Gossamer

The approach of winter has got me to thinking about the small things I will miss until spring returns.  The sudden whirr-vibration of a hummingbird -- often unseen, only heard and felt.  The kingdoms of sand painstakingly constructed by ants along the seams in the sidewalks.  Butterflies "flying crooked" (as Robert Graves puts it).  The list is not exhaustive.

And -- ah, yes -- the criss-crossing threads left by spiders as they traverse the gardens and the meadows.

            Early Morning

The path

The spider makes through the air,

Invisible,

Until the light touches it.

The path

The light takes through the air,

Invisible,

Until it finds the spider's web.

Janet Lewis, in R. L. Barth (editor), The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis (Swallow Press 2000).

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "Near Leatherhead" (c. 1939)

The following poem is often characterized as one of Robert Frost's "dark" poems.  But this whole "dark Frost" versus "light Frost" dichotomy has always puzzled me.  There is darkness and lightness throughout his poetry, beginning with the first poem in his first volume.  And often in the same poem.  Here, then, is a meditation upon a spider going about its business. Dark?  Light?  Both?  Neither?  

                            Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall? --

If design govern in a thing so small.

Robert Frost, A Further Range (1936).

All that build-up about a calculating, perhaps malevolent, perhaps heartless Universe, and then the sleight-of-hand in the final line.  But it is not as though Frost has not warned us:

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

Robert Frost, In the Clearing (1962).

Christopher Nevinson, "The Weir, Charenton"

I have never been able to muster a great deal of enthusiasm for the poetry of Walt Whitman.  I appreciate his cosmos-wide, visionary energy.  But he wears me out.  It is all at too high a pitch.  He reminds me of one of those insistent, often over-educated, self-styled prophets one occasionally encounters in public spaces.  But there are times when he lowers the register a bit.

                    A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect             them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1881).

Whitman being who he is, "O my soul" necessarily makes an appearance. But the conceit here is a lovely one.  And the particulars are lovely as well: "filament, filament, filament" and "the ductile anchor," for instance.

Christopher Nevinson, "A Winter Landscape" (1926)

As long-time (and much-appreciated!) readers may recall, I have often commented upon the knack of Chinese and Japanese poets for getting to the heart of the matter in as few words as possible, with no loss of depth or intimation.  To wit:

Drops of dew

strung on filaments

of spider web --

such are the trappings

that deck out this world.

Saigyo (1118-1190) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia University Press 1991).

Christopher Nevinson, "View of the Sussex Weald" (c. 1927)

Mangels

We have previously considered the poetic possibilities of the humble swede. It is now time to turn our attention to the mangel (also known as the mangel-wurzel and the mangold).  Those who are knowledgeable about such things (I am not a member of that group) are quick to point out that a mangel is a variety of beet, whereas a swede is a variety of turnip.  Thus, in my researches into this matter, I discovered an ancient English proverbial phrase:  "He doesn't know a swede from a mangel-wurzel!"

In any event, the mangel is a noble vegetable, and it has a noble poetic history.

Stanley Spencer, "Distant View of Maidenhead, Berkshire" (1939)

The following poem by Ivor Gurney begins with Edward Thomas, turns to mangels, and then heads off on one of Gurney's wonderful excursions.

                              The Mangel-bury

It was after War, Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras --
I was walking by Gloucester musing on such things
As fill his verse with goodness; it was February; the long house
Straw-thatched of the mangels stretched two wide wings;
And looked as part of the earth heaped up by dead soldiers
In the most fitting place -- along the hedges yet-bare-lines.
West spring breathed there early, that none foreign divines.
Across the flat country the rattling of the cart sounded;
Heavy of wood, jingling of iron; as he neared me, I waited
For the chance perhaps of heaving at those great rounded
Ruddy or orange things -- and right to be rolled and hefted
By a body like mine, soldier-still, and clean from water.
Silent he assented; till the cart was drifted
High with those creatures, so right in size and matter,
We threw them with our bodies swinging; blood in my ears singing:
His was the thick-set sort of farmer, but well-built --
Perhaps long before, his blood's name ruled all:
Watched all things for his own.  If my luck had so willed
Many questions of lordship I had heard him tell -- old
Names, rumours.  But my pain to more moving called
And him to some barn business far in the fifteen acre field.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

Of course, one wonders whether Gurney had Thomas's "Swedes" in mind, both when he was tossing mangels into the farm-cart and later when he wrote the poem.  I find the phrase "after War" (not "after the War," as one might expect) intriguing:  does Gurney have in mind "War" as a perennial human condition, rather than "the War" as a unique historical event?  But I may be reading too much into it.

Christopher Nevinson, "A Winter Landscape" (1926)

In 1932, Thomas's widow Helen visited Gurney in the asylum in which he was confined.  Her description of her initial meeting with Gurney is heart-breaking:

"We were walking along a bare corridor when we were met by a tall gaunt dishevelled man clad in pyjamas and dressing gown, to whom Miss [Marion] Scott introduced me.  He gazed with an intense stare into my face and took me silently by the hand.  Then I gave him the flowers, which he took with the same deeply moving intensity and silence.  He then said, 'You are Helen, Edward's wife and Edward is dead.'  And I said, 'Yes, let us talk of him.'

