In Memory Of Crethis

The angled light of early spring and early autumn is, I think, the loveliest light of the year.  It calls things to your attention, things that detain you, delightfully.

After a rain-filled night, today was bright and blustery.  It was a wide-open-sky day, a day that encouraged expansiveness.  But, as I walked, my attention was drawn to the various mosses lining the edges of the paths or filling the cracks in the sidewalks.  In the slanting yellow afternoon light they glowed in a range from bright lime green to deep forest green.

Some lines from Louis Simpson's poem "The Foggy Lane" come to mind: "Walking in the foggy lane/I try to keep my attention fixed/on the uneven, muddy surface."  The loud, importunate parts of the World -- the media, politics, economics, et cetera -- do their best to lure us into abstractions and categories and classifications.  But in our heart of hearts we know it is the particulars that matter.

John Aldridge, "Artichokes and Cathay Quinces" (1967)

Their Crethis, with her prattle and her play,
The girls of Samos often miss to-day:
Their loved workmate, with flow of merry speech,
Here sleeps the sleep that comes to all and each.

Callimachus (c. 310 B.C. - c. 240 B. C.) (translated by A. H. Bullen), in A. H. Bullen, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes (1921).

Henry Lamb, "Tea Things" (1932)

Crethis, young prattler, full of graceful play,
Vainly the maids of Samos seek all day;
Cheerfullest workmate; ever talking; -- she
Sleeps here, -- that sleep, from which none born can flee.

Callimachus (translated by "F. H."), in The Classical Journal, Volume XXXIII (March and June, 1826), page 9.

Charles Mahoney, "Auriculas in Pots" (1956)

The Samian virgins us'd often to play
With Crethis the witty, the pleasant and gay,
But now, when they seek her, she cannot be found,
Their sportive companion sleeps here under ground,
Discharging the debt which to nature we owe;
For all must descend to the regions below.

Callimachus (translated by H. W. Tytler), in H. W. Tytler, The Works of Callimachus, Translated into English Verse (1793).

Thomas Henslow Barnard, "Still Life"

The Samian maidens oft regret their friend,
     Sweet Crethis, full of play and cheer,
     Whose gossip lightened toil.  But here
She sleeps the sleep they all will sleep at end.

Callimachus (translated by Edward Cook), in Edward Cook, "The Charm of The Greek Anthology," More Literary Recreations (1919).

Charles Ginner, "Yellow Chrysanthemums" (1929)

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Two: "Humanly Alive"

In a recent post, I used C. P. Cavafy's poem "Ionic" to raise the question whether we live in a disenchanted world.  I am not suggesting that, like Yeats, we go searching for fairies in the gloaming.  But it is worthwhile to consider how much the deification of Progress and Science has cost us in terms of human truth.

"What a marvelous time it was when everything was alive, according to human imagination, and humanly alive, in other words inhabited or formed by beings like ourselves; when it was taken as certain that in the deserted woods lived the beautiful Hamadryads and fauns and woodland deities and Pan, etc., and, on entering and seeing everything as solitude, you still believed that everything was inhabited and that Naiads lived in the springs, etc., and embracing a tree you felt it almost palpitating between your hands and believed it was a man or a woman like Cyparissus, etc., and the same with flowers, etc., just as children do."

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013), page 77.

Yes, I realize there is no turning back.  And I also realize that the soft golden light of Classical Greece is itself a myth.  For instance, we know from Herodotus that, when the Persian heralds sent by Darius asked the Athenians and the Spartans for a tribute of earth and water (signifying obeisance), the Athenians threw the herald into a barathrum ("pit of punishment") and the Spartans threw theirs into a well.  The heralds were told (a paraphrase):  "There's plenty of earth and water down there." Herodotus, The Histories, Book VII, Chapter 133.  Thus, I harbor no illusions.  (Well, perhaps a few.)  But we have lost something.

