said,
And in the silence
What they were,
Their life, becomes a poem.

And so with my dead,
As I know them
Now, in his
And her
Long silences;
And wait for, yet a while hence,
My own silence.

F. T. Prince, Collected Poems: 1935-1992 (The Sheep Meadow Press 1993).

Here is the lovely inspiration for Prince's poem:

"The most prosaic man becomes a poem when you stand by his grave at his funeral and think of him."

Thomas Hardy, notebook entry for May 29, 1872, in Richard Taylor (editor), The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan 1978).

I'm surprised that Prince uses "common" rather than Hardy's "prosaic": the transition from "prosaic" to "poem" is wonderful.  I'd wager that Hardy would have described himself as prosaic.  Aren't we all?  And "common" as well.  Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't faced the facts.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Midsummer, East Fife" (1936)

The following passage perhaps provides a roundabout instance of what Hardy has in mind.

Thus did he speak.  "I see around me here
Things which you cannot see:  we die, my Friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left."

William Wordsworth, "Book First: The Wanderer," lines 469-474, The Excursion, in Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (editors), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Volume V (Oxford University Press 1949), page 24.

The lines are spoken by "the Wanderer."  "The Author" has found him drowsing in the sun, "the shadows of the breezy elms above/Dappling his face."  Ibid, lines 440-441.  The Excursion is a diffuse poem, with a tendency towards the long-winded, but one of the things that Wordsworth may be getting at is that we all have it in us to live, like the Wanderer, in our own "peculiar nook of earth."  But does that nook indeed die with us?  Is there "no memorial left" of how we have lived?

Hardy suggests that each of us ("prosaic" though we are), together with our peculiar nook, becomes a poem.  It certainly seems that way when the departed return to visit us.  A sentimental notion, I concede.  But I have no quarrel with sentimentality.

James McIntosh Patrick, "A Castle in Scotland"

I suspect that the subject matter of this post may be traceable to the fact that I have been visiting Thomas Hardy's poetry over the past few weeks.  As I have noted in the past, communings with the departed are a matter-of-fact occurrence in Hardy's poetry.  Things are seen out of the corner of one's eye.  There are tappings on windows and whispers in the boughs of trees. But these signals are never a cause for alarm.  Hardy -- sunk in the past as he was -- treats them as commonplaces.  Who does not think of the dead? And who's to say they are not thinking of us?

Hardy admired the poetry of Charlotte Mew, and he, along with others, helped procure a Civil List Pension for her when she was in financial straits.  The departed are plentiful in her poetry as well.

                              Here Lies a Prisoner

               Leave him:  he's quiet enough:  and what matter
               Out of his body or in, you can scatter
The frozen breath of his silenced soul, of his outraged soul to the winds
          that rave:
Quieter now than he used to be, but listening still to the magpie chatter
                                   Over his grave.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Downie Mill" (1962)

In the end, we all return to silence, don't we?

       The Best Thing to Say

The best thing to say is nothing
And that I do not say,
But I will say it, when I lie
In silence all the day.

C. H. Sisson, Collected Poems (Carcanet 1998).

"The Best Thing to Say" is one of Sisson's harrowing final poems, a selection of which appeared here five years ago.  He doesn't present a pretty picture.  Thus, it falls upon Thomas Hardy -- the purported "pessimist" -- to provide us with hope.  Yes, each of us returns to silence.  But we each become a poem.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Braes o' Lundie"

April

I can assure you that my fondness for April is not attributable to the fact that I was born in this month (an Aries born in the Year of the Monkey). No, I am fond of April because of its sprightly fickleness:  anything can happen (even snow in some climes).  In my opinion, it is manifestly not "the cruellest month."

William Cowper is in the main correct about both April and life:  "It is a sort of April-weather life that we lead in this world.  A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm."  Still, despite its changefulness and "chancefulness" (Thomas Hardy, "The Temporary the All"), I believe that April carries with it an overall sense of blue- and yellow-hued promise.

                                   April, 1885

Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh;
The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:
All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:
The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower
At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth.
On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower
In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.

Robert Bridges, The Shorter Poems (1896).

Note the internal rhymes within lines (delay/gay, now/bough, et cetera), the combination of end rhymes and internal rhymes across three lines (cometh/starreth/hummeth, shower/flower/uptower), and the internal rhymes across lines (smiles/miles, cloud/crowd).

Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959), "The Cornish April"

On my afternoon walk yesterday, I noticed that the tulips are beginning to peak.  The daffodils are on the wane.  Sidewalks and green lawns are strewn with the fallen creamy-white petals of magnolia trees.  April is a series of arrivals and departures.