So we went into a little cell-like bedroom where the only furniture was a bed and a chair.  The window was high and barred and the walls bare and drab. He put the flowers on the bed for there was no vessel to put them in; there was nothing in the room that could in any way be used to do damage with -- no pottery or jars or pictures whose broken edge could be used as a weapon. . . . We spoke of country that he knew and which Edward knew too and he evidently identified Edward with the English countryside, especially that of Gloucestershire."

Helen Thomas, "Ivor Gurney," in Time and Again: Memoirs and Letters (edited by Myfanwy Thomas (Carcanet 1978).  The final stanza of "Adlestrop" comes immediately to mind:

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

She then recounts her second visit to Gurney:

"The next time I went with Miss Scott I took with me Edward's own well-used ordnance maps of Gloucestershire where he had often walked. This proved to have been a sort of inspiration, for Ivor Gurney at once spread them out on his bed and he and I spent the whole time I was there tracing with our fingers the lanes and byways and villages of which Ivor Gurney knew every step and over which Edward had also walked.  He spent that hour in revisiting his home, in spotting a village or a track, a hill or a wood and seeing it all in his mind's eye, with flowers and trees, stiles and hedges, a mental vision sharper and more actual for his heightened intensity.  He trod, in a way we who were sane could not emulate, the lanes and fields he knew and loved so well, his guide being his finger tracing the way on the map.  It was most deeply moving, and I knew that I had hit on an idea that gave him more pleasure than anything else I could have thought of.  For he had Edward as companion in this strange perambulation and he was utterly happy, without being over-excited."

Ibid.

Kenneth Roberts, "Benvie, Gray and Gordie" (1988)

Gurney's encounter with the farmer is reminiscent of Edward Thomas's encounter with a farmer plowing a field in the untitled poem which begins "As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn."  The poem takes place during the War, before Thomas was sent to France.  Here is part of the poem:

                  . . . Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
                      The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said.  'When will they take it away?'
'When the war's over.' . . .

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

Christopher Nevinson, "Near Leatherhead" (c. 1939)

Blackthorn, Revisited

Charles Tomlinson is a close observer of the natural world, and his descriptions of that world are both precise and illuminating.  The title of one of his earliest collections is Seeing Is Believing, and I think that that phrase characterizes quite well his work as a whole.  He is also an artist. Thus, it is not surprising that his poetry has a strong pictorial feel to it.  In the following two poems, he considers the blackthorn.

                                 Christopher Nevinson, "Near Leatherhead"

                   Blackthorn Winter

Pallor of blossom between still-gaunt trees:
The blackthorn's white acetylene is clearing
Spaces for summer and the vast arrival,
Swimming whose floodtide we shall still recall
This first and tentative, this weightless stirring
Of whiteness above the thicket of winter's vestiges.

Charles Tomlinson, The Vineyard Above the Sea (Carcanet 1999).

I learned from a reader's comment this week that the term "blackthorn winter" is used in England to describe a cold spell in late winter or early spring.  In the American South, the term "blackberry winter" is used in the same fashion.

                       Christopher Nevinson, "A Winter Landscape" (1926)

               The Order of Saying

'As soon as the blackthorn comes in flower
     The wind blows cold,' she says:
I see those bushes tossed and whitening,
     Drawing the light and currents of the air
Into their mass and depth; can only see
     The order of her saying in that flare
That rises like a beacon for the wind
     To flow into, to twist and wear
Garment and incandescence, flag of spring.

Charles Tomlinson, The Flood (Oxford University Press 1981).

              Christopher Nevinson, "View of the Sussex Weald" (c. 1927)

"The Long September Evening Dies"

As one might expect, the "Decadent" poets of the 1890s -- with their wistfulness, melancholy, and obsession with death -- found autumn to be congenial.  I confess that I, too, am a pushover for the autumnal dreamland (without the death).  Thus, although some might find it old-fashioned, quaint, and predictable, I am quite fond of the following poem by Arthur Symons, which has it all:  "mist-enfolded lanes," "a few faint stars," "lingering twilight" (which, of course, "wanes"), and a "darkening vale" -- not to mention "lover with lover wandering."

           Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "Near Leatherhead, Surrey"

            Autumn Twilight

The long September evening dies
In mist along the fields and lanes;
Only a few faint stars surprise
The lingering twilight as it wanes.

Night creeps across the darkening vale;
On the horizon tree by tree
Fades into shadowy skies as pale
As moonlight on a shadowy sea.

And, down the mist-enfolded lanes,
Grown pensive now with evening,
See, lingering as the twilight wanes,
Lover with lover wandering.

Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895).  Symons indicates in a note that the poem was written on September 12, 1891.