Charles Mahoney (1903-1968)

"Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden" (c. 1936)

                    Echoes of Hellas

O choir of Tempe mute these many years,
O fountain lutes of lyric Hippocrene,
On whose polluted brink no Muse is seen.
No more, between the gleaming vales, one hears

Apollo's footfall or the sobbing tears
Of Daphne budding finger-tips of green.
No nymphs are bathing with their huntress Queen
In the warm shallows of the mountain meres,

Great Pan is dead:  he perished long ago:
His reedy pipes these uplands never heard.
What trembling sounds from yonder coppice come?

Some ravished queen, who tells the dale her woe?
Nay, since the maids Pierian here are dumb,
The nightingale is nothing but a bird.

John Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley), Collected Poems (1903).

A note:  I have previously posted John Leicester Warren's poem "The Knight in the Wood," which I highly recommend.

Charles Mahoney, "The Artist's Hand"

               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 (Penguin/The Gallery Press 1991).

Charles Mahoney, "The Garden" (1950)

Christmas, Part Six: "The Hearth"

R. S. Thomas was never one to mince words.  Thus, not surprisingly, his Christmas poems (several of which I have posted here previously) have a touch of Thomas's fierceness to them.  But they also have an undercurrent of peace and serenity.  (Again, not surprisingly.  Thomas was not as much of a curmudgeon as he is sometimes made out to be.  Yes, he often presents a fairly brusque and forbidding surface, but this often serves as a mask, I think.)

The following poem is an instance of what I am trying to describe:  a bit of peace, a bit of serenity, even a whisper of love -- and a dose of fierceness for good measure.  There is nobody quite like R. S. Thomas.

                                     Stanley Spencer, "Fire Alight" (1936)

            The Hearth

In front of the fire
With you, the folk song
Of the wind in the chimney and the sparks'
Embroidery of the soot -- eternity
Is here in this small room,
In intervals that our love
Widens; and outside
Us is time and the victims
Of time, travellers
To a new Bethlehem, statesmen
And scientists with their hands full
Of the gifts that destroy.

R. S. Thomas, H'm (1972).

                                                  Charles Mahoney
                  "Christmas Tree Viewed Through Red Curtains" (c. 1952)

"The Unwept Waste"

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

       The Unwept Waste

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

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

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

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

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

                                   Charles Mahoney, "The Plant Table"

Farewell To Autumn (For This Year): Robert Frost And Saigyo

It is time to call a halt to further musings on the meaning of autumn, what with the voices of Bing Crosby and Perry Como in the air and a Christmas tree in the living room.  Thus, I shall give the last word(s) on autumn to Robert Frost and Saigyo (1118-1190).

            In Hardwood Groves

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

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.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.

Robert Frost, A Boy's Will (1913).

                           Charles Mahoney, "Allegory of Autumn" (1932)

Every single thing
Changes and is changing
Always in this world.
Yet with the same light
The moon goes on shining.

Saigyo (translated by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite), The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964).

                                 Anthony Day, "Autumn Fenland" (1961)

"The Knight In The Wood"

The following poem is a little-known poem that was written by a little-known poet.  However, I think that it says something important about art (in the broad sense of any creative activity, including poetry).  I hope that I do not sound too high-falutin', but I am not interested in art that cannot tell us something about what it means to be a human being, and, perhaps, how to get through an ordinary day in a sensitive, dignified manner.  (In other words, no dead sheep suspended in formaldehyde-filled glass tanks for me, thank you.)  But enough.  The poem says it much better than I can.

               The Knight in the Wood

The thing itself was rough and crudely done,
Cut in coarse stone, spitefully placed aside
As merest lumber, where the light was worst
On a back staircase.  Overlooked it lay
In a great Roman palace crammed with art.
It had no number in the list of gems,
Weeded away long since, pushed out and banished,
Before insipid Guidos over-sweet,
And Dolce's rose sensationalities,
And curly chirping angels spruce as birds.
And yet the motive of this thing ill-hewn
And hardly seen did touch me.  O, indeed,
The skill-less hand that carved it had belonged
To a most yearning and bewildered heart,
There was such desolation in its work;
And through its utter failure the thing spoke
With more of human message, heart to heart,
Than all these faultless, smirking, skin-deep saints;
In artificial troubles picturesque,
And martyred sweetly, not one curl awry --
Listen; a clumsy knight who rode alone
Upon a stumbling jade in a great wood
Belated.  The poor beast with head low-bowed
Snuffing the treacherous ground.  The rider leant
Forward to sound the marish with his lance.
You saw the place was deadly; that doomed pair,
The wretched rider and the hide-bound steed
Feared to advance, feared to return -- That's all!