              In the Valley

On this first evening of April
Things look wintry still:
Not a leaf on the tree,
Not a cloud in the sky,
Only a young moon high above the clear green west
And a few stars by and by.

Yet Spring inhabits round like a spirit.
I am sure of it
By the swoon on the sense,
By the dazzle on the eye,
By the long, long sigh that traverses my breast
And yet no reason why.

O lovely Quiet, am I never to be blest?
Time, even now you haste.
Between the lamb's bleat and the ewe's reply
A star has come into the sky.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Time Importuned (1928).

I hadn't noticed this until I placed the two poems together in this post:  "the dazzling south" of Bridges and "the dazzle on the eye" of Warner.  And, coincidentally, Warner employs the same technique of end rhymes and internal rhymes across three lines used by Bridges:  sky/high/by; eye/sigh/why.

Lucien Pissarro, "April, Epping" (1894)

April's mutability is embodied in the trees:  their branches are still mostly bare, but, from a distance, they seem to be enveloped in a yellow-green haze.  Mutability and promise.  "Nature's first green is gold."

                      April

Exactly:  where the winter was
The spring has come:  I see her now
In the fields, and as she goes
The flowers spring, nobody knows how.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (Carcanet Press 1994).

Victor Elford, "April Sunshine" (1971)

As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers of this blog may recall, I have a May poem (Philip Larkin's "The Trees"), a November poem (Wallace Stevens's "The Region November"), and an April poem that I annually revisit in each of those months.  Please humor me as we pay a return visit to my April poem.

                      Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (edited by Antoinette Quinn) (Penguin 2004).  The poem was first published in Kavanagh's Weekly on April 19, 1952.

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "Glamis Village in April"

"An Honest Man Who Will Never Lie To Me"

"The most prosaic man becomes a poem when you stand by his grave at his funeral and think of him."  Thomas Hardy (notebook entry, May 29, 1871), in Richard Taylor (editor), The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan 1978).

Perhaps this will sound hyperbolic, but I believe that what distinguishes Thomas Hardy's poetry from that of any other poet is its humanity.  No poet has ever written with such honesty, fellow-feeling, and compassion about what it means to make one's way through life, and to confront one's mortality.

These qualities do not become truly evident until one moves beyond the well-known anthology pieces and immerses oneself in Hardy's poetry as a whole.  I have been reading his poetry for nearly forty years, and I will probably never work my way through all of his 900 or so poems.  But, over time, my admiration for him, both as a poet and as a human being, continues to deepen.

Hardy's genius (there is no other word for it) is often best revealed in the small, out-of-the-way poems one unexpectedly encounters while, say, searching out an old favorite.

       The Peace-Offering

It was but a little thing,
Yet I knew it meant to me
Ease from what had given a sting
To the very birdsinging
        Latterly.

But I would not welcome it;
And for all I then declined
O the regrettings infinite
When the night-processions flit
        Through the mind!

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

I will go out on a limb and suggest that most of us have experienced the feelings expressed by Hardy in this poem.  Perhaps we have experienced them from both sides at different times in our lives.  Although I have read this poem many times, part of me still shies away from reading it because of the feelings I know it will evoke.  "O the regrettings infinite/When the night-processions flit/Through the mind!"  Enough said.

James Paterson, "Moniaive" (1885)

Of Hardy, Thom Gunn writes:

"[T]hroughout, there is always the feeling that he is trying to see things as they are, whether it is an abstract term like Pity or a physical thing like the way the heat of noon breathes out from old walls at midnight; he is never trying to falsify either them or his emotion about them -- and so much the worse if the poem ends up in bathos or flatness.  Ezra Pound more than once praises Hardy for his insistence on immersing himself in his subject. And this is well said, for the immersion leaves him no room for pretence, or for anything other than honesty.  Much of what sustains me through the flatter parts of the Collected Poems is this feeling of contact with an honest man who will never lie to me."

Thom Gunn, "Hardy and the Ballads," The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (North Point Press 1985), page 105.

          Just the Same

I sat.  It all was past;
Hope never would hail again;
Fair days had ceased at a blast,
The world was a darkened den.

The beauty and dream were gone,
And the halo in which I had hied
So gaily gallantly on
Had suffered blot and died!

I went forth, heedless whither,
In a cloud too black for name:
-- People frisked hither and thither;
The world was just the same.

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (1922).