                           Christopher Nevinson, "The Weir, Charenton"

"Crossing The Bar"

Charles Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" (which appeared in my previous post) revolves around the image (and sound) of the "moaning" of "the harbour bar."  According to Christopher Ricks, who has edited Alfred Tennyson's poetry, Tennyson owned a copy of Kingsley's Andromeda and Other Poems (1858), in which "The Three Fishers" appeared.  Christopher Ricks (editor), Tennyson: A Selected Edition (1989), page 665.  Further, Tennyson's wife Emily noted in her journal that he read some of Kingsley's poems to her in 1858.  Ibid.

Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar" in October of 1889 when crossing the Solent to the Isle of Wight.  Although the poem was prompted by that journey, Kingsley's "Though the harbour bar be moaning" may have been hovering somewhere in the back of his mind as well.

              Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "Silver Estuary" (c. 1925)

            Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
     And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
     When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
     Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
     Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
     And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
     When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
     The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
     When I have crost the bar.

Alfred Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems (1889).

Commentators on the poem usually link "bourne" in line 13 to Hamlet's description of death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns."  Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, 79-80. Coincidentally, Christina Rossetti wrote a poem titled "The Bourne," which I have previously posted here.  The poem was published in 1866, but I am not suggesting that it influenced Tennyson, merely noting another use of the word in Victorian poetry.

Commentators also suggest that "face to face" in line 15 may be an allusion to 1 Corinthians 13.12:  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face."

                                  Christopher Nevinson, "Saint-Malo"

"I Heard The Sighing Of The Reeds"

Among the "Decadent" poets of the 1890s, my favorite is Arthur Symons (1865-1945).  Like the others, he wrote his fair share of poems about the lamp-lit, absinthe-tinged world that is usually associated with the Nineties.  However, he also wrote a number of fine poems that, although they reflect the Decadent penchant for world-weariness coupled with dreaminess, provide lovely descriptions of places that he visited.

In particular, he is a wonderful poet of the sea-side.  Not surprisingly, he wrote quite a few poems set in Dieppe, a favorite haunt of the Decadents. He also wrote poems about places on the coasts of England, Wales, and Ireland.  Symons identified the following poem as having been written on September 1, 1896, at Rosses Point, which is located in County Sligo, Ireland.   Rosses Point, Rosses Upper, and Rosses Lower are three villages (or townlands) on a peninsula in Sligo Bay.  Hence the phrase "the Third Rosses" in the title of the poem.

     By the Pool at the Third Rosses

I heard the sighing of the reeds
In the grey pool in the green land,
The sea-wind in the long reeds sighing
Between the green hill and the sand.

I heard the sighing of the reeds
Day after day, night after night;
I heard the whirring wild ducks flying,
I saw the sea-gull's wheeling flight.

I heard the sighing of the reeds
Night after night, day after day,
And I forgot old age, and dying,
And youth that loves, and love's decay.

I heard the sighing of the reeds
At noontide and at evening,
And some old dream I had forgotten
I seemed to be remembering.

I hear the sighing of the reeds:
Is it in vain, is it in vain
That some old peace I had forgotten
Is crying to come back again?

Arthur Symons, Images of Good and Evil (1899).

                    Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946), "The Old Harbour"

Symons wrote an essay about the time that he spent in Sligo.  The essay contains the following passage:

"And if you go a little in from the sea-edge, over the green lands, you will come to a great pool, where the waters are never troubled nor the reeds still; but there is always a sighing of wind in the reeds, as of a very gentle and melancholy peace."

Arthur Symons, "In Sligo: Rosses Point and Glencar," Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands (1918).

I presume that he is writing about the same reeds and the same pool that appear in the poem, and it is interesting to see how the poetry goes beyond the prose.  The poem is built upon repetition, both of phrase and of rhyme. First, of course, "I heard the sighing of the reeds" begins each of the first four stanzas, changing to "I hear the sighing of the reeds" in the final stanza.  Further, in the first three stanzas, "sighing" in the middle of the first line rhymes with the final word of the third line.

In addition, consider the repetition of sounds in "the whirring wild ducks" (line 7) and "the sea-gull's wheeling flight" (line 8).  Consider also "day after day, night after night" in line 6, followed later by "night after night, day after day" in line 10, and "some old dream I had forgotten" in line 15, followed later by "some old peace I had forgotten" in line 19.  And, finally, notice line 18: "is it in vain, is it in vain."  The poem is an embodiment of the sound and the movement of the reeds (and of the wind and the sea).

                      Christopher Nevinson, "Silver Estuary" (c. 1925-1927)

"The Region November" Revisited

Things have turned from bright red and gold to rust and russet.  Today, as I walked through a grove of mostly empty trees, their trunks creaked and their branches clacked in the wind.  The grey swirls amidst the hills on the other side of Puget Sound may have been mist or may have been snow flurries.

It is, therefore, a perfect day to revisit one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems.  To those loyal (and much appreciated!) readers who were here last November, I beg your indulgence.  But any good poem is worth revisiting, isn't it?  Here's one way to look at it (perhaps):  are you the same person that you were a year ago?

               The Region November

It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.
It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated
On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

Wallace Stevens, "Late Poems," Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997).  Stevens wrote "The Region November" in the last year or so of his life.  It was first published in 1956, the year after his death at the age of 75.

                 Christopher Nevinson, "View of the Sussex Weald" (c. 1927)