Life Explained, Part Twenty-One: "We Are On A Kind Of Stair"

We have previously heard Christina Rossetti ask of Life:  "Does the road wind up-hill all the way?"  Ian Hamilton takes a similar view of things in the following poem.

                           Steps

Where do we find ourselves?  What is this tale
With no beginning and no end?
We know not the extremes.  Perhaps
There are none.
We are on a kind of stair.  The world below
Will never be regained; was never there
Perhaps.  And yet it seems
We've climbed to where we are
With diligence, as if told long ago
How high the highest rung.
Alas:  this lethargy at noon,
This interfered-with air.

Ian Hamilton, Sixty Poems (Faber and Faber 1998).

In an interview, Hamilton noted that the poem "starts off with a line from Emerson."  The London Review of Books (January 24, 2002).  In fact, much of the poem echoes the opening sentences of Emerson's essay "Experience":

"Where do we find ourselves?  In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.  We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.  But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (1844).

Hamilton wrote a poem titled "Larkinesque" about a couple's divorce proceedings (and their annoying solicitors).  I hear a Larkinian note as well in the final two lines of "Steps," particularly in the phrase "interfered-with air." (With a nod to Emerson for "lethargy at noon," which has its source in his "the lethargy now at noonday.")

                                     Eric Ravilious, "Beachy Head" (1939)

"What Syllable Are You Seeking, Vocalissimus, In The Distances Of Sleep?"

A few poems onward from "The Wind Shifts," Wallace Stevens again considers the wind in the poem that brings Harmonium to a close. Although the poem is brief, it encapsulates a recurring theme in Stevens's poetry: how do we make our way in a World (or, as Stevens preferred, in a Reality) that is beautiful, but mute?

     To the Roaring Wind

What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923).

This brings to mind a poem by Robert Nye about the wind, and its words.

     Words on the Wind

I heard a voice calling
"Do not be afraid
For blessed is he
Who is what he was
Before he was made."

They came on the wind
Those singular words
And on the wind went.
Perhaps all it was
Was the calling of birds?

Perhaps all there is
Is the calling of birds
As they're blown on the wind
And we just mistake it
For singular words?

God knows I don't know
But now night is falling
I am what I was
Before I was made,
And this is my calling.

Robert Nye, The Rain and the Glass: 99 Poems, New and Selected (Greenwich Exchange 2005).

                         Eric Ravilious, "Two Women in a Garden" (1933)

"There Is A Door I Have Shut Until The End Of The World"

This year I find myself at the midpoint of my fifties.  Mind you, I have no complaints.  Unlike Dante midway through his life's journey, I do not consider myself to be lost in the midst of a dark wood ("selva oscura").  However, I keep being unwittingly confronted with dire pronouncements about this stage of life.  Am I too complacent?

For instance, I discovered by chance that Philip Larkin has some fairly horrific (but, as always, entertaining) things to say about one's fifties.  (Yes, I know:  what a surprise!)  But I shall save Mr. Larkin's thoughts for another time.  (Hint:  they are contained in a letter to Kingsley Amis.  Again:  what a surprise!)  In addition, while idly perusing a volume by Jorge Luis Borges, I came across a poem that I had read before, but hadn't thought about in quite some time.  Who knows why these things return to us when they do?

                                   Limits

There is a line of Verlaine I shall not recall again,
There is a nearby street forbidden to my step,
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time,
There is a door I have shut until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some I shall never reopen.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year:
Death reduces me incessantly.

Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology (1967).  The poem is translated by Anthony Kerrigan.

As I did recently with translations of a poem by Wang Wei, it may be interesting to compare Kerrigan's translation with another translator's version.

                                   Boundaries

There is a line by Verlaine that I will not remember again.
There is a street nearby that is off limits to my feet.
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.
There is a door I have closed until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I'm looking at them now) are some
     I will never open.
This summer I will be fifty years old.
Death is using me up, relentlessly.

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (1999).  The poem is translated by Kenneth Krabbenhoft.

Yikes!  Death has been "reducing me incessantly" (or "using me up, relentlessly" -- take your pick) for more than five years now.  Little did I know.

                         Eric Ravilious, "Interior at Furlongs" (1939)   

"Arrivals, Departures"

The cruise ship season has begun again.  Out on Puget Sound, the huge, brilliantly-lit ships leave for Canada and Alaska in the evening.  A week or so later, they return at dawn.  Their glow is reflected on the water.  If the wind is right, festive music comes ashore.  And what might Philip Larkin have to do with this light-hearted scene?

                         Arrivals, Departures

This town has docks where channel boats come sidling;
Tame water lanes, tall sheds, the traveller sees
(His bag of samples knocking at his knees),
And hears, still under slackened engines gliding,
His advent blurted to the morning shore.

And we, barely recalled from sleep there, sense
Arrivals lowing in a doleful distance --
Horny dilemmas at the gate once more.
Come and choose wrong, they cry, come and choose wrong;
And so we rise.  At night again they sound,

Calling the traveller now, the outward bound:
O not for long, they cry, O not for long --
And we are nudged from comfort, never knowing
How safely we may disregard their blowing,
Or if, this night, happiness too is going.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (1955).

                                          Eric Ravilious, "Pilot Boat"

"The Old Year's Gone Away To Nothingness And Night": John Clare

As the New Year arrives we should spare a thought for the Old Year.  Yes, T. S. Eliot has suggested that "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past." ("Burnt Norton" in Four Quartets.)  However, I fear that such a mystic state of affairs is not accessible to most of us.  Instead, I think that John Clare (1793-1864) has it right:  we should bid the Old Year a fond fare thee well. 

               The Old Year

The Old Year's gone away
   To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
   Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
   In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbour's face,
   In this he's known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
   Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they're here
   And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
   In every cot and hall --
A guest to every heart's desire,
   And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
   Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
   Are things identified;
But time once torn away
   No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
   Left the Old Year lost to all.

John Clare, Poems, Chiefly from Manuscript (edited by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter) (1920).

                              Eric Ravilious, "Downs in Winter" (1934)

Trains In The Distance At Night: Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust, And Emmylou Harris

I hold romantic notions about the sound of distant trains in the countryside at night.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that I am a city dweller.  Or perhaps it has something to do with country music -- Emmylou Harris singing "Tulsa Queen," for instance.

Siegfried Sassoon wrote the following poem near the beginning of the Second World War:

                    A Local Train of Thought

Alone, in silence, at a certain time of night,
Listening, and looking up from what I'm trying to write,
I hear a local train along the Valley.  And "There
Goes the one-fifty," think I to myself; aware
That somehow its habitual travelling comforts me,
Making my world seem safer, homelier, sure to be
The same to-morrow; and the same, one hopes, next year.
"There's peacetime in that train."  One hears it disappear
With needless warning whistle and rail-resounding wheels.
"That train's quite like an old familiar friend," one feels.

Siegfried Sassoon, Rhymed Ruminations (1940).

 

                                 Claughton Pellew, "The Train" (1920)

I would ask myself what time it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now further off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in the forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; translation revised by D. J. Enright) (1913).

                               Eric Ravilious, "Train Landscape" (1939)