Hardy's poem was no doubt prompted by a specific experience in his life, which we could perhaps tease out (as critics have tried to do) by examining the biographical details.  But that is not what makes the poem resonate with us.  Once more, I would suggest that most of us have experienced in our own lives exactly what Hardy relates in the poem.  Consider one possible instance among many:  have you ever walked out from a hospital into the sunlight after someone you love has died?

James Paterson, "Autumn in Glencairn, Moniaive" (1887)

Thom Gunn again:

"[W]e never for a moment doubt that Hardy means what he says.  We make much of 'sincerity' nowadays . . . And clearly sincerity is a value, even though one rather difficult to define -- maybe it is one of the ultimate values in literature.  But there are different ways of being sincere, and I suggest that Hardy's is a supremely successful one.
     The critics who have written on Hardy's poetry spend an inordinate time in complaining about the badness of his bad poems.  The bad poems are certainly there, but though they may be boring or ridiculous they are never pretentious.  By contrast, if you take the collected Yeats, you feel the strain of all that rhetorical striving in the minor poems, and it is only in the best of Yeats, and not always then, that he is able to free himself from the rhetoric.  Rhetoric is a form of pretence, of making something appear bigger or more important than you know it is.  Well, you never feel, even in Hardy's most boring and ridiculous poetry, that he is pretending -- he is never rhetorical.  And there are not many poets of whom this can be said."

Thom Gunn, "Hardy and the Ballads," The Occasions of Poetry, pages 104-105.

       Waiting Both

A star looks down at me,
And says:  "Here I and you
Stand, each in our degree:
What do you mean to do, --
          Mean to do?"

I say:  "For all I know,
Wait, and let Time go by,
Till my change come." -- "Just so,"
The star says:  "So mean I: --
          So mean I."

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925).

James Paterson, "Borderland" (c. 1896)

The cumulative impact of Hardy's poetry is expressed well by C. H. Sisson:

"No single poem, and no short selection, can give an adequate impression of the weight of Hardy's achievement as a poet.  The sheer bulk of closely-felt impressions, covering sixty years or more of his writing life, is without parallel in our literature.  He is no Wordsworth, hardening as the years go on, and the last poems are as lively as, and deeper than, the first.  The whole oeuvre is united by temperament and by a style which did not harden simply because it was nothing more than the words and rhythms that it was natural for Hardy to use, in his persistent impulse to set down the truth as he saw it."

C. H. Sisson, English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (Methuen 1981; first published in 1971), page  30.

                       Nobody Comes

     Tree-leaves labour up and down,
          And through them the fainting light
          Succumbs to the crawl of night.
     Outside in the road the telegraph wire
          To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
          Swept by a spectral hand.

     A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
          That flash upon a tree:
          It has nothing to do with me,
     And whangs along in a world of its own,
          Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
          And nobody pulls up there.

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925).

James Paterson, "The Last Turning, Winter, Moniaive" (1885)

"I Tread On Many Autumns Here"

Over the weekend we had a strong wind-storm, and the trees have now lost most of their leaves.  I'm not inclined to hear voices when I am out and about in the World.  Today, however, as I walked beneath bare branches, through piles of fallen leaves, I heard the trees say something along these lines:  That's it.  We're done.  Ah, look at the waste around us!  It's sad, isn't it?

Have no fear.  I'm not going mad.  I did not reply.

William Rothenstein (1872-1945), "St Martin's Summer"

The images of leaves underfoot in C. H. Sisson's "Leaves," which appeared here recently, reminded me of the following poem by Andrew Young.

      Walking in Beech Leaves

I tread on many autumns here
     But with no pride,
For at the leaf-fall of each year
     I also died.

This is last autumn, crisp and brown,
     That my knees feel;
But through how many years sinks down
     My sullen heel.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).

The poems by Sisson and Young in turn bring to mind the second stanza of Robert Frost's "In Hardwood Groves," which I have posted here before:

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

Gilbert Spencer, "Burdens Farm with Melbury Beacon" (1943)

Well, one way or another, leaves -- and we -- reach the same destination. The World provides us with any number of symbols and metaphors and allegories for our journey towards this destination.  If forced to choose among the options, I would opt for leafhood.

        June Leaves and Autumn

                             I
Lush summer lit the trees to green;
     But in the ditch hard by
Lay dying boughs some hand unseen
Had lopped when first with festal mien
     They matched their mates on high.
It seemed a melancholy fate
That leaves but brought to birth so late
     Should rust there, red and numb,
In quickened fall, while all their race
Still joyed aloft in pride of place
     With store of days to come.