John Leicester Warren, Rehearsals: A Book of Verses (1870).  (A note on line 25:  a "marish" is a marsh. According to the OED, the word is "now poetic, archaic, and regional.")  An aside:  the "Listen" at the beginning of line 21 is, I think, a very fine (and affecting) touch.

                       Charles Mahoney (1903-1968), "The Artist's Hand"

Edward Thomas On Thomas Hardy: "Ninety-Nine Reasons For Not Living"

As I have noted before, Edward Thomas knew English poetry backwards and forwards.  Not surprisingly, therefore, his comments on particular poets are very perceptive.  When it comes to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Thomas (as is the case with anyone who reads the poems) is bound to remark upon Hardy's pessimism.  Who wouldn't?  Consider, for instance, "Hap," the fourth poem in Hardy's first collection.  With its references to "Crass Casualty," "dicing Time," and "purblind Doomsters," the poem establishes a theme that occurs again and again in Hardy's poetry.

In his review of Hardy's 1909 collection Time's Laughingstocks and Other Poems, Thomas memorably acknowledges the conventional wisdom about Hardy's pessimism:  "The book contains ninety-nine reasons for not living."  (Despite his melancholy, Thomas did have a sly and dry sense of humor.  One can see why he and Robert Frost got along so well together.)  But Thomas wisely recognizes that there is much more to Hardy:

"The book contains ninety-nine reasons for not living.  Yet it is not a book of despair.  It is a book of sincerity . . . Mr. Hardy looks at things as they are, and what is still more notable he does not adopt the genial consolation that they might be worse, that in spite of them many are happy, and that the unhappy live on and will not die.  His worst tragedies are due as much to transient and alterable custom as to the nature of things.  He sees this, and he makes us see it.  The moan of his verse rouses an echo that is as brave as a trumpet."

Edward Thomas, review of Time's Laughingstocks and Other Poems, in The Daily Chronicle (December 7 1909), reprinted in Edna Longley (editor), A Language Not To Be Betrayed: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas (1981).

Hardy's poem "Going and Staying" is, I think, a good illustration of the point that Thomas makes.  It first appeared in the inaugural issue of The London Mercury (edited by J. C. Squire, the bane of T. S. Eliot and other "Modernists") in November of 1919 as follows:

                    Going and Staying

The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
          But they were going.

Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
          But they were staying.

One would think that, after making these jolly observations, Hardy had said enough.  But he could not leave well enough alone.  Hence, when the poem was published in book form in 1922, Hardy (a clever lad at the age of 82) added a third stanza:

Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
          Alike dissolving.

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922).  Now, whether this third stanza is calculated to make us feel better or worse, I cannot say.  I also cannot say whether it makes this particular reader feel better or worse.  But one thing is certain:  it is classic Hardy.

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

Hospital Poems, Part 4: "And The Saved Man Goes Home"

Here is a hospital poem by James Reeves, one of my neglected poets.  Whether this poem is light or dark or deep or shallow I have never been able to decide.  (Which no doubt means that I am very slow on the uptake.)

                    Discharged From Hospital

He stands upon the steps and fronts the morning.
The porter has called a taxi, and behind him
The infirmary doors have swung and come to rest.
Physician, surgeon, and anaesthetist
Have exercised their skill and he is cured.
The rabelaisian sister with the bedpan,
The vigorous masseuse, the sensual nurse
Who washes him modestly beneath a blanket,
The dawn chorus of cleaners, the almoner,
The visiting clergyman -- all proceed without him.
He is alone beyond all need of them,
And the saved man goes home, to die of health.

James Reeves, The Questioning Tiger (1964).

                 Charles Mahoney (1903-1968), "Still Life With Celery"