                             II
At autumn-end I fared that way,
     And traced those boughs fore-hewn
Whose leaves, awaiting their decay
In slowly browning shades, still lay
     Where they had lain in June
And now, no less embrowned and curst
Than if they had fallen with the first,
     Nor known a morning more,
Lay there alongside, dun and sere,
Those that at my last wandering here
     Had length of days in store.

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

James Bateman, "Lulington Church" (1939)

A Lost World, Part Three: "Grave Sweet Ancestral Faces"

The following poem by Kathleen Raine has its source in a painting by Samuel Palmer.  I'm guessing that the painting she has in mind is the one that appears immediately below.  However, any number of paintings and engravings by Palmer (a few of which have appeared here previously) evoke a similar atmosphere.  My sense of Palmer is that he knew he was witnessing the passing of a world, and that he wished to preserve what he could of it before it vanished.

Samuel Palmer

"Coming from Evening Church" (1830)

          Returning from Church

That country spire -- Samuel Palmer knew
What world they entered, who,
Kneeling in English village pew,
Were near those angels whose golden effigies looked down
From Gothic vault or hammer-beam.
Grave sweet ancestral faces
Beheld, Sunday by Sunday, a holy place
Few find, who, pausing now
In empty churches, cannot guess
At those deep simple states of grace.

Kathleen Raine, The Oracle in the Heart (1980).

The poem brings to mind Philip Larkin's "Church Going" and J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country, both of which have a similar elegiac feeling.

Robin Tanner, "Harvest Festival" (1930)

The following poem by Derek Mahon goes well, I think, with Raine's poem.

                 Nostalgias

The chair squeaks in a high wind,
Rain falls from its branches;
The kettle yearns for the mountain,
The soap for the sea.
In a tiny stone church
On a desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing 'Abide With Me'.

Derek Mahon, Selected Poems  (Viking/The Gallery Press 1991).

Nowadays, the word "nostalgia" has acquired a vaguely pejorative sense. As has the word "sentimental," with which it is often paired.  At least that's my perception.  But perhaps I'm being defensive, since I do not find anything inherently wrong with nostalgia or sentimentality, as long as we realize that the past was not "better" in all respects than the world in which we presently live.  I'm pleased that we now have electricity and plumbing. Beyond that . . .

Of course, there are those who choose to believe that we have "advanced" beyond those lost times and that human history is an unbroken narrative of "progress," as measured in scientific and political terms.  How quaint and beguiling a notion.

"Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience.  Today they judge that aeroplanes and the radio etc. are means for the closer contact of peoples and the spread of culture."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Paragraph 132 (translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe) (Basil Blackwell 1969).

Samuel Palmer, "A Hilly Scene" (c. 1826)

            New World

New world, I see you dazzle,
Like the sun on a door-knocker
In a straight street inhabited
By people I do not know.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (Carcanet 1980).

Robin Tanner, "Christmas" (1929)

"Earth Never Grieves"

Today was -- I'm afraid there is no other way to put it -- A Glorious Autumn Day.  Not a cloud in the sky.  The barest wisp of a wind.  The trees are half-empty, save for the Japanese maples, which are at their bright red brilliant peak.  On my afternoon walk, the only sounds were the cluck and chirp of birds in the distance and the rustle and crackle of leaves underfoot.

All seemed still and unchangeable.  I was doing my best to keep my mind empty, in deference to the World.  But some lines by Wallace Stevens appeared:  "He wanted to feel the same way over and over. . . . He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest/In a permanent realization." But, of course, that is not in the cards.  There shall be no walking beside the river, "under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast."  For which we should be thankful.

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

Upon returning, the following poem by Thomas Hardy came to mind.  It has appeared here before, but, as I am wont to say of poems that I like:  it bears revisiting.

  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 (1909).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Two Dead Leaves" (1963)

On a first reading, the following poem by C. H. Sisson is not as easily accessible as Hardy's poem.  However, it is worth the effort to puzzle it out.

                                Leaves

Leaves are plentiful on the ground, under the feet,
There cannot be too many, they lie below;
They rot, they blow about before they are rotted.
Were they ever affixed to trees?  I do not know.

The great connection is from the leaf to the root,
From branch, from tendril, to the low place
Below the burial ground, below the hope of the foot,
The hand stretched out, or the hidden face.

On all occasions, or most, remember this:
Then turn on yourself like a small whirlwind of leaves.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (Carcanet 1980).

The two poems say roughly the same thing, don't they?  The final two lines are particularly lovely.

Eliot Hodgkin, "Dead Leaves and Birds' Eggs" (1963)

                         Under Trees

Yellow tunnels under the trees, long avenues
Long as the whole of time:
A single aimless man
Carries a black garden broom.
He is too far to hear him
Wading through the leaves, down autumn
Tunnels, under yellow leaves, long avenues.

Geoffrey Grigson, Collected Poems: 1924-1962 (1963).

Eliot Hodgkin, "Leaves" (1941-1942)

"I Am Your Old Intentions She Said And All Your Old Intentions Are Over"

W. B. Yeats's "Ephemera," which I posted last week, goes quite well with the following poem by Thomas Hardy.  Although the poem was first published in 1899 (in Hardy's first collection of verse), it was written much earlier in Hardy's life.  He appended "1867" to it when it was published. Thus, the poem either was based upon an incident that occurred in 1867 or was written in that year, likely the latter.  Richard Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (1954), page 98; Dennis Taylor, "The Chronology of Hardy's Poetry," Victorian Poetry, Volume 37, Number 1 (Spring 1999), pages 1-58.

In 1867, Hardy was 27 years old.  Yeats was 19 when he wrote "Ephemera." It is not surprising that the two young romantics might alight upon a similar theme and similar images.  But in their own idiosyncratic fashions, of course.

John Nash, "Autumn, Berkshire" (1951)

                    Neutral Tones

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
          -- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
          On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
          Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . .

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
          And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1899).

"Neutral Tones," like "Ephemera," is a poem that I discovered in my twenties.  I recall being particularly taken with:  "The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/Alive enough to have strength to die."  The entire poem is evocative of that time of life, isn't it?

John Nash

"The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble" (1922)

The following poem provides a nice complement to both "Neutral Tones" and "Ephemera."  Serendipitously, next Monday will be "Monday the 28th of October."

               Eastville Park

I sat on a bench in Eastville Park
It was Monday the 28th of October
I am your old intentions she said
And all your old intentions are over.

She stood beside me, I did not see her
Her shadow fell on Eastville Park
Not precise or shapely but spreading outwards
On the tatty grass of Eastville Park.

A swan might buckle its yellow beak
With the black of its eye and the black of its mouth
In a shepherd's crook, or the elms impend
Nothing of this could be said aloud.

I did not then sit on a bench
I was a shadow under a tree
I was a leaf the wind carried
Around the edge of the football game.

No need for any return for I find
Myself where I left myself -- in the lurch
There are no trams but I remember them
Wherever I went I came here first.

C. H. Sisson, Anchises (Carcanet 1976).  Eastville Park is in Bristol, where Sisson was born and raised.

Sisson's use of "impend" in "the elms impend" (line 11) is lovely:  he combines the word's usual emotional sense (e.g., "impending doom") with its less commonly used physical sense: "to hang over" or "to overhang."

John Nash, "The Garden" (1951)

Castles And "The Fond Dream"

The castles that we construct in our minds our quite amazing, aren't they? Bright and inviting realms and dark and foreboding realms.  Either way, the building and the dismantling and the re-building never end.  I am reminded of a poem by C. H. Sisson.

       The Mind of Man

The mind of man is nothing but
A repertoire of what is not,
Never was, and can never be:
So, at least, it is with me.

C. H. Sisson, Antidotes (1991).

             Harold Speed, "The Alcantara, Toledo, By Moonlight" (1894)

What is one to do about this?  Perhaps nothing needs to be done.  I do not pretend to possess any wisdom on the matter.  I do know that the beguiling but false worlds of the media and advertising and entertainment and politics and social science try their best to convince us to be dissatisfied with ourselves, and to accede to their artificial visions of utopia.  But they all have an agenda, don't they?  And they know absolutely nothing about each of us as individual souls.  All I can come up with is this:  if we cannot help but construct castles, we should at least take care to construct our own.

       The Fond Dream

Here's the dream I love.
     Stay, old Sleep, allow me this
     Yet one moment, godlike bliss.
Here's the dream I love.

Tell us then that dream?
     O, it's nothing, nothing at all.
     But I was walking young and small
In a scene like a happy dream.

What especial scene?
     None especial:  pure blue sky,
     Cherry orchards a brook runs by,
And an old church crowns the scene.

Only that?  If so,
     All would be well; but, dreams have changed.
     Dreamers are banished, joys estranged.
I wake; it is not so.

Edmund Blunden, Poems of Many Years (1957).

                         Harold Birchall, "Reflections, Etruria Vale" (1949)

"Mad Agility In Compound Deceit"

In the country in which I live, we are in the midst of a presidential election campaign.  The months between now and the first Tuesday in November lie before us like a yawning abyss.  One thing can be stated with absolute certainty and without fear of contradiction:  the media will put on a display of "mad agility in compound deceit."  (One of my favorite phrases from Saul Bellow.  (It is from Mr. Sammler's Planet.)  Ten syllables in what may be iambic pentameter.  It sounds like something by Shakespeare or Donne. Bellow could have been a poet.)
 
While at all times protesting their "neutrality."  But of course.

                                       George Price Boyce (1826-1897)
          "Newcastle from the Rabbit Banks, Gateshead-on-Tyne" (1864)

                  The Trade

The language fades.  The noise is more
Than ever it has been before,
But all the words grow pale and thin
For lack of sense has done them in.

What wonder, when it is for pay
Millions are spoken every day?
It is the number, not the sense
That brings the speakers pounds and pence.

The words are stretched across the air
Vast distances from here to there,
Or there to here:  it does not matter
So long as there is media chatter.

Turn up the sound and let there be
No talking between you and me:
What passes now for human speech
Must come from somewhere out of reach.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (1994).

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

April: "Exactly"

April feels like the beginning of a monumental undertaking.  All of this will culminate sometime in the middle of August, when the yellow light goes aslant and the daytime shadows sharpen.  But enough of that for now. There will be plenty of time to mull that over.  In the meantime, April is most certainly not "the cruellest month."

                             Adrian Paul Allinson, "The Cornish April"

                                 April 1885

Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh;
The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:
All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:
The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower
At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth:
On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower
In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.

Robert Bridges, The Shorter Poems (1891).

         Eileen Aldridge, "The Downs near Brighton, East Sussex" (1962)

                   April

Exactly:  where the winter was
The spring has come:  I see her now
In the fields, and as she goes
The flowers spring, nobody knows how.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (1994).

                  James McIntosh Patrick, "Springtime in Eskdale" (1935)

"Is The Noise I Hear From An Important Quarter?"

The quiet, self-contained life of a hedgehog seems romantically preferable to the noisy world in which we abide.  As C. H. Sisson notes in the poem that appeared in my previous post:  "The noise is more/Than ever it has been before."  A great deal of this noise comes in the form of "news" (an extremely loose term in this day and age).  The following poem by Sisson may serve as a further comment on the theme of "noise."

                            News

They live in the excitement of the news.
Who is what?  What is that?  And is the noise
I hear from an important quarter?  When
Is what to happen?  Who is what, finally?

Finally nobody is anything.
That is the end of it, my busy friend
And just as what you hear has no beginning
It has, assuredly, no certain end.

The end that comes is not the end of what,
The end of who perhaps, and perhaps not;
The rattle and the flashing lights are over,
Death is overt, but all the rest lies hidden.

Think of what you will, nothing will come of that,
What you intend is of all things the least;
As you spin on the lathe of circumstance
You are shaped, it is all the shape you have.

C. H. Sisson, Collected Poems (Carcanet 1998).

                    Kenneth Rowntree, "New Church, Llangelynnin" (1941)

Perhaps one of the secrets of freeing oneself from the news -- of becoming hedgehog-like -- is to come to the realization that there is no "important quarter" from which one can expect to hear news.  There are no important quarters out there.  All perspective has vanished, along with all credibility and decency.  Mary Coleridge has the right idea.

               No Newspapers

Where, to me, is the loss
    Of the scenes they saw -- of the sounds they heard;
A butterfly flits across,
    Or a bird;
The moss is growing on the wall,
    I heard the leaf of the poppy fall.

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

Mary Coleridge wrote "No Newspapers" in 1900, and thus had not yet encountered radio, television, and what not.  Hence, perhaps we may silently consider "newspapers" to include a host of evils unknown to her.

                  Kenneth Rowntree, "Black Chapel, North End" (c. 1940)

"The Noise Is More Than Ever It Has Been Before"

Periodically, I vow to tune out the babbling media world in which we live. (Hypocritically disregarding the fact that, as I type these words, I am, after a fashion (in a tiny way), participating in that world.)  And, periodically, my vow is soon broken.  Which does not stop me from (hypocritically) decrying this state of affairs.

                  The Trade

The language fades.  The noise is more
Than ever it has been before,
But all the words grow pale and thin
For lack of sense has done them in.

What wonder, when it is for pay
Millions are spoken every day?
It is the number, not the sense
That brings the speakers pounds and pence.

The words are stretched across the air
Vast distances from here to there,
Or there to here:  it does not matter
So long as there is media chatter.

Turn up the sound and let there be
No talking between you and me:
What passes now for human speech
Must come from somewhere out of reach.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (1994).

                          Louisa Puller, "Haymill, Downton Gorge" (1941)

Near the end of the 19th century, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote poetry that was bewildering and ahead of its time.  The poems are untitled.  It feels as though one has stumbled into the middle of a conversation or a story. What one hears may be portentous, or merely trivial.  But the poetry is (for me, at least) oddly alluring (in small doses).  Much of it seems prescient. Or, put another way, timeless.

Yes, I have a thousand tongues,
And nine and ninety-nine lie.
Though I strive to use the one,
It will make no melody at my will,
But is dead in my mouth.

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895).

                     Louisa Puller, "The Railway Station at Tetbury" (1942)

Life Explained, Part Twenty-Five: "The Hedgehog"

A sweet-smelling garden at night.  Beneath the stars, a hedgehog makes its rounds.  Enough in themselves to provide a perfectly suitable Explanation of Life.

                  The Hedgehog

The garden is mysterious at night
And scented! and scented! in the night of stars.
The hedgehog snuffles somewhere among leaves,
Just by the arch-way.  So it is with time
-- Mute night and then a voice that says nothing,
Busying itself, complaining and insisting:
When this has end, silence will come again.

C. H. Sisson, Collected Poems (Carcanet 1998).

                              Robin Tanner, "Wren and Primroses" (1935)

To think of Time as a hedgehog making its patient, imperturbable way through a garden, beneath a starry sky, is a fine image indeed, and is quite comforting.

"Those of us who have allowed our minds to be besotted by the pressure of personal affairs, who perhaps are wasting our time in amassing wealth that we can never hope to enjoy, might well have our folly corrected by an accidental glimpse of this self-contained individualist in his shirt of thorns moving out of the cavernous shadows of some cool odorous flower-bed.

Through the trembling leaves of the garden trees the summer stars shine bright on the outlandish back of the small quadruped, impressing the conscious intelligence with a clear comprehension of the wealth of earth-poetry revealed by the mere existence of so fabulous an urchin directing its activities by the light of the Milky Way."

Llewelyn Powys, "Hedgehogs."

                                    Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)

"Charred Wood": Two Variations On A Theme

The following poems by C. H. Sisson and Philippe Jaccottet share the same closing image.  They perhaps have other things in common as well:  time and aging and memory, for instance.  Both poems are somewhat elusive (for me, at least).  However, they certainly sound lovely (as I often say when confronted with such difficulties).

                        Differently

If I had done differently I should have done well;
Differently is better, it could not have been worse.
I cannot stand, looking, as into a fire,
Into the past.  There is only the charred wood.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (1980).

           Eric Hubbard (1892-1957), "The Cuckmere Valley, East Sussex"

                        Ignorance

The older I grow the more ignorant I become,
the longer I live the less I possess or control.
All I have is a little space, snow-dark
or glittering, never inhabited.
Where is the giver, the guide, the guardian?
I sit in my room and am silent; silence
arrives like a servant to tidy things up
while I wait for the lies to disperse.
And what remains to this dying man
that so well prevents him from dying?
What does he find to say to the four walls?
I hear him talking still, and his words
come in with the dawn, imperfectly understood:

'Love, like fire, can only reveal its brightness
on the failure and the beauty of burnt wood.'

Derek Mahon (translator), Words in the Air: A Selection of Poems by Philippe Jaccottet (The Gallery Press 1998).

           George Mackley (1900-1983), "Brackie's Burn, Northumberland"

"Dwell In Some Decent Corner Of Your Being"

Pascal's best-known observation on the human condition is perhaps this: "I have often said, that all the Misfortune of Men proceeds from their not knowing how to keep themselves quiet in their Chamber."  The translation is by Joseph Walker, who published the first English translation of Pascal's Pensees in 1688.  In an edition published in 1908, W. F. Trotter translated the same passage as follows:  "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."

As one's youthful infatuation with utopian thought-projects dissipates (sooner rather than later for some; never for others -- e.g., politicians and other busybodies), one begins to see the wisdom of Pascal's view of things. Of course, staying in one's chamber is easier said than done, especially in our youth, when our physical and mental capacities seem limitless.  But, as we enter our middle and late years, it begins to make more sense:  one has seen enough to know that the World would be a much better place if some people just stayed put in their room.

                                                       Charles Ginner
                                       "Spring Day at Boscastle" (1943)

I offer the following poems by James Reeves and C. H. Sisson as possible corollaries to Pascal's thought.  I think of them from time-to-time, especially when the World seems madder than is usually the case.

                         Precept

Dwell in some decent corner of your being,
Where plates are orderly set and talk is quiet,
Not in its devious crooked corridors
Nor in its halls of riot.

James Reeves, The Questioning Tiger (1964).

                                       Charles Ginner, "The Greenhouse"

               The Commonplace

A commonplace is good for nothing now,
Yet that is how the world goes, all the same:
Nothing is what you had when you set out,
And nothing you will have when you go home.

C. H. Sisson, Exactions (1980).

                               Charles Ginner, "The Winged Faun" (1926)

"But I Learnt How The Wind Would Sound After These Things Should Be"

As I have noted before, I (like many others, I suspect) was introduced to Edward Thomas by coming across "Adlestrop" in an anthology.  Although "Adlestrop" brought me to Thomas, the following poem was the one that took my breath away -- and I immediately realized that (for me, at least) Edward Thomas would never be just another poet.  I still feel that way after about three decades.         

               The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain:  old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.

Thomas wrote the poem in March of 1915.  The house referred to was located at Wick Green near Steep in Hampshire.  Thomas's family began living there in December of 1909.  The house was located on a hill.  Hence the wind.

How I feel about "The New House" in particular, and Thomas's poetry in general, is reflected in these words from C. H. Sisson about Thomas:

He is, without doubt, one of the most profound poets of the century.  What did he say?  He said what is in the poems, and there is no message beyond them.  But he belonged to the underside of the world, from which renewal must come, and he speaks with conviction of matters which may be touched and felt.

C. H. Sisson, English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (1971), page 79.

                                Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)

On The Eve Of An Election

Please note:  this is not a political blog and this is not a political post.  Rather, it is a post about one's nation, and about the political class (not the people) of one's nation.  The following poem is by C. H. Sisson, an Englishman who was described, in the Telegraph's 2003 obituary, as a "doughty defender of traditional Anglicanism" who held "unfashionable high Tory views."  (As I have said before:  A man after my own heart, even though I am not an Englishman, an Anglican, or a Tory.)

               Thinking of Politics

Land of my fathers, you escape me now
And yet I will in no wise let you go:
Let none imagine that I do not know
How little sight of you the times allow.
Yet you are there, and live, no matter how
The troubles which surround you seem to grow:
The steps of ancestors are always slow,
But always there behind the current row,
And always and already on the way:
They will be heard on the appropriate day.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (1994).

                       A future presidential candidate at the age of 42.
                            Headquarters of the Army of the Potomac.
                                   Cold Harbor, Virginia.  June, 1864.

C. H. Sisson: Final Poems

C. H. Sisson's final poems make for harrowing reading.  Not that this is surprising:  Sisson was never one to mince words, and one would expect him to report things exactly as he saw -- and felt -- them.  The following poems (save for "It is") appear in the last section ("Poems since What and Who") of his Collected Poems.  (What and Who was published in 1994, when Sisson turned 80.) 

   The Best Thing to Say

The best thing to say is nothing
And that I do not say,
But I will say it, when I lie
In silence all the day.

Collected Poems (Carcanet Press 1998), page 492.  "The Best Thing to Say" is anticipated by this earlier poem:

              It is

It is extraordinary how old age
Creeps on one
First it is not believed, even noticed
Then one notices symptoms but says nothing:
At the last nothing is what one says.

Anchises (1976), in Collected Poems, page 200.

        Five Lines

The splashed light on the rain-wet stones
Is in the eye, not in the sun:
Eyes dimmed, the light is gone,
And all the wonder of the world
Cannot withstand the touch of age.

Collected Poems, page 485.

        Olim

It is no longer I who speak:
There was a man who spoke, but he is dead.

Collected Poems, page 488.

        Finale

Nothing means anything now:
I am alone
-- My mind a vacant space,
My heart of stone.

A tuneless thing I am,
A broken lyre.
I cannot even boast
A flameless fire.

There is the work I did
-- Paper and ink --
I have no part in it:
There is no link

Between the man who wrote
-- And more, was once alive,
And this relic for whom
The end does not arrive.

Although the life has gone
There is no corpse to show:
When others find it, I
Alone shall never know.

Collected Poems, page 496.

                            C. H. Sisson (by Patrick Swift, c. 1